Scott Resnick has enjoyed many successes since he went into real estate 20 years ago, but the opening of a sales office next week at his company’s newest property at 200 Chambers St. in Manhattan has special significance for him.

“It’s been a soap opera,” he said. “I remember the frustration, the long and brutal negotiations, and the horror of September 11, 2001. That’s why this project gives me special pleasure. It almost didn’t happen, and now it’s going to be bigger than what we set out to do. We’ve paid the city more money that it had expected, and we’re giving more space to the local community and a local school than originally planned.”

Mr. Resnick paused, and then said: “A good deal is one where everybody almost gets everything they wanted. This is such a deal. I feel very proud to be building a beautiful building.”

The condominium development, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2006, will have 257 units ranging from 573-square-foot studios to 2,300-square-foot three-bedroom apartments. They will be priced between $500,000 and $3 million. Some 30,000 square feet will be used for a new community center, a donation from Mr. Resnick and his family’s company, Jack Resnick & Sons, of which he’s president and chief operating officer.

The initial design by Sir Norman Foster, the famed British architect, and Costas Kondylis, a New Yorker who specializes in high-rise architecture, called for a 35-story building. But Mr. Foster left the project, apparently tired of objections from local residents who argued for two decades that big buildings don’t belong in a low-rise neighborhood.

The project has come into shape as a 30-story edifice with an accompanying seven-story structure that will house the community center, a school annex, and residential-amenity space. A local school, P.S. 234, will be given enough space for a dozen classrooms.

The project will cost $220 million, with $40.5 million already paid to the city for the land, which was a city urban-renewal site known technically as Site 5C. Four blocks north of ground zero, it will be the first completely new building in the TriBeCa area since the attacks of September 11. The fact that it’s being built at all is a tribute to Mr. Resnick’s persistence during several years of negotiations with the city and Community Board 1.

Mr. Resnick said he inherited those qualities from his father, Burton, who’s chairman of the family-owned company that his father, Jack, founded in 1928. As a child, Mr. Resnick would go with his father to various construction sites. As a teenager, he worked on some of them.

“I was at the low end of the totem pole,” Mr. Resnick said. “Twice a day I went to fetch sandwiches and coffee for my fellow workers. They were real tough guys, but at the same time it was so inspiring to be in their company.”

He still recalls one “rite of passage”: Hardened steel workers dared him to walk on a 6-inch-wide beam 20 stories from the ground at 52 Broadway. He was terrified, but he did not flinch. A Polaroid picture was taken of him on that beam, but when Mr. Resnick showed it to his mother that evening, she wasn’t amused.

“I learned a lot about construction in those years,” Mr. Resnick said. “Those summer jobs helped demystify the process of building a building. I realized that while building construction was a complicated business because so many components and trades were involved, it was still a fairly linear process.”

As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, he studied art history and majored in communications and political science. He’s maintained interest in art and films: Mr. Resnick is a trustee of the Whitney Museum and is on the board of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He went to the Cardozo School of Law for a year before deciding that his real calling was in real estate.

“But the greatest lesson I learned in law school was the ability, when presented with an endless pile of data, to plow through that data and glean the essence,” Mr. Resnick said.

In 1985, he joined Sonnenblick-Goldman, a real estate mortgage banking firm, where he gained extensive knowledge of the New York City market. He also gained insight into the business from mentors such as William Stern of Sonnenblick-Goldman, who often let him sit in on negotiations and listen when he was talking to clients. It was priceless education for Mr. Resnick.

Later, when he moved to his family’s company in 1989, another mentor was Asriel “Rickey” Rackow. “Rickey was a tough taskmaster,” Mr. Resnick said. “He taught me that you’d better be thinking two questions ahead.”

Mr. Rackow, in fact, had been with Jack Resnick when he formed the company in the Bronx in 1928; the entire staff at the time consisted of Jack Resnick, Mr. Rackow, and a secretary.

Today, Scott Resnick is president of a real estate empire that includes 5 million square feet of office space.