Donald Moore, Who Expanded Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Dies at 90

Donald Moore, who oversaw the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as president during the 1980s, when it doubled its indoor exhibit space and tripled its membership, died Sept. 30 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was 90.

His death, from complications of a fall, was announced by Elizabeth Reina-Longoria, the garden’s director of communications.

Moore presided over the design and construction of the Steinhardt Conservatory, part of a $30 million expansion project that included new greenhouses and classrooms and the transformation of the 1914 McKim, Mead & White beaux-arts conservatory into the Palm House, a catering facility that has generated revenue to subsidize the garden’s operating expenses.

The Steinhardt Conservatory, named for Wall Street investor Michael Steinhardt and his wife, Judy, who donated $3 million, is a 32,000-square-foot ethereal glass and steel complex composed of a central rectangular building for aquatic plants, bonsai, ferns and other plants and three octagonal ones that house tropical, temperate and desert plants. It was completed in 1988.

Moore also tripled membership to about 25,000 and developed the annual two-day Sakura Matsuri spring cherry blossom festival, which draws tens of thousands of visitors to the garden, which encompasses 52 acres alongside Prospect Park.

Donald Eugene Moore was born June 17, 1928, in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in nearby Auburn. His father, Carl Henderson Moore, was a mail carrier. His mother, Janet (Whitten) Moore, was a homemaker.

After serving in the Marine Corps, he graduated in 1951 from Washburn University, in Topeka, where he majored in English. He was a newspaper reporter in Kansas and served as an editor for a home improvement magazine in Chicago before moving to New York City in 1955 to work in publicity and marketing.

In 1968, he became the founding president of the Downtown Brooklyn Development Association and helped galvanize the revival of that dilapidated neighborhood.

From 1978 to 1980 he was the president of the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry. During his tenure, the chamber sold its venerable beaux-arts headquarters at 65 Liberty St. in lower Manhattan and also merged with the New York City Partnership, an advocacy group organized by David Rockefeller in the aftermath of the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis. (The chamber is now headquartered on West 44th Street.)

Moore was named president of the garden in 1980; he had sat on its board. When he retired in 1990, he and his wife of 65 years, Susan (Taylor) Moore, who had directed preschool child development centers in Brooklyn, moved to Tucson, Arizona; they moved to Allentown in 2007. She died in 2015.

He is survived by his son, Stephen; his daughter, Leslie Dennis; four grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and his sister, Mary Gillespie.