The handyman.

• Author: Lester, Margot
• Position: Entrepreneur Joe Hakan

Whether it's picking up a new skill or unsticking a tangle of red tape, Joe Hakan will find a way to get things done.

Like the giraffes he collects - in ceramic, wood and leather - Joe Hakan is not afraid to stick his neck out. The Chapel Hill resident launched a career as an engineer, planner and designer in one of the most anti-development towns in the state and managed to build a resume that reads like a tour of the Triangle - Crabtree Valley Mall, Dean E. Smith Center, The Siena Hotel.

But now at an age when many men are kicking back on their Boston Whalers or spending time on the links, Hakan, 70, is still emulating his favorite animal, stretching to take on what many in the Triangle might term a near impossibility - making Raleigh's City Market work.

"I'd met all the challenges in the design business, and I mainly liked development," he says. So in 1993 he sold his interest in Hakan/Corley & Associates, his Chapel Hill-based architectural, engineering and planning firm, for a sum he keeps private and last year bought Raleigh's downtown white elephant for $1.07 million. "City Market has so much potential," he says. Maybe so, but critics say drawing more people to the retail and dining complex, especially after dark, will be a struggle.

Sure, the project is daunting, but that's the way Hakan likes it: "I want to keep the adrenalin flowing - I don't want to get stale. Once you think you've got it made, you're dead. You've got to have passion for your work."

He got his first taste of building during World War II as a Navy Seabee. In addition to getting him interested in design and engineering, his wartime experience taught him how to think big. His battalion's claim to fame was constructing New Guinea's largest latrine (a 64-seater).

He had grown up in Joplin, Mo., where his dad was an optometrist and his mother a professional concert singer. "Joplin was a wide-open town," he recalls. Its raucous nightlife drew revelers from neighboring Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma, all dry states. His first job was delivering fried chicken to local brothels.

At 15, he started working for nearby lead mines as a surveyor's helper. After high school and a year of college, he went into the Navy. Discharged in 1946 as a petty officer third class, he decided to try his hand at engineering. Under the GI Bill, veterans with last names starting with A to M could attend Duke University, where he received his degree in 1949.

He got a job with H. Raymond Weeks Architects, a Durham firm. Anticipating a flood of veterans, UNC launched a building campaign, including Carroll and Venable halls, for which Hakan's firm got the contract. The work put him in contact with some key players at Carolina, and when the university had an opening for a director of engineering, planning and construction, Hakan, then 27, landed the job. "It was a fortunate thing," he says now. "They had a lot of projects planned and said, 'You go do...