He did not invent the atomic bomb, public housing, the modern suburb or the State of Israel.
But Philip M. Klutznick, who died Saturday at age 92 after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease, played an important role in the development of all those things, leaving an indelible imprint on Chicago, the nation and, indeed, the world.
He was Chicago’s man for all seasons: statesman, multimillionaire, adviser to five Democratic presidents and dean of real estate developers in a city famous for big-name developers.
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For all his achievements, though, “Phil” Klutznick was possessed of a low-key humanity that set him apart from the hard-chargers and corner-cutters who built so many of Chicago’s skyscrapers and suburbs. From his late teens until the last years of his life, Klutznick devoted as much time to good works and philanthropy as to his worldly projects, which were legion.
“He is considered by many to be the leading Jew in the United States,” the director of the Holocaust Memorial in Washington told the Tribune in 1985. That was after two decades of leadership with the World Jewish Congress and the B’nai B’rith, but before he led a team appointed by the late Mayor Harold Washington to straighten out the chronically troubled Chicago Housing Authority. At the time, he said the CHA job was the toughest he’d ever faced.
That may have been an overstatement.
This was the man who, during the Depression, helped develop the federal government’s first efforts at slum clearance and public housing; who, during World War II, supervised construction of entire residential cities around defense plants; who, with his business partners after the war, built the suburb of Park Forest and later the Chicago region’s first, and arguably best, shopping malls.
He was never apologetic about abetting “suburban sprawl” or the out-migration from cities, figuring that GI mortgages, superhighways and cheap gasoline made that inevitable. Klutznick had a sharp eye, however, for changes in public taste, and when “back-to-the-city” chic caught on in the 1970s, he conceived a vertical shopping mall for North Michigan Avenue and dubbed it Water Tower Place. It was his crowning achievement in real estate–a 74-story mall-hotel-condominium spectacular. He and his wife, Ethel, took a condo there so they could live, as he said, “over the store.” He situated his office across the street, at Olympia Center, in such a way that Water Tower Place was outside the window like a picture on the wall.
And what walls they were, lined with photographs of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. Klutznick worked for them all, at the highest levels, finishing his avocation as a federal troubleshooter with a stint as secretary of commerce in the early 1980s. His closest political ties, though, may have been to two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. As ambassador to the United Nations, Stevenson used Klutznick’s political acumen and financial connections to energize Third World redevelopment efforts and, at one point, bail out the UN itself by organizing a $200 million bond issue.
Born in Kansas City, Mo., to Eastern European Orthodox Jewish parents, Klutznick remembered making his first contribution to the Zionist cause when he was 13 years old, when he dropped some pennies in a pushka, a collection box to fund, someday, a Jewish homeland. At the University of Kansas, the University of Nebraska and later at Creighton University Law School, he was steadily active in Jewish causes and philanthropy.
A favorite professor at the latter school got him started in government with a job as assistant city attorney in Omaha. He evinced a gift for solving housing problems and was quickly put in charge of Omaha’s fledgling office of urban renewal–a previously unheard-of science that was emanating from the first Roosevelt administration in Washington. Klutznick wheedled so much federal money out of the new Works Progress Administration–enough to widen Omaha’s main street and launch two housing projects–that he was summoned to D.C. and promptly made assistant U.S. attorney general for public lands.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed that mission totally. Klutznick was put in charge of building temporary housing for defense workers across the eastern U.S. His staff threw up thousands of apartments near the Hampton Roads shipyards, Detroit tank factories and Iowa’s Hawkeye ammunition complex. One of his biggest instant towns: Oak Ridge, Tenn., where a small army of scientists and technicians developed the first nuclear bomb.
He once told the Tribune: “I don’t know if the atomic bomb could have been built if it weren’t for the expandable trailer.”
After the war Klutznick served briefly as commissioner of the federal public housing authority before moving to Chicago, where he saw an opportunity to put his city-building skills to profitable use.
Cities and their close-in suburbs were overwhelmed by mortgage-able veterans anxious to start families but with no place to go. Klutznick and a partner, Nathan Manilow, formed a company called American Community Builders, bought up 2,400 acres of cornfields 27 miles south of Chicago and dubbed it “GI Town.” Later named Park Forest, the community became America’s first “new town,” a vision of a now-familiar suburban future that had quiet, winding streets leading to high-capacity arterials and all converging on a central shopping mall.
“We were able to take a veteran with wife and child,” Klutznick said, “and set him up in a three-bedroom house for $75 a month.” To show that the modest ranches were good enough for a budding millionaire, Klutznick and his family moved in.
Author and urbanist William H. Whyte, in his best-selling study of the aborning postwar middle class, “The Organization Man,” derided the instant suburb as a hotbed of conformism. But Klutznick set about perfecting the most profitable element of the Park Forest mix–the regional shopping mall. There was Old Orchard in Skokie, Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook and River Oaks in Calumet City. Mall-less suburbs complained that their old downtowns couldn’t compete, but Klutznick saw that only as another problem to be overcome with good design, financing and marketing.
“The automobile had changed everything,” he later said. “But I didn’t feel guilty about it. We were just keeping up with the needs of the people.”
Meeting those needs was Klutznick’s Urban Investment and Development Co. (UIDC), which had formed a mutually beneficial alliance with the Aetna Life and Casualty Co. Constantly improving on the Park Forest formula, the enterprise specialized in large, complete packages such as New Century Town in Lake County.
Never much of a golfer, card player or vacationer, Klutznick spent much of his early retirement years on the phone, tweaking old friends to give more to his favorite causes (Israel and the Democratic Party being the leading two), preparing an occasional speech, answering his mail and doting on his family. From retirement he also quarterbacked the residential counterpart to Water Tower Place–a new-town-in-town called Dearborn Park, built on 50 acres of derelict railyards south of the Loop.
“If there is anything I have learned at all,” he once said, “it is that everything is temporary in this world, and there isn’t much difference between peoples.”
Said his son James, who along with his brother Thomas helped guide UIDC after his father’s retirement, “He was a visionary in many ways. He led probably 10 lives. The intelligence and energy was a very rare combination. Such men do not come along that often.”
Mr. Klutznick is survived by his sons, Thomas, James, Robert and Samuel; his daughter, Bettylu Saltzman; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The family will hold a private service Monday in Arlington Heights.
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