New York City lost a major landmark —a gregarious, white-maned, 70-year-old supersalesman, one of the last of the P. T. Barnum era—Joseph Paul Day. Auctioneer Day had sold more real estate in & around New York City than any other single human being in the memory of man. As far back as 1935 his transactions were totted up to $1.5 billion. And years before he died last week in Manhattan's Flower Hospital, he had become a millionaire—and a legend.
The Legend. Joe Day was Manhattan-born of English-Irish parents. His father, who had a prosperous soda-water business in New York City, died when Joe was five. His mother died nine years later. Joe left school, went to work for a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods firm; salary, $100 a year. By the age of 20, he was a star salesman, and had left the firm when he was refused a raise to $15 a week. He went into the real-estate business with a friend. Terms: Day put in no capital, but was to get a partnership if he doubled the business in two weeks. He made the gamble good; two years later he was doing nine-tenths of the business, and had pulled out to start his own office.
At that time, selling real estate was on a social par with selling patent medicine. Suckers were" lured with door prizes of "imported" china and junk jewelry, free lunches and a circus barker's side show. Joe Day revolutionized the business by 1) investigating and advertising his properties in advance; 2) discovering that a one-man side show by a man who knew his business sold more lots than all the free china he could stack up.
The Price of Peace. Joe Day's discoveries about selling real estate coincided with the northward expansion of Manhattan. As he progressed from one "biggest deal in history" to the next, feature writers repeated the Joseph P. Day legends over & over. He was the man who used no gavel to knock down his sales, but had the auction block padded to keep his right hand from fracturing; the man who relaxed his nerves by quaffing pineapple juice and having two strong-arm men grip his arms and his heels and try to pull him apart; the man who invariably breakfasted on acidophilus milk and lunched on crackers & milk and ice cream.
He was also the man whom one hard-headed client insured for $1,000,000 until he had safely completed the sale of the Sheepshead Bay race track, and whose sales in a single year (1922) topped $100,000,000. Just after World War I started, he put the lid on his own legend by trying to persuade the world that the holocaust could be stopped if Germany bought a piece of France at a price high enough to persuade every last penny-pinching Frenchman that peace had a profitable price.
The Deals. A loyal Tammanyite and oldtime pillar of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, Joe Day was always a tough trader. When he engineered the sale of Tammany's famed 14th Street headquarters, one cynic penned a sarcastic parody of When Day Is Done, ending:
"It's fifty-fifty, so they say—fifty Joe and fifty Day.
And there is nothing left when Day is done."
But Joe Day was also the man who stopped an auction in mid-frenzy when the bidding went higher than his shrewd sense of values told him was sound. Nonetheless, he had some frantic figures to brag about: