Biography|Larry Fink — The Park Avenue Plaza Quarter That Wiped Out a Hundred Million

Park Avenue Plaza at 55 East 52nd Street sits over the Racquet and Tennis Club.

In the mid-1980s First Boston's bond rooms occupied this new tower.

Fink had arrived from UCLA in 1976 as a mortgage-backed trader.

By the middle of the decade he was running the mortgage desk and sitting on the management committee.

The New Yorker later described the building in those years as the firm's stylish Camelot.

The first quarter of 1986 was the desk's best.

Published accounts put the profit near 130 million dollars.

The second quarter reversed it.

Interest rates moved against the book.

Coming back from travel, Fink was told the hole was close to 100 million dollars, a figure repeated by the New York Times in 2006, by Bloomberg in 2010, and in a 2014 note he published on LinkedIn.

He was 33.

Profiles from that period say the loss ended talk that he and Bruce Wasserstein might one day share the top of the firm.

He stayed into 1988, then left.

The lesson he later put on the public record was that the desk had made money without tools that could show the size of the risk.

Two years later that argument became BlackRock.

The same address later housed BlackRock itself, on a dozen floors, until the firm moved west to Hudson Yards.

The plaza you can walk into from 52nd Street is a privately owned public space.

The trading rooms are gone.

What remains is the building that taught the man who now runs the world's largest asset manager what a wrong-way rate move costs.

Photo: Jim Henderson, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons