Richard Ravitch, savior of the New York subway and finances, dies at age 89
Richard Ravitch, a politically savvy, socially minded developer and citizen who helped save New York City from the brink of bankruptcy and its dilapidated subways from budget collapse, died in Manhattan on Sunday. He turned 89.
His death in a hospital was confirmed by his wife, Kathleen M. Doyle.
Mr. Ravitch has never won an election post. But he left an outsized mark on the government on every level as one of the behind-the-scenes wise men recruited to avoid the 1975 financial collapse of New York’s Urban Development Corporation and, a few months later, the government’s own accounts. municipality of New York.
Gathering public support for inventive ways to generate revenue, he also played a major role in rejuvenating the city’s public transportation system as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the 1980s.
He later served as Lieutenant Governor of New York, hired by David A. Paterson in 2009 to confer gravitas on his wavering administration. (Mr. Paterson succeeded Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace following a prostitution scandal.)
Mr. Ravitch, who inherited a construction company, also left his mark on the cityscape with signature apartment projects such as Waterside and Manhattan Plaza.
Progressive in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, he espoused an Emersonian belief in democracy as a dynamic symbiosis between politics and good governance. Referring to a lesson learned from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose successful Senate run he helped promote in 1976, Mr. Ravitch recalled in his 2014 memoir: “There is so much to do: a full life of business, politics and confrontation with fiscal crises.” “There is a more powerful connection than people think between the world of ideas and the world of practical politics.”
He enjoyed the intellectual challenges of crises. “Like Cincinnatus of the early Roman Republic,” Stephen Eide, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in “City Journal” in 2014, “Ravitch is best known for temporarily serving in times of great need.”
Together with Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, he formed the Task Force National Budget Crisis in 2011 to draw attention to the fiscal vulnerability of governments across the country. In 2014, Mr. He volunteered for another rescue mission: He was called to advise a federal judge and the governor of Michigan as Detroit works its way out of bankruptcy.
Mr. Ravitch was cunning, guileless, and so unequivocally blunt that he was sometimes dismissed as a doomsayer.
“As pessimistic as we were, he was always a darker shade of gray,” recalled Eugene Keilin, who served as president of the Municipal Assistance Corporation during the New York City fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. Mayor Edward I. Koch called him a Cassandra. But Mr Ravitch countered that only by relentlessly sounding the alarm could he muster the requisite political base to face a given crisis.
Richard Ravitch was born in Manhattan on July 7, 1933. His father, Saul, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia who manufactured manhole covers, was a builder. His family business, HRH Construction, would redefine the city’s skyline with majestic structures, including the Beresford and San Remo condominiums. His mother, Sylvia (Lerner) Ravitch, was an accomplished sculptor.
Richard attended Lincoln School and graduated from Fieldston School. He then enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, but transferred to Columbia College, graduating in 1955 with a degree in history. There he received a formal introduction to party politics. st
Attracted by Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign, he invited Eleanor Roosevelt to a meeting in Columbia and, as her on-campus chaperone, had an intoxicating one-on-one luncheon with her beforehand.
But he was dismayed to discover that the local Democratic organization did nothing to help Mr. Stevenson, because registering more voters would introduce too much unpredictability into what really mattered to party regulars: next year’s mayoral race.
“This was my introduction to the reality that politics is complicated and that campaigns, for better or for worse, are not necessarily driven by idealistic fervor or loyalty,” he wrote.
He graduated from Yale Law School in 1958, worked in Washington as an assistant counsel to a House subcommittee on military operations, and briefly served in the military, where he was called to active duty during the 1961 Berlin Wall crisis. .
In Houston in 1960, he married Diane Silvers, who went on to become a prominent education historian and policy analyst. They divorced in 1986. His marriage to Betsy F. Perry, in 1994, also ended in divorce.
In 2005, he married Mrs. Doyle, the president of William Doyle Galleries. She outlives him, as do two sons, Joseph and Michael, from his first marriage; three stepdaughters, Carrie and Laura Doyle and Liz Doyle Carey, from his marriage to Mrs. Doyle; and 13 grandchildren.
In 1960, Mr. Ravitch joined the family business, inherited with his cousins, which built the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Citicorp Center in Manhattan, as well as the Ebbets Field Apartments and Trump Village in Brooklyn. But it was the reform of democratic politics that opened the door to a lifetime of networking, both in private development and public service.
