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The Jewish Home | JULY 14, 2022
Mind Y
ur Business
Ralph Zucker: “Find Your Niche” By Yitzchok Saftlas
T
his column features business insights from a recent “Mind Your Business with Yitzchok Saftlas” radio show. The weekly “Mind Your Business” show – broadcasting since 2015 – features interviews with Fortune 500 executives, business leaders and marketing gurus. Prominent guests include: John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi; Dick Schulze, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Best Buy; and Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair of GE; among over
400+ senior-level executives and business celebrities. Yitzchok Saftlas, president of Bottom Line Marketing Group, hosts the weekly “Mind Your Business” show, which airs at 10pm every Sunday night on 710 WOR and throughout America on the iHeartRadio Network.
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n a recent 77WABC “Mind Your Business” broadcast, Yitzchok Saftlas (YS) spoke with guest Ralph Zucker (RZ), president of Someset Development. Zucker is best known for Bell Works, a 2 million square foot metroburb redeveloped from the former Bell Labs. *
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YS: Ralph, you’ve been in residential and commercial real estate for many decades. Tell me a little bit more about Somerset Development. How has the business evolved since the very early days compared to where it is today? RZ: We started out as a suburban sprawl developer. We were doing the typical single family, cul-de-sac, town-
house-style home. But suburban zoning is not exactly helpful for great development. It’s pretty much designed so that the garbage can be picked up and the firetruck can get to your house in case of emergency. But it’s not a human scale plan. So, we worked these first few projects, but it was unsatisfying to me personally. I saw all these great neighborhoods being created, but it didn’t really feel right. I started gravitating toward something I now know is called new urbanism. I would go to places and say, “Why can’t we build places like this?” Places that feel right, the right scale with a little bit more of a pedestrian feel. Walkability is not just the ability to walk. It’s the desire to walk. So, creating better places became something of an obsession. I was introduced to a book called The
New Urbanism by Peter Kats, and I actually reached out to one of the people that he highlights, Andrés Duany, who’s known as a father of new urbanism. I started doing some projects together with Andrés and his team, great urban planners, and that’s where we started. Let’s go back 10-15 years ago when Bell Works was just an idea inside your brain, and take us through that whole process of bringing it to life. So, what was then Bell Labs was owned by Alcatel Lucent of Lucent Technology, leftover from the Bell Telephone company. It was designed by Eero Saarinen to create connectivity, not through the telephone, but in personal encounters as well. Think of 6,000 of the greatest minds in the universe, com-
ing together in a 2-million-square-foot building designed to foster connectivity, cross pollinate, and create serendipitous encounters. But when I walked into the building, after it had been vacated by Lucent, it had fallen into disrepair. On a rainy day, we literally needed a bucket brigade. Most people wrote it off. But as we walked in, because of my new urbanist background and being used to thinking in terms of human scale environments, it struck me that what Saarinen had created was this perfect indoor pedestrian street. There was clutter. but it just struck me intuitively that if we could strip it down to its essence and bring the building back to its bones, we could create a great space. I think I was the only one in the world who thought so.
