Preston Robert Tisch, 79, Owner of Loews, Giants And Ambassador of New York to Washington

Preston Robert Tisch, who died Tuesday at 79, was a billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and public servant.A hotelier whose buildings and later civic leadership led to a rejuvenation of New York’s tourist and convention industries starting in the 1950s, he went on to become the city’s ambassador to Washington and half owner of its most successful football team, the Giants.Starting in the late 1950s, Tisch and his brother, Laurence, parlayed their hotel earnings into ownership of the Loews Corporation, which they turned into one of the leading conglomerates in the country. Its businesses included theaters and hotels, and also tobacco, energy, and financial services. The brothers remained close, both personally and as business partners, until Laurence’s death, in 2003.“They were called Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, to use football terminology,” a head coach of the Giants in the 1960s and a friend and one-time neighbor, Allie Sherman, said. “Larry took care of the business affairs,and Bob was the outgoing guy, the ambassador. That’s how they ran their company.”Blessed with an extraordinary memory that he bolstered with little brown notebooks, Tisch relished the details of running a business and knew “every towel and every doorknob in every hotel,” one employee said. Indeed, one of the drawbacks of owning multiple businesses, according to a Fortune article from 1971, was the necessity of delegating responsibility. Tisch did it “somewhat wistfully – for he loves the personal contact with operations.”“Bob had more friends than anybody I know,” a long-time friend, E. John Rosenwald, a retired vice chairman of Bear, Stearns & Company, said. “He invented the power breakfast.”A natural outgrowth of Tisch’s sociability and business interests, the power breakfast began as a roundtable at his Park Avenue Regency Hotel during the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Such civic leaders as Lewis Rudin, Victor Gotbaum, and Felix Rohatyn gathered each morning to nosh and hash out solutions to the ailing city’s finances. The breakfast became an institution for the city’s moguls, who gathered each morning to do business. Tisch served as both host and participant. One morning in 1991, Wellington Mara stopped by and the two created a working agreement for running the Giants. More recently, Tisch tapped everyone from Donald Trump to the CEOs of Keyspan, Merrill Lynch, and a litany of others to support “Take the Field,” his public/private partnership that rebuilt athletic fields and facilities at 43 city high schools. Among the expertise Tisch brought to bear on the project was knowing where to get fake grass at bargain prices, thanks to his ownership of the Giants.“Take the Field,” which completed its renovations last year as Tisch’s illness worsened, was merely the latest in a remarkable record of philanthropic leadership. Others included New York University, where the Tisch medical and arts facilities are merely the most salient evidence of his giving; Citymeals-on-Wheels, of which he served as the first board president and occasional deliveryman; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a large set of galleries bear the Tisch name, and many others.As a public servant, Tisch was for 19 years chairman of the New York Convention and Visitors bureau, during which time it rolled out its “Big Apple” campaign, celebrated the centennials of the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge, and orchestrated the Tall Ships event at the Bicentennial.He was also chairman of the Partnership for New York and the New York Chamber of Commerce, and for 18 months at the end of the Reagan administration served as postmaster general.Tisch was brought up mainly in Brooklyn, the son of a garment manufacturer who moved the family every three years, as was the custom in those days, to take advantage of free rent promotions offered by landlords. At one point, the family lived in the Bronx, which failed to break his devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers. He later recalled that when playing stickball, he was a “two-sewer hitter.”The family was close with Beverly Sills’s family, and the Tisch boys, escorted by an aunt, would attend singing contests at Brooklyn’s Fox Theater and go nuts in attempts to drive the applause meter to the top. “If Aunt Fay didn’t think they were applauding loud enough, she would click them in the head with her fingers. And then when we won” – prizes could be as much as $10 – “we went out for ice cream,” Ms. Sills said in an interview.“Bubbles and Bobby,” as they called each other, were among the first campers at Camp Laurel, one of two summer camps the Tisch family owned and ran in Northwest New Jersey. Tisch attended Erasmus Hall high school, where he was manager of the baseball team, then enrolled at Bucknell College. His education was interrupted by service in the Army during World War II. He graduated in 1948 from the University of Michigan, where he met his wife-to-be, Joan Hyman.Soon after graduating, Tisch joined his brother to help run Laurel-in-the-Pines, a sleepy, kosher, 300-room resort in Lakewood, New Jersey, that Laurence – known to all as Larry – had bought with $125,000 the family raised from savings and by selling their summer camps. Already, the brothers tended toward their familiar business roles – Bob handling purchasing and coordinating the dining room, Larry in charge of reservations and the front desk.The arrangement proved so successful that the brothers next bought the Grand Hotel, a summer resort in Highmount, New York, in the Catskills. By 1950, they were dealing in hotels as if they were counters on a Monopoly board, buying three in Atlantic City alone by 1954. In Manhattan, they bought, renovated, and sold the McAlpin and the Belmont Plaza.In 1955, they built a new hotel for the first time, the 780-room Americana in Bal Harbour, Florida. It was a stunning achievement, with a flamboyant design by architect Morris Lapidus that became influential throughout the industry. More importantly, from a business standpoint, it cost $17 million to build, and the brothers managed it without a mortgage. It was profitable from the start, although there were lessons to be learned. For instance, the alligators in the rock pool on the ground floor had to be routinely replaced after they expired from