Irwin Cohen, an inventive developer who transformed a derelict factory, where the first Oreo cookie was produced in 1912, into Chelsea Market, an exuberant 21st-century food bazaar that helped revitalize its New York City neighborhood, died on Dec. 18 in Manhattan. He was 90.

In creating the market, Mr. Cohen reconfigured the former National Biscuit Company plant — a complex of 17 brick buildings dating to the 1890s, filling a block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets — into an industrial destination for foodies. Repurposing the plant spurred the gentrification of West Chelsea.

Mr. Cohen and his daughter purchased the factory for $14 million. In 2018, Google bought the property for $2.4 billion.

Peter Tarnoff, a seasoned diplomat whose work behind the scenes for presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton included establishing a secret channel to Fidel Castro and helping arrange the escape of six U.S. Embassy officials from Iran, an escapade later depicted in the 2012 movie “Argo,” died on Nov. 1 at his home in San Francisco. He was 86.

While other outsized personalities like Richard Holbrooke and Anthony Lake became famous, Mr. Tarnoff preferred to wield his influence out of the public eye. “Peter was really the quintessential diplomat in the sense that he never asked for the spotlight,” said Wendy Sherman, who served alongside him in the Clinton administration. “He never needed to be the named person. He just got the job done.”

Robert Brustein, an advocate for nonprofit theater, where he served at various times as critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and actor, died on Oct. 29 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96.

Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays. He taught at both institutions. He also reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years.

In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, non-pandering theater, and he worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.

“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”

As erudite and contentious as ever, Mr. Brustein continued to bemoan the state of theater in his later years. “…Our values have somehow gotten very skewed, and we’ve gone back — if we ever left it — to the notion that success is the highest value in this country. Not integrity, not quality, not intelligence, not spirit, not soul. Success, financial success. And this is a heartbreaker.”

Anita A. Summers, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who addressed a variety of public policy topics, including zoning, education and tax incentives, died on Oct. 29 at her home in Gladwyne, PA. She was 98. Her son Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Secretary of the Treasury, confirmed the death.

She insisted that public policymaking be strengthened with economic analysis, that the business and finance world could benefit from a greater understanding of policymaking. That, in fact, was her primary task at Wharton, where she moved in 1979 after spending nearly a decade at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. She was the founding chair of Wharton’s public policy and management department, the first of its kind at a business school.

Both at the Philadelphia Fed and later at Wharton, Mrs. Summers was a leading advocate of public planning at the regional level, pushing city and state governments to collaborate on economic issues that often crossed political boundaries.

Alan G. Hevesi, a New York politician who spent 35 years as an elected official until he suffered a fall from grace that led to his resignation as state comptroller and 20 months in prison for corruption, died on Nov. 9 in East Meadow, L.I. He was 83.

On Oct. 23, 2006, a state ethics commission concluded that Mr. Hevesi had knowingly violated the law by improperly assigning a public employee to handle personal chores. On Nov. 3, he was ordered by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to reimburse the state $90,000 in addition to $83,000 he had already paid. Yet, on Nov. 7, he was reelected. A month later, he pleaded guilty to defrauding the government and resigned from office.

Four years later, in October 2010, he pleaded guilty to corruption charges stemming from a pay-to-play scheme in which, as comptroller, he had accepted $1 million in gifts, trips and campaign contributions for steering $250 million in New York State pension fund investments to a California venture capitalist. Mr. Hevesi was sentenced to one to four years in prison, and was released on parole on Dec. 19, 2012, after serving 20 months.

Ida Applebroog, an artist who confronted the violence, coercion and mortality that can simmer beneath everyday relationships with a prolific stream of drawings, paintings, sculptures and videos, died on Oct. 21 at her home in Manhattan. She was 93.

Writing in The New York Times in 2010, Randy Kennedy called her work “funny in a way that skews toward weird without losing the ha-ha.” Her work also demonstrates her comfort in grappling with the unspeakable, the unshakable, and the unknown, The Times said.

“It’s hard to say ‘What is your work about,’” she said in a 2005 interview with the website Art21. “But for me it’s really how power works — male over female, parents over children, governments over people, doctors over patients.”

Her work is in the collections of the Whitney, the MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Gary Winnick, a former junk-bond salesman who in 1997 founded Global Crossing, a telecommunications company that laid fiber-optic cable underwater around the world to speed internet and phone traffic, but that imploded five years later under billions of dollars in debt, died on Nov. 4 at his estate in Los Angeles. He was 76.

For a time, Mr. Winnick was the wealthiest person in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. He spread his philanthropy to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington and to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, both in Los Angeles.

In 2000, he bought his 40,000-square-foot, 60-room estate, called Casa Encantada, for $94 million from David Murdock, a billionaire businessman. He subsequently spent millions more renovating it. Four years ago, he listed it for $225 million. Its current asking price, $250 million, is believed to be the highest for a home ever publicly listed in the United States.