In Friday’s (5/11) Seattle Times Eric Pryne reports the death of real-estate developer and philanthropist Jack Benaroya. “There’s [the Seattle Symphony’s] Benaroya Hall. And the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason Medical Center. Plus a host of office, industrial and business parks in and around Seattle that over the past half-century have borne the Benaroya name. They’re all monuments to the outsized impact Jack Benaroya had on the city to which he moved with his Lebanese immigrant parents nearly 80 years ago. Mr. Benaroya, a pioneering real-estate developer and philanthropist who had an aversion to publicity, died Friday, May 11. He was 90.” Benaroya was born in Birmingham, Ala., raised in California, and following service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he entered the real-estate field and founded the Jack A. Benaroya Co. “Through his family foundation, he donated $15 million in 1993 to the Seattle Symphony for a new concert hall. At the time it was the largest gift ever to a Seattle non-profit.… ‘If he hadn’t stepped up, I don’t think we would have the world-class orchestra we have today,’ said Leslie Chihuly, who chairs the symphony board.”
Posted May 14, 2012
