Leonard Abrams
Leonard Abrams, the founder of the East Village Eye, a community newspaper dripping with attitude that, according to The New York Times, “captured in newsprint the do-it-yourself post-punk ethos that ignited the explosion of groundbreaking art, music and fashion in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s,” died of a heart attack on April 1, at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike on his way home to Queens. He was 68.
The Eye, a monthly publication with an international readership, was “a house organ for the graffiti artists, New Wave bands, and maverick fashion designers who created one of New York’s storied cultural flowerings,” The Times said. Stars like Keith Haring and Barbara Kruger, musicians like Iggy Pop and the Beastie Boys, fashion designers like Patricia Field and Betsey Johnson made up its pages.
The Eye shut down in the late 1980s, and The New York Public Library added some salvaged issues in Mr. Abrams’ possession to its archive. Of the acquisition, Mr. Abrams said, “I had a nose for news, and the news I had a nose for was 10 years ahead.”
Edward H. Meyer
Edward H. Meyer, an empire-building chief executive who transformed a midsize New York advertising agency into a global power, died April 11at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 96.
Mr. Meyer joined Grey Advertising as an account services executive in 1956, when the agency was billing about $34 million a year. He was named president in 1968 and chairman and chief executive in 1970. Over the next 35 years, he built Grey into a behemoth that was billing $4.2 billion at the time of its sale to the British communications company WWP in 2005 for $1.5 billion.
He retired in 2006. To many in the industry, his departure seemed unimaginable. In an interview with Chief Executive magazine late in his career, Mr. Meyer discussed his seemingly endless tenure as Grey’s chief. “When will I retire?” he said. “To paraphrase Warren Buffet, five years after I die.”
Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter
Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter, who with her husband, Jack, built the empire of tulle and satin known as Kleinfeld’s, the bridal superstore that for decades drew women from all over the world to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, died on March 29 in Manhattan. She was 99.
I Kleinfeld & Son was a family business, originally a small fur concern started by Ms. Schachter’s father, Isadore Kleinfeld. But it was Ms. Schachter, known as Miss Hedda, who with Jack expanded it into what would become perhaps the largest and most famous bridal emporium in the world.
Patricia Leigh Brown, writing in The New York Times in 1987, described it as a store “that is to wedding gowns what the Pentagon is to fighter bombers.”
Jessica Burstein
Jessica Burstein, a photographer best known for her candid shots taken at Elaine’s, the restaurant and celebrity hangout, died on April 11 at her home in Manhattan. She was 76.
In 1992, Ms. Burstein became the official photographer at Elaine’s, her framed photos displayed on the restaurant’s walls. Ms. Burstein met Dick Wolf, the creator of the “Law & Order” franchise at Elaine’s in 1993, and he soon hired her to photograph the crime scenes that were conceived weekly for the original series until it was cancelled in 2010.
She freelanced over the years for newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and magazines like TV Guide, Rolling Stone, People, Time and Vanity Fair. In 2006, she signed on as the exclusive photographer of the construction of the new Yankee Stadium, which would open in April 2009. Her photos were used in a commemorative book for holders of Yankee premium season tickets and were exhibited at the stadium.
Leon Levine
Leon Levine, an American businessman and philanthropist who founded the Family Dollar chain of discount stores, died on April 5 in Charlotte, NC. He was 85.
In 1959, he visited a store in Kentucky that sold nothing costing more than a dollar. He liked the simple concept and, in November 1959, at age 22, he opened a similar store in Charlotte. The company grew rapidly. In 1962, Family Dollar did about $2 million in business ($19.9 million in 1923 money). By the end of 1979, Family Dollar had 380 stores in eight states.
Yehonatan Geffen
Israeli songwriter, playwright, author and columnist Yehonatan Geffen, nephew of Moshe Dayan and father of pop star Aviv Geffen and filmmaker Shira Geffen, died April 19 in Israel. He was 76.
Geffen also wrote novels and penned hundreds of columns for Ma’ariv from 1972 to 2013, which made him a popular commentator. He was a member of the legendary group Lool (Chicken Coop), and performed with the top entertainers in the country.
Bernice Rose
Bernice Rose, an art historian and curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions put traditional drawing on an equal footing with painting and sculpture, died on April 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
As a drawing curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she organized exhibitions showing that drawings were far more than preliminary works executed mainly on paper. In a catalogue that accompanied “Drawing Now: 1955-1975,” she wrote that drawing had become “a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own.”
Bernice Rose left MoMA in 1993 to become director of special exhibitions at Pace Gallery in New York. In 2007, the Menil Collection in Houston appointed her the inaugural chief curator at its drawing institute. Although she retired from the Menil in 2014, she continued working as chief editor emerita of the “Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings,” published in 2018, as well as an adviser to the Houston collector Louisa Stude Sarofim.
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