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Who

With Richard Born, Ira Drukier is the founder of BD Hotels, the company that owns boutique hotels like the Mercer, Chambers, and Maritime and also developed the Richard Meier-designed glass towers on Perry Street.

Backstory

Ira Drukier's connection to Richard Born goes back a generation: Ira's father, Charles Drukier, developed midrange apartment buildings in the 1960s and '70s with Robert Born, Richard's dad. Raised in the Rego Park section of Queens, Ira didn't initially intend to go into real estate. A science nerd, he studied solid-state physics at Cornell and stayed on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, going on to work as a researcher at RCA Laboratories and founding a firm that produced parts for the aerospace industry. Drukier cashed out in 1979, selling his company to Siemens. A few years later he turned his attention to real estate, and teamed up with Born to buy and renovate midrange hotels such as the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street and a Ramada at the Newark airport.

Their first foray into the world of high-end hospitality came in 1996, when Andre Balazs approached the duo about a hotel on Mercer Street in SoHo that he'd been working on since 1988 but had yet to complete. Drukier and Born bought out Balazs's partner in the project, Sonesta, and brought the Mercer Hotel to life two years later. In 2000 they followed up with a boutique hotel of their own, the David Rockwell-designed Chambers in Midtown; the Maritime in the Meatpacking District opened a year later.

These days BD Hotels owns and/or operates 21 hotels, and is involved in condo development as well, most famously developing the two Richard Meier-designed towers in the West Village that are home to Calvin Klein, Martha Stewart, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, among others.

Of note

Possibly the most prolific—and lowest-profile—hotel developers in the city, Born and Drukier have had a hand in a number of glitzy hotel projects in recent years. In 2001 they teamed up with Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode to turn the grungy Covenant House into the Maritime Hotel. Five years later, they worked with Goode and MacPherson on the Bowery Hotel. In 2008, they unveiled their latest project, the $43 million, 75-room, 13-suite Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca, in partnership with Robert De Niro.

Other hotels in their portfolio include the Elysée Hotel (co-owned with Henry Kallan), the Skyline, the Belvedere, the Pod Hotel, the Travel Inn on West 42nd Street, the Blakely, and an outpost of the Chambers in Minneapolis. They also own the parcel of land that's now occupied by the Gansevoort Hotel, which they leased to William and Michael Achenbaum, the father and son team who developed the property.

Off hours

The balding and bespectacled Drukier has been a serious collector of Surrealist art since he graduated from college. A collector of work by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, and Yves Tanguy, Drukier also boasts an extensive set of "exquisite corpse" drawings, which have been on display at Cornell's Johnson Museum.

Personal

Ira is married to Gale Drukier, who used to be a faculty member at Trenton State University. They have one daughter and live in an East 70th Street apartment they purchased for $7.3 million in 2003. They also own a summer home in Southampton.