De Niro Partners Make Billions With Boutique Manhattan Hotels

Mt. Sinai

Born said their properties have a loan-to-value ratio from 25 to 30 percent. They said they didn’t know the exact value of their holdings.

“Billions on a leveraged basis and billions on an unleveraged basis,” said Born. “It would take a team of accountants to figure out the value.”

Born started his career as a surgical resident at New York University and Mt. Sinai hospitals. Drukier, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering, started a division of Microwave Semiconductor Corp. that made microwave transistors used by the aerospace and other industries.

Both had abandoned their careers for real estate by the mid-1980s. Born called Drukier, an acquaintance through their fathers’ relationship, after he heard that he’d left his old job, and they decided over lunch to form a partnership. Using money from Born’s second career as a commercial real estate broker and proceeds from Drukier’s time at MSC, they bought a Howard Johnson at Newark Airport. They sold it in 2013 for about $28.5 million, according to estimates by property researcher Real Capital Analytics Inc.

Tennessee Williams

Their first major hotel renovation in Manhattan was the Hotel Elysee in Midtown East, which reopened in 1992. A gathering spot for celebrities and intellectuals in the 1940s, and onetime residence of playwright Tennessee Williams, the property inspired them to focus on boutique hotels.

“It was the first hotel that had a bit of a style differential,” Drukier said. “The Elysee was family-owned and had a lot of disrepair. We wanted to include a French flair with lots of yellows and blues.”

After the Elysee, Born and Drukier ventured to a part of Manhattan where their fathers rarely went: downtown.

Their hotels now dot the city’s gritty-turned-fashionable neighborhoods and have interiors that match the surroundings. Rooms at the Bowery on the Lower East Side are outfitted with floor-to-ceiling factory-style windows and Turkish Oushak rugs. At the Jane in the West Village, rooms are called cabins in a nod to the building’s history as a hotel for sailors.