Jerry Speyer Biography

Jerry I. Speyer (born June 23, 1940) is an American real estate tycoon. He is one of two founding partners of the prominent New York real estate company Tishman Speyer. As of 2012 Speyer is the owner of Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building.

Early life and education

According to a 1998 profile in The New York Times, "[Speyer's] mother is Swiss, and his father comes from one of the old Jewish families of Frankfurt" (however, there is only very distant connection to the Speyer banking family, if any); his father, a shoe manufacturer, fled Germany in 1939, established a business in Milwaukee, before moving to New York when Jerry was three months old. Speyer grew up in a cultivated and proper German-Jewish household on Riverside Drive. He graduated from the prestigious private high school Horace Mann School. At Columbia University, he majored in German literature and joined Zeta Beta Tau, a Jewish fraternity. Speyer was one of those people who were solid, and even solemn, at an age when others are still flailing and unsure of themselves." Speyer graduated from Columbia College in 1962 and received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1964.

Career

Speyer began his career in 1964 as Assistant to the Vice President of Madison Square Garden. Speyer has served as President & CEO of Tishman Speyer since his father-in-law Robert Tishman and he formed the company in 1978.

Speyer is deputy chair and a member of the Executive Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vice chairman of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, and vice chair on the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation. Speyer is also chair of the Executive Committee and chairman emeritus of Columbia University, chair emeritus of the Real Estate Board of New York, and past president of the Board of Trustees of the Dalton School.

Speyer sits on the board of Carnegie Hall, alongside Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, with whom he has a close business relationship (see External Links below). His other board affiliations include Siemens AG and the Real Estate Roundtable, and have included YankeeNets, the New York Presbyterian Foundation, Inc., and the Urban Land Institute. He is a member of the Economic Club of New York and the Council on Foreign Relations.

On October 17, 2006, Speyer signed a deal to buy Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, 12,232 apartments in 110 buildings along the East River in Manhattan, for $5.4 billion. In January 2010, Speyer defaulted on the loan, losing millions for the investors.

Speyer campaigned for former New York State Governor, Eliot Spitzer, paid for a political exhibition in Grand Central Terminal, and was a member of Governor Spitzer's cabinet. As a political advisor, Speyer is immune from investigative questions in the Governor's "troopergate" scandal.

Speyer is also chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, and chair emeritus of the influential Partnership for New York City, founded by David Rockefeller.

Personal life

In 1964, Speyer married Lynn Tishman, whose great-grandfather Julius Tishman founded Tishman Realty and Construction, of which Tishman Speyer is a spinoff. In 1987, they divorced (Lynn later remarried to Harold R. Handler who is retired as a senior partner in the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett). They had three children:

• Valerie Hope Speyer Peltier (born 1967) works at Tishman Speyer as part of the Acquisitions and Development group. In 1993, she married Jeffrey Richard Peltier of Tipp City, Ohio. The wedding was officiated by Rabbi Peter Rubenstein at the Rainbow Room in New York.
• Robert Speyer (born 1969) previously worked as a reporter at The New York Daily News but is now is a chief executive and the president of Tishman Speyer. In 2008, he married Anne-Cecilie Engell (who is Danish) in a nondenominational ceremony in Copenhagen.
• Holly Ann Speyer Lipton (born 1973) works as a television producer. In 1999, she married Jonathan Lipton. The wedding was officiated by Rabbi Peter Rubenstein at the Pierre in New York.

In 1991, he married Katherine G. Farley whom he hired in 1984 to oversee international development. They have one daughter Laura Speyer (born 1992). Farley graduated from Brown University in 1971 and with a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1976. She served as manager of new business development for East Asia and the Pacific for Turner International Industries, before joining Tishman Speyer in 1984. She is a senior managing director at the Tishman Speyer, responsible for the company's real estate activities in Latin America and for the company's expansion into other emerging markets, chairs the company's Compensation Committee, and is a member of the Management, Investment, and Executive Committees. She is chairwoman of Lincoln Center's redevelopment and is on the executive committee of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief and resettlement organization; is chairman emerita of Women in Need, which helps homeless women and children in New York City; is a vice president of the Brearley School, and a member of the Board and Executive Committee of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Farley served on the boards of Lincoln Center Theater and the New York Philharmonic.

See also

• Rockefeller Center
• Museum of Modern Art
• Lincoln Center
• Carnegie Hall