A. Alfred Taubman, the self-made Michigan billionaire whose successes included integrating the shopping mall experience into American culture, has died at the age of 91, NBC News reports.
Taubman, a prolific philanthropist who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to universities, hospitals and museums, died Friday night at his home of a heart attack, said son Robert S. Taubman, president and CEO of Taubman Centers, Inc.
Taubman’s business ventures were numerous, from real estate and art houses to the A&W restaurant chain, leading him to travel to Hungary to determine why the country’s sausage was so tasty. He also became a fierce supporter of stem-cell research.
But his shaping of the culture of shopping— with a parking lot in front and several stores clustered in one space — left his most indelible mark on American culture. Taubman Centers, founded in 1950, currently owns and manages 19 regional shopping centers nationwide.
Taubman was born on Jan. 31, 1942, in Pontiac, Michigan, the son of German-Jewish immigrants. As a boy, he toiled in a department store after school near his family home, one of the custom houses and commercial buildings developed in the area by Taubman Sr.
The elder Taubman, savvily recognizing the booming growth of the middle class post-WWII, launched his first real estate development company in 1950. In his autobiography, he wrote that he had noticed shoppers responding positively to the convenience of “one-stop comparison shopping opportunity,” When a friend suggested erecting a shopping plaza in Flint, MI, Taubman’s company went one step further: stores were relegated to the back of the lot and parking spaces were placed in the front.
The move was a success, allowing Taubman’s young company to undertake larger-scale developments in Michigan, California and other states in the 1950s and early ’60s.
In 2001, Taubman was convicted of conspiring with Anthony Tennant, former chairman of Christie’s International, to fix commissions charged by auction houses. Prosecutors alleged that sellers were cheated out of as much as $400 million in commissions. Taubman was fined $7.5 million and spent a year in a low-security prison in Rochester, Minnesota.
Despite his conviction, the real-estate scion maintained his innocence and expressed regret that he never testified in his own defense.
“I had lost a chunk of my life, my good name and around 27 pounds,” he recalled in his book, insisting he was forced to take the rap for other wrong-doers.
