Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his stepdaughter, Chloe Malle, said.
As chairman of the library’s board of trustees from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rose, along with his predecessor, Andrew Heiskell, and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s longtime president, engineered the resurgence of the Beaux-Arts landmark on Fifth Avenue and the derelict greensward just to its west.
Mr. Rose returned as chairman in 1997 for another two years after Elizabeth F. Rohatyn resigned to join her husband, Felix G. Rohatyn, the newly appointed ambassador to France, in Paris.
Mr. Rose played pivotal roles in the creation of the Science, Industry and Business Library in the former B. Altman emporium on Madison Avenue (it closed in 2016, after two decades, and was folded into a more high-tech incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan Library) and in the decision to construct vital new stacks for books, instead of a disruptive parking garage, under Bryant Park.
During his tenure as chairman, the library effected the dazzling renovation of the Deborah, Jonathan F.P., Samuel Priest and Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room in the research library on Fifth Avenue. The project was financed with a gift in honor of their children from Frederick P. Rose, who oversaw the renovation, and his wife, Sandra Priest Rose, members of a venerable New York real estate family unrelated to Marshall Rose.
After presiding over the Arlen Realty and Development Corporation and its E.J. Korvette discount-chain subsidiary in the early 1970s, Mr. Rose in 1978 founded the Georgetown Company, which in 1999 developed the Easton Town Center mall in Columbus, Ohio, with Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire retailer.
Mr. Rose’s company built and managed shopping centers, apartments and commercial properties in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Washington; renovated Madison Square Garden when it was owned by Gulf and Western Industries in the early 1990s; and oversaw the development of the architect Frank Gehry’s beehive-like headquarters of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActive Corporation in the West Chelsea section of Manhattan, completed in 2007.
As a philanthropist, Mr. Rose helped establish three charter high schools funded by the Robin Hood Foundation, one in the South Bronx and two in Brooklyn.
Many websites that published Mr. Rose’s obituary referred to him in their headlines as the husband of the actress Candice Bergen, whom he married in 2000. But he was better known in New York as a civic leader.
He could be demanding; he could also be relentlessly loyal to friends. His advice on real estate and finance was highly valued.
When Donald J. Trump offered to complete the stalled renovation of Wollman Rink in Central Park in 1986, the Trump Organization consulted Richard Ravitch’s HRH Construction on Mr. Rose’s recommendation. Mr. Rose also advised Central Synagogue on the lucrative sale of the air rights over its temple on Lexington Avenue to a nearby development site in 2017.
“He was a model of civic virtue and commitment,” Gordon J. Davis, a former parks commissioner and president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and a life trustee of the library, said in an interview. “Marshall was a central and indispensable figure in what happened with the New York Public Library from 1981 until today.” (His commitment endured even in death; the family encouraged contributions in his memory to the library.)
“Vartan Gregorian, Andrew Heiskell and Marshall Rose,” Mr. Davis added, “not only restored Bryant Park, they were the driving force that rescued the New York Public Library and made it into the extraordinary institution of learning and diversity for all New Yorkers that it is today.”
Daniel Biederman, the founding president of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, said that Mr. Rose’s “real estate know-how was critical.”
Marshall Rose was born on Jan. 2, 1937, in Brooklyn, to Jack Rose, an English-born furrier who also worked in real estate, and Jean (Klein) Rose.
Raised in the Brighton Beach section of the borough, he attended Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and then earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from City College.
After graduating from New York University School of Law, he briefly practiced law and for a short time worked on real estate matters for the investment bank Lazard Freres, before deciding that he wanted to develop property.
“I asked him if he ever attended a school reunion,” his friend Elihu Rose (Frederick Rose’s brother) recalled in the eulogy he delivered on Wednesday at Central Synagogue. “He said no, because he thought that most of his classmates would have been in jail. And from that social start, he ended up by being an intimate friend of Brooke Astor, the undisputed grande dame of New York’s social life.”
In 1965, Mr. Rose married Jill Kupin, who became president of the International Center of Photography in 1989. She died in 1996. In 2000, he married Ms. Bergen, best known as the star of the hit CBS-TV comedy “Murphy Brown” from 1988 to 1998 and 2018 to 2019. (In her 2015 memoir, “A Fine Romance,” Ms. Bergen said Mr. Rose was clueless about popular culture: “He’d never seen ‘Seinfeld,’ for example, and had barely heard of ‘Murphy Brown.’”)
In addition to Ms. Malle and Ms. Bergen, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Wendi and Andrew Rose; and six grandchildren.
The Roses lived on Fifth Avenue and had a home on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton.
At the library, Mr. Rose helped guide the renovation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. He served briefly as the chairman of the Lincoln Center Constituent Development Corporation, but quit in 2001 after the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera and other institutions squabbled over a master plan for renovations.
In 2019, the library dedicated a new plaza and entrance on West 40th Street in Mr. Rose’s honor.
“He was an unstoppable force of nature when it came to protecting and building what the public needed from its library,” said Anthony Marx, who in 2011 succeeded Paul LeClerc as the library’s president.
Mr. Biederman recalled that Mr. Rose’s predecessor as board chairman, Mr. Heiskell, once acknowledged that Mr. Rose had not been a major donor to the library, but said that he had contributed significantly with his mind, which placed him ahead of some other supposed benefactors.
“About 1 percent of the people who give, give anonymously,” Mr. Rose told The New York Times in 1997. “It sometimes seems that all the people who don’t give claim to be in that 1 percent.”