Problem building svn on x86-64

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

I'm trying to build svn from sources on my x86-64 machine and get:

cd subversion/libsvn_subr && /bin/sh /gcc/gcc/subversion-1.2.3/libtool --tag=CC --silent --mode=link gcc  -g -O2  -g -O2 -pthread  -DNEON_ZLIB   -rpath /usr/local/lib -o libsvn_subr-1.la  auth.lo cmdline.lo config.lo config_auth.lo config_file.lo config_win.lo ctype.lo date.lo error.lo hash.lo io.lo lock.lo md5.lo opt.lo path.lo pool.lo quoprint.lo sorts.lo stream.lo subst.lo svn_base64.lo svn_string.lo target.lo time.lo utf.lo utf_validate.lo validate.lo version.lo xml.lo /gcc/gcc/subversion-1.2.3/apr-util/libaprutil-0.la -lgdbm -ldb-4.2 -lexpat /gcc/gcc/subversion-1.2.3/apr/libapr-0.la -lrt -lm -lcrypt -lnsl  -lpthread -ldl 
/usr/lib/libgdbm.so: could not read symbols: Invalid operation
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

The problem is that /usr/lib/libgdbm is a 32-bit file.  It should be using
/usr/lib64 and ld should know that.  But it looks like something is
short-circuiting stuff.  Does anybody know enough about svn build
procedures to know how to fix this?