Gulf and Western Industries

Gulf and Western's origins date to the 1934 founding of the Michigan Bumper Corporation, although Charles Bluhdorn treated his 1956 takeover of Michigan Plating and Stamping Company as its "founding" for the purpose of later anniversaries. In 1957, Michigan Plating and Stamping acquired the Beard & Stone Electric Company of Houston, Texas, and changed its name to Gulf and Western Corporation in 1958. The name reflected the company's operations in Houston near the Gulf of Mexico and its intent to serve the growing automotive industry in the Western United States.[2][3]

Under Bluhdorn the company diversified into a variety of businesses that included stamping metal bumpers, financial services, manufacturing, apparel, home and consumer products, agricultural, auto parts, natural resources, building products, entertainment, and publishing. A partial list of Gulf and Western's holdings between 1958 and 1982 with the year of acquisition in parentheses:

• Hendrie & Bolthoff Manufacturing & Supply Company (1961)
• Crampton (1964)[4]
• Foxcraft Products Corporation (1964)[5]
• Kamis Engineering Company (1964)
• Philmont Pressed Steel (1964)
• Lenape Forge, acquired from Charles Moore (1965)
• The New Jersey Zinc Company, including Empire Zinc subsidiary (1966)
• Paramount Pictures (1966)
• Universal American, including American Pulley, Amron, Bingham Stamping, Bohn Aluminum and Brass, Butterworth, Daybrook-Ottawa, Hubbard Spool, Morse Cutting Tools, Norma-Hoffman, Super Tool, Van Norman and Young Spring & Wire subsidiaries (1966)[6]
• Bonney Forge (1967)
• Collyer Insulated Wire (1967)
• North & Judd Manufacturing Company, including Wilcox, Crittenden & Company subsidiary (1967)
• South Puerto Rico Sugar Company (1967), a holding company in Jersey City, New Jersey, with a principal subsidiary, called South Porto Rico Sugar Company,[7] a cane sugar refiner in Ensenada, Guánica, Puerto Rico[8] which owned the Central Guánica, purported to once be the largest cane sugar refinery in the world.[9]
• Taylor Forge (1967)
• Unicord (1967)
• Associates First Capital Corporation (1968), a financial services company.
• Brown Company (1968)
• Consolidated Cigar, including Flinchbaugh Products, Sentinel Plastics, Simon Cigar and N.V. Willem II Sigarenfabrieken subsidiaries (1968)
• E. W. Bliss, including Eagle Signal, Gamewell and Mackintosh-Hemphill subsidiaries (1968)
• Stax Records (1968)
• Sega (1969)
• Compañía Insular Tabacalera S.A. (1972)
• Schrafft's (1974)
• Hammacher Schlemmer (1975)
• Kayser-Roth (1975), a clothing company that owned the Miss Universe pageant because it had bought Pacific Mills, which had invented the pageant to sell its Catalina Swimwear brand.
• Simon & Schuster (1975)
• Madison Square Garden and by extension the New York Rangers and New York Knicks (1977)
• Gremlin Industries (1978)
• Simmons Bedding Company (1979)
• Thomas Ryder & Son, of Bolton, England, a machine tool manufacturing company, acquired from Whitecroft (1981)[10]

With the Paramount acquisition, Gulf and Western became parent company of the Dot Records label and the Famous Music publishing company, created in 1928 by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, Paramount's predecessor. After Stax was acquired, that label became a subsidiary of Dot, although Dot was not at all mentioned on the label (rather, Dot and Stax were noted as subsidiaries of Paramount). Later on, the record operation was moved under Famous Music.

In 1967, the company also purchased Lucille Ball's Desilu Productions library, which included most of her television product, as well as such properties as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, both of which would rank amongst its most profitable commodities over the years. Desilu was renamed Paramount Television.

Gulf and Western sold Stax back to its original owners in 1970, and with it the rights to all Stax recordings not owned by Atlantic Records. A year before, Dot's non-country music roster and catalog was moved to a newly created label, Paramount Records (the name was previously used by a Paramount Records label unrelated to the film studio; Paramount acquired the rights to that name in order to launch this label). It assumed Dot's status as the flagship label of Paramount's record operations, releasing music by pop artists and soundtracks from Paramount's films and television series. Dot meanwhile became a country label.

In 1971, Tumbleweed Records was formed by Larry Ray and Bill Szymczyk with the financial backing of Gulf and Western. The label was a subsidiary of Famous Music until 1973, when it folded.

Famous Music provided distribution for several independent labels, such as Neighborhood Records and Sire Records. Famous began distributing yet another independent label, Blue Thumb Records, before buying it outright in 1972. In 1974, Gulf and Western sold the entire record operation to the American Broadcasting Company, which continued the Dot and Blue Thumb imprints as subsidiaries of ABC Records, while discontinuing the Paramount label altogether.

