Lester Kabacoff, 90, New Orleans Developer
Louisiana Lou
Among projects was 1984 world's fair
Monday January 26, 2004
By John Pope
Staff writer
Lester Kabacoff, a visionary, public-spirited New Orleans developer whose
projects included luxury hotels, subdivisions, the city's first television
station and the 1984 world's fair, died Sunday at his New Orleans home. He
was 90.
A New York City native who had lived in New Orleans since 1942, Mr. Kabacoff
was a Wall Street lawyer who came to the city during World War II and
decided to stay. After the war, he became the executive assistant to
businessman and philanthropist Edgar Stern; that tie provided access to
powerful people with whom Mr. Kabacoff, a strong, driving force since his
days on the junior tennis circuit, helped make things happen.
During the next half-century, Mr. Kabacoff assembled teams that built luxury
hotels, subdivisions, the 1984 world's fair and the Ernest N. Morial
Convention Center. He helped set up WDSU-TV, revitalize the city's flagging
tourism industry and establish civic organizations such as the Council for a
Better Louisiana, the Public Affairs Research Council, the Police
Foundation, the Metropolitan Area Committee and the agency now known as the
New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. Through projects
such as the New Orleans Hilton and the fair, Mr. Kabacoff helped New
Orleanians rediscover the Mississippi River.
"I think he's been able to get things done that made other people throw up
their hands and say, 'It can't be done,' " said restaurateur Ella Brennan, a
longtime friend. "When he saw something that could be done, he couldn't
stand it if he couldn't make it happen."
Mr. Kabacoff's feats earned him an array of tributes. A plaza and a
professorship at Dillard University, a restaurant at the Hilton and a
division of the University of New Orleans bear his name, and the awards he
received include the Mayor's Medal of Honor and The Times-Picayune Loving
Cup.
Despite the plaudits, Mr. Kabacoff remained steadfastly humble about his
deeds.
"I'm a sort of putter-together fellow," he said in an interview. "I do not
quit. If I think something's worthwhile doing, I do it."
Early competitive streak
The son of Russian immigrants, Mr. Kabacoff showed his competitive streak
early on the tennis court. He started playing when he was 12 and kept at it
for most of his life, winning the state singles and doubles tennis
championships in his age group the year he turned 70. Mr. Kabacoff used
tennis not only for exercise but also for making personal and professional
contacts.
In 1931, Mr. Kabacoff and his partner, Bernard Friedman, won the national
junior indoor doubles championship. His prowess resulted in a tennis
scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where Mr. Kabacoff earned
undergraduate and law degrees and was the team's co-captain.
He passed the bar examination in 1937 and was hired by the New York firm
Garey, Desvernine and Kissam. But when the United States entered World War
II, Mr. Kabacoff was impatient to see action, so he volunteered for the Army
and applied for officer training.
In 1942, he was sent to New Orleans' Port of Embarkation as a
labor-relations officer. His assignment was to keep the port open so
munitions and supplies could get to Europe, a tricky task that meant
negotiating with often-contentious black and white longshoremen's unions,
said Pres Kabacoff, Mr. Kabacoff's son.
Because of his success in labor relations, Mr. Kabacoff was sent to solve
disputes throughout the Gulf Coast area. "If they had a labor problem
anywhere in the New Orleans area, they'd ask me to handle it," he said in a
privately published memoir.
Tennis at Longue Vue
While on duty in New Orleans, things began to happen in the young officer's
personal life.
In 1943, he received an invitation from Lt. William Ewing "Slew" Hester, a
fellow tennis buff who later was president of the U.S. Tennis Association,
to play at what was described as "the nicest tennis court in New Orleans."
It was at Longue Vue, the suburban estate that was home to Edgar and Edith
Stern, philanthropists and activists who championed a host of civic, social,
cultural and educational causes.
The four became friends and regular tennis partners, forming a group they
called the Longue Vue Racquet and Julep Club. Because the Army didn't
provide housing for the officers and because the Sterns' children were away,
they invited Hester and Mr. Kabacoff to move in.
A year after Mr. Kabacoff had decamped to Longue Vue, he caught a ride to
work one morning with his commanding general. Also in the car was Gloria
Simmons, the general's secretary. That chance meeting launched a courtship
that culminated in an August wedding performed by an Army chaplain at Longue
Vue.
The newlyweds honeymooned in New York City. Because Gloria Kabacoff was
Catholic and because members of her new spouse's law firm there had social
and religious contacts, the couple had another ceremony -- in St. Patrick's
Cathedral, with Cardinal Francis Spellman officiating. The Sterns gave a
party for them on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel.
Decides to stay
In May 1945, Mr. Kabacoff was admitted to the Louisiana bar. When the war
ended, Mr. Kabacoff told his senior partner in New York he had decided to
make New Orleans his home. Within a year, Edgar Stern asked Mr. Kabacoff to
be his executive assistant and attorney.
"It took me about three seconds to make up my mind and say yes," Mr.
Kabacoff said in an interview.
It was a loosely defined job in which Mr. Kabacoff was assigned to see to
Edgar Stern's pet projects, becoming not only his protégé but also his alter
ego.
"He had gotten tired of going to all these meetings," Mr. Kabacoff said. "My
job was to do everything Edgar Stern didn't want to do anymore."
As a result, Stern's causes became Mr. Kabacoff's, among them Dillard
University. "He took the torch from Mr. Stern in terms of service at
Dillard," Dillard President Michael Lomax said.
