The accomplished winners might want to save their best oratory for another speech. Mr. Kuhn was the recipient of the Young Real Estate Man of the Year honor in 1986. “I walked up, said ‘thank you’ and stepped down,” he recalled.
“With all due respect to the deserving award winners, they’re not Marlon Brando or Anne Hathaway,” Mr. Sussman said. “You’re not going to be hearing any dramatic political statements. I’ve experienced it, talking to even smaller groups—people’s eyes wax over and they dive in their chairs.”
Not everyone is as forgiving of the audience patter drowning out the dais. “The gala should be one large cocktail party or a designated networking event,” Steve Siegel, chairman of global brokerage at CBRE, said. “I’ve said for years that I don’t understand the purpose of everyone being seated. Just serve drinks and hors d’oeuvres and hand out the awards at a separate ceremony with 300 guests.”
Mr. Siegel spoke from firsthand frustration. “Edward S. Gordon died, and he was an icon of our business. I’d worked with him, so I was asked to speak,” Mr. Siegel said. “I brought the room to silence for a whole minute for the first time in history by holding up a giant sign with “silence” written across it. Maybe it didn’t last a whole minute, maybe 40 seconds.”
The banquet has been dependably boisterous for as long as attendees can remember. Total alcohol intake has also remained steady and impressive. But the makeup of the assembled has evolved. Mr. Sussman went to his first banquet in 1967. “There were two women there—Hattie Carnegie and Leona Helmsley, before she was Helmsley,” Mr. Sussman said.
REBNY presented the Louis Smadbeck Award in 2004 to a woman for the first time. The winner, Mary Ann Tighe, stepped down this month as the board’s first female chairperson.
But as esteemed as the awards are, they are secondary to the gala’s primary function as a social extravaganza. The catching up and conversation is surprisingly innocent: most people who spoke to The Commercial Observer about the event said deal-making, for once, takes a backseat to nonprofessional friendliness. (Mr. Montana, on the other hand, said, “I can tell you that deals get done there.”)
“The interactions are shorter than a tweet,” Ms. Himmelman said. “There’s not really time for deals; it’s ‘Hi, I love your dress.’” Mr. Kuhn also noted the revolving door of interactions that keeps engagement concise but civilized. “I talk to 1,000 people for 30 seconds each, he said. “You have to. If you don’t show up, they’ll think you’re dead.”
