The death of Laurence Tisch, in a season when so many of our corporate titans are being brought down by business failures or criminal prosecutors, invites reflection on the impact a great and honest businessman can have on a community. He started his business career with an investment in a modest hotel in New Jersey. He was fortunate to have something more valuable than capital, a great brother, Preston Robert. They grasped the underlying value of the real estate owned by the chain of movie theaters that became their vehicle, Loews Corp.,which grew to be the proprietor not only of hotels but of oil tankers and tobacco and broadcasting and insurance holdings worth billions. If that were all, it would have been enough, the great American story.

But the mark that was made by Larry Tisch was amplified by the institutions he guided and built in the public life of this city. This was evident in his contributions to the medical establishment, such as New York University Medical Center, and cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He oversaw the merger of charities that created the UJA-Federation of New York, which played an outsized role in raising resources for the Jewish state, for the rescue of Jews targeted with special oppression under Soviet communism, and for New York’s own Jewish community, which was absorbing great numbers of immigrants and as many as 20% of whose members lived below the poverty line.

Tisch chaired the trustees of New York University for 20 years, a span that saw NYU emerge as a major institution on the national scene and a rival to the city’s member of the Ivy League, Columbia. Under his leadership, NYU’s school of arts, its law and medical schools, and its undergraduate college came into their own. For all this, Martin Lipton, his successor as chairman of NYU, told us, it was not Tisch’s financial contributions that made the most impact on NYU. It was his ability to marshal broader resources, human talent and creativity, to get a job done.

Tisch was a centrist politically. Some have remarked that the metaphor for his cheerful enjoyment of political talk was the dining room of the Regency Hotel, which was presided over by his brother Bob and is probably the only place in the city where one could encounter in the same room figures as disparate as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Abraham Foxman, Vice President Gore and Henry Kissinger, Natan Sharansky, George Steinbrenner and the Rev. Al Sharpton. In a dining room in back, Larry Tisch hosted an occasional breakfast at which, it can be said without breaking the offthe-record nature of the proceedings, leaders of the Jewish community talked out their often-divergent opinions in an impassioned, yet calm way that seemed possible under the hospitality of few, if any, others.

Even at the height of his influence, Tisch was open to newcomers. The editor of The New York Sun was introduced to Tisch by Tisch’s son Thomas shortly after the editor arrived in New York in the late 1980s with a plan to start a newspaper. As the patriarch listened to the young editor’s ideas, a half hour became an hour became lunch. Tisch kept asking questions, probing and reacting. Tisch never invested, but the editor told his colleagues last night that the fact that a businessman of his stature would even listen was enormously encouraging. Eventually, Thomas Tisch, became a founding partner in the Sun.

No doubt, much of Tisch’s strength was drawn from his magnificent marriage, in 1948,to Billie. They lived a sedate life, with an apartment on Fifth Avenue and a home in Rye, N.Y. They raised four sons, two of whom, James and Andrew, are active at Loews, while Thomas and Daniel are in the investment business. All are themselves involved in the public and charitable life of the city, as are their spouses and now even grandchildren. Their involvements span medical, university, cultural, and other institutions, as well as public education in the city and state.

The formula has established the likelihood that when the history of New York City in the 20th century is written, the name of Tisch will loom large, well after glitzier names will have evaporated from the books. It is not that money and profits weren’t important to him; on the contrary, building and preserving his enormous wealth were a central commitment throughout his span. But his ability to sustain this for his 80 years was derived from a value system centered on his family, his study of Jewish texts, and his enjoyment of lasting friendships. One of his friends said last night that the most important thing about Laurence Tisch is that he never lost his value system. It can be said that his greatest bequest to his city was his own example of what such values can achieve.