PHOTO: “She was bigger than life,” Esther Muller, left, said of Ms. Consolo, right. Credit…Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Wrapped in furs, dripping with diamonds and with her blond hair perfectly coifed, Faith Hope Consolo cut a glamorous figure in the flashy, late 20th-century world of New York City real estate.
Ms. Consolo was born into the business, benefiting from her father’s legacy as a real estate executive. Emboldened professionally by her mother, a child psychiatrist, Ms. Consolo parlayed her privileged Connecticut upbringing, which included a stint at Miss Porter’s School for Girls and a degree from Parsons Paris, into a bold career, socializing and cutting deals with the moneyed classes she knew so well.
In late 2018, Ms. Consolo died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 73. As someone who had covered her for years, I wrote her obituary, which included some of the details above, confirming her place in this rarefied world.
But those details, I soon discovered, were lies.
The broader truth, of course, involved a trailblazing career in commercial real estate. Her professional achievements are real. As the self-anointed “queen of retail,” Ms. Consolo was often the only woman in the room. She lured the Spanish clothing store Zara to New York City in the 1980s, persuaded Cartier’s landlords to renew the lease of its iconic Fifth Avenue mansion a decade later, and negotiated the relocation of Ivanka Trump’s jewelry boutique to SoHo in 2011.
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