Hartz Mountain Industries
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hartz Mountain Industries (HMI) is a private family owned and operated company known for its vast real estate holdings in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. Its former parent Hartz Mountain Corporation (of pet products fame), was founded by German-American businessmen Max and Gustav Stern. Multi-billionaire Leonard N. Stern is owner, Chairman, and CEO. It is based at 400 Plaza Drive in Secaucus, New Jersey, in the Harmon Meadow Plaza retail shopping complex in the Meadowlands.
Max and Gustav Stern emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1936 with five singing canaries, and began manufacturing bird food under the Hartz Mountain brand in 1932. They later sold pets such as canaries, parakeets, hamsters, tropical fish, and associated supplies throughout the U.S. and Canada, and eventually introduced pet supply departments into more than 30,000 supermarkets in North America and the United Kingdom.
Known as Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC), this pet products side of the Hartz empire, which had been owned and operated by the Stern family for 75 years, was sold to investment group J.W. Childs along with select HMC management in 2000, although for goodwill purposes it still retains the HMC name. HMC's new owners opted to retain its longtime Secaucus offices, so that HMC is now a tenant of the owners of the building, Hartz Mountain Industries (HMI). HMC was sold to the Sumitomo Corporation of Japan in 2004.
Hartz Mountain Industries, which started as a real estate hobby for the Sterns, began construction of its first speculative industrial building in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1966, and made its first major land acquisition with a 750 acre (3 km²) tract of land in the New Jersey Meadowlands. HMI currently owns more than 1,800 acres (7.3 km²) of land close to Manhattan, and its real estate activities account for most of its business, with over 200 buildings boasting over 38 million square feet (3,500,000 m²) of industrial, commercial, office, retail and hospitality space. Its own in house staff manages, operates, and maintains its complete real estate portfolio.[citation needed]
Max’s son, Leonard N. Stern, who joined the company in 1959, is the current Chairman and CEO. His son Emanuel Stern is President and Chief Operating Officer, and his son Edward Stern also works for the company.
[edit] Former Hartz properties
Hartz Mountain’s businesses also included a publishing company, Harmon Publishing. Hartz purchased New York City’s alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, in 1986, as well as other such periodicals in cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Orange County, California. The combined circulation of these papers was 950,000. Other holdings included the Carpet Magic Company, which manufactured and maintained carpet cleaning machine rental departments in 20,000 retail locations, and S.M. Cork, a leading general merchandise service distributor of the United Kingdom. Hartz no longer owns these properties.
