1983 series: The mall maker of Tucson

In 1978 a roomful of developers in three piece suits met for the bankruptcy auction of The Meadows, a promising but financially troubled condominium development on North Kolb Road near East Tanque Verde Road.

In the midst of the developers, one man stood out. He was wearing slacks and shirtsleeves, and in an exchange of 34 bids he came out on top — paying slightly more than $1.2 million for about 15 acres.

The winning bidder was Joseph Kenneth Kivel, the man who with his wife, Esther, owns most of Park Mall, a third of El Con Mall and major portions of other Tucson properties.

At age 73 and after nearly 50 years in Tucson, Joe Kivel is far from a household name in his adopted city. Many of his merchants have never heard of him. You won't find him speaking to a luncheon of the Tucson Trade Bureau or heading this year's fund-raising for the United Way.

Unless he wants to see you, you probably won't ever run into him. And he likes it that way. In the pressure-cooker world of property development, Joe Kivel is far removed from the loud, superhype touters.

He is a phantom — a highly successful phantom who has engineered some of the biggest land deals in Tucson. He has always kept a low profile, and in the last 20 years has increasingly operated from shadows of anonymity that would have drawn the admiration of Howard Hughes.

Kivel fought a coalition of homeowners for more than a decade to win the zoning rights to build Park Mall, yet has lived quietly for almost 20 years in the same neighborhood. Except for a next-door neighbor, few in the area know who he is.

Willam Hawes Smith, a retired development officer for Valley National Bank, says the bank loaned Kivel and others much of the interim financing for the construction of El Con, but that only two VNB officers could recognize Kivel on sight.

"I'll bet you could ask dozens of Tucson's top business leaders to identify Joe Kivel, and no one could do it," Smith said. At Park Mall, interviews with a half-dozen merchants failed to tum up any who could recognize the name of their landlord, yet his non descript offices are in their midst in a comer of the mall.

"Joe likes the shadows," said one El Con merchant. "He operates better if no one knows who he is. They have to come to him. It's sort of a position of power, if you know what I mean."

For more than Six months Kivel declined requests to be interviewed, but reluctantly agreed to talk late last month.

He insists that his business accomplishments pale in comparison with those of the DeConcini, Nanini, Amos and other Tucson families, and rejects any suggestion that he ever possessed any exceptional vision of the development of Tucson's eastside. He describes himself as a conventional developer, and as an extremely fair and sympathetic landlord who lets promising tenants fall months behind in their payments during hard times.

Says lawyer Charles E. Conner, who has worked for Kivel for about 40 years: "I've never seen a more lenient landlord when a tenant is in trouble. Go down to the court of record and look for the lawsuits we've filed (to collect debts) —you won't find one."

Other friends and business associates paint a picture of Kivel as a close-mouthed, tight-fisted and highly secretive wheeler dealer who signs big checks and negotiates tough leases. Longtime merchants who know him say they fear he would someday jack up their rents if they talked about him on the record.

"He is the toughest negotiator I've ever met in my life, and I don't want to make it any tougher, so leave my name out of this," said one merchant. "The only things that matter to Joe are money, power and control, in that order. To be a successful shopping center developer you've got to go to s.o.b. school, and I sit down with him next week for my lease. I really hate that.”

Another merchant described Kivel as “a small man concerned with petty things even though he accomplished big things.” He said that in contrast, Simon, Joe’s late elder brother and longtime business partner, “was very well-liked,” and that Alvin Kivel, Simon’s son and the owner of Korby’s department store, is held in similarly high regard.

Former Levy’s owner Leon Levy describes the developer as a constant nitpicker during lease negotiations. Kivel even insisted on a clause guaranteeing him a percentage of the revenue if Levy’s ever installed pay toilets, Levy said. Kivel said he was only concerned about the possible future growth of sales through all sorts of vending machines.

Still, he emphasized: "Don't paint my relationship With Joe in a bad light. He and I are friends, after 6 o'clock."

Real estate developer Roy Drachman said Kivel is "a decent, honorable, good family man, but he's tough to do business with."

