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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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In the end, financially it just wouldn't work the way he was going to do it, so if fell it apart, and we sold it to Citicorp. That's some of the history on Black Rock.

We, CBS, at that time were, in the Manhattan area, in 26 different locations. Whenever we needed office space and didn't have any, I'd rent a building here; I'd rent a building there. It made no sense at all. We spent an enormous amount of time and money just trying to keep people tied together. This was well before the days of fax machines and things of that kind, which would make it a lot easier today than it was.

Paley agreed that we needed a central building, but couldn't quite make up his mind. I wanted to buy--excuse me, I didn't want to leave Madison Avenue. I was very taken by the Madison Avenue address. There wasn't any way we could build on the site where we had our offices, at 485, but on the other side of the street--at, I think, 58th to 59th, where now it's the back end of the General Motors Building, there was a hotel there--I think by the name of the Madison Hotel.

At any rate, I knew that was available, and I wanted to buy that property and build our home there. This was not something I could do unilaterally. It's a lot different than making a decision such as firing Friendly or hiring somebody. This was a major move, and Paley, I guess, just wouldn't go along. At any rate, he didn't go along. We never had any words about it. I just couldn't get him to move, and I lost the option.

Then I moved down to the space where the Palace Hotel is now--the Ogden-Reid estates. Those brown buildings across from the church. I thought that would be a spectacular site for the building. Well, there were a lot of problems with that, because the Brown-Reid





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