Richard Ravitch, a politically savvy, civic-minded developer and public citizen who helped rescue New York City from the brink of bankruptcy and its decaying subways from fiscal collapse, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Kathleen M. Doyle.
Mr. Ravitch never won elective office. But he left an outsize mark on government at every level as one of the backstage wise men recruited to stave off the financial collapse of New York’s Urban Development Corporation in 1975 and, a few months later, of New York City’s own overdrawn municipal accounts.
By rallying public support for inventive means of raising revenue, he was also instrumental in rejuvenating the city’s mass transit system in the 1980s as the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
He later served as New York’s lieutenant governor, enlisted by David A. Paterson in 2009 to lend gravitas to his teetering administration. (Mr. Paterson had succeeded Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace after a prostitution scandal.)
Mr. Ravitch, who inherited a construction company, also left his mark on the cityscape with signature apartment projects like Waterside and Manhattan Plaza.
A progressive in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, he espoused an Emersonian faith in democracy as a dynamic symbiosis between politics and good government. Invoking a lesson learned from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose successful Senate candidacy he helped promote in 1976, Mr. Ravitch recalled in his 2014 memoir, “So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises,” “There is a more powerful connection than people think between the world of ideas and the world of practical politics.”
7 comments:
Never elected? Then he must be part of the deep state, therefor a communist.
Here in the great red state of Texas, we don't need no Subways. We don't need no water breaks for construction workers. That stuffs for liberal snowflakes.
Here we burn gasoline and coal. So what if it gets a little hot! That's what we got ac's for.
If a few construction workers drop-dead from the heat, we get a few more to replace them. That's what our good governor says.
None of that socialist nonsense down here. As for global warming and stuff.
Fake news. It's nice and cool here in my air-conditioned office.
"World of ideas and the world of practical politics.”
Crime Wave Kathy Hochul strikes again with her mental illness of putting in congestion pricing. Guess what? Nobody is going to eat in NYC anymore or shop there.
What else do ya expect from Joe Biden and the Democrats?
Rest In Peace Dick Ravitch our New York City savior !
"A progressive in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt"
Lol! FDR was a psychotic, blood-sucking Communist maniac who was the real instigator of WWII, despite the fairy stories we get told in school.
@NPC_doofus, re: "Lol! FDR was a psychotic, blood-sucking Communist maniac .."
Well said Mr/Ms. Doofus. Not many people really know that FDR started WWII. Most Sheeple blame it on Hitler and his fellow Fascist, Mussolini. Little do they know that it was really the commie, FDR.
Keep up the great work, Mr/Ms Doofus.
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