Melvin Simon

Origins and early life

Melvin Simon was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 21 October 1926, the son of Max and Mae Simon; his father was a tailor who had emigrated from Central Europe, and the family moved to the Bronx when he was a boy. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and earned a degree in accounting at City College of New York, and in 1953 the army sent him to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis, where he sold encyclopedias door to door to supplement his pay.

Work and career

He stayed in Indianapolis after his discharge and became a leasing agent for the Albert Frankel Company, a developer of strip shopping centres, for a hundred dollars a week. In 1960 he set up his own firm, Melvin Simon & Associates, with his younger brothers Herbert and Fred; it began with strip centres anchored by grocery stores and drugstores and had moved on to enclosed malls by 1964. The company drew department stores in as anchor tenants with lower rents, signed them before choosing a site so that banks would finance the projects, and was one of the first developers to bring cinemas into shopping centres.

In 1983 he and Herb bought the Indiana Pacers at the request of city leaders, which kept the basketball team in Indianapolis, and in 1993 the company went public as Simon Property Group, later led by his son David. Born to a Jewish family, he was active in Jewish life in Indianapolis: he sat on the board of the Jewish Welfare Foundation, the Jewish Welfare Federation named him its Man of the Year, and his funeral was held at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck.

With his wife Bren he gave 50 million dollars in 2006 to the Indiana University cancer centre, which was renamed in their honour, and 10 million dollars to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He and Herb stepped down as co-chairmen of Simon Property Group in 2007, and he died of cancer in Indianapolis on 16 September 2009, at the age of eighty-two.