Jerry Wolkoff

Developer, Heartland Business Center

The largest private land owner and developer in Suffolk County grew up tenement-poor in Brooklyn, waxing floors after school at age 11 to earn his keep. By age 16 Jerry Wolkoff was running a successful floor-waxing company. It was this entrepreneurial spirit, and a propensity for the name Heartland, that’s driven the Wolkoff Group into become Long Island’s largest development company, as measured by square feet currently under construction. Wolkoff got his first taste of the construction business in the early Sixties, watching his older brother build houses in Oceanside. Within several years he ran one of the largest home building companies in Brooklyn. By the late Sixties he was constructing homes by the hundreds in a Staten Island development he named Heartland Village. By the early 1970s Wolkoff had pressed into Suffolk County, opening the Heartland Executive Park: over 250 acres in Hauppauge with 5+ million square feet of industrial warehouse and office space. In 1983 he broke ground in Edgewood for the Heartland Business Center: 5+ million square feet of office and industrial space on 400 acres. He also owns and manages additional properties in other states. Wolkoff argues – persuasively – that his vision, knowledge, expertise and passion make the Wolkoffs uniquely qualified to navigate and complete mega-projects like Heartland Town Square and 5Pointz Towers, the 1.3 million square foot mixed use project on Jackson Avenue in Queens New York. In a region that’s become known as the Land of No, this developer hears quite a few Yes’s.