Shopping mall pioneer, philanthropist A. Alfred Taubman dies

[Hudsons81]

First dead malls close down and now mall owners die. I can't believe all this.

http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2015/04/18/a-alfred-taubman-dies-obit/25977167/

Taubman: 'His loss leaves a huge hole in our community'

A. Alfred Taubman's self-made wealth â€" as a pioneer who helped revolutionize how America shops â€" fueled a lifetime of far-reaching philanthropy and support for civic institutions and the arts, including his deep commitment to the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Taubman, the Pontiac native who helped bring malls to America and became one of Michigan's most important donors to museums and universities, died Friday of a heart attack in his home in Bloomfield Hills. He was 91.

Taubman's impact on Detroit and Michigan was broad and deep and will be felt for generations. He made direct donations of money and gifts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the DIA, the University of Michigan, Lawrence Technological University, the College for Creative Studies and more.

Will Taubman's legacy as great DIA patron grow after his death?

"His greatest legacy will be how he used his fortune to help people in Michigan and beyond," Gov. Rick Snyder said in a written statement. "He will be long remembered not just for his retail genius, but for the lives he touched through his kindness."

Taubman spent a half-century building some of America's most successful malls, devoting his business life to making sense of the minutiae of retail and understanding how Americans' shopping wants and needs were evolving.

Born to Jewish immigrants who went bust in the Great Depression, Taubman used hard work and his retailing acumen to build a fortune estimated at $3.1 billion in 2015 by Forbes magazine.

He used that fortune to spread hundreds of millions of dollars across the community: Hospitals, universities, research centers and museums were transformed by his gifts.

"Alfred was one of the DIA's most significant patrons in its entire history, and his contributions are many," said DIA Director Graham Beal.

He also was the largest donor to the University of Michigan in the institution's history, giving more than $142 million. The U-M Taubman Medical Research Institute has been a leader in stem cell research that has shown promise in the fight against debilitating diseases, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Al Taubman: A scrappy kid from Pontiac who never let up

U-M's college of architecture and urban planning and various buildings at its medical school bear his name, as does Lawrence Tech's student center building, the Taubman Center for Design Education at the College for Creative Studies, and buildings at Harvard and Brown universities. And Taubman gave $3 million to help establish the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights on the Wayne State University campus.

On Wednesday, Taubman was at U-M at the ground-breaking for a new wing at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He said he hoped to be there in two years to see the finished wing, which also will bear his name, the university said in a Saturday e-mail.

Taubman studied architecture at U-M before and after his service in World War II, and received an honorary degree there in 1991. The College of Architecture was renamed in his honor following a $30-million gift in 1999, and other campus buildings also are named for him.

"He valued state-of-the-art facilities for teaching, research and patient care," U-M President Mark Schlissel said.

Other tributes poured in.

Former U.S. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan: "He was as authentic as he was outspoken. He never forgot where he came from, and I'll never forget him."

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell: "(He was) a great businessman and a true philanthropist, whose generosity touched lives in Michigan and around the world."

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan called Taubman a great personal friend: "His loss leaves a huge hole in our entire community. I'm going to miss him terribly."

Taubman praised for his contributions, 'authenticity'

And U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith, whose friendship with Taubman spanned four decades, recalled a man who never hesitated to help others. It was Taubman who cleared the way for civil rights icon Rosa Parks to move into the Riverfront Towers after she was beaten up in her Detroit home and arranged in 2000 for a private plane to fly Parks to Montgomery, Ala., for the opening of the Troy University Rosa Parks Museum.

"Every time I asked him to help," Keith said, "he just did it, quietly. He should be remembered as a great human being. Totally unselfish. I have lost one of my dearest and closest friends, and I am in deep sympathy with the Taubman family."

Retail innovator

Taubman rewrote the rules of retail, constantly retooling the mall experience he helped invent.

Women buy more menswear than men do, he observed. Why do department stores feature cosmetics on the first floor? More shoppers visit the first floor than any other, and cosmetics have a very high markup.

And why do traffic patterns at malls favor right turns? Right turns are twice as quick as left turns.

"We want people to get in easily and get out easily," Taubman once explained to a roomful of students, many one-quarter his age. "Getting out is just as important as getting in. That man drives a woman for shopping on Saturday, and he has trouble getting out so he can't see a football game? He'll say, 'Don't you ever bring me back here again.'"

In a career full of honors and accomplishments, there was seemingly only one slip â€" one that proved especially painful.