A former interior designer for Diamonds said, "Joe will do anything to avoid the limelight." The designer said that in the late 1970s, Kivel called Diamonds manager Frank Grant and told him to hold his best tailor after hours. Late into the night, when Grant and the tailor were "standing around, doing nothing, this little old guy would let himself in with his own key" so he could buy off-the-rack suits and have them altered "while nobody was around to see him."

Kivel said the story is ridiculous and "has no foundation in fact," and that he . didn't have a key to Diamonds and "never kept a tailor there when he wasn't supposed to be there."

The developer agrees, however, that he has a habit of roaming through his malls at night, explaining that it is often a good idea to check on the guards.

Joe Pesci, the former executive director and manager of El Con, said that several years ago "a security guard called me at home to tell me he found a little guy wandering through the El Con after the mall had shut down for the night. I asked the guard to put him on the phone after the description sounded familiar. It was Kivel. I told the guard to let him go, he owned the place.”

Kivel frequently stops by the shops at Park Mall and engages the sales clerks or managers in idle conversation about business while making small purchases. He rarely, if ever, identifies himself.

Kivel’s father, Hyman, lived and worked in Los Angeles around the turn of the century before moving to Phoenix. There he met Hersh Kaplan, former director of the Jewish Community Council and later a board member of its massive Kivel Geriatric Center, named after Hyman because of his $105,000 bequest to the Jewish Council.

"I had no idea he was so wealthy," Kaplan said of Kivel's father. "I invited the family from Tucson (for the dedication of the nursing home) but I don’t think anyone came. Maybe they thought we were going to ask them for money or something, but I asked them as a courtesy.”

Kaplan said Hyman Kivel's will left $1 to each of his children, with the rest going to charity.

"I can't understand why you're interested in the Kivels (of Tucson). I've never heard one word about their civic generosity. There are more humane ways people can spend their money, you know. Why don't you write about them?"

Kivel rejected Kaplan's comments, saying Kaplan was "disgruntled because I wasn't making enough contributions lately.'' The developer added that an examination of his tax returns would show that he has made major donations. He declined to elaborate except for two cases on public record.

In July 1963, to secure the zoning for Park Mall and appease its neighbors, Kivel donated a little more than 9 acres out of the 72-acre mall site to the city and agreed to build a buffer park, now named Sears Park, on the land. The city, he said, offered to name the park after him, but he declined.

In the summer of 1968, Kivel and his El Con partners donated $15,000 to charity through an auction of the contents of the old El Conquistador Hotel.

Banker Smith, however, said his late wife chaired a committee that tried to save the 1928 mission-style hotel or at least have its furnishings donated to charity and that she met with frustration and delay while Kivel was "trying to calculate his best avenue for tax advantage.”

Late one Sunday evening while she was on vacation in San Francisco, Kivel finally phoned to tell her she had a week to remove all the items f rom the hotel. She dashed back to Tucson, and the last of the items were taken out just hours ahead of the wrecking ball.

Soon after, the chairs, crockery and other items were auctioned off, Smith recalls.

Kivel remembers it differently. "We were not sitting around trying to judge our best tax advantage, we were trying to decide which of the many charities we should give the furnishings to."

Smith and Evo DeConcini, the former Arizona Supreme Court justice, agree that Kivel is as tight-fisted as many of his contemporaries label him.

"For years, he seemed to be operating his businesses out of the trunk of his car," Smith said. Adds an El Con merchant: "Kivel not only has the first buck he ever made, he got the first buck I ever made."

Marvin Volk, former local president of U.S. Home Corp., has bid against Kivel many times for land in the Tucson area, and perhaps knows him as well as anyone in the business community. When asked about Kivel, he replied: "You tell Joe Kivel for me that you can do so much more with your wealth than what he's doing. He should enjoy it now. Don't let some executor do it for you."

If Kivel seems secretive and frugal, no one can accuse him of not being a shrewd businessman.

"Joe's ability to forecast changing trends in real estate is uncanny," Pesci said. "He has the knack of estimating market conditions years in advance and buying real estate somewhere in that area." Said Volk: "In the early '40s and '50s he went around buying up corner properties. He knew that the market would eventually catch up with him."

