Lost Japan by Alex Kerr

Lost Japan by Alex Kerr

Author:Alex Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141979755
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-08-01T04:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 8

Trammell Crow

The Bubble Years

At the end of 1983, I visited Dallas, Texas, for Christmas. I was invited there by Trammell S. Crow, an old Yale classmate. Trammell S., with his long hair, bright orange jumpsuit, sports car and elfin grin, was one of my wilder college friends. He had promised to meet me at the airport, but when I arrived I couldn’t find him. Then I realized with a shock that the clean-cut businessman in a blue suit holding out his hand to greet me was Trammell S.; I only recognized him by his grin. When I asked what had happened to him, he told me that he had gone to work for his father, Trammell Crow.

As our car approached downtown Dallas, Trammell S. pointed at the skyline ahead, and said, ‘That forty-story skyscraper on the right is ours, and that fifty-story building under construction is also. And the hotel we’re passing – Dad let me design some of it myself.’ I realized then that I really knew nothing about his father. Trammell S. began to tell me something about him.

Trammell Crow was a Texan, born in Dallas, and until the age of thirty-five he was an ordinary bank employee. However, one day he had a sudden inspiration to buy an old warehouse. He remodeled it, found tenants to rent it, and then bought up two or three warehouses nearby. He remodeled them, and rented them out also. He continued for forty years, expanding from warehouses into trade marts, office buildings, apartments, hotels and every other imaginable form of real estate. Eventually, the Trammell Crow Company became the largest real estate developer in the world.

The next day, Trammell S. took me to his father’s office. Expecting to see dull, corporate Americana, I felt for a moment that we had mistakenly stepped into a museum: as far as the eye could see was a treasure house of Asian art. Khmer sculpture stood in the corridors, and Chinese jade carvings sat casually next to computers and on top of filing cabinets. ‘Dad loves Asian art,’ Trammell S. said. ‘He likes using his collection to decorate the office, so his employees can enjoy it too. I’ll introduce you to him.’

Trammell Crow sat at a long table covered with blueprints, in conference with his architects concerning the design of a new city. ‘Dad, I want you to meet a friend,’ said Trammell S, but his father did not even lift his head. ‘He studied with me at Yale.’ Still no interest. ‘He majored in Chinese and Japanese Studies.’

At this, Trammell Crow jumped up and said excitedly, ‘Chinese and Japanese? Wonderful!’ He grabbed a jade carving from the shelf nearest at hand and asked me, ‘What do you think of this?’ ‘It has the squared barrel shape of an ancient Chinese Song jade, but I don’t think it could be so old,’ I answered. ‘The style of the characters was popular at the end of the nineteenth century, so I would guess it’s probably a nineteenth-century scholar’s reconstruction.



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