As then-owner of the Sotheby's art auction house, he was indicted by the U.S. government in 2001 in a price-fixing scandal over setting the level of sales commissions with rival auction house Christie's. Convicted, Taubman, then in his late 70s, spent 9 1/2 months in a minimum-security federal prison.

Taubman defended his actions and was adamant that no price-fixing had taken place. His great friend, federal appeals court judge Keith, testified to his character at the trial.

And his many admirers welcomed him back with honors and acclaim. He resumed his philanthropic work, giving away much of what the government hadn't taken in penalties and settlements.

Overcoming disabilities

Taubman grew up in Pontiac and nearby Sylvan Lake. His parents emigrated from Germany.

He served in World War II, and around that time started using his middle name Alfred, instead of his given first name, Adolph, for an obvious reason.

While he divulged few details about his youth, he did express some frustration with school. A lefty, he was forced to write with his right hand, the prevailing wisdom at the time.

And reading didn't come easy, either. Taubman struggled with dyslexia, which means he saw words backward. To top things off, he had a slight stutter early in life.

Taubman learned to express himself through art. He drew houses as a boy, studied fine art in college, and continued to paint in watercolors and oils into adulthood. He enrolled at U-M and later attended Lawrence Tech when the school was housed in the old Ford complex in Highland Park.

Eventually, Taubman left school before graduating to support his first wife, Reva Kolodney, and baby daughter Gayle. They later had two sons, Robert and William, before divorcing in 1977.

Taubman's master plan was to become a builder like his father, who built custom homes in Pontiac, but the younger Taubman wanted to do it on a larger scale. For several years he worked for other contractors until taking the plunge in 1950 to start his own business.

He was just 25.

A shopping experience

But houses and industrial buildings â€" the things others during the post-World War II era were constructing â€" weren't in his plans. Taubman saw another opportunity as families began to move out of the city into suburban three-bedroom homes.

He knew they would need places to shop. At first, he concentrated on building stores around Detroit but soon he found himself designing, building, owning and operating shopping centers and malls. His sprawling malls would help shape American life for years to come.

During the late 1950s, Taubman had the good fortune of hooking up with Detroit financier Max Fisher, who hired Taubman's firm to build Speedway gas stations. The two became close friends and longtime business partners.

As Taubman's malls grew in number, he became known as a trendsetter. He was one of the first to build two- and three-level malls. He would use profits from one mall to finance and build another bigger center.

In 1970, he built Woodfield, a $90-million, 2-million-square-foot mall in suburban Chicago, then the world's largest center. The project was considered daring. The suburb surrounding Woodfield had only 18,000 residents at the time. But Taubman could see growth coming.

"He is a true innovator. No question, he's developed some of the biggest and some of the best and most productive shopping centers in the world," Jim Bieri, president of Bieri Co., a Detroit-based retail consultant, said in 2001.

Taubman would insist that he was merely continuing a retail tradition that stretched back to antiquity. Once, showing students at Lawrence Tech an image of a 14th-Century Persian fabric bazaar, he quipped, "Looks like one of my centers. We didn't copy this but I wish I had. It's beautiful."

At the same time, Taubman would describe his ability to see what others didn't as "third-dimensional thought," something that may have come from his years struggling to read with dyslexia.

"When I look at something, I have a sense, not of what it is, but of what it could be," he once said.

Next generation

Taubman Centers is now run by his sons Robert S. Taubman, who is the firm's chairman, president and CEO, and William S. Taubman, its chief operating officer.

"One thing that will never be taken from us is Alfred Taubman's vision that will continue to guide and inspire us. Our family thanks you for all your kind thoughts and support through this very difficult time," Robert Taubman said.

Besides his three children, Taubman is survived by his wife, Judith Mazor Rounick. They married in 1982.

The Taubman company has owned and developed landmark malls in Michigan and across the country, including Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor; Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn; Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi; Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights; Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids; Great Lakes Crossing Outlets in Auburn Hills and The Mall at Partridge Creek in Clinton Township.

Last month, Taubman traveled to Puerto Rico for the grand opening of The Mall of San Juan, the firm's newest property.

While Taubman's list of business achievements is long and his tradition of charitable kindnesses perhaps unmatched in Michigan, many described him as alternately gregarious and intimidating, a bear of a man with a big laugh and an acerbic wit.

When a reporter once asked Taubman at a news conference about being listed on the Forbes list of richest Americans, he shot back, "Did they include you?"