Kivel's plans for what is now the Rancho shopping center on East Speedway drew community laughter in the late 1940s. Speedway had yet to be paved beyond North Country Club Road. But later the center boomed, and Kivel says he was able to swap his interest in that property and others for his late brother Simon's share of the Park Mall site.

In the 1970s, "The talk down at the Old Pueblo Club used to be about Kivel and what new crazy lease clauses they were sticking the tenants of Park Mall with," Smith said. "They invented a few areas of control most of us never even thought of at the time. Those leases were all for the landlord and nothing for the tenant, but people took them because sitting in a major mall would be worth a lot of money, and everyone knew it."

Kivel strongly disagrees, but Leon Levy says that with El Con, Kivel was so successful in negotiating with his department store that he was able to take the lease to his bankers and finance the development of the rest of the first local mall.

In response, Kivel said there is "no tougher negotiator than Leon Levy,'' adding that "from the rent he paid, we were lucky to finance the construction of his store — alone — let alone the rest of the center. We had to go out and get more stores and more leases to compensate."

For years, Kivel has played poker with a longtime group of friends, but sources say that uncharacteristically, Kivel is a frequent loser in games with stakes of up to $5,000. Kivel says the stakes have not been more than a couple hundred dollars and that what a player loses one night he wins back on another.

Kivel has operated under an array of corporate names, but owns much of his property in his own name and with his wife. Some of his operations have included Sierra Investment Co., Eastside Development Co., El Conquistador Estates, El Conquistador Co., El Rancho Development Co., Broadway Trust Co. and Western Trust Co.

Born in Los Angeles in December 1909, Kivel was one of seven children. In 1932 he earned a bachelor's degree in pharmacology at the University of Southern California. In the same year, he bought a pharmacy in Yuma.

"It looked like an opportunity to get into bussiness with very little money,'" Kivel recalled, saying he had to put up $3,000 to buy the R&B Drug Co. "It was damn tough, and it wasn't too pleasant living in Yuma in those days. There was no air conditioning, and it was the depths of the Depression. Druggists worked 12 hours a day for $17 a week — if they had a job. They didn't all have jobs. And it wasn't a hell of a Jot better in '34, '35 or '36."

A close friend of a relative said Kivel made a lot of money with the help of flashlights. A customer who bought a set amount of merchandise could buy a flashlight at a reduced price or get one free.

Yuma County records show Kivel in Yuma through 1947, but from 1936 he is listed in Pima County records as living in Tucson. Kivel went to work with Simon, who in 1928 had run the Pee Wee golf course on North Fourth Avenue, then bought the Market Spot grocery story on East Speedway near North Park Avenue in 1932.

Kivel settled in at 1115 N. Park in a two-bedroom stucco-and-adobe house just behind the grocery. Levy said he first met Kivel at the Market Spot when "I'd go over with my family. … He used to cut our steaks behind the butcher's counter." Kivel, however, said he ran the store's pharmacy. "I was never behind the butcher's counter in my life."

From that retail base, the Kivels gradually built up their holdings in real estate, but Kivel always kept up his pharmacy license. It is now one of the oldest such licenses in the state — No. 1415, issued in August 1936. Asked why he still keeps the license, he replied: "You never know. I might have to go back to rolling pills someday."

Kivel has lost weight in recent years and is not as agile as he used to be, but is considering a new major venture. "I'm looking to get into the hotel business," he said last fall. "If you know of anybody with a deal on a local hotel, let me know."

The mall maker emphasizes that though the days are long gone when midtown land could be bought for $200 to $300 an acre, opportunities still abound. He warns, however, that owning malls isn't necessarily the most lucrative investment.

"I enjoyed putting a development together even though it was complicated, hard and took a lot of time — I enjoyed putting it together and making it work," he said. "Frankly, I could have made far more money in just buying speculative land around here - what DeConcini and many others have done."

Kivel said he "never bought property for speculation; I would hold on to it for development later."

He declined to be photographed even for a drawing. "I've avoided publicity all my life. To me, it's like the plague," he said. "I think I'd rather take a dose of castor oil."

Tomorrow: The making of El Con.