He was a partner in Washington’s first desegregated housing project. One of the first tenants was Robert C. Weaver, who would become the nation’s first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the first African American to hold a cabinet-level post.
Through civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, with whom he participated in the 1963 March on Washington, Mr. Ravitch to A. Philip Randolph, the illustrious union leader, with whom he established an apprenticeship program to prepare young black men for union jobs. .
He also met Joseph A. Califano Jr., who would join Lyndon B. Johnson’s cabinet and become a lifelong friend, and Lewis Davis, an architect with whom he would collaborate on major projects.
Two projects built in the 1970s put Mr. Ravitch’s problem-solving skills to the test in creating new neighborhoods.
One, Waterside Plaza, was built along the East River on debris from the World War II Blitz in Bristol, England, used as ballast in ships coming to the United States. He had to address concerns that the project, by projecting into the estuary, would impede navigation.
The other, Manhattan Plaza on West 42nd Street, was conceived as a luxury apartment complex but was hampered by financial problems. It was transformed with heavy government subsidies to attract low and middle income performers.
In 1975, Mr. Ravitch was recruited by Governor Hugh L. Carey to bail out the Urban Development Corporation, which had been founded by a predecessor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, to circumvent local zoning restrictions and build housing for low-income New Yorkers.
The company defaulted on its short-term loans, but Mr. Ravitch convinced the legislature to create the Project Finance Agency to issue new debt backed by federal grants to repay old loans.
That new agency not only enabled the company to complete its ongoing projects, but also served as a model for the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which later saved New York City from bankruptcy in 1975 by taking on the city’s crushing debts .
On October 18, when the city had a deadline later that day to repay short-term notes, Albert Shanker, the leader of the teachers union, opposed an earlier agreement to buy $200 million worth of bonds from the Municipal Assistance Corporation with the pension from his union. funds. Mr. Ravitch persuaded him to honor his agreement, then contacted Washington’s comptroller of currency to keep the banks open after their hours so the city could pay its debts before midnight.
In 1979, Mr. Ravitch again recruited by the governor, this time to save the transit system. He was uniquely qualified: a rarity among government officials, he was a regular subway traveler.
He warned that rates would rise unless lawmakers approved a tax increase. They complied. He endured an 11-day transit strike in 1980 and lived with police escort after an intruder shot his police bodyguard in the thigh at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters.
Lobbying for long-term funding to rebuild the transit system, Mr. Ravitch drafted an $8.5 billion plan whereby private companies would purchase buses and railcars from the MTA and lease them back at a savings to the authority, and the companies would receive tax benefits.
“In terms of having a vision,” said Robert F. Wagner Jr., a member of the MTA board at the time, “in terms of what the system needed, crafting a plan and surpassing the odds, he produced one of the extraordinary legacies a government official will have left over the last 50 years.”
Mr. Ravitch retired from the haulage business in 1983, but not from public life. He led a group of investors that returned the ailing Bowery Savings Bank to profitability in two years; chaired a charter review committee in New York City that tightened rules on ethics and public campaign funding; and remained active in Jewish philanthropies.
As Major League Baseball’s chief negotiator, he proposed a revenue-sharing plan that placed a cap on players’ salaries, which helped precipitate the strikes of 1994 and 1995.
Seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1989, he won critical acclaim as a cerebral and politically independent citizen savior, but he ran a distant third, behind David N. Dinkins, who came in first, and Mr. Koch, the incumbent.
Two decades later, Mr. Ravitch by appointment as lieutenant governor of the state, filling a vacancy created when Mr. Paterson Mr. Spitzer, who resigned after being identified by federal investigators as a client of a prostitution ring.
Because the nomination was challenged by Senate Republicans (who sought a court order to block it), Mr. Ravitch was hastily sworn in over steak, tomatoes and creamy spinach at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn. (Steak from Luger’s was served May 2 at an early 90th birthday party for Mr. Ravitch, held at the New-York Historical Society.)
Mr. Ravitch took the task seriously and won a hearing among lawmakers for his proposals for a payroll tax and tolls on East River bridges to support public transportation. He also recommended borrowing to help close a $9 billion state budget gap, coupled with strict tax and accounting controls. The governor rejected most of his advice.
But the underlying budgetary demands remained, in New York and other states. The challenge, wrote Mr. Ravitch in “So Much to Do,” is “how a free society can reduce benefits for some and increase burdens for others without unacceptably tearing at the social fabric.”
“In a democracy,” he argued, “if you insist on being above politics, you cannot govern well.”