ORANGE — It was a rainy day and Terrence Murray’s kindergarten class was forced to stay inside during recess.
Terrence didn’t mind. He gathered up a bunch of the other boys in his class and all the blocks they could find and they began to build things.
“I knew from a very early age, literally kindergarten, I knew I wanted to build things,” Murray said. “There was never anything else I wanted to do.”
Murray, 49, of South Orange, and his company, Gateway Merchant Banking, recently began the biggest building project in Gateway’s history, transforming the former Orange Memorial Hospital site into a complex with 1,000 apartments, a new City Hall, 40,000 square feet of retail space, an acre and a half of public park land plus a skating rink that will be used for ice skating in winter, roller skating in summer and as a place for public programming at other times.
“This isn’t just a real estate deal for me,” Murray said. “I live seven minutes from here. I passed by the site for years, thinking about what could be done. I really think if we do this right, it’s a real opportunity to give a lot of people opportunities.”
Murray grew up in Decatur, Ga., outside of Atlanta, where his father was a banker. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Florida A&M University and an MBA with a major in real estate from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Murray had a series of internships during those years. He said one was particularly pivotal as it was located in a building designed by John Calvin Portman Jr., who was an architect and real estate developer widely known for popularizing hotels and office buildings with multi-storied interior atria.
He worked with MetLife in the securities trading group, where they dealt in trades for mortgage backed securities.
“It blended real estate and finance,” he said.
He also did an internship with Morgan Stanley on the trading desk working with preferred stock.
There were about two weeks left in the summer of 1996 when he overheard an ongoing deal involving real estate. He immediately stood up, asked about it and how he could get involved in that aspect of the business.
After college, he worked in real estate investment banking for three years with Chase Manhattan before going to the Wharton School of Business where he studied real estate. He was very involved in campus life and was co-president of the Real Estate Club and the chair of The Whitney M Young Memorial Conference.
He was lucky, a word he uses often about his career and life, and earned a fellowship from Credit Suisse, where he worked as a real estate investment banker for a year after graduation.
He was 26 and living in Brooklyn and decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur so he left Credit Suisse.
“I turned down a fantastic job and I ran around for the summer looking for deals,” he said, repeating with a slight smile. “I was 26.”
His copresident from the Real Estate Club at Wharton contacted him and got him an interview at Fannie Mae.
He got the job and worked in the Capital Markets group of Fannie Mae’s Multifamily Division where he was responsible for purchasing multifamily loans from banks and originators across the country.|
Murray worked with, among many groups, the East West Bank, which is a commercial bank that operates in both the United States and China. It provides financial services, particularly for businesses involved in cross-border trade and investment between the two countries. The bank focuses on helping U.S. companies enter the Chinese market and vice versa.
“We would buy mortgages,” he said. “It was an interesting group of people.”
Murray, who was living in Washington, D.C. at the time, left Fannie Mae just before the 2008 mortgage crisis, also known as the Great Recession. The
financial crisis was caused by a combination of factors, including a housing bubble, risky lending practices, and inadequate regulation.
Murray moved back to the New York area and took a job with Prudential in Parsippany in investment management.
“I went to Prudential,” he said. “The rock. The biggest, safest place I could find.”
He stayed with Prudential from 2007 until 2015, moving to Maplewood in 2013. While working in the Prudential Real Estate Investors (PREI) section, he led the firm’s financing efforts throughout the recession, including chairing PREI’s Global Debt Committee. Post-recession, he was responsible for more than $2 billion of annual financing activity and hundreds of millions of acquisitions.
“It was a terrible time for the country but it was the right time for me,” Murray said, adding his skill set was valuable in restructuring deals after the crisis.
In 2016, he took a job with Värde Partners, where he had global responsibilities working with the management teams of Värde’s portfolio companies to develop financing strategies.
Just prior to this he had begun working with Charles Frazier who had been a principal or partner in the investment or development of mixed-use, mixed-income, student and market-rate apartments in 13 markets in 7 states.
The two former Florida A&M classmates were developing a 319 unit building with 11,000 square feet of retail in Washington. Murray told Varde about the project he was working on but that didn’t dissuade them from hiring him. They told him they liked entrepreneurs.
“Again, I was lucky,” he said. “I ended up doing double duty.”
Varde offered him an opportunity to do several things he had always wanted to do: work in real estate; be senior enough that his work mattered; open an office; do global deals.
“The role gave me the opportunity to do all that,” Murray said. “We were buying businesses.”
In the role, Murray got a chance to buy businesses including The Canadian subsidiary of one of the largest global banks; a home building company in India;
and the 11th largest credit card portfolio in the U.S.
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“The most fun I had was when we bought the controlling interest in an $18.5 billion financial services company,” he said. “The scope of the deal, the personalities involved, the negotiations, all of it was amazing to be part of.”
Murray’s boss was in London so he would often start the day at 5 a.m. with a call to England and the day might end at 9 p.m. with another call checking in on the home building company in India.
“I had a truly global role, it was heady stuff.”
He left Varde in 2019 to focus on Gateway. Gateway had sold their Washington development for more than $125 million. He has been there since.
The project at the Orange Memorial Hospital site is the company’s largest to date. The hospital has been closed since 2004 and the site has deteriorated since then with broken windows, graffiti, vandalism and people living inside.
“You would need an unlimited budget to restore it,” Murray said, looking at the complex from Henry Street.
The development will save Mary Austen Hall, which was home to the historically important nursing school at Orange Memorial Hospital. The nursing school was the first of its kind in New Jersey and one of the first in the country. The building will become the new Orange City Hall.
“This will be an impactful change for Orange,” Murray said, adding that local residents will get preference in hiring and subcontracting.
He also said he hopes the project will drive development along Central Avenue, which runs along the east side of the site.
“Now is the time; get in line for that Dunkin (Donuts) franchise,” he said.
Murray said the first design presented to him was an uninviting fortress-like structure. It went through several iterations before the final design.
“Instead of building to keep people out, let’s build it to encourage people to come in,” he said.
Walking in the area recently along Central Avenue by Central Playground, Murray looked around, pointing at the playground, the high school across the street, the fire station down the avenue, the pizza place and said he didn’t want the complex to intrude but to add.
“Our design is meant to be a continuation of what’s here,” he said. “This is small town America. All of this flows together.”
The boiler plant and powerhouse building is one of the structures, along with the main building of the nursing school, that will be saved. The plan is for it to become a restaurant but what type has not been determined yet. Murray says that decision will happen near the end of construction.
“Orange is a special place. You talk to people from a generation ago, they say, people got along, Italians, African Americans – it was a community that wasn’t divided in that way,” Murray said. “You’ve got this Italian heritage, along with African Americans, now this Central and South American population.”
The current economic uncertainty does not worry him, he said.
“I’m not worried, I’m not naive, but I’m not worried,” he said. “We are not trying to build it all tomorrow. I have time to build it out over time.”
The plan is to build the complex over about seven years.
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