American Airlines In-Flight Magazine -
Modern-day renaissance man
1 April 2004 | By PAMELA ROBIN BRANDT
Jacob Gelt Dekker is an MBA who paints portraits, a wildly successful entrepreneur who hangs with princes and taxi drivers alike, and he's rebuilding Curaçao , too.
In Curaçao, the C of the former Dutch colonial ABC Netherlands Antilles islands, there is a famous floating bridge from the Victorian era, known affectionately by locals as the Swinging Old Lady. Built in the 1880s, the bridge swings open numerous times daily to allow ships into the bay that divides the island's capital city, Willemstad. It also connects the city's two equally historic halves, Punda, settled in 1634, and Otrabanda ("the other side"), only about 50 years younger.
For much of the past century, though, the bridge's pedestrian traffic has been decidedly one-way: tourists from cruise ships docked in Otrabanda fleeing swiftly toward Punda's quaint, colorfully painted Dutch Caribbean cafes and upscale duty-free shopping. Though Otrabanda was once as commercially thriving as Punda and possibly even more picturesque - more open space allowed expansive buildings centered on kura , or courtyards - by the new millennium it had deteriorated into a slum of fallen-down buildings plagued with drug dealing, prostitution, and seemingly hopeless poverty.
Today, Otrabanda's harbor front hums with new construction. In just the past two years, three international hotel chains (Howard Johnson, Marriott, and Hilton) have opened major resorts around Otrabanda's main public square, Brionplein, and Hyatt is currently building. In the renovated ruins of an old fort is a 60-shop retail complex. Buildings that formerly made up an old monastery now house a new medical school. Throughout the quarter, crumbling private homes have been rebuilt, excitingly innovative individual artisan businesses have opened (example: Angelica's Kitchen, an interactive eatery where a local woman teaches diners to prepare their own Curaçaon meal), and, most miraculously, crime and squalor have been virtually banished from the streets.
One man is credited with almost single-handedly spearheading the super speed revival - Jacob Gelt Dekker, a former Dutch dentist turned international entrepreneur-philanthropist. Curaçao Tourist Board executive director Jim Hepple calls Dekker the chief catalyst for Curaçaon renewal, and Dekker himself isn't shy about cheering the new Otrabanda.
"The pushers are totally gone! Prostitutes are gone! Beggars, gone!" he exclaims. "All the people now have jobs."
The pioneer project that Hepple says, "has boosted the tourism outlook not just for Otrabanda but for Curaçao as a whole? is Dekker's Kura Hulanda, a picture-perfect eight-square-block village-within-a-village containing an 80-room luxury boutique hotel (with art and furnishings supplied, in part, from the "spare parts palaces" of a couple of Sultans and Rajahs Dekker met on his world travels) plus an international cultural studies institute and a world-class African/Caribbean museum of anthropology, archaeology, and art that has drawn more than 100,000 visitors since opening in 1999. Though the sprawling, deceptively casual-looking museum contains artifacts worthy of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the collection's highlight is a life-size walk-in slave ship galley that conveys with inescapable poignancy what it must have been like to make that trans-Atlantic voyage, chained. Grown men climb out of the cramped hold crying.
Rather than the standard approach of razing the crumbling 17th- and 18th-century Dutch colonial houses on the Kura Hulanda site, the artistically gifted Dekker restored them beautifully - with an architect, but largely according to his own personal plan - to house the museum. An adjunct eco-resort, with a luxe lodge and a nature preserve dedicated to bringing back native Curaçaon birds, is scheduled to open in the fall.
"Flights from Europe to Curaçao before the Kura Hulanda were 200 seats a day. Now it's 1,200 seats. Tourist growth has been 46 percent this year compared to last year," says the youthful Dekker, whose vagabond-long hair and unlined, film-star face belie his 54 years. "All of it got going from a little renovation in a taboo part of town where nobody went."
"To make something out of nothing, especially when everybody tells you not to do it," Dekker chortles gleefully. "Isn't that fun?"
