Richard Weinstein, Public-Minded Urban Planner, Dies at 85

Richard Weinstein, an architect who helped redefine urban planning in New York and Los Angeles by coupling private profit with public benefit to make cities more livable, died Feb. 24 in Santa Monica, California. He was 85.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Nikolas said.

Recruited to New York City government in the late 1960s by the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay, Weinstein joined several like-minded young colleagues in a new Urban Design Group within the Department of City Planning.

Their goal was to tailor zoning regulations to a neighborhood’s unique form, function and features rather than impose generic rules by rote.

“We are trying to make development responsive to some human purpose,” he told The New York Times in 1973.

Working largely backstage, Weinstein was instrumental in the creation of special zoning districts that retained the character of the theater district and the area around the new Lincoln Center performing arts complex.

He also played major roles in the preservation of the U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan and what became the South Street Seaport.

In the 1970s, he helped negotiate the development of Battery Park City on landfill from the construction site of the World Trade Center. He also conceived a plan for selling air rights over the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan to a private developer to subsidize the museum’s expansion. The developer built a residential high-rise next door.

Weinstein moved to California in 1985 and became dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He held that post until 1995 and was a professor emeritus until 2008.

As dean, he incorporated computer technology and robotics into the curriculum. He also helped select designs for the Walt Disney Concert Hall — Frank Gehry’s was chosen — and the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, designed by José Rafael Moneo.

“He was certainly a champion of creating humanity and urbanity,” Gehry said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Samuel Richard Weinstein (he was named after his grandfather, an immigrant from Belarus, but apparently switched his first and middle names) was born Nov. 30, 1932, in Manhattan to Herman and Lillian Weinstein. His father was in the garment business.

After graduating from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, he earned a bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology from Brown University and a master’s in clinical psychology from Columbia.

While administering psychological exams at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Weinstein was captivated by several houses in the capital area designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. He began taking correspondence courses in architecture.

He later enrolled in an architecture program at Harvard but found it stifling and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a master’s degree in architecture in 1960.

In 1961, he won the Prix de Rome for architecture, and he later worked for the architectural firms of I.M. Pei and Edward Larabee Barnes.

Weinstein joined the city government after campaigning for Lindsay in his successful run for mayor in 1965. His new colleagues included visionaries like Donald H. Elliott, who became the chairman of the City Planning Commission, and Jaquelin T. Robertson, Jonathan Barnett and Myles Weintraub, who, along with Weinstein, became founding members of the Urban Design Group.

As director of the Office of Planning and Development for Lower Manhattan from 1968 to 1974, Weinstein persuaded David Rockefeller and other downtown bankers to buy air rights that preserved the buildings that later formed the South Street Seaport, now a popular tourist attraction.

His work in creating special zoning for the Lincoln Square neighborhood around Lincoln Center and the theater district helped preserve and promote their unique cultural characteristics and encouraged the construction of more theaters.

“In New York, while everyone watches politicians playing politics as usual, the planners and lawmakers are making a new kind of city possible through a new kind of zoning,” Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic for The Times, wrote in 1971.

In a 1994 interview with the Museum of Modern Art, Weinstein explained what that new kind of zoning demanded when a developer wanted to build beyond what regulations allowed.

“We completely stopped the practice of granting variances to developers in exchange for increased taxes to the city,” he said, “and took the position that public benefits had to be identified as flowing from the variance.”

For example, he said, in the theater district, “if a developer wanted to build a building, he had to build a theater in it if he wanted the variance.”

“As a result of that policy,” he added, “four theaters were built: the Minskoff, the Uris, the Circle in the Square and the American Place Theater — two experimental theaters and two Broadway theaters.”

When Cass Gilbert’s beaux-arts custom house (later renamed the Alexander Hamilton Custom House) was about to be carved into courtrooms for federal judges, Weinstein collaborated with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others to preserve much of the building’s historic character, including its 1930s murals by Reginald Marsh. He later helped relocate the Museum of the American Indian there from upper Manhattan.

He was also a consultant to the National Park Service’s Gateway National Recreation Area in New York Harbor.

Weinstein is survived by his wife, the former Edina Mommaerts; his sons, Nikolas and Alexandr, from his first marriage, to Sandra Cohen; and two granddaughters.

If his influence was enduring, it was also eclectic.

When Weinstein learned that the city’s Department of Transportation was about to apply a new coat of olive green paint to the Brooklyn Bridge in the early 1970s, he checked with the Smithsonian Institution to determine the bridge’s original color, from 1883.

It was tan and silver.

The city has applied that two-tone pattern to the bridge ever since.