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Shopping Centers Today -> December 2001
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HARRY NEWMAN, 80, INDUSTRY PIONEER AND POET
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| Harry Newman, developer, past chairman of ICSC, and a lot besides. |
Developer Harry Newman Jr., chairman emeritus of the ICSC Educational Foundation, who pushed tirelessly for educational programs in retail real estate and helped create university curricula for that field of study, died Oct. 19. He was 80.
Newman served as chairman of ICSC from 1969 to 1970 and was an educational pioneer for the organization who got his message out through passionate efforts and a winsome nature. In 1988, he helped establish the ICSC Educational Foundation, designed to promote knowledge of the industry. Under his guidance, sometimes described as relentless, the foundation helped create a new field of study for dozens of university graduate programs, and alerted the economic community to the importance of shopping centers.
He also served as trustee for two terms during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1998, Newman relinquished his full-time leadership of the Educational Foundation, but continued to play an active role as chairman emeritus.
Newman was known as a piercing intellect, who found the time and energy to excel in property development, writing, publishing, education and community leadership. An early member of ICSC, he founded Newman Properties, of Long Beach, Calif., in 1961, which went on to develop more than 9 million square feet of shopping center properties in Washington, Nevada, Texas, Iowa and California, where he built the Mall of Orange.
On the need for the industry to continually reinvent itself, Newman this year told author Nancy Cohen: “With a success, you sit back and rub your hands and say, ‘Boy, was I brilliant’ Ð until something new comes along and makes you say, ‘Jesus, what a mistake.’” Cohen is writing a book on the history of shopping centers for ICSC.
Newman was born in St. Louis in 1921. He graduated from Harvard College in 1942, and Harvard Business School one year later. Moving on to further studies at Cambridge University in England, he graduated with a Masters of Letters degree in 1949. While at Cambridge, he began publishing Varsity, the first weekly campus newspaper.
While in England, he founded the British Case-Study Writer’s Circle, and co-founded the publishing company Newman Neame, which produced the first Fodor’s Travel guides.
He was also a community leader. In 1981, he established the Long Beach Regional Arts Foundation, to stimulate an understanding and interaction in the arts among school-aged children, and to offer inner-city youths after-school programs. He taught poetry classes and read to young students at Long Beach elementary schools.
Newman also wrote four books of poetry; his most recent work, “TURNING 21: A Businessman’s Odyssey to the New Century,” was published in 1999. “He was more than a poet; in a way he was himself a poem of many rhythms, sounds and rhymes,” said John T. Riordan, vice chairman of ICSC and a friend of Newman’s, at the funeral in October. “And he was an awful lot of fun.”
He is survived by his wife, Anne; a son, Alan; four daughters, Felicity, Catherine, Elinor, and Sara; two grandchildren; and his former wife, Mary.
 | Current Issue November 2008 |