Jones Lang LaSalle


It began with single lot in NYC
Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Harwood Properties, the privately owned company set to develop Journal Square, has its roots in a New York City parking lot.

Wolfe Harwood and his wife, Sarah, started a hat-selling business sometime in the 1920s. But their real estate empire began soon afterward with an investment aimed at cashing in on a new-fangled technology: they purchased a parking lot at the corner of Bowery and Bayard streets in Lower Manhattan.

Seventy-five years later, the family's parking empire included 55 garages in New York City, and nearly 200 lots in the Northeast U.S. and Canada.

Samuel Harwood, Lowell's father, purchased the family's first Jersey City property in 1936 - a parking lot at the corner of Cottage Street and what is now Kennedy Boulevard.
Today, the family still owns the Square Ramp garage behind the Loew's Jersey Theater and a second parking lot on Sip Avenue.

They also have numerous real estate investments up and down the Eastern Seaboard, including being part-owners of the recently opened State Square 130-unit apartment complex and a half-block in Manhattan's theater district.