He and Judith, a former Miss Israel, would spend much of their time with the rich and famous in New York and Palm Beach, where he owns homes. Many in those circles identify Taubman first with the arts and next with his philanthropy and many middle-class-focused malls.

It didn't take Taubman long to expand beyond malls. He owned the A&W Restaurants chain between 1982 and 1994 and the Michigan Panthers in the old United States Football League in the early 1980s.

The Sotheby's test

But it was his plunge into the art auction world that brought him great joy as well as pain.

In 1983, Taubman, Fisher and the late Henry Ford II bought a controlling interest in the then-financially suffering Sotheby Parke Bernet for $130 million. The art experts controlling the auction house had wanted it in British hands. And the last thing they wanted to do was turn it over to someone who couldn't appreciate its treasures.

But Taubman, unlike other American bidders, passed the test by impressing the Sotheby's people with his deep appreciation for and understanding of art.

A. Alfred Taubman through the years

In 1988, he took the auction house public. It became one of the premier live and Internet auction houses in the world, buying and selling such notable pieces as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' estate items.

Many art experts have said that Taubman helped bring the customer experience into art auctions, creating a new approach that straddled art, business and shopping.

But in the early 2000s, an investigation into alleged price-fixing between Sotheby's and rival auction house Christie's led to Taubman's conviction for antitrust violations related to fixing commissions on auction sales. He was fined $7.5 million and imprisoned in 2002.

Taubman always maintained he had done nothing wrong, and his legions of admirers believed he had gotten caught up in something he may not have entirely understood, something far from his real estate expertise.

"It's a hard thing to say, but I still don't know what I did supposedly," he said after his release. "I wouldn't break the law for anything in the world. I never have, and people that know me believe me."

Asked about prison itself, Taubman said he read a lot, exercised and played bridge to pass the time.

"There were some very good bridge players there," he said with a smile.

Donor to the end

Taubman returned to standing ovations and multiple awards for his work, in real estate and in philanthropy. He continued to bestow multimillion-dollar donations on U-M, Lawrence Tech, and other recipients.

And he kept looking for ways to make a difference. In his late 80s, he got involved in supporting adult literacy, believing that it was a key to getting many people out of poverty and into the workforce. He gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Reading Works and became an honorary chair.

"Aside from his support, which was substantial, I never stopped marveling at his energy and his concern that others might live a better life," said Paul Anger, Free Press editor and publisher and chairman of Reading Works. "He never stopped looking for ways to make the community better, to make lives better, to give back."

In 2010, the then-86-year-old Taubman taught a series of seminars on the history of retail to students at Lawrence Tech. Joking that "a guy's got to make a living," Taubman stood for much of the 100-minute classes, showing slides of malls and tossing off references to past retail giants Levi Strauss and Marshall Field as if they were old friends.

"I like working with young people," Taubman said.

Architecture student Lily Diego, 34, of Pleasant Ridge said she had shopped at Taubman's malls and understood his place in American retail history: "To have someone like Alfred Taubman teaching â€" it just made it one of those no-brainers to take."

Students and visiting faculty applauded Taubman at the end. They knew they were seeing â€" and hearing â€" history before them.

Architecture dean Glen LeRoy said afterward that it was "like taking 50, 60 years of experience â€" and then pouring it out for the class. A great storyteller."

Staff writers Paul Egan, JC Reindl and Mark Stryker contributed to this report.

The Taubman family and information on services

A. Alfred Taubman is survived by his wife, Judith Mazor Taubman; Rounick his two sons, William and Robert; his daughter, Gayle Taubman Kalisman, his stepchildren Tiffany Dubin and Christopher Rounick, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Funeral arrangements: The Ira Kaufman Chapel in Southfield is handling arrangements. and the funeral is tentatively set for 11 a.m. Tuesday at Congregation Shaarey Zedek on Bell Road in Southfield. Interment will be at Clover Hill Park Cemetery in Birmingham.

Actually, he didn't really create the mall concept as we know it, but he was one of a few responsible for creating those big multi-anchor two-story malls.

[TRU7536]

His company helped build and still own malls like Westfarms, Stamford Town Center, and Short Hills in New Jersey.

[MikeRa]

He also owned for a bit Woodward & Lothrop Department Stores, and John Wanamaker Department Stores, before selling both in 1996

[TheFugitive]

Owned the Michigan Panthers franchise in the USFL.