Billionaire Leonard Lauder Says He Will Never Leave New York

By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh & Fern Sidman

For some, the Big Apple may have lost some of its allure. Many residents have been heading for the hills with Broadway, museums, and so many of the events that branded it as ‘the City that Never Sleeps’ shuttered, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Some New Yorkers, however, will remain forever faithful.

Cosmetics mogul, billionaire and philanthropist Leonard Lauder, says he will always remain loyal to New York City. The 87-year-old chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies, the multibillion-dollar cosmetics corporation started by his parents, Joseph and Estée Lauder, can’t fathom why anyone would ever want to live anywhere else.

Mr. Lauder, who has an estimated net worth of $21 billion, recently gave an interview to the NY Times, to discuss how he will always be a New Yorker and never give up on his city. “You have to remember that the people who are still here — and there’s millions of people still here — these people truly love New York,” he said. Though the city is expensive, it remains invaluable and an “explorer’s delight”, with exceptional museums, city streets and parks and even the public schools, he said.

“I love the New York City public school system,” said Mr. Lauder, who attended P.S. 87 and Bronx Science.

Lauder has released a much anticipated new memoir entitled, “The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty”. In his book, which is now a # 1 New Release on Amazon, he shares his business and life lessons. He tells how as a child he would visit NYC’s museums after school, as he waited for his parents to finish work. “I’ve learned so much from those museums. They babysat me, but they also taught me”, he said, in his interview with the NY Times.

When speaking of restaurants that he loved from his earlier years that have since been closed down, he told the Times, “New York can reinvent itself if it makes it easier for people to launch restaurants again. That’s New York’s motto: reinvention.”

Mr. Lauder’s heartfelt support and love for NYC has also been sealed by contributions in which he hopes to pay it forward. He has endowed $131 million to the Whitney Museum. He has also promised in 2013 to donate his art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including his $1.1 billion Cubism collection of 85 works by masters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

According to Wikipedia, Lauder’s art comes from some of the world’s most celebrated collections, including those of Gertrude Stein, the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, and the British art historian Douglas Cooper. