Today is the funeral of my former husband, Richard Ravitch. He died on Sunday only days before his 90th birthday.

He was a remarkable man in many ways, not only in his professional, political, and civic life but in his wide-ranging personal interests. Sam Roberts of the New York Times wrote a fulsome account of his life and accomplishments in this obituary.

His grandparents immigrated from Russia to New York City in the 1880s. They came with nothing and lived in tenements on the Lower East Side. His grandfather started a small foundry, making iron gratings, manhole covers, and other such things. Eventually, he entered the construction business and created HRH, which he later turned over to his son (Dick’s father) and son-in-law.

Dick was born in 1933. He attended the progressive Lincoln School and Fieldston School. He started college at Oberlin but transferred to Columbia College to take care of his mother when his father died at a young age. He then went to Yale Law School.

Dick’s parents revered FDR. They were liberal, progressive, and educated (his father went to Tufts, his mother to Hunter). Among their friends were artists, musicians, and writers. Dick learned to love classical music, opera, and Broadway musicals.

We met in 1959 when he was working on the staff of a Democratic congressman in Washington. We married a year later, two weeks after I graduated college. I was 21 and he was 26. We divorced in 1986. We had three sons, one of whom died of leukemia at the age of 2.

After we married, Dick joined his family’s construction company in partnership with his cousin Saul Horowitz Jr., known as JR. JR was interested in construction, Dick was interested in real estate development. As a lawyer, he mastered the federal programs that encouraged middle-income housing. That’s where he directed his energy.

While other developers built only luxury housing, Dick focused on middle-income housing. Whatever he did, he wanted to serve a social purpose. That was his FDR legacy. He wanted to make a difference. Among the buildings he developed are Waterside, on the East River in the 30s; Manhattan Plaza, moderate-cost housing for performing artists on 42nd Street; and Riverbend in Harlem. He built the first desegregated housing in Washington, D.C.

He enjoyed being a developer, but he yearned to have a life of public service. He became the guy that mayors and governors called upon whenever there was a crisis. Governor Hugh Carey asked him to run the Urban Development Corporation, which built low- and middle-income housing. At one point, Dick told me, Donald Trump came to see him about getting tax breaks for the renovation of a luxury hotel; Dick turned him down. Trump threatened to get him fired from his $1 a year job. Dick told him to do something that is anatomically impossible. He considered Trump to be an inconsequential playboy.

When the city was in the throes of a fiscal crisis in 1975, Dick was among a small number of people who helped to end it. I recall a night when Albert Shanker, president of the United Federation of Teachers, came to our home, and Dick spent hours convincing him to use the teachers’ pension funds to bail out the city. The unions saved the city. Dick was always close to labor leaders, including Shanker, Victor Gotbaum, and Lane Kirkland, head of the AFL-CIO. He always believed in the importance of organized labor.

Dick went on to lead the MTA, the state agency that oversees rail and bus transit for the entire metropolitan region. He was in his glory.

After our divorce, there was a period of estrangement but we eventually became good friends and enjoyed talking about our children, our grandchildren, and the world.

He was always very busy solving fiscal crises in different states and cities. When Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York, his Lieutenant Governor David Paterson succeeded him and asked Dick to be his Lieutenant Governor, from 2009-2010.

Dick taught a course in state and municipal finance at Yale Law School right up to last year. He was a philanthropist: he established a chair in pediatric hematology at Mount Sinai on Hospital, named for the son we lost. He served on the Mount Sinai board for more than forty years. He created a program to train journalists to cover fiscal matters at the City University of New York’s Journalism School. A list of the organizations where he was a board member or president would be longer than this post.

Dick was married in 2005 to Kathy Doyle, the CEO of a major auction house. This was a marriage made in heaven. Kathy is a wonderful woman who brought great joy to Dick. She has three beautiful daughters, who adored Dick. Her daughters married and among them had nine children, who were of course his grandchildren. Adding our four grandsons, Dick had 13 grandchildren. He was thrilled to have such a large, beautiful family. And it made me happy to see that he had found a wife who was just right for him.

I mentioned his personal interests. Dick was an accomplished woodworker. He taught himself at first, then took courses. He bought wood turning equipment and heavy duty saws. He loved turning bowls and eventually made beautiful pieces of furniture, reproductions of antiques that he had seen in books. Dick and Kathy’s home is filled with his elegant handmade furniture.

His other passion was gardening. There too he made himself a master, studying the right soil composition and tending to the earth in which he planted.

Dick died just two weeks shy of his 90th birthday. He lived a full and happy life. He was loved by his family, by hundreds of friends, and by uncounted admirers. He was a man of principle and integrity. He believed that political problems could be solved by reasonable people, working things out.

These days, when our politics is so polarized and when many political figures act so unreasonably, I know how Dick would respond. Organize. Build coalitions. Support the good guys. Do what’s right for the underdog. Ignore the extremists who make compromise impossible. Progress requires give and take. Never lose sight of the goal, which is the betterment of life for all people. He loved New York City, New York State, and America, and he wanted to make them better. He was a disciple of FDR to the end.

Rest in peace, dear Richard.

Diane

Our son Joe commissioned this portrait of his father. It hangs in the halls of Yale Law School, which both Joe and Dick attended.