To say Jacob Gelt Dekker is an extremely effective entrepreneur would be an understatement akin to saying a personal computer is an extremely effective electric typewriter, i.e. it's true, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Although the Quote 500, the Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg (or BeNeLux) region's version of the Fortune 500, recently named Netherlands citizen Dekker Europe's 90th richest person, colleagues define the exuberant entrepreneur as much, much more. He's an almost textbook example, they say, of a businessman who has figured out how to do well for himself while simultaneously doing good for other people, and has also managed to succeed in business without giving up his creative and scholarly sides.
"Jacob is like a diamond. He has many facets, and in whatever capacity he's involved in something, he'd shine," muses former Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder, whom Dekker is advising about the creation of a more African-American-oriented slavery museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia. "There are so many things we're going to steal from his museum concept for ours," Wilder adds, chuckling. "He's really a modern Renaissance man, a resource for far more than money."
Practically speaking, "Jacob has opened many doors for us with funding sources, media, construction people, everyone," seconds U.S. National Slavery Museum executive director Vonita W. Foster. "But he's also been a personal inspiration. When I went to the island to see his museum, even taxi drivers and waitresses seemed to know and admire him. He's truly able, as the saying goes, to walk with kings and still keep his common touch."
"Do you know how he got all that stuff in his museum?" Wilder interjects. Answer: Not the way most millionaires acquire art collections, by spreading around money through agents. "He went up these African rivers himself, for several months, in a canoe! I said, 'Where'd you put all that priceless stuff, in that little bitty boat? Where'd you even sleep?' "
"He's a very simple person," Kura Hulanda president Peter Heinen agrees. When Dekker travels (which he does eight months a year), "he goes off to the airport with a backpack. You wouldn't know he had a penny."
Actually, explains Dekker, as a child growing up in WWII-torn Holland, he didn't. His father, a middle-class Jewish real estate developer who went underground, lost his entire fortune - ironically, to the family of Dekker's mother, who were hiding his father. "The farmers who hid people didn't do it because they were humanitarian. They did it for money. After signing over most of his property to my mother's family, he was labeled a shoplifter by his in-laws, and my mother consequently hated my father and wanted nothing to do with me. There was little food anywhere anyway, and since I was a sickly child, skinny like a rat, my mother would always say, 'Oh, I'm not going to waste any food or time on him. He's not going to last.' "
Dekker's father, psychologically destroyed by the war, offered no alternative emotional or practical support. Both parents refused to finance an emergency appendectomy when he was 12; Dekker worked after school for four years to pay it off. "So I was a self-made man very early," he explains, tongue firmly in cheek.
Hardship also prompted Dekker's early start on lifelong learning. "There was no heat in my bedroom, so I spent all my spare time in the library or the art museum." He read and started keeping a journal. "So ever since I was a little kid, my companions have been books and writing."
Formal schooling was another story, though Dekker excelled in his classes; schoolmates shunned him, and teachers, he says, systematically sexually abused him "till I was old enough to stand up to it, about 16." Consequently, lack of family and/or life partner is the one notable hole in Dekker's otherwise richly fulfilled life. "I tried a couple of times," he says of two long-term relationships, "but it made me uncomfortable. I didn't have the right basis for that. And I felt, if you don't have the tools to do one thing, try something else you are able to do."
After a 10-year state-sanctioned detour into dentistry, that ability exploded into an MBA, a simultaneous master's in economics, and a subsequent spectacular business career. Catalyst for the change was, once again, hardship: a five-year bout with near-terminal thyroid cancer. He moved to La Jolla, California, for treatment at the renowned Scripps Clinic, and while there, Dekker took a lot of walks around town. He noticed "a little shop that was doing a tryout of this new technology of one-hour photo development." Dekker contacted his longtime business partner and friend John Padget, "and he got a machine and we started a shop in Amsterdam. Then three shops, and a hundred shops . . . like that." At 160 shops throughout BeNeLux, Dekker sold the chain to Kodak.
It was European Budget Rent-A-Car, though, that made Dekker's fortune. "We bought Budget from a bankrupt company. Then it was 200 old cars. We grew that into 25,000 cars in BeNeLux." With Padget doing the operational nuts and bolts, Dekker introduced innovations. "We closed all the repair shops and talked manufacturers into selling us new cars as advertising - but for only nine months, so we never repaired cars. It was a totally new approach to building a fleet. And we gave people cellphones in the cars. Since we rented to travelers from all over the world, they called all over and we made more money off the phones than the cars, of course."
"We paid $20,000 for the company in 1981. We sold it in 1996 for $600 million."
During Dekker's five-year bout with cancer, though, he not only started on the road to fantastic material success but, conversely, "detached from materialistic achievements. I learned there's no importance to it, to anything except now, the moment. That's why I've become a greater risk-taker than most people. And maybe why I've become a great giver."
Both a risk to himself (initially) and a gift, financially, to Curaçao (eventually) as well as to himself, the Kura Hulanda project began impulsively after a visit to friends in Willemstad, just then designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. "I was there just for the weekend, but they showed me everything. Everyone went to the yacht harbor and that kind of stuff with the big villas, not to Otrabanda. I thought, that looks like a neighborhood that needs a little renovation, doesn't it? It was an opportunity!" he says of his impetus to begin Kura Hulanda. "I bought the ruins of one house in 1997, and fixed it. And then I bought another hundred. It was like you get into a marriage and then you finish up with 10 children."
In 2000 - after Dekker found, in a poverty-stricken Indian village, the granite cobblestones now paving Kura Hulanda's streets ("200 containers- now it's an export product so these people have a way to sustain themselves!"), but before the Kura Hulanda project was finished - cancer struck again, this time melanoma. Padget and other associates supervised the resort's opening. Confined to bed and unable to work or even read, Dekker took up portrait painting. The work is, naturally, professional quality, though Dekker pooh-poohs his achievement. "Everyone knows how to paint."
Dekker's now back on his feet, and when asked whether he feels he's definitively won his fight with melanoma, he shrugs impatiently. "We'll see what happens. When they come back, I just get them cut out again. That's how I deal with it."
Meanwhile, in addition to work on the U.S. Slavery Museum and the eco-lodge, Dekker has a few other new projects.
Because Curaçao has the world's highest incidence of diabetes-related kidney failure, he is building a dialysis clinic.
Because education is a personal priority, he's planning to open a culinary institute to train chefs for all those new hotels and restaurants.
Because ecology is a concern, he's working with Conservation International to develop the reef off the Netherlands Antilles. Also in association with CI, he is collaborating with "my good friend Ermias" - exiled Crown Prince Ermias Sahle-Selassie Haile-Selassie - to establish, in Ethiopia, a nature park/conservation project that also promises economic sustainability for the needy developing nation.
Oh, and he writes weekly newspaper columns, and is turning one of his six book manuscripts into a screenplay.
Dekker denies having any special artistic gift or special world-saving impulses, but Prince Ermias demurs. "He's very creative, and identifies passionately with the neglected. He believes that given opportunities, others would be successful as he has been."
"I've learned in my life," Dekker concedes, "you take a negative and turn it into a positive. I had the blessing of an upbringing that set me free in my thinking. And I certainly believe that we have a collective responsibility to the people we live with. So I should use that talent to show the world, to show children who are disadvantaged, from my own experience, that no matter how negative your upbringing is, no matter how dreadful it is, that can become your strength. That can become your power - your competitive advantage over everybody else who was spoiled as a child. That can become your blessing."
PAMELA ROBIN BRANDT , based in Miami Beach, writes on food, travel, and people for publications such as The New York Times .
TIM OKAMURA is a Brooklyn-based painter, illustrator, and college professor whose work has been frequently featured in magazines, on book and album covers, and in London's National Portrait Gallery.
|
