The Patriot-News, PA
Dec 16 2004
JOHN O. VARTAN 1945 – 2004
A VISIONARY
BY JACK SHERZER
Of The Patriot-News
John O. Vartan, an Armenian immigrant who built a business empire
that propelled him to celebrity status in the Harrisburg area, died
yesterday in Polyclinic Hospital.
Vartan, 59, had battled throat cancer for 15 years.
The Susquehanna Twp. entrepreneur made his mark through the thousands
of square feet of office space he built, and for the even greater
projects he envisioned.
He was a poet and art collector who carried himself with big-city
flair in a town where limousines are generally reserved for weddings.
People knew it was Vartan when they saw his Rolls-Royce or Bentley
drive by.
And despite the cancer that left him gaunt and constantly needing to
drink water to keep his mouth and throat moist, he remained an active
part of the community until he was hospitalized about a month before
his death.
An engineer by training, Vartan had a willingness in the mid-1980s to
take on the established power structure and build offices in the
then-depressed city. Many credit his investment in Harrisburg as a
key spark in the city’s resurgence.
Vartan was unafraid to speak his mind or sue when he felt wronged,
and he racked up his share of adversaries. But he also had supporters
who point to his successful projects and charitable works.
In the early 1990s, he threatened to move to Princeton, N.J., when he
became frustrated at opposition to his plans for a 17-story
skyscraper capped by a revolving restaurant on Third Street.
The midstate’s movers and shakers entreated him to stay. More than
100 of them affixed their names to a full-page ad in this newspaper
pleading for him to change his mind.
He stayed and kept dreaming big dreams, though many were never
realized.
Plans to transform 22 blocks of uptown Harrisburg into a village of
affordable housing and neighborhood shops, dubbed “Vartan Village,”
came to naught. The city ended up swapping land with Vartan, and
another developer eventually turned a smaller section into the town
homes today known as Capitol Heights.
The additional 41 stories he said would top the Forum Place office
building at Fifth and Walnut streets — making it one of
Pennsylvania’s tallest buildings — never happened. He sold the
10-story building to the Dauphin County Authority for $78.7 million.
Last year, he was brought back to manage the building by bondholders
after the authority wasn’t able to attract the needed state leases
and defaulted on the bonds used for the purchase.
“I think he’ll be judged like all visionaries — not everything that
they envision happens,” said David Black, president and CEO of the
Harrisburg Regional Chamber. “But being able to get discussion going,
being able to inspire the imagination of others, is not necessarily a
bad thing, even though the project itself may not have happened.”
Vartan put “incredible investment back into the city,” Black said.
Gave back to community:
Over the years, Vartan has been called Harrisburg’s version of Donald
Trump.
He clearly enjoyed the limelight. He once bought a 27-foot section of
stairs from the Eiffel Tower. He said it would one day grace the
atrium of one of his buildings.
In 1995, he tried driving his $75,000 military Humvee across the
Susquehanna River when it was exceptionally low. Chortling that it
was more fun than driving his Rolls, Vartan said he wanted to see if,
in an emergency, he could reach areas of the drought-parched river
too shallow for boats.
But he was more than a builder with a knack for self-promotion.
He zealously guarded his private life, and friends describe him as a
devoted family man.
And he was generous, many times privately and sometimes publicly
giving to better the community and help those in need, including the
American Cancer Society and the Harlem Boys Choir.
“I think anyone who has been successful has an obligation to return
to the community some of the good fortune,” Vartan once said. “You
need to make a profit so you can continue doing business and continue
employing people and continue doing good things.”
He donated two homes and 35 acres in Susquehanna Twp. to create
Widener University’s Harrisburg campus law school; built the Central
Allison Hill Community Center; contributed more than $3 million in
gifts to Penn State Harrisburg; gave $200,000 in building supplies
for South Carolina hurricane victims; gave $60,000 to help Armenian
earthquake victims; and another $4.5 million to the Armenian
Apostolic Church of America to create a charitable endowment.
When the city’s only private business club, the Tuesday Club, was on
the edge of extinction, Vartan rescued an institution that was more
than 40 years old. But with an eye to the practical, he retained the
private aspect of the club for lunch only and morphed it with parev,
a French restaurant.
“John Vartan was a quintessential American success story,” said
Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed, who, like others, disagreed with
the developer at times.
“Through hard work, incredible sacrifice and dogged determination, he
rose from humble and adverse beginnings to become one of central
Pennsylvania’s most admired and respected business and civic
leaders,” Reed said. “John was a close, personal friend and
supporter, as well as a key partner in fostering Harrisburg’s
renaissance.”
Challenged Harristown:
Vartan was born Vartan Keosheyan in the country of Lebanon, where his
Armenian parents had been moved by the French colonial government to
escape Turkish oppression. He worked briefly as a steward for Middle
East Airlines, then enrolled as an engineering student at American
University in Beruit in 1966.
He came to the United States in 1968 and enrolled in Michigan
Technological University, where he received a civil engineering
degree. Vartan moved to the Harrisburg area in 1970 for a sanitary
engineering job with Gannett Fleming, and also earned a master’s in
engineering from Penn State Harrisburg.
In 1975, he opened Vartan Associates, offering engineering services
to municipalities. He also formed Gazelle Inc., a commercial
construction firm, which later became Vartan Enterprises. Much of his
early construction projects focused on Susquehanna Twp., along North
Progress Avenue.
But it was in the early 1980s that Vartan really made his mark, with
his successful antitrust lawsuit against Harristown Development
Corp., which at the time controlled what could be built in the city’s
downtown.
Vartan opened the doors for private development. As part of the
settlement, he received land along Fifth Street between Market and
Walnut streets for $1. He later built the Forum Place on the
property, as well as the state Public School Employee’s Retirement
System building, which he sold to the agency for $8.5 million.
