Planner & Patron

ROBERT WHITTLE DOWLING

ONE of the most influential men in U.S. city planning is neither a licensed architect, a city official, nor an engineer. He is Manhattan Real Estate Tycoon Robert W. Dowling. who at 64 bosses the $53 million City Investing Co., and whose conception of his role makes him an amateur do-it-yourself designer, an inventor and innovator, and a patron of the arts on a grand scale. Bowling's purpose is simple enough. He wants 1) to make money, while 2) enhancing the U.S. landscape with well-planned developments. Says Dowling: "I always think about our place in history. The great question is, will we do anything unique and beautiful enough so that people living in a future time will not be justified in saying of us: 'There lived a people who produced lots of Coke bottles and chewing gum, but what did they leave the world?' "

Last week Dowling was hard at work on his newest project. On 20,000 acres in Sterling Forest near Tuxedo. N.Y.. 40 miles from Manhattan, he is building what he plans to be "the largest and most beautiful research, science and engineering center in the world." He visualizes a $200 million development of laboratories and research firms, with homes, shops and recreation facilities for a population of 100,000 people living in a woodland preserve. Union Carbide already has a $9,000,000 nuclear lab completed. Dowling's City Investing has pumped another $1,000,000 into an international research building for other companies to try on a rental basis before making a full commitment. Next week, to lure more potential customers to view Sterling Forest --and incidentally turn a tidy tourist profit--Dowling will open the world's most lavish tulip garden with 1,500,000 bulbs planted over 125 acres.

Dowling's City Investing was a pioneer in making factories airy, pleasant places to work, has built multimillion-dollar industrial parks at Edison Township. N.J., Elmira, N.Y.. Atlanta. When the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to build its Penn Center in downtown Philadelphia, it called on Dowling for the planning. He urged the road to sacrifice some office rental space in favor of setback buildings with fountains, air and light, convinced Pennsy brass that what was lost in footage would be made up in higher rent. When Pittsburgh was having trouble deciding how to go about redeveloping its gritty downtown area. Dowling, then adviser to Equitable Life Assurance, came to the rescue. At a meeting in his office, he advised Pittsburgh planners to stop thinking small about a mere four-block housing project. On his desktop, he sketched a 23-acre project of ten large office and commercial buildings grouped around a gardenlike development. Total cost to date of what is now known as the Golden Triangle: $92 million.

THE son of one of New York's top builders at the turn of the century. Dowling was born to the business. But for a while he was more interested in flexing his muscles than his mind. With a strapping, oaklike physique (6 ft. 1 in.. 210 Ibs.). Dowling was a great boxer and swimmer, is one of the few ever to swim the 36 miles around Manhattan Island (time: 13 hours. 45 min.). After high school and a hitch in the Navy during World War I, he lost interest in formal education.

Dowling refused to go into his father's firm ("If you do anything good, people say, 'No wonder; his old man's head of the office' "), instead, worked in a handful of real-estate companies, specialized in redeveloping slum areas, became a self-taught expert. By 1943, when his father died, leaving him stock control (now 25%) of City Investing. Dowling had by then already made a name for himself.

When Dowling took command. City Investing had assets of $11,000,000 and a net worth of $8,000,000. Today, the assets have multiplied fivefold, and the profits are better than $1,000,000 a year. City Investing owns five of Broadway's top theaters, and unlike their dilapidated Shubert neighbors, they are showplaces in themselves. Dowling does not lease his theaters; he operates them. "We knew the product." he says, "and we wanted to see it the best in the city--in decor, air conditioning, treatment of customers--so we had to become operators." A devoted theatergoer himself, Dowling has helped back critical successes (J.B., A Touch of the Poet} as well as box-office hits (Redhead, The Sound of Music).

WHEN Russian Premier Khrushchev visited the U.S., Dowling so impressed him with his discourse on apartment construction that the Red leader later sent over a delegation of 21 architects to learn Dowling's methods. When Vice President Nixon toured Russia, Dowling went as his adviser on cultural affairs.

Bob Dowling engages in no ideological flapdoodle--he merely wants to swap ideas to improve both himself and the U.S. As he works amid the fountains and statuary in his palatial, terraced office atop the 70-story building at 25 Broad Street, ideas and inventions* pour forth. He talks of a vast redevelopment of Harlem's slums, a shopping center-mall in Dallas, a development project in Arizona that he hopes to make even bigger than Sterling Forest. Recently he submitted a plan to provide industrial Akron with a new civic center. One touch was characteristic. There would be a businessmen's luncheon club, but to reach it, businessmen would have to go through the art museum. Thus, says Dowling with a grin, "whether they want to be or not, they will be exposed to the finer things in life."

* Dowling is credited with popularizing the all-glass door in the 1930s, is now at work on a new kind of facing brick, a vibrationless pavement breaker, 16-power binoculars that telescope to transistor-radio size.

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