Early Life and Business Activities
Greenfield, born Avrahm Gruenfeld in 1887 in Kiev, Ukraine, emigrated to the United States along with his parents and family in 1892, settling in Philadelphia and attending school there. Leaving school at age 15 to become a clerk for a prominent local real estate lawyer, he rapidly gained interest in, and knowledge of, the real estate business. Just two years later, in May 1905, Greenfield opened his own real estate firm, Albert M. Greenfield & Co., at 218 South 4th Street, with $500 that his mother borrowed for him from her brother. The money was rapidly repaid, as Greenfield was earning $60,000 a year by age 23; by 1917, his personal wealth had increased to $15 million. The alliances created through his growing real estate business led to investments in motion picture theaters, building and loan associations, and mortgage financing.
By the early 1920s he controlled 27 building and loan associations. In 1924, Greenfield and his father-in-law Sol C. Kraus formed Bankers Bond & Mortgage Company to handle first mortgages on real estate in Philadelphia. After expanding to the New York City market, the firm was renamed Bankers Bond & Mortgage Company of America. From 1925, until its closing on December 22, 1930 as a result of the crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression, he ran the Bankers Trust Company of Philadelphia. In 1927, Greenfield formed the Bankers Securities Corporation (BSC) for general investment banking and trading in securities, serving as its chairman until March 1959. It eventually became the parent company for virtually all of Greenfield's financial interests, including City Stores Company.
In common with many investors during the Depression, Greenfield was financially wiped out. Worse was to come; after Bankers Trust went under, he took another hit when City Stores was declared insolvent in 1931. However, after Greenfield himself took over the chairmanship of City Stores upon bankruptcy, CSCo realized a profit of $32 million in his first year at its helm, and he never looked back as the company expanded throughout the East Coast over the next 20 years, earning profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. When asked much later about his negative experiences during the Depression, Greenfield replied, "It wasn't too bad. I've always treated both success and failure as imposters. I like making money, but I can get along without it. I never worried about having it because I knew I could always make more."
Read more about this topic: Albert M. Greenfield
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, business and/or activities:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (18941963)
“Look at your [English] ladies of qualityare they not forever parting with their husbandsforfeiting their reputationsand is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girlswho have politeness, sense and conversationbut these are fewand then look at your trademens daughterswhat are they?poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.”
—Frances Burney (17521840)
“If we decide to take this level of business creating ability nationwide, well all be plucking chickens for a living.”
—H. Ross Perot (b. 1930)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)