Westchester”™s business community is mourning the loss of developer and banker Martin S. Berger, a towering figure in the county”™s business and civic life for half a century whose company pioneered the transformation of the suburban landscape with office and industrial parks, high-rise residences, hotels and shopping centers, and mixed-use developments.
Berger, a New York City resident who also had homes in Quogue and Palm Beach, Fla., died Sept. 12 of heart failure. He was 81. A funeral service was held Sept. 15 at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Burial was in Sharon Gardens Cemetery in Valhalla.
“He was literally a guy that shaped the Westchester business and residential landscape,” said Jon Halpern, CEO of Halpern Real Estate Ventures in New York City and a second-generation development partner with the Robert Martin Co., the Elmsford-based company formed in 1959 by Berger and business partner Robert Weinberg. “What”™s happened in the last 40 or 50 years, the developments that they did are kind of morphed into the landscape. They don”™t stand out as unique product anymore.
“They were the first to do everything. They were the first to build high-rise residential. They were the first to be home builders on a large scale. They were the first to build office parks.
“Marty was a business giant, period,” Halpern said. “He had a unique ability to be able to see the big picture. He was a great strategist.”
Halpern”™s father, the late Joel Halpern, was one of the county”™s four pioneers of office park development ”“ along with Berger, Weinberg and Platinum Mile developer Lowell Schulman ”“ honored last May with lifetime achievement awards by the Westchester Building Owners and Managers Association. The younger Halpern, who with his brother Jason accepted the award for their father, said the partnership with the Robert Martin Co. he inherited from his father “truly is one of the proudest accomplishments in my career.”
Attorney Alfred B. DelBello, who represents the Robert Martin Co. in its real estate projects and who also worked with Berger and Weinberg during his tenure as Westchester County executive, called theirs “an absolutely perfect partnership. They”™re the most interesting couple ”“ like night and day. They built a great business. They”™re just a great team and really made a major difference in Westchester County with the buildings that they”™ve built. They”™ve made an impact throughout Westchester County.”
DelBello, much like others in the business community here, described the physically imposing Berger as “a good businessman, but a very gentle human being. Marty was just the nicest guy you ever wanted to meet. He was like a big softie.”
In both physique and personality, “We were totally different,” said Weinberg, who began his partnership with Berger in the home-building business. As they moved into commercial development and urban renewal projects in White Plains and across Westchester, “He was the sales and marketing side” who worked with local officials to secure project approvals. “We were building at various times in as many as a third of the communities in Westchester County. That was his job. Mine was getting it done. We had a natural fit.”
Robert Martin Co. went public in 1997 when the partners sold 6.5 million square feet of office and industrial space and their building management operations to Mack-Cali Realty Corp., the New Jersey-based real estate investment trust, in a reported $440-million deal. The partners, though, retained their vacant properties to develop as hotel, retail, residential and commercial space.
Ever the adaptive pioneers in a changing market, Berger and Weinberg, with the younger Halpern as an investment partner, at the time of his death were at work on a $20-million retail project that will put a Super Stop & Shop grocery store on undeveloped office-park space on Route 119 in Tarrytown.
For about 20 years, said Weinberg, Berger had spent more time focused on another long-time business of the partners, City and Suburban Federal Savings Bank in Yonkers, formerly Tremont Savings and Loan Association, in which the partners acquired a 50 percent interest more than 40 years ago. Berger served as the bank”™s board chairman and CEO until its sale in 2007 to Ridgewood Savings Bank.
For the partners, the bank “was a separate profit center and it too was successful,” said Weinberg. “That was a very big thing for Marty. He enjoyed it and I enjoyed watching him do it.”
Broker Carl Austin, president of Austin Corporate Properties Inc. in Rye Brook, called Berger a mentor and “a source of support and inspiration” in his real estate career in the county. “He was a man who was available to all who knew him. He was compassionate and practical at the same time. I think that distinguished him,” Austin said.
Austin said Berger also was distinguished by his civic involvement in Westchester “beyond the building community.” He was the force behind his company”™s sponsorship of an annual breakfast commemorating Martin Luther King on his birthday ”“ in frigid January. He also championed health care in the county as a longtime member of the White Plains Hospital Center board of directors.
“He was a great friend to our hospital and made important contributions in terms of his time, expertise and resources to assure that the hospital would be successful,” said White Plains Hospital Center President and CEO Jon B. Schandler. “Marty was a great friend and supporter. He used his enormous network of contacts to assure that the health care available to the community was at the highest levels.
“He was one of those rare individuals who really made an important difference to all of us,” Schandler added. “I will miss him a great deal.”
“Marty was a mentor, a friend and he”™s really been a rock in my life,”
Halpern said.
“It”™s a shocking loss,” said DelBello.
Those sentiments and that loss were felt by many in Westchester”™s business community.
