Karen Gerard, who died Monday at 75, was an urban economist who served for two years as the deputy mayor for economic policy and development during the Koch administration.

As deputy mayor from 1981–1983, Gerard helped develop Battery Park City’s commercial center and the East Side River Walk. But she also was criticized for being a policy-oriented technician rather than an effective administrator. She conceded as much in an exit interview with the New York Times in 1982, in which she advised her successor, “You have to have a balance between having a solution to something instantly — being reactive — and having a framework, a longer-range view of where you want to go.”

Longer terms were more her style. She worked for Chase Manhattan Bank for 25 years, starting in 1955. A Columbia University-trained economist, Gerard specialized in urban economics. During New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, she was an advisor to Mayor Lindsay and a highly respected commentator who served on numerous government boards. While an officer at Chase in the early 1970s, she negotiated a deal to work just four days a week. It was a highly unusual concession at the time for a mother raising a family, and the negotiations surrounding it were described by anonymous sources at the time as a “battle royal.”

Gerard also served as president of the Women’s Forum, a networking and mentoring organization. It was during a Women’s Forum seminar that Mayor Koch discovered Gerard and eventually asked her to be deputy mayor.

Raised in Hewlett, Long Island, Gerard majored in economics at Radcliffe and told the Times that she got a C in her first economics course. After receiving a master’s degree from Columbia in 1954, she went to work at Chase Manhattan. She became a vice president of the company in 1976.

After stepping down as deputy mayor in early 1983, Gerard became a specialist in advising companies on relocating in and out of New York City. In 1988, her later successor as deputy mayor, Alair Townsend, criticized her consulting firm, Moran, Stahl & Boyer, for “a predisposition to advise its clients to relocate outside the city.” Gerard rejected the charge, although she said she needed to do right by her clients. “I am not writing off the city,” she told Crain’s New York Business.

It was through a consulting client, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, that she became an author. The company’s publisher, William Jovanovich didn’t take her advice to stay in New York, but he did tell her that she “really should be writing.” The result was “American Survivors: Cities and Other Scenes,” a series of essays on urban development. Ken Auletta, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said the book offered “a substantial taste of urban government — what it can, and cannot, accomplish.” The author, he said, was “a woman with an eye for mischief and an altogether appealing, if undeserved, modesty.” In 1989, Gerard founded her own corporate relocation consultancy, Kelly Legan & Gerard. She retired in 1993. Retaining her curiosity about the city, Gerard volunteered as a docent at the New-York Historical Society and at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Karen Nina Gerard

Born April 11, 1932, died March 10 at her Upper West Side home; survived by her husband of 53 years, Egon Gerard, her children, Deborah and Daniel, and four grandchildren.

To contact obituaries editor Stephen Miller Phone: 212-901-2638 E-mail: smiller@nysun.com