This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Herbert Greenwald did not start out headed toward real estate development at all. He pursued rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University before switching to philosophy at the University of Chicago, and he served in the United States military during the Second World War before either path had fully resolved into a career. He entered real estate only in 1949, using funds inherited after his mother's death, partnering with Samuel Katzin on his first ventures. He married Lillian Feldman and had two sons, Michael and Bennet, and he supported working artists, including Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, at a point in their careers when that kind of patronage mattered. His decisive professional relationship began in 1946, while Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was still working on the Farnsworth House for Edith Farnsworth; the two men became acquainted then, and Greenwald went on to become one of Mies's most consistent and consequential clients, commissioning the Promontory Apartments in 1949 and then the paired towers at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, announced that same April with co-developer Robert Hall McCormick and financed by a 3.1 million dollar loan from Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company secured that July. Groundbreaking came on December 17, 1949, with more than half the apartments already presold before construction had even begun, a sign of how quickly Chicago's market had come to trust Greenwald's eye for what Mies's architecture could deliver. He would go on to develop several more Mies buildings across Chicago and, eventually, Detroit, but 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, the project born out of that 1946 introduction, remains the clearest evidence of how completely a philosophy student turned developer had, within a few short years, made himself indispensable to one of the twentieth century's most demanding architects.