Samuel "Sandy" Harvey Lindenbaum

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/nyregion/samuel-h-lindenbaum-lawy...

Samuel H. Lindenbaum, ‘Dean’ of New York Zoning Lawyers, Dies at 77

John Sotomayor/The New York Times Samuel H. Lindenbaum cultivated a scholar's knowledge of the Zoning Resolution, the arcane document that governs development in New York By DAVID W. DUNLAP Published: August 21, 2012

Samuel H. Lindenbaum, who was widely considered New York City’s top zoning lawyer and who was credited with doing as much as any of the powerful developers among his clients to shape the modern skyline of Manhattan, died on Friday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 77.

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times Samuel H. Lindenbaum, amid the city he helped shape with legal interpretations, in 1999. The cause was esophageal cancer, his daughter Erica Tishman confirmed.

Mr. Lindenbaum did not become the unofficial dean of the land-use bar in New York City through connections alone, though he was well connected. Nor did he engineer back-room deals that depended on skid-greasing, though he knew the world of fixers. “His edge was his brilliance and creativity in statutory interpretation,” said Michael T. Sillerman, a colleague of more than 30 years at Rosenman & Colin and at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, where Mr. Lindenbaum had served as counsel since 2002.

Mr. Lindenbaum cultivated a scholar’s knowledge of the Zoning Resolution, the arcane document that governs development in New York. As a result, he was able to bend the resolution to his clients’ will without breaking it. And because his clients were major builders and landowners — among them Harry B. Helmsley, Harry Macklowe, Larry A. Silverstein, Jerry I. Speyer, Leonard Litwin, Steven Roth and Donald J. Trump; the Fishers and Tisches and Rudins and Roses; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art — Mr. Lindenbaum’s imprint was enormous.

His interpretations sometimes seemed to contradict the plain meaning of the resolution. For instance, in 1992 he and his colleagues convinced the City Planning Commission that the public would actually gain by losing public space at the former AT&T headquarters on Madison Avenue, which was being renovated as Sony Plaza.

They argued successfully that the loss of 10,000 square feet of open-air space would be more than offset by the addition of 4,000 square feet of climate-controlled pedestrian space. “He could create something out of nothing,” Mr. Speyer said on Monday during Mr. Lindenbaum’s funeral, at Central Synagogue in Midtown.

Not everyone welcomed such creations; certainly not the neighbors of Trump World Tower at First Avenue and East 47th Street, which was built in 2000 as the tallest residential building in the world. They battled the project until the Court of Appeals upheld the city’s approval process and, by extension, the intricate assemblage of development rights that Mr. Lindenbaum had helped to craft.

Samuel Harvey Lindenbaum was born in Brooklyn on March 29, 1935, to Abraham M. and Belle Lindenbaum. He was sandy-haired as a boy, when he earned the nickname that would stick with him for a lifetime. (“It’s common throughout the real estate industry for people simply to say, ‘Ask Sandy,’ ” Mr. Speyer said. “No last name was necessary.”) He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1952 and from Harvard College in 1956.

The next year he married Linda M. Lewis, whom he had met when they were teenagers at Camp With-a-Wind in Pennsylvania. She survives him, as do their daughters, Ms. Tishman and Laurie Lindenbaum, and six grandchildren. He also had a home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Mr. Lindenbaum earned his law degree from Harvard in 1959, after which he and his young family left for Oslo on a Fulbright fellowship. After returning to New York in 1960, he was soon tugged to his father’s side at Lindenbaum & Young on Court Street in Brooklyn. His father, known as Bunny, had a thriving real estate practice, representing Donald Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and the brothers Preston Robert Tisch and Laurence Tisch, who were then developing a half-dozen Loews hotels in New York.

“They came to see us and my father said, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ ” Mr. Lindenbaum recalled in an interview for The Real Deal magazine in 2009. “When they left, he turned to me and said, ‘Go take care of it.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, I have no idea what you guys were talking about!’ He said, ‘You’re not going to make a liar out of your father, go take care of it.’ ”

At the time, the Zoning Resolution was hot off the press, having been comprehensively revised in 1961. “Believe it or not,” Mr. Lindenbaum said, “I figured it out.”

What he figured out was that zoning rules said hotel garages were intended “primarily” for guests and employees — not “exclusively.” He persuaded the Buildings Department to accept that interpretation, which allowed the Tisch brothers to open moneymaking transient parking spaces to the general public.

In 1974, after 12 years with his father, Mr. Lindenbaum joined what was then Rosenman Colin Kaye Petschek Freund & Emil. He built up its land-use practice, serving as counsel to the firm beginning in 1983. His clients included The New York Times Company, which he represented before the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2001 regarding the exterior of The Times’s headquarters at the time, at 229 West 43rd Street.

Gary R. Tarnoff, a colleague at both Rosenman & Colin and Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, recalled being interviewed for a job by Mr. Lindenbaum in 1988. “He said that he expected phone calls returned within the hour, and that’s how he lived his life,” Mr. Tarnoff wrote in an e-mail. At the funeral, one eulogist after the next testified to the same habit: Mr. Lindenbaum did not allow the business day to end without having called back everyone who had telephoned him.

So it was in June that a reporter for The Times, looking for historical perspective on a city tax-exemption program and having no idea how gravely ill Mr. Lindenbaum was, left a message at his office. From East Hampton, Mr. Lindenbaum returned the call.

A version of this article appears in print on August 22, 2012, on page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Samuel H. Lindenbaum, 77, Zoning Lawyer.