By Guy T. Baehr

Billionaire real estate developer Samuel LeFrak just turned 81, but he's not slowing down. He's speeding up.

"You reach a crescendo," he said Tuesday at his second groundbreaking on the Jersey City waterfront in less than two weeks -- this time for a 22-story office tower to be completed by September of next year. "I'm at the top of my game."

Even LeFrak seemed a bit amazed as he swept his hand around the 400-acre former rail yard opposite lower Manhattan, one that he's spent 14 years developing into a mini-city called Newport.

"You know, we have $450 million worth of work going on here right now. We're working seven days a week, 24 hours a day," he said.

Other projects include a 189-room Courtyard at Marriott hotel started this month; a 441-unit apartment tower started last September; an 18-story office tower scheduled for completion in September and a 409-unit apartment tower that will go to construction this summer.

"I gave myself 20 years to complete this," he said. "That means I have another six years to go."

LeFrak first visited the site in 1983 when he was brought into the project by two shopping center developers, Melvin Simon and Herb Glimcher, who wanted to put a mall on the tract and needed an apartment developer to meet local requirements for housing development.

Sensing greater possibilities, he assembled the site -- 1.5 miles along the Hudson River -- from more than 80 individual owners and began mapping out a grand plan for a $10 billion mini-city he says will eventually have a daytime population of 500,000.

The Queens-based developer who has built more than 200,000 apartments, mostly in New York City, called this project on New Jersey waterfront his "greatest vision" and "a legacy" he wants to see done "in my lifetime."

Given continued good health and a good economy, LeFrak has a chance to meet his goal, according to his son, Richard S. LeFrak, 54, who is president of the Lefrak Organization, chaired by his father. (The family spells its name differently from the company.)

"We're actually ahead of schedule," said the younger LeFrak, who said the original plan approved by local officials back in 1985 is about 50 percent complete.

With the work under way, he said, Newport will have about 2.8 million of the 5 million square feet of office towers for which it is zoned, about 4,000 of the 9,000 planned apartments, 200 of the 1,200 hotel rooms and 1.2 million of the 1.5 million square feet of retail mall space approved by the city.

Both father and son are quick to note that having a vision for the property was important, but so was having the deep pockets to make it a reality. "Look, we're a conservative company. We're not over-leveraged with debt," said the older LeFrak, who ranks 92nd on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans with an estimated fortune of $1.7 billion.

He also credits Jersey City's cooperative attitude toward development. "In New York City, this would take three times as long to do."

Six years might not seem like enough time to complete the second half of a project that has already taken 14 years, but Richard LeFrak said the hardest part of the job is done. (Rats were one of the early difficulties. A local health inspector shut down work briefly in 1987 after he found the site infested with rats. More serious, he said, was the real estate recession that shut down most new commercial development -- including at Newport -- from about 1990 to 1994.)

"We've reached critical mass," he said. "Newport and the whole Jersey City waterfront are now a recognized community. People don't ask where it is any more," he said. That wasn't true earlier. Comedian Jay Leno, a Jersey City native, had to be hired to help publicize the opening of Newport Centre Mall back in 1987.

"It's got its own momentum now," he said.

Tuesday's celebrity-free groundbreaking was evidence of that.

It was just a year ago that the LeFraks broke ground for a 14-story, 568,000-square-foot office building at Newport. Begun with their own money and without signed leases, the building was the first new speculative office building started along the Hudson County waterfront in nearly a decade.

By last month, three months before the expected completion of that building, they had signed leases with Cigna, U.S. Trust and PaineWebber -- all prime corporate tenants.

"Will history repeat itself?" with the even larger "spec" building started Tuesday, the elder LeFrak asked. "Mark your calendars, same time next year, you're all invited," he said, noting that the master plan for Newport calls for another office tower just to the north.

He said later that at least six "serious" potential tenants have expressed interest in the building, which is expected to bring annual rents of just under $30 per square foot, according to his grandson, Harrison (Harry) LeFrak, who is working in the family business.

The business was started by Sam LeFrak's French immigrant father almost 100 years ago when he acquired a valuable piece of farmland in Brooklyn. Over the years the company prospered by building middle-income housing in New York and still owns more than 90,000 rental apartments.

LeFrak's efforts to complete Newport according to his original 1985 vision drew support from local, state and federal officials at Tuesday's groundbreaking.

Encaracion Loukatos, a regional director with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said the federal housing agency has provided $337 million in low-interest financing to build more than 3,000 moderate-income apartments at Newport and expects to provide additional financing in the future.

State Transportation Commissioner James Weinstein told the LeFraks that a planned Hudson-Bergen light rail trolley line should begin operation through Newport by November of next year, "just a few weeks" after they complete their latest office tower.

The line, which will start at a park-ride lot in Bayonne, is to reach Exchange Place in March and Hoboken Terminal in November, he said. Future plans call for the 20-mile NJ Transit line to extend north to Weehawken and then west to the New Jersey Turnpike's Vince Lombardi park-ride in Bergen County.

The office site is already next to an existing PATH subway station that links it to downtown Manhattan, Hoboken and Newark, but Richard LeFrak said the light rail line will make commuting to the site from elsewhere in Hudson County more convenient and could reduce the traffic impact of future development on the site.

Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler called Newport a valuable asset for his city, saying it and other new developments along the waterfront already pay about 30 percent of the city's property tax revenues and support hundreds of jobs for city residents.