Attorney Joseph A. Klein, who represented Vartan against Harristown
but later battled the developer over his proposals in Susquehanna
Twp., agreed Vartan was one of the moving factors behind the city’s
resurgence.
“Frankly, that was the beginning of private development, the
renaissance of downtown development, which had been stymied for some
time,” Klein said of Vartan’s lawsuit. “It was not an inexpensive
venture to decide to take a legal challenge against [Harristown] and
take them to court.”
Wouldn’t back off:
Vartan had a reputation for not backing off when he felt he was
right, and he didn’t hesitate to use the courts. Many times, as in
the Harristown case, he won.
In another case, he even changed the makeup of his own township’s
political structure.
After being denied a zoning permit to build his concrete plant on
Linglestown Road in Susquehanna Twp. (where his building supply
warehouse is now located), Vartan sued the township in federal court
for violating his rights.
He won in May 2000, with a jury finding that four commissioners
improperly acted against him. Not only was he able to force three of
the still-serving commissioners to resign, he also secured a $4
million verdict against the township, $3 million of which was picked
up by its insurance carrier.
The concrete plant battle also pitted Vartan against another
developer, Francis McNaughton, head of McNaughton Co., who was
concerned over the plant’s impact on his nearby housing development.
Although McNaughton wasn’t part of his lawsuit, Vartan at the time
accused McNaughton of pulling political strings against him, which
McNaughton always denied. In 2002, Vartan also backed a candidate to
run for the state House against McNaughton’s son, Mark, who retained
his seat after an expensive campaign. More recently, Vartan and
McNaughton patched things up.
“Each of us were very tenacious in defense of a stated position, and
sometimes it was very difficult to have either of us alter our points
of view,” said McNaughton, himself a self-made man who went from
being a certified public accountant to presiding over one of the
area’s largest home builders.
“I think he was a man of his time, I think he was absolutely a major
force in the rejuvenation of downtown Harrisburg,” McNaughton said.
“John went in there when others wouldn’t and made large investments
that contributed to the success of downtown Harrisburg, and I think
that’s a legacy that he alone enjoys.”
McNaughton also cautioned against making too much of those projects
Vartan talked of building but didn’t.
“I wish I could tell you how many times we attempted to develop
something and it makes it to the charts and drawings but is never
consummated,” he said. “I do believe [Vartan] was a visionary for
this area and I think he’s done a lot of wonderful things for this
area.”
Unrealized dream:
Perhaps Vartan’s largest unrealized goal was his dream of creating
his own community. After Vartan Village fell apart, in 2001 and on
the heels of winning his federal lawsuit against Susquehanna Twp., he
approached the township with a project called “Vartown.”
The plan called for up to 1,000 residential units mixed with stores
and office space on 95 acres off Linglestown Road and Progress
Avenue. Many area residents balked at the congestion they feared it
would bring, and the township ultimately ruled against granting
Vartan a zoning change he needed to proceed. Today, it remains an
open field bearing a Vartan property sign.
“[Vartown] was really going to be the crown jewel of what John’s
legacy was really going to be all about, he really believed in this
idea of mixed use and the idea that you could live, work and play all
in one area,” said Bruce Warshawsky, the attorney hired by the
township to oversee the hearings over Vartan’s attempt to change the
zoning.
He later became Vartan’s friend, and the developer backed
Warshawsky’s unsuccessful 2002 run against state Rep. Mark
McNaughton.
Warshawsky said many of Vartan’s detractors were envious and
unwilling to accept an outsider, particularly one they viewed as a
foreigner.
“He was not willing to compromise his principles” when he felt in the
right, Warshawsky said. “He wasn’t afraid to use the leverage and
power he had, especially once he became the icon he was.”
‘Loved the community’:
There was another dimension to the man, though — the family side
that Vartan separated from his public business persona, Warshawsky
said. Especially after surviving his first brush with throat cancer,
Vartan made spending time with his family a priority.
“John Vartan was really an outstanding family man,” Warshawsky said,
adding the developer often worked from an office at home to be closer
to his wife and children. “The one thing I think he learned from his
close brush with death 15 years ago was that you can’t get back that
time with your kids, watching them grow up.”
Vartan is survived by his wife, Maral; four children, Taleen, Hovig,
Vahe and Armen; two sisters, Madeleine Keosheyan and Baydzar O.
Keosheyan; and three brothers, Movses Sarkuni, Tigran J. Sarkuni and
Sarko O. Sarkuni.
“His own personal tastes were minimal, but he understood what power
can bring and what the illusion of power can do,” said Graham
Hetrick, Dauphin County’s coroner and a friend of Vartan for many
years.
Hetrick said he called Vartan in the early 1980s after reading a
newspaper story detailing how he came to the United States and his
love for this country. “I wanted to meet this guy who was an
immigrant and loved America so much, and we became fast friends,”
Hetrick said.
When Vartan again showed his dreamer side and tried to create his own
newspaper in the early 1980s — The Pennsylvania Beacon — to
showcase only good news, Hetrick wrote a column.
Hetrick attributed much of Vartan’s drive to make good and have his
name in the public eye to the upheavals his family endured: “He
constantly talked about this, he watched his father accumulate money
and lose it and be thrown out of one country or another and that
really left a long-term, enduring impression on John Vartan.”
And Vartan was determined. Hetrick laughed, recalling how the two
played racquetball before Vartan’s cancer and how one time, a game
kept going because neither would give up. It was that same
determination that kept him going in the last 15 years of his life,
despite the pain and discomfort of the cancer, Hetrick said.
“I truly believe he loved the community, I think he liked the people
and he liked being a big fish in a little pond,” Hetrick said. “He
was a visionary and sometimes his vision was bigger than the
community’s acceptance.”