ingesting plastic toothpicks tossed by thoughtless guests.In 1959, the brothers gained control of the Loews Theaters, which had recently been spun off from its movie studio parent by antitrust decree. In a move that would become familiar in their later acquisitions, they ousted management and then steered the business in directions that were more profitable. With Loews, they sold off some of the chain’s less profitable theaters and razed others for the value of the real estate.One such lot at 51st Street and Lexington Avenue became the site of the Summit, the first new hotel built in Manhattan in 30 years. In search of the lucrative New York convention business, they next erected the luxurious Americana. At 50 stories on its completion in 1962, it was said to be the tallest hotel in the world.Loews later added the Regency to its collection of Manhattan hotels, as well as several others located elsewhere in America, Canada, Europe, and the Bahamas.Together with his brother and other investors, Tisch began moving outside the hotel industry. In 1968, they purchased Lorillard, the fifth-largest tobacco company in America. Top management was winnowed, while unprofitable product lines, such as animal food and candy, were spun off. In 1974, CNA Financial Corporation, a troubled Chicago-based insurance company, was added to the Loews portfolio. Loews’s revenues grew to more than $3 billion a year by 1980 from $100 million in 1970. By 1986, it included the watchmaker Bulova, a gas pipeline, offshore oil drilling, and a small fleet of super tankers, picked up during a depressed oil market for little more than their value as scrap.In the 1980s, Larry Tisch purchased and ran CBS. Meanwhile, Bob concentrated on New York civic matters, bringing the Democratic National Convention to New York in 1976 and 1980 while heading the Convention and Visitors Bureau. Professedly not a party man, he answered President Reagan’s call to work as postmaster after a period of rankling between the Post Office and the legislative branch. While heading the largest civilian workforce in the world, Tisch managed to negotiate labor contracts without any job actions. Realizing that revenue from stamp collectors was essentially free money, since they didn’t mail their stamps, he helped steer the Post Office into catering more to philatelists.In 1990, Mayor Dinkins appointed Tisch New York’s ambassador to Washington, where he served until 1993 as a liaison between the city’s business community and his friends and colleagues in the national government. In a statement released after Tisch’s death, Mr. Dinkins said Tisch was unusual in counting among his friends “mayors and moguls, cops and kids, “who were “drawn to his irresistible charm and affability, impressed with his knowledge of all things ‘New York,’ and confident of his ability to win friends, influence people, and make a difference in their lives and the lie of the city.”Wall Street liked the austere “Tisch touch,” which extended to Spartan office decor. He kept an apartment at the Regency, but hardly lived in regal style. On weekends, he often had friends and family to his home in Westchester, where he showed films in his private screening room. In recent years, he traveled frequently with friends, once taking a trip around the world with Ms. Sills. He went on safari with J. Ira Harris, a Chicago investment banker and old friend who was amazed that Tisch seemed to know people everywhere he went. “I used to kid him that he knew the names of the lions,” Mr. Harris said. In all things, Tisch evinced what one waggish journalist called “a refreshing lack of egomania.”Tisch once said he was content to work on Sundays and never even attended a football game until 1961 when Allie Sherman, the Giants coach and a Scarsdale neighbor, convinced Tisch to attend. Coincidentally, Tisch happened to own six season tickets, part of the Loews deal from 1959. He soon became a fan, and attended nearly every Super Bowl.In 1970, he attempted to form a syndicate to purchase the Jets, and later considered purchasing the Patriots, but in the end it was the Giants that Tisch wound up owning.The purchase came at an opportune time, ending a decade-long feud between co-owner Wellington Mara and his nephew Tim Mara, who was the seller. Despite having just won Super Bowl XXV, the Giants’ finances were in shambles.The Maras knew football, not business.”All I want is to get 10 years of enjoyment out of the team before I’m through.”“In that case,”Mara famously retorted,”you’d better plan on being around for 30 years.”Tisch paid his $75 million and threw himself into reforming the team’s finances, despite the fact that the business was miniscule compared to his others. The partnership with Mara was by all accounts harmonious, and Tisch ended up helping reform the National Football League’s finances as well.While he vowed to stay out of the “football side” of the business, Tisch was a familiar figure at training camp, and was always on hand to shake players’ hands after games. He befriended several Giants players.“When Ginny and I first found out we were pregnant with our first son AJ, Bob sent his congratulations,” Tiki Barber, a Giants running back since 1997, said in a statement. “The only problem was that we hadn’t told anyone yet. When I asked him, he said ‘Tiki, there’s not much that goes on in this city that doesn’t cross my desk, especially when it comes to my players.'”It was a rare instance of Tisch non-familial behavior. In most things, the brothers worked together and their families were close, too. Tisch’s children, Steve, Laurie, and Jonathan, took part in Tisch family businesses and charities, Laurie founding the Children’s Museum and Jonathan serving as chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels. Steven was producer of the film “Forest Gump” and is the Giants executive vice president.On Sunday, Jonathan Tisch, who also serves as treasurer of the Giants, said, “Probably with all his assets, probably with all his recognitions, with all his titles, the one job in his life that he loved the most was co-owner of the Giants.”Preston Robert TischBorn April 29, 1926, in Brooklyn; died November 14 at his home in Manhattan of a brain tumor; survived by his wife, the former Joan Hyman, and their three children, Laurie, Jonathan, and Steven.

Preston Robert Tisch, 79, Owner of Loews, Giants And Ambassador of New York to Washington

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