Martin Kimmel

Origins and early life

Martin Kimmel was born in the Bronx on 9 April 1916 into a Jewish family, one of four sons of Henry and Emma Kimmel; his father ran the family's lighting fixture store and later built apartment houses in New York.

Work and career

He went to Syracuse University but left to serve in the Army in the Pacific during the Second World War, then learned the homebuilding trade in the family construction firm, Henry Kimmel and Sons. With that knowledge he started his own company, which built garden apartments and town houses in the suburbs of Long Island. In 1958, with the profits from those buildings, he and his friend Milton Cooper sealed a partnership with a handshake and built their first shopping centre, Coral Way Plaza in Miami, and the company took its name from theirs: Kim for Kimmel, Co for Cooper.

The partners saw South Florida becoming a retirement haven, and Kimmel followed the utility trucks to learn where new power lines, and so new homes, were going. Starting from a strip mall anchored by a Zayre discount store, Kimco grew to about 1,900 properties in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Brazil, and in 1991 it went public as a real estate investment trust. Kimmel retired that same year and gave the rest of his life to philanthropy with his wife, Helen.

At New York University he funded the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Stem Cell Biology and helped build the Kimmel Center for University Life, home of the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Recognition

At the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, the couple paid in 1990 for fifty acres beside the campus and endowed centres for magnetic resonance, nanoscale science and archaeological science; the Institute made him an honorary doctor in 1997. A member of Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan and a longtime supporter of the Jewish Museum in New York, he died in New York on 15 April 2008, aged ninety-two.