Wilbur Breslin

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Wilbur Breslin is one of Long Island's best-known real estate developers, specializing in medium-sized shopping malls, often located in working-class neighborhoods (so-called "blighted areas"). He grew up in Hempstead, Long Island, and founded Breslin Realty soon after World War II.

The project that was to have crowned his long career was nicknamed WillyWorld.

[edit] WillyWorld

"WillyWorld" covers a vast collection of giant shopping malls, housing, and a few smaller malls, proposed by Breslin for one of the last wooded areas on Long Island, near Yaphank. The nickname was originally coined by Richard Amper, director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society. The name has stuck, partly because Breslin Realty's original name for the 2,100-acre development, "North Shore Properties" made no sense, since the biggest of the proposed projects were slightly closer to the South Shore, and most were about as far from both shores as one can get. In any case, Breslin withdrew the "North Shore Properties" name in the early 1990s for strategic reasons, since environmental regulators, lenders and investors were taking an increasingly jaundiced view of overambitious construction projects in the wake of the S&L scandals, the Houston office bubble, etc.[1] In connection with his aborted effort to launch an initial public offering (IPO) of a Breslin Realty real estate investment trust (REIT), Mr. Breslin filed an S-11 Statement with the SEC which nowhere mentioned "North Shore Properties", "WillyWorld", or even the idea of a 2,100-acre mixed-use development.[2]

This idea dated back at least to 1969, when the notion of an "instant city" in the Yaphank pine barrens was first proposed by Lee Koppelman in a Long Island Master Plan. The Moniebogue Press in December 1971 reported that a Stony Brook University research project was quietly gathering residents of the Yaphank-Moriches area, to probe their attitudes about instant cities. At least two developers, Parr and Grant,[3] [4] [5][6] tried to build in the area (one got as a far as a short-lived racetrack) before Mr. Breslin acquired the key land parcels in 1987-88. The grand plan was unveiled with enormous fanfare and enthusiasm by Newsday in early 1988.[7] Newsday's then-publisher, Robert M. Johnson, was later hired as a Breslin Realty consultant for an undisclosed salary. (See also related article on Urban Development Corporation, section on "Long Island Partnership" which is thought by some to have been intended to finance construction of WillyWorld with publicly-guaranteed loans.)

Like the legendendary Wardenclyffe Tower of Nicola Tesla, or the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant just down the road, WillyWorld seems likely to be remembered as another of Long Island's "Ghost Projects". Mr. Breslin decided to have much of the forest bulldozed in the mid-1990s, but this seems to have been more to make a political or philosophical statement than to prepare for any construction.