Franz Leichter, 92, Maverick Albany legislator who got results, dies

Franz S. Leichter, a New York State maverick legislator for three decades whose progressive views on abortion, gay unions, and the decriminalization of marijuana eventually became law in the state, aided in no small part by his persistent advocacy, died Sunday in Manhattan. He turned 92.

The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his children, Kathy and Josh Leichter. He spent years in congestive heart failure and in recent days developed pneumonia and end-stage renal failure, they said.

First as a delegate and then as a state senator representing his famously quarrelsome Manhattan neighborhood, the Upper West Side, Mr. Leichter considered one of the legislature’s staunchest liberals and the harshest critics of his own practices, though he was often dismissed as a Don Quixote tipping vainly at windmills.

But even if he did, it was a badge of honor for him, rooted in a deep sense of injustice imbued in him growing up in Nazi-controlled Vienna and as a young, motherless Jewish refugee in New York. His mother, Käthe Leichter, a leading Austrian sociologist who had pushed for equal pay and employment opportunities for women, was imprisoned in Nazi Germany’s Ravensbrück concentration camp and murdered in 1942.

As a Harvard-educated lawyer, Mr. Leichter (pronounced LIKE-ter) joined other “reformers” in successfully weakening New York’s Tammany Hall Democratic machine. Then, in 1968, during the national unrest over the Vietnam War and civil rights for black Americans and the assassinations of two progressive leaders, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, he won a seat in the General Assembly. . But he did so in elections where the Democrats lost control of that House, leaving him and her relatively powerless.

Two years into his first term, he teamed up with Constance E. Cook, a Republican MP from the state, to draft a bill legalizing abortion in the state. It was a time when affluent women would evade a near nationwide ban on abortion by flying to Puerto Rico or another country to have the procedure, while poorer women risked their lives with quacks or self-induced attempts with coat hangers and other improvised devices. . In the United States, only Hawaii had legalized abortion, but it had restricted the procedure to residents of Hawaii.

Although the New York legislature had only four women and both houses were Republican-controlled, the bill managed to pass the Senate in April 1970. Although it was amended in the Assembly to limit the procedure to the first 24 weeks of pregnancy unless the mother’s life was endangered, it also passed a last-minute amendment of a single vote – that of Councilor George M. Michaels, a Democrat representing a rural, heavily Roman Catholic neighborhood in the Finger Lakes region; he correctly predicted it would end his political career.

Signed into law by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican, the law was instrumental in the United States Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion.

In 1974 Mr. Leichter won a Senate seat in an election that saw Democrats regain control of the Assembly. Again he was sent to the Minority Party as the Senate had gone Republican, but it seemed to suit his contrarian streak.

In 1990, Mr. Leichter wrote a bill authorizing same-sex marriages when the possibility of same-sex marriage seemed distant. The bill failed to pass, but it added to the momentum that led to the state’s same-sex marriage law in 2011.

He also introduced the so-called pooper-scooper law, which required dog owners in New York City to clean up after their dogs; and a law requiring banks to credit deposits immediately so that account holders could start earning interest immediately, a blow to banks that could have benefited from the extra investment time.

But with Democrats outnumbered in the Senate, most of Leichter’s legislative career seemed like a pointless exercise. He wrote scathing reports on banking practices and corporate tax breaks and exposed the common practice of using legislative mailing privileges in reelection campaigns, only to see bills passed that amplified such opportunities for venality.

He took on his own institution, giving countless speeches and holding countless press conferences speaking out against legislators’ spending of pig barrels and making deals, labeling the Senate as “a dictatorship” or a “tyranny by a few members’.

“It’s a tightly closed system that has crystallized and become even more of a way of life since I came here,” he said after announcing his retirement in 1998. “This is no time to be in government.”

Franz Sigmund Leichter was born on August 19, 1930 to Otto and Käthe (Pick) Leichter and grew up in a very assimilated Viennese Jewish household. His mother was one prominent labor researcher and political adviser to the Austrian Social Democrats, and his father was also a leading party member and edited the magazine until 1934.

After the Anschluss of 1938, in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the party was suppressed, and Otto slipped out of the country on a false passport to avoid arrest. Käthe stayed behind to make similar arrangements for her mother and two sons.

Franz, then 7, was put on a train to Brussels with the family’s non-Jewish housekeeper, Irma Turnsek. He was told to pose as her son. Käthe planned to follow weeks later, but the night before she was due to leave, she was betrayed by an associate and arrested. She was imprisoned in the Ravensbrück camp, north of Berlin, and was murdered in early 1942 in the Bernburg Euthanasia Center, set up to exterminate the sick and disabled.

As the German army rolled through much of Europe, Otto managed to join Franz and Otto’s eldest son, Henry, and the three made their way first to Paris and then to an unoccupied zone in southern France.

After three months, aided by Austrian emigrants with friends in the White House, the father and sons obtained visas to resettle in the United States. They arrived in New York by ship in 1940. Otto found work as a foreign correspondent for an Austrian newspaper.

“It’s one of a million stories of what people endured during those difficult years,” said Franz Leichter, describing his wartime experiences to Swarthmore College’s alumni magazine. “I was one of the lucky ones.”

Franz was educated at a boarding school in Darien, Connecticut, in public elementary schools in New York and the former High School of Commerce in Manhattan. He graduated magna cum laude from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in 1952.

After a stint in the military, including a deployment to Japan, he enrolled at Harvard Law School and received his law degree in 1957. party in Manhattan, in which upstarts like Ed Koch successfully challenged party boss Carmine DeSapio’s Tammany Hall machine.

Despite his rebellious image—Senator Guy J. Velella, a Republican from the Bronx, called him “one of the last beatnik types”—Mr. Leichter was a formal dresser, preferring double-breasted suits and starched shirts and he had a scholarly look with accents of metal-rimmed glasses.

Mr. Velella and other colleagues considered him warm and friendly. Mr. Leichter’s criticisms of the legislature and its members were often outrageous, but he settled into the camaraderie of displaced New Yorkers stranded in Albany during the legislative season and was fondly missed when he retired in 1998 .

While serving in the legislature, Mr. Leichter makes his living as a commercial and corporate litigation attorney, usually representing foreign clients, including Brazilian and Mexican banks.

In 1958, he married Nina Williams, who was diagnosed as bipolar and went through severe depression. She committed suicide in 1995. He married Melody Anderson in 2001. She died in 2010.

In addition to his daughter, Kathy – who made a documentary, “Here One Day,” about the life and death of her mother – and his son, Josh, he is survived by six grandchildren. After living on the Upper West Side for about 50 years, Mr. Leichter moved to the Upper East Side in 1997 and was living there at the time of his death.

Parks were a particular passion of Mr. Leichter. He co-wrote legislation that transformed four miles of dilapidated and decaying piers under West 59th Street in Manhattan into the swathes of greenery and concrete piers that make up Hudson River Park. He was also a leading advocate for the construction of a 10-block park atop a water treatment plant on the Hudson River, now called Riverbank State Park. Both are among his most tangible achievements.

Alex Traub reporting contributed.