Fort Lauderdale visionary dies at 87
William Farkas, the Pennsylvania-born visionary who played a critical role in shaping Fort Lauderdale’s downtown, has died. He was 87.
Farkas, who was always known as Bill, was pivotal in turning the Broward Center for the Performing Arts from dream into reality. He died Feb. 3 in North Miami after a long illness.
The son of Hungarian immigrant parents was born Sept. 13, 1931, in Bethlehem, Pa. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in political science from Lehigh University, then earned his master’s degree in public administration from Syracuse University.
Farkas began building his career in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, taking his first job with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. He headed Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority and the non-profit Action Housing.
Recruited in 1975 to become director of Fort Lauderdale’s Downtown Development Authority (DDA), Farkas discovered a downtown with a single tall building and 14 acres of vacant land at the city center.
The former DDA board chairman and CEO of the Fort Lauderdale-based North American Company, Charles Palmer, was instrumental in hiring Farkas. “Bill had a way of working well with people. He had a great personality and could get along with everybody. He’d listen to the board instead of lecturing to it, which was a refreshing change,” Palmer says.
“We made the decision to try and get every major public facility, non-profit or private office building to locate downtown,” Farkas recalled in a 2016 Fort Lauderdale Magazine story. “And we would leave retail to Las Olas.”
His plan involved making downtown a center of government, education and culture, so that office buildings and urban dwellings would follow.
And they did. During Farkas’ tenure, architect Don Singer’s innovative modernist City Park Municipal Garage was built, as were the Main Library, the NSU Museum of Art, Broward County government offices, the downtown home of Broward College and Florida Atlantic University — and that cultural anchor atop a manmade hill on the New River at Sailboat Bend, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
Singer recalled the management style and achievements of a leader who became his friend.
“[The Downtown Development Authority] was an amalgam of many differing points of view as well as very active egos. What struck me right away was Bill’s ability to navigate that mix and, in his own gentle way, direct the group to a path that he knew, inherently, to be the correct one,” Singer wrote in an email. “Bill’s hand in the reshaping of Fort Lauderdale’s downtown … left the infrastructure that remains as the core of the metro area.”
George Bolge, who served as director of the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale for 18 years, said of Farkas, “Bill was the glue that held everything together. He was an advocate for the arts, a savvy businessman and a great negotiator. He was the quintessence of a decent guy. Bill really had the city’s interests at heart and dealt with all sides equally. The whole development of downtown Fort Lauderdale can be laid at Bill’s feet.”
In 1989, Farkas took on a new and formidable challenge: getting the Broward Center from construction to completion in time for the mega-musical “Phantom of the Opera” to launch its national tour there in February 1991.
As executive director, he did just that, pushing through construction delays, architectural disputes, fund-raising challenges and opposition from leaders of the center’s anchor cultural groups, who felt that opening with a long run of a commercial Broadway production in the heart of the season was a bad idea all around. Yet the $59.6 million complex opened on time, welcoming “Phantom” on a dark and stormy night, achieving the dream of a performing arts center before Miami’s Arsht Center and West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center followed.
Farkas, who had never run a performing arts facility, learned on the job and eventually became the center’s president. In the course of his tenure there, he achieved an easy backstage camaraderie with such major stars as Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Keith Carradine, Rita Moreno, Yo Yo Ma, Emanual Ax and Sally Struthers. Linda Birdsey, now marketing director at the Kravis Center worked with him in those early year, recalls him as “a positive and supportive leader. He had a great smile that came from the heart and calm disposition and one not to be ruffled easily.” Farkas stayed until 1997, when Mark Nerenhausen took over, and then made a first attempt at retiring, though that didn’t last.
After working briefly as a development officer for Florida Atlantic University, Farkas, a longtime Miami Beach resident, became executive director of ArtCenter South Florida, then executive director of the Miami Design Preservation League bringing his lifelong passion for historic preservation to the fore.
Former Miami Beach mayor Mattie Bower said of Farkas, “Bill worked extremely hard to build up the Miami Design Preservation League, and he supported preservation and the historic district with all his might. He was nice and kind and respectful. The kind of person he was is hard to find nowadays.”
In addition to Dunlop, Farkas is survived by his son Greg Farkas of Bristol, Tenn.; his daughter Wendy Boyer of Mount Lebanon, Pa.; and his son Adam Dunlop-Farkas of Los Angeles, six grandchildren and three great-grandchild. He was predeceased by his grandson Matthew Farkas. A memorial service will be held at a time and date to be determined.