From Left to Right: Emanuel Stern, Leonard N. Stern & Edward Stern

Summer 2007

It all began back in 1926 when my late father, Max Stern, seeking a better future in America, emigrated from his native Germany along with five thousand singing canaries. Then in 1932 he began to manufacture bird foods under the Hartz Mountain brand. During the decades that followed, Hartz pioneered the sale of millions of canaries, parakeets, hamsters, tropical fish, goldfish and their supplies in variety stores throughout the United States and Canada.

Max Stern, Founder 1898-1982

In 1959, at the age of twenty-one, I joined the Company, immediately expanding the Company's bird food product lines to include large selections of dog and cat supplies. We soon introduced the concept of a complete pet supply department into more than thirty thousand supermarkets and mass merchandisers throughout North America and the United Kingdom.

While expanding our pet supply business, we slowly began what would in time become a major new undertaking with the construction of our first speculative industrial building in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1966. Two years later we made our first of many major land acquisitions with the purchase of a 750 acre tract of land in the New Jersey Meadowlands, less than six miles from Manhattan, which began our major commitment to real estate development. In time we would purchase more than 1,800 acres of land close to Manhattan in addition to extensive acreage elsewhere in New Jersey and our real estate activities would come to dwarf all of our other businesses.

Our real estate portfolio now boasts over 200 buildings containing over 38 million square feet, and includes 21,000,000 square feet of industrial, 10,000,000 square feet of office, 1,000,000 square feet of retail, and 11 hospitality properties containing over 2,200 rooms. Included are the chic New York Soho and Tribeca Grand Hotels, and 667 Madison Avenue, a 267,000 square foot 25-story world class office building in Manhattan. We are especially proud that almost all the buildings in our vast portfolio were first designed, then built and are now managed by our own in-house organization.

As the years went by, we also built and then sold other successful businesses including, Harmon Publishing, publishers of 175 free locally distributed Harmon Home advertising magazines, and The Carpet Magic Company that manufactured and maintained carpet cleaning machine rental departments in twenty thousand U.S. retail locations. In the United Kingdom we built S.M. Cork into that country's leading general merchandise service distributor, finally selling the business after many years of ownership.

In 1986, we entered the alternative newspaper publishing business with the acquisition of the Village Voice, followed by our ownership of the leading alternative weeklies in Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Orange County with a combined weekly circulation of 950,000 copies. In 1999, as part of our continuing effort to refocus the Corporation's future real estate and hospitality activities under the day-to-day management of my son Emanuel, and our growing financial and investment activities under my son Edward, we also sold this successful business.

However with the growth of our expanding real estate portfolio, and the need for even more intense management of our growing financial operations, which we see as ultimately equaling the values of our real estate portfolio, we made the emotionally difficult decision to sell the Hartz Mountain pet supply business in December 2000. This sale reluctantly ended our 76 years of managing the very business that was the foundation of all that came thereafter. With that sale completed, we were able to concentrate our efforts on the expansion of our real estate, hospitality and financial operations.

We continue growing our Real Estate portfolio with active development and acquisitions in Secaucus, Jersey City, Weehawken, Edison, Kearny, Ridgefield Park and Ridgewood, New Jersey.