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Martin S. Kimmel, 92, Co-Founder of Retail Real Estate Firm and Rehovot's Weizmann
By Dennis Hevesi
Also see: Legacy.rehovot.org, Obituaries and Guest book we site of Rehovot, Israel
Martin S. Kimmel, a real estate developer who tracked power company trucks throughout South Florida in the early 1960s to find sites for what eventually became the nation’s largest builder of strip malls, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his stepdaughter, Betsy Karel, said.
With a handshake, Mr. Kimmel and his friend Milton Cooper started the Kimco Realty Corporation in 1960. Until the corporation went public 30 years later, the partners never saw a need to formalize their business relationship, Mr. Cooper said Wednesday.
Starting with a “mundane pedestrian strip” on Coral Way in Miami with a Zayre discount store and two other stores, Mr. Cooper said, the company has built a portfolio that now includes about 1,900 properties in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Brazil — approximately 1,100 of them strip shopping centers. The value of the common stock of Kimco, based in New Hyde Park, N.Y., was $286 million in 1991; today it is about $10.2 billion.
With that first shopping strip under construction, “Cooper and Kimmel quickly learned the tricks of the local real estate game,” a 1998 article in Institutional Investor magazine said. “Kimmel would follow utility trucks to find out where new power lines were being laid,” an early sign of new residential development.
“That’s how we knew where the traffic was going,” Mr. Kimmel recalled in the article.
Though lacking the luster of skyscrapers or enclosed malls, the strips are cheaper and easier to build and rapidly generate profits. Of Kimco’s 1,200 shopping centers, 135 are now in Florida and about 100 in New York State.
“Kimco has become the king of U.S. strip shopping centers,” Institutional Investor said.
Born in the Bronx on April 9, 1916, Mr. Kimmel was one of four sons of Henry and Emma Kimmel. His father managed a lighting fixture store. After briefly attending Syracuse University, Mr. Kimmel served in the Army in the Pacific during World War II.
After the war, while working with his father at the lighting store, he became acquainted with home builders and began questioning them about the intricacies of construction. Eventually, that led to the start of a company that built garden apartments and town houses on Long Island. With profits from those developments, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Cooper started Kimco, aware that South Florida was being transformed from vacation destination to retirement haven.
In addition to his stepdaughter, Betsy Karel of Washington, Mr. Kimmel is survived by his wife, the former Helen Lyttle; another stepdaughter, Abby Leigh of Manhattan; a stepson, Alexei Hay of Manhattan; a son from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce, Adam; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Kimmel retired from Kimco in 1991 and concentrated on philanthropy. Debra LaMorte, the senior vice president for development at New York University, said Mr. Kimmel and his wife made important gifts to the university, among them financing the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Stem Cell Biology; creating a professorship of molecular immunology; and contributing to the construction of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life. This 210,000-square-foot granite-and-glass student center at Washington Square houses the 1,022-seat Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
Mr. Kimmel and his wife also made major contributions to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. They financed the acquisition of 50 acres by the institute, increasing its land by 20 percent, and established a major award program for research scientists there.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction of April 18, 2008
An obituary on Thursday about Martin S. Kimmel, a developer of strip malls, misstated the relationship of one of his survivors. Abby Leigh is his stepdaughter, not his daughter.
Source: Dennis Hevesi. Martin S. Kimmel, 92, Co-Founder of Retail Real Estate Firm, Dies (17 April 2008) Correction Appended. New York Times [FullText]
Also see: Legacy.rehovot.org, Obituaries and Guest book we site of Rehovot, Israel
Martin S. Kimmel, a real estate developer who tracked power company trucks throughout South Florida in the early 1960s to find sites for what eventually became the nation’s largest builder of strip malls, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his stepdaughter, Betsy Karel, said.
With a handshake, Mr. Kimmel and his friend Milton Cooper started the Kimco Realty Corporation in 1960. Until the corporation went public 30 years later, the partners never saw a need to formalize their business relationship, Mr. Cooper said Wednesday.
Starting with a “mundane pedestrian strip” on Coral Way in Miami with a Zayre discount store and two other stores, Mr. Cooper said, the company has built a portfolio that now includes about 1,900 properties in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Brazil — approximately 1,100 of them strip shopping centers. The value of the common stock of Kimco, based in New Hyde Park, N.Y., was $286 million in 1991; today it is about $10.2 billion.
With that first shopping strip under construction, “Cooper and Kimmel quickly learned the tricks of the local real estate game,” a 1998 article in Institutional Investor magazine said. “Kimmel would follow utility trucks to find out where new power lines were being laid,” an early sign of new residential development.
“That’s how we knew where the traffic was going,” Mr. Kimmel recalled in the article.
Though lacking the luster of skyscrapers or enclosed malls, the strips are cheaper and easier to build and rapidly generate profits. Of Kimco’s 1,200 shopping centers, 135 are now in Florida and about 100 in New York State.
“Kimco has become the king of U.S. strip shopping centers,” Institutional Investor said.
Born in the Bronx on April 9, 1916, Mr. Kimmel was one of four sons of Henry and Emma Kimmel. His father managed a lighting fixture store. After briefly attending Syracuse University, Mr. Kimmel served in the Army in the Pacific during World War II.
After the war, while working with his father at the lighting store, he became acquainted with home builders and began questioning them about the intricacies of construction. Eventually, that led to the start of a company that built garden apartments and town houses on Long Island. With profits from those developments, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Cooper started Kimco, aware that South Florida was being transformed from vacation destination to retirement haven.
In addition to his stepdaughter, Betsy Karel of Washington, Mr. Kimmel is survived by his wife, the former Helen Lyttle; another stepdaughter, Abby Leigh of Manhattan; a stepson, Alexei Hay of Manhattan; a son from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce, Adam; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Kimmel retired from Kimco in 1991 and concentrated on philanthropy. Debra LaMorte, the senior vice president for development at New York University, said Mr. Kimmel and his wife made important gifts to the university, among them financing the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Stem Cell Biology; creating a professorship of molecular immunology; and contributing to the construction of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life. This 210,000-square-foot granite-and-glass student center at Washington Square houses the 1,022-seat Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
Mr. Kimmel and his wife also made major contributions to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. They financed the acquisition of 50 acres by the institute, increasing its land by 20 percent, and established a major award program for research scientists there.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction of April 18, 2008
An obituary on Thursday about Martin S. Kimmel, a developer of strip malls, misstated the relationship of one of his survivors. Abby Leigh is his stepdaughter, not his daughter.
Source: Dennis Hevesi. Martin S. Kimmel, 92, Co-Founder of Retail Real Estate Firm, Dies (17 April 2008) Correction Appended. New York Times [FullText]
Labels: Death Notices, Weizmann Institute
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