A developer presumed dead with his wife in a private plane crash near Jamaica had an “uncanny instinct” for revitalizing properties and an “incalculable” impact on Rochester’s resurgence from crumbling industrial center to trendy destination for young professionals, friends and colleagues said.
Laurence Glazer, 68, bought up dozens of properties in the city on the shores of Lake Ontario, including landmark buildings belonging to the manufacturing giants Xerox Corp. and Bausch + Lomb. He converted abandoned factories into loft apartments and turned a shuttered hospital into offices.
Glazer had a way of “taking properties that were dead and breathing life back into them at a time when people were really skeptical about the ability to do that,” Heidi Zimmer-Meyer, president of Rochester’s Downtown Development Corp., said Saturday. “Buildings that nobody thought would ever fill, he would manage to turn them around, to rehab them.”
Glazer and wife Jane were on a single-engine turboprop Socata TBM700 that flew on its own for 1,700 miles — the couple apparently incapacitated — before running out of fuel and slamming into the sea at least 14 miles off Jamaica’s northeast coastline on Friday.
U.S. fighter pilots launched to shadow the aircraft off the Atlantic coast after it failed to respond to radio contacts observed the pilot slumped over and its windows frosting over.
Laurence and Jane Glazer, the founder of household-products catalog company QCI Direct, were both experienced pilots. They were flying to Naples, Florida, near where Glazer’s development company, Buckingham Properties, also has interests.
“It’s beyond tragic here. We’re reeling,” Zimmer-Meyer said, calling the couple “people who just cannot be replaced.”
Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy, the former mayor of Rochester, echoed that sentiment and said the Glazers “possessed two of the brightest minds in business.”
“Their business acumen was only matched by their integrity, philanthropy and community spirit,” he said in a statement.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Sen. Charles Schumer were among other officials who publicly expressed sorrow for the couple’s loss.
Harold Samoff, the lawyer who recruited Glazer to real estate from working for his wife’s family’s printing company in 1970, said his friend was a “man of many, many, many skills” who had an interest in “practically everything.”
“Once he got involved, he knew it,” Samoff said.
Glazer and Samoff started with a small apartment building, around the start of the city’s long economic decline, and went on to acquire and revitalize more and bigger properties on the periphery of the city’s core, reasoning that “just like blight can spread, improvement can spread, also,” Samoff said.
“Larry was really the nuts-and-bolts guy — he could look at a building and understand its inner workings and see and understand how much it would cost to fix it up and what it could be done,” seeing potential even in a pigeon-infested former factory, said Samoff, who concentrated more on accounting and tenancy matters. He retired about a decade ago.
These days, downtown Rochester is undergoing a renewal, with a number of developments under way.
“His contribution is actually incalculable because a lot of other people didn’t step up” to refurbish buildings as early as he did, Samoff said.
The Glazers brought entrepreneurial acumen and a philanthropic spirit to the western New York city, Zimmer-Meyer said.
They also had green thumbs.
Particularly interested in bonsai, Laurence Glazer kept a greenhouse and helped Samoff determine what to plant when moving into a new house.
Glazer was also generous with advice to others just starting out, Zimmer-Meyer said. She said she received a call last week from a young real estate entrepreneur who mentioned that Glazer had helped her.
“The one good thing is that he’s left an unbelievable legacy,” Zimmer-Meyer said. “The difficult thing is that he’s gone.”