Gulf and Western Industries

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (March 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Gulf and Western Industries, Inc.

Type	Conglomerate
Industry	Clothing, entertainment, industry, mass media, publishing
Founded	1934; 87 years ago (1934) (as the Michigan Bumper Company)
Defunct	1989; 32 years ago (1989)
Fate	Asset management; re-branded as Paramount Communications.
Successor	Paramount Communications (1989–1994) Viacom (1994–2006, 2005–2019) ViacomCBS (2019–present)
Headquarters	New York City, New York, United States
Key people	Charles Bluhdorn, Martin S. Davis
Owner	Charles Bluhdorn (1958)
Subsidiaries	Associates First Capital Corporation Consolidated Cigar Kayser-Roth Madison Square Garden New Jersey Zinc Paramount Pictures Paramount Television Simon & Schuster Sega South Puerto Rico Sugar Company

Gulf and Western Industries, Inc., (stylized as Gulf+Western) was an American conglomerate. Gulf and Western's origins date to the 1956 purchase of the Michigan Bumper Company by entrepreneur Charles Bluhdorn, although Bluhdorn treated his 1958 takeover Michigan Plating and Stamping as its "founding" for the purpose of later anniversaries. Originally, the company focused on manufacturing and resource extraction. Beginning in 1966, and continuing throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the company purchased a number of entertainment companies, most notably Paramount Pictures in 1966,^[1] Desilu Productions in 1967, and a number of record companies including Dot Records (a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures at the time of purchase) and Stax Records. These became the nucleuses of Paramount Television and Paramount Records respectively.

Through asset management, the company's non-publishing and entertainment assets were dismantled and sold off through the course of the 1980s, with the company re-branding itself as Paramount Communications in 1989.^[1] A controlling interest of Paramount Communications was purchased by Viacom in 1994, and the entertainment assets of Gulf and Western are today part of the media conglomerate ViacomCBS.^[1]

History[]

Bluhdorn period[]

Under Bluhdorn the company diversified widely 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:

• APS Holding Corp., auto parts manufacturer
• Paramount Pictures (1966)
• New Jersey Zinc (1966)
• Universal American, including Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation subsidiary (1966)^[2]
• Taylor Forge (1967)
• South Puerto Rico Sugar Company (1967), a holding company in Jersey City, New Jersey, with principal subsidiary, called South Porto Rico Sugar Company,^[3] a cane sugar refiner in Ensenada, Guánica County, Puerto Rico^[4] owners of Central Guanica, purported to once be the largest cane sugar refinery in the world.^[5]
• The Associates First Capital Corporation, a financial services company (1968)
• Consolidated Cigar (1968)
• Stax Records (1968)
• Sega (1969)
• 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)
• Simmons Bedding Company (1979)
• Thomas Ryder and Son, of Bolton, GB, a machine tool manufacturing company, acquired from Whitecroft (1981)^[6]

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-Lasky Corp., 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 and renamed the Famous Music Group.

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.

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, in 1971, 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", but he could not convince the board of trustees/directors of the wisdom of this idea. Fox owner News Corporation was, however, interested in starting a network.

Early 1980s[]

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, however, 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.^[7]

In 1981, former officials of Gulf and Western's Natural Resources Division 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 Dominican Republic to New York headquarters, 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.

Martin Davis restructuring[]

Davis slimmed down the company's wilder diversifications and focused it on entertainment, and sold all of its non-entertainment and publishing assets.^[8]

In 1983, Gulf and Western sold Consolidated Cigar Corporation to five of its senior managers.

Also in 1983, Gulf and Western sold the U.S. assets of Sega to pinball manufacturer Bally Manufacturing. The Japanese assets of Sega were purchased by a group of investors led by David Rosen and Hayao Nakayama.

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.

South Puerto Rico Sugar Co. (renamed) was sold to an investment group including The Fanjul Brothers in 1984.^[9]

In 1985, APS auto parts, Kayser-Roth clothing and Simmons Bedding were sold to the Wickes Companies. The company, thus restructured, subsequently renamed itself Paramount Communications in 1989, and promptly sold The Associates to the Ford Motor Company.

Headquarters[]

Prior to 1970, the headquarters was on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.^[10]

The Gulf and Western Building (15 Columbus Circle in Manhattan) by Thomas E. 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,"^[11] 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.

See also[]

• List of Paramount executives

References[]