Philip Klutznick; Ex-Commerce Secretary, Urban Planner and B’nai B’rith Leader

Philip M. Klutznick, former U.S. commerce secretary, real estate developer who pioneered planned cities, and former president of B’nai B’rith International who raised millions of dollars for Israel, has died. He was 92.

Klutznick, who also served as president of the World Jewish Congress, died Saturday in Chicago. He had Alzheimer’s disease.

The peripatetic urban developer, a Democrat, served the federal government under seven presidents, beginning as a commissioner of the Federal Public Housing Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt. He served Dwight D. Eisenhower as a delegate to the United Nations, and John F. Kennedy as ambassador to the U.N. Economic and Social Council. His highest rank was the Cabinet position as commerce secretary under Jimmy Carter.

But Klutznick was an international luminary completely aside from his governmental influence. Dedicated to Zionist and Jewish causes from his youth in a Yiddish-speaking home in Kansas City, Mo., he was an organizer for the Anti-Defamation League as a student at the University of Kansas and worked in B’nai B’rith throughout his life.

Joking that he had a B’nai B’rith membership card before he owned a razor, Klutznick became national president of its youth division and then from 1953 to 1959 was president of the international organization.

“B’nai B’rith International, and the world, have lost a man who provided leadership, vision and direction,� said the group’s president, Richard D. Heideman. “He had a most vibrant and distinguished career of service.�

Long after he assumed the title of honorary president of B’nai B’rith and president emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, Klutznick continued to cajole his vast contacts in government, the building industry and other areas into contributing millions of dollars in aid to Israel.

“He is considered by many to be the leading Jew in the United States,� a director of the Holocaust Memorial in Washington once said.

Early in his career, after earning a law degree at Creighton University Law School in Omaha, Klutznick supervised slum clearance and urban renewal in that city, first privately and then as assistant U.S. attorney general for public lands. He wrote Nebraska’s Housing Authority Act.

During World War II, he was put in charge of building temporary housing for defense workers, and hastily assembled self-contained towns that became prototypes for planned cities. One of his projects housed scientists and engineers developing the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tenn., causing Klutznick to remark years later: “I don’t know if the atomic bomb could have been built if it weren’t for the expandable trailer.�

Klutznick and his American Community Builders, and later his Urban Investment and Development Co., went on to build much of the face of Chicago constructed over the last half-century.

His most historic suburban achievement is Park Forest, Ill., the first postwar planned community, just south of Chicago. Its apartments and ranch-style houses clustered around shopping centers were created to house returning servicemen and their families.

Klutznick moved his own family to Park Forest, and his children attended its first schools and heard complaints of tenants against their father. Because returning veterans moved in virtually before the plaster was dry or grass was planted, there were initial problems. But developers everywhere learned from that pioneering planned city.

Klutznick’s urban monument is his more modern Water Tower Place, a high-rise shopping and residential complex in the heart of Chicago’s pricey north Michigan Avenue. He made his home in a 72nd story condominium there, which he told the Chicago Tribune in 1985 was like “living over the store.�

In recent years, Klutznick had developed complexes primarily within Chicago’s urban core, including Dearborn Park, 3,000 units of middle-income housing in the southern part of the city’s downtown Loop.

Klutznick sold Urban Investment and Development Co. to Aetna Life & Casualty Co. in 1970, which sold it to JMB Realty Corp. in 1984.

A widower, Klutznick is survived by his daughter, Bettylu Saltzman; four sons, Thomas, James, Robert and Samuel, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Burial was private. A memorial service will be planned for next month.

The family has asked that memorial contributions be made to the national Alzheimer’s Assn., the B’nai B’rith Foundation of the United States, or to the Philip M. Klutznick B’nai B’rith National Jewish Museum in Washington.