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¶ "The largest absolute partition sale of city real-estate lots in the history of the country": a four-day, 1918 auction of the 1,500 Bronx lots that made up the old Ogden Estate. Other famous-name estates partitioned by Day: Van Cortlandt, Astor, Harkness, Gould, Schwab, Doherty, Juilliard, James Gordon Bennett.
¶ The $3,882,000 auction, in December 1922, of 1,574 Jersey shipyard homes owned by the U.S. Shipping Board—a record 12-hour session when Day stopped the clock for two hours to avoid selling on a Sunday.
¶The development of the Jersey Meadows, across the Hudson from Manhattan, from no-account marshlands into a prime industrial area (including big plants owned by Ford, U.S. Steel, and Western Electric)
¶ Persuading U.S. Steel's legendary board chairman, the late Elbert H. Gary, to pay a cool $5,000,000 for the Empire Building at Broadway and Rector Street where Big Steel had made its offices for years. Day sold Judge Gary on staying where he was by simply letting him reminisce about the steel history that had been made in the old building.
The Heirs. No one has ever disputed Joe Day's claim that he sold "at least a third of the Bronx" and almost as big a slice of Queens, Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan. Last week one eloquent obituary estimated that if all his sales were strung end to end they would "make a strip 100 ft. wide from the Atlantic to the Pacific." He was also a fanatically successful booster of New York and of the U.S., was famed for his war-bond sales and social services. Stuck in London when War I broke out, he was the man who got 60,000 stranded Americans home from Europe, and started Herbert Hoover along a similar humanitarian road by putting him in charge of lost luggage.
But Joe Day's own favorite project was New York City's famed, misnamed Brooklyn resort, Manhattan Beach. He poured some $8,000,000 into turning it into the city's greatest "middleclass Coney Island." He liked to tell his children that it would some day be the heart of Day properties worth perhaps $100,000,000. That dream died with World War II: early in 1942, Joe Day sold Manhattan Beach to the Coast Guard (as a training center) for a mere $6,000,000. But, although his estate was modestly valued in the Surrogate's Court last week at "more than $10,000," Real Estater Day's heirs should do well—at least until Manhattan is sold back to the Indians.