Clockwise from top left: Stanley Chera, Sheldon Solow, Peter Hauspurg, Gerald Hines, Jerry Wolkoff, and Bianca Yankov
In a year when so many lives were lost, real estate was not spared. The industry mourned both legendary figures and those who died too soon.
But it was the death of Stanley Chera, the 77-year-old patriarch of Crown Acquisitions, that epitomized the year. The real estate titan had decamped New York City for Deal, New Jersey, early in the pandemic at the behest of his longtime friend, President Donald Trump. But on April 11, Chera died of complications from Covid-19. When Trump contracted Covid later in the year, he reportedly asked an aide, “Am I going to go out like Stan Chera?”
1. “An Evolving Situation”
There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the
COVID-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was modelled on the American institution. Redfield had just received a report about an unexplained respiratory virus emerging in the city of Wuhan.
The field of public health had long been haunted by the prospect of a widespread respiratory-illness outbreak like the 1918 influenza pandemic, so Redfield was concerned. Gao, when pressed, assured him that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. At the time, the theory was that each case had arisen from animals in a “wet” market where exotic game was sold. When Redfield learned that, among twenty-seven reported cases, there were several famil
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The Lives They Lived
By Jamie Lauren Keiles
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The New York real estate titan was in some ways a foil to the president and was on his mind as he went to Walter Reed.
The Lives They Lived Stanley Chera in 2011. Pako Dominguez/Alamy
The Lives They Lived
b. 1942 The New York real estate mogul was, in some ways, a foil to Trump and was on the president’s mind as he went to Walter Reed.