While working for Paramount, Barry Diller had proposed a "fourth network"; ultimately, the Paramount Television Service was cancelled six months prior to launch by Bluhdorn, who feared a major loss of revenue had the network gone forward.[11] Diller later left Paramount for 20th Century Fox; that studio's new owner, News Corporation, was interested in starting a network, which became the Fox Broadcasting Company.

On June 5, 1980, Gulf and Western unveiled an electric car, powered by a zinc chloride battery that would hold a charge for several hours and permit speeds of up to 60 miles per hour (97 km/h). By year's end, the U.S. Department of Energy (which had invested $15 million in the project) reported that the battery had 65% less power than predicted and could be recharged only by highly trained personnel.[12]

In 1981, former officials of Gulf and Western Natural Resources Group led a buyout of New Jersey Zinc and made it a subsidiary of Horsehead Industries, Inc.

In 1983, Bluhdorn died of a heart attack on a plane en route home from the Dominican Republic to New York, and the board bypassed president Jim Judelson and named senior vice president Martin S. Davis, who had come up through Paramount Pictures, as the new chief executive officer.

Davis slimmed down the company's wilder diversifications and focused it on entertainment, selling all of its non-entertainment and publishing assets. The idea was to aid financial markets in measuring the company's success, which, in turn, would help place better value on its shares. Though its Paramount division had done very well in recent years, Gulf and Western's success as a whole was translating poorly with investors. This process eventually led Davis to divest many of the company's subsidiaries.[13][14]

In 1983, Gulf and Western sold Consolidated Cigar Corporation to five of its senior managers. Also that year, Gulf and Western sold its building products operations (Livingston-Graham, Symons Corporation and the Richmond Screw Anchor Company) to Merrill Nash[15] and the U.S. assets of Sega (manufacturing division of Sega Electronics, along with licenses to technology and distribution rights to arcade game library of Sega in the United States for two years) to pinball manufacturer Bally Manufacturing. The Japanese assets of Sega (Sega Enterprises, Ltd., Sega trademarks, and its library of games) were purchased by a group of investors led by David Rosen and Hayao Nakayama the year after. Gulf and Western subsequently folded the former Sega U.S. companies (the old Sega Enterprises, Inc. and Sega Electronics, Inc. were renamed and currently exist as shell companies Ages Entertainment Software LLC and Ages Electronics, Inc., part of CBS Media Ventures) into Simon & Schuster[16] and the old Sega Europe Limited into Paramount Pictures (since renamed several times and currently exist as High Command Productions Limited, part of Viacom International).[17] Ironically, years later Paramount and Sega would co-produce movies based on the latter's flagship video game franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog.

In 1984, Gulf and Western divested itself of its many Taylor Forge operations to private owners. Taylor Forge's Somerville, New Jersey plant became Taylor Forge Stainless, while its facilities in Paola, Kansas and Greeley, Kansas became Taylor Forge Engineered Systems. That same year, the company's holdings in Florida and the Dominican Republic were sold to an investment group including Carlos Morales Troncoso and the Fanjul brothers.[18]

In 1985, Gulf and Western Consumer and Industrial Products Group -- consisting of APS auto parts, Kayser-Roth clothing and Simmons bedding -- was sold to the Wickes Companies. The company, thus restructured, renamed itself Paramount Communications in 1989, and sold Associates First Capital Corporation to the Ford Motor Company.[19]

Prior to 1970, the company's headquarters were on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.[20]

The Gulf and Western Building (15 Columbus Circle in Manhattan) by Thomas Stanley was built in 1970 for the Gulf and Western company north of Columbus Circle, at the south-western corner of Central Park. The building occupies a narrow block between Broadway and Central Park West and, at 583 feet (178 m), it commands the dramatic view to the north, as well as its immediate surroundings.

The top of the building sported a restaurant, The Top of the Park, which was never a full success even though run by Stuart Levin, famous for the Four Seasons, Le Pavillon, and other "shrines of haute cuisine,"[21] and it being graced with Levin's own elegant signature sculpture by Jim Gary, "Universal Woman."

Similarly, the cinema space in the basement, named Paramount after the picture company that Gulf and Western owned, was closed as the building was sold.

Problems with the 45-story building's structural frame gave it unwanted fame as its base was scaffolded for years and the upper floors were prone to sway excessively on windy days, even leading to cases of nausea akin to motion sickness.

The 1997 renovation into a hotel and residential building, the Trump International Hotel and Tower (One Central Park West) by Costas Kondylis and Philip Johnson, involved extensive renovation of both interior and facades. For example, the 45 stories of the original office tower were converted into a 52-story residential building, enabled by the lower ceiling height of residential spaces. The facade was converted with the addition of dark glass walls with distinctive shiny steel framing.