The Race for Rangoon

On a sultry afternoon in May, Richard Friedman sits in the back of a 1990s Buick with faulty air conditioning, mired in traffic in downtown Yangon (formerly Rangoon). The rainy season in Myanmar—also known as Burma—has just begun, and the sky is a leaden gray; the temperature is pushing 95F. Friedman, one of the highest-profile American investors to be lured by the siren call of this newly opened Southeast Asian country, peers out at a sweep of colonial-era buildings, many of them derelict. We drive past the old British Customs House and the former Pegu Club, where Rudyard Kipling spent his only night in Burma, in 1889, while traveling from Calcutta to San Francisco. The stories he heard there inspired his poem “Mandalay.”

A short, vigorous 72-year-old who coached the Harvard ski team after graduating from Dartmouth in the early 1960s, Friedman made his name turning neglected but historic properties into top-flight hotels. In 2005 he redeveloped San Francisco’s 1907 Williams Building into a $180 million mixed-used project that includes the St. Regis Hotel, condominiums, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. Two years later he transformed the 19th century Charles Street Jail on Boston’s Beacon Hill into the four-star Liberty Hotel. Friedman is the president and chief operating officer of Carpenter & Co., a Cambridge (Mass.)-based real estate development and management company. He’s also a major Democratic fundraiser. During the 1990s, the Clintons used his beachfront home on Martha’s Vineyard as their summer White House half a dozen times.