George S Kaufman
Property tycoon who revitalised New York’s film and TV scene
George S Kaufman, a real estate magnate whose transformation of a derelict movie studio in New York’s Queens helped revive film and television production in the city, died on 20 February at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 89.
The cause was heart failure, his wife, Mariana, said.
In 1982, Kaufman, the scion of a century-old New York real estate family, led a group of investors in rescuing the Queens complex, which had opened in 1920 as the cavernous home of what became Paramount Pictures.
He developed the site into 500,000 square feet of studios, production facilities, offices, service space and a back lot, drawing television and movie producers eager to film in new York.
The Cosby Show, Sesame Street, Orange Is the New Black, Nurse Jackie and the police procedural Blue Bloods have been among the TV shows to use the studios. Movies filmed in part there include Goodfellas, Angels in America, The Wiz and the 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.
The Kaufman real estate company was founded by his grandfather Samuel in 1918, when he bought a single building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to house his garment business. Today the company owns or manages around 7 million square feet of property.
George Kaufman’s investment in the Astoria studio helped spark a commercial and residential boom in northwest Queens. He also helped
the singer and Astoria native Tony Bennett and his wife, Susan Benedetto, a publicschool teacher, establish the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school, in the neighbourhood.
As a major stakeholder in midtown Manhattan properties, Kaufman became the first president of a business improvement district in the Garment District, now known as the Garment District Alliance. A self-taxing group, the alliance is a chamber of commerce that also sponsors an auxiliary police force and sanitation service. It immediately rebranded the neighbourhood as the Fashion Centre, to reflect its transformation from a manufacturing hub jammed with trucks being loaded with dresses on rolling racks to a locus of stylish showrooms for products now mostly manufactured in the American South or abroad.
At his death, Kaufman was chairman of Kaufman Astoria Studios and the Kaufman Organisation.
“I never understood why people retire,” he told the New York Times in 2011. “What do you do?”
George Stewart Kaufman was born on 17 March 1928 in Manhattan to Benjamin Kaufman, chairman of Kaufman Management, and the former Stella Cohen, a fashion designer known as Brownie.
He graduated from Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan and Ohio State University and earned a Master of Science degree in economics from New York University.
He served in the military during the Korean War and became president of Kaufman Realty Corp (now run by a cousin) in the late 1950s. He was also a vice president of Warner Bros, from 1968 to 1970.
Kaufman was on the boards of the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, part of the State University of New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of the Moving Image, founded in Queens in 1988; the Citizens Union Foundation, a research, educational and advocacy organisation; and Exploring the Arts, an educational partnership also founded by Bennett and Benedetto.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Mariana Zoullas, whom he married in 2000, he is survived by a daughter, Cynthia Kaufman, from his first marriage, to Stephanie Engelman.
The Astoria sound stages Kaufman restored were opened by Adolph Zukor, president of Famous Players-lasky Corp, the predecessor to Paramount. Among the films made there were The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers’ first full-length feature, in 1929, and Battle of Paris, with Gertrude Lawrence, that same year. Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Ethel Barrymore, WC Fields, Lillian Gish and Paul Robeson also worked there.
After Paramount decamped for Hollywood, the Army produced training films at the complex from the early 1940s until 1970. Plans were afoot to build housing and expand a community college at the Astoria studios site before a complete restoration of it became the cause of two union officials, Sam Robert and Larry Barr, representing stagehands. They found allies in the singer and actress Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts, and Claire Shulman, who worked for the Queens borough president and would later hold that post herself for many years.
Kaufman soon assembled a group of private investors, including chat show host Johnny carson and play wright Neil Simon, and the city, which had taken title to the property, granted the enterprise a 99-year lease and tax abatements.
Kaufman was not related to the playwright of the same name, but his family had other showbusiness connections. He recalled that his uncle Harry had been a songwriter who would sometimes visit Jimmy Durante and accompany him on the piano.
Of all his real estate holdings, Kaufman said, he got the greatest satisfaction from the sound stages he created in Astoria.
“He was a true New Yorker,” Leonard A Lauder, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon, said on Monday at Kaufman’s funeral at Temple Emanu-el in Manhattan. For Kaufman, he said, the Queens complex “wasn’t a hobby, it wasn’t a business – it was a passion.” New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service