Like Stern, Mr. Kabacoff served on the board of trustees, and the Kabacoffs
gave generously -- more than $600,000, according to Dillard records. The
Gloria and Lester E. Kabacoff Professorship in Business Administration was
established in 1996, and Kabacoff Quadrangle has been named in his honor on
the Gentilly campus.
In 1998, when Mr. Kabacoff retired after 28 years on the board, including
service as treasurer and chairman of the committee on finance and
development, he was named a trustee emeritus.
Civic group founder
Working with the Sterns, Mr. Kabacoff helped set up WDSU in 1948 and develop
Pontchartrain Park, a Gentilly suburb designed in the early 1950s to give
black people a chance to own their own homes.
"It was not built as a segregated community," Mr. Kabacoff said. "It was
built to fill a need, and for $14,000 you could buy the best house in
Pontchartrain Park."
Mr. Kabacoff also was a founder of civic groups such as the Council for a
Better Louisiana, the Public Affairs Research Council and the Metropolitan
Area Committee.
But he was also a canny businessman. "He had a lot of drive, and once he set
his sights on something, I think he pursued it with a great deal of
determination," said Charles A. Ferguson, former editor of The
Times-Picayune, a longtime friend of Mr. Kabacoff's and president of
Dillard's board of trustees.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Kabacoff masterminded the deal that resulted in the
Royal Orleans Hotel (now the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel), the city's first
major new hotel in 42 years. These Kabacoff projects followed: the Royal
Sonesta, the Dauphine Orleans, Beau Chene subdivision and the New Orleans
Hilton, where a restaurant, Kabby's, bears his nickname. The Hilton is part
of a riverfront complex that includes the Riverwalk marketplace and One
River Place, the luxury high-rise that has been the Kabacoffs' home.
Vision for riverfront
The notion of developing New Orleans' riverfront, an area that had been
dominated for decades by warehouses and wharves, seemed logical, Mr.
Kabacoff said.
"I've been to Paris; I've been to London," he said. "The nicest places to
live in many cities of the world are on the river. We've got this river,
with 17 miles of wharves, and 98 percent of the people of New Orleans, until
the Moonwalk was built, had never seen the river."
To draw more attention to the riverfront and the adjoining, ignored
Warehouse District, Mr. Kabacoff was an early backer of the 1984 world's
fair, a splashy venture that delighted visitors but turned into a financial
disaster for its investors.
That setback "put him into a funk," Pres Kabacoff said. "He was just sick
about the fact that people were hurt. I think that was, perhaps, the most
difficult period for him."
But the exposition did have a good long-term effect, Pres Kabacoff said,
because it made people aware of the Warehouse District's potential as a site
for homes, restaurants, galleries, hotels and offices, resulting in one of
the country's major examples of urban revitalization.
Father of tourism
And the fair's Great Hall, which had housed the Louisiana Pavilion and many
smaller exhibits, became the nucleus of the building Mr. Kabacoff had long
said the city needed: a convention hall big enough to land meetings that
were bypassing New Orleans because nothing in the city could house them.
The center, now known as the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, has been
enlarged several times since, expanding beneath and beyond the Crescent City
Connection with more growth scheduled. It is the most visible outgrowth of
Mr. Kabacoff's determination, born in the early 1970s, to strengthen efforts
to attract business and pleasure travelers to the area.
University of New Orleans Chancellor Tim Ryan has called Mr. Kabacoff the
father of modern tourism. As a result of Mr. Kabacoff's work and his gifts
to UNO, the university's School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism
Administration was named for him in 1998.
The seed for one of Mr. Kabacoff's last initiatives was planted one night in
the mid-1990s. As he and his wife were leaving a Garden District party,
their host told them to wait until a private guard could walk them to their
car. That made Mr. Kabacoff think about trying to improve law enforcement;
the result was the New Orleans Police Foundation, a private organization
that strengthens the Police Department by finding money for continuing
education, better equipment and support for community policing.
"He not only led the way with his ideas and his compassion, but also with
his personal contributions to making it go," said Terry Ebbert, the
foundation's former director, who is executive assistant to Mayor Ray Nagin
for homeland security and public safety.
Social conscience praised
In summing up Mr. Kabacoff's achievements, former Mayor Moon Landrieu
praised his business skills and his social conscience: "Very few people that
I know of have contributed more to this city than Lester Kabacoff, not only
in terms of physical developments that he initiated and completed but also
in terms of his contribution to the improvement of the government and many
of the private institutions that make the city what it is."
Mr. Kabacoff was a former president of Metairie Park Country Day School's
board of trustees and a former board member of the Boy Scouts of America's
New Orleans Council, the United Negro College Fund and the Urban League of
New Orleans. He was co-chairman of the task force that helped land the 1972
Super Bowl for New Orleans.
"The city's been good to me," Mr. Kabacoff said. "I wanted to give something
back to the city. I've felt that way, ever since I've done all the things
I've done."
Survivors include his wife, Gloria Simmons Kabacoff; a son, Pres Kabacoff; a
daughter, Margot K. Peters of Austin, Texas; a sister, Helen Davis of South
Orange, N.J.; four grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
The funeral and burial will be private.
A gathering celebrating Mr. Kabacoff's life will be held Wednesday at 11:30
a.m. in the Mark Twain Courtyard of the New Orleans Hilton. The event will
be moved indoors in case of inclement weather.
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/metro/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1075100161272760.xml
DGH
This thread contains the only mention of the name "Kabacoff" in
alt.obituaries that I can find.