Frank D. Rich Jr., the chairman and former president of the real estate development company that led the transformation of downtown Stamford, Conn., from a deteriorating factory and retail district to a sleek office and commercial center, died on Tuesday at his home in Darien. He was 83.
The death was confirmed by his son Frank Rich III.
Mr. Rich was president of the F. D. Rich Company in the 1960s when the Stamford Urban Redevelopment Commission chose it as the sole redeveloper of a 118-acre swath of the downtown area, dotted with rundown row houses and wood-frame homes.
“It was like so many other New England cities: old and tired and based on manufacturing,” Stamford’s mayor, Dannel P. Malloy, said in an interview yesterday. “There were large pockets of poverty, substandard construction of buildings.” And the furniture factories and meat-packing plants were going out of business.
By 1985, however, a New York Times article on the city’s resurgence said: “Stamford’s old downtown has been not so much gentrified as eliminated. In its place has come an injection of high-rise energy in the midst of Fairfield County’s otherwise placid suburban landscape.”
Mayor Malloy said, “The urban redevelopment movement in the ’60s and ’70s was renowned for its failures, but in Stamford, it was an amazing success, and the Rich company deserves a very large part of the credit for that.”
The company was founded in 1921 by Mr. Rich’s father, F. D. Rich Sr., a stonemason who had emigrated from Italy. For years it was primarily a construction contractor. But under the leadership of Frank Rich Jr., his brother Robert and their chief counsel, Lawrence Gochberg, the Rich Company won the city’s urban renewal contract, with federal grants that eventually reached $100 million.
In all, the company developed about five million square feet of new space, including three million square feet for corporate offices; the 850,000-square-foot shopping center called the Stamford Town Center, the 500-unit Stamford Marriott Hotel; three silo-like apartment buildings called St. Johns Towers; and Landmark Square, a complex of six office buildings, one of which, at 21 stories, is the tallest building in the city. Mr. Rich hired prominent architects, including Cesar Pelli, Hugh Stubbins and Moshe Safdie, to design the brick, steel and glass buildings along the Long Island Sound shore that changed the city’s skyline.
Frank Domenic Rich Jr. was born in Stamford on July 4, 1924. He served as a first lieutenant in the Marines in World War II, graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, then joined the family business.
In addition to his son Frank III, of New Canaan, and his brother Robert, of Stamford, Mr. Rich is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Jean Hopkins; four daughters, Laura Rowland of Darien; Susan Mailman of Stamford; Lisa Coats of Palm City, Fla.; and Robin Fulton of Hilton Head, S.C.; another son, Charles, of Suwanee, Ga.; and 13 grandchildren.
Mr. Rich was president of his company from 1961 to 1971 and its chairman since 1979. He also served on the boards of many civic and charitable organizations and was chairman of the Stamford Center for the Arts.
The Rich company’s projects were not limited to Stamford. It built the Alaska Pavilion and the Jordanian Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens; federal office buildings in Toledo, Ohio, and Bismarck, N.D.; military airplane hangars and barracks throughout the country; and about 500 units of housing in Anchorage, Alaska, after an earthquake struck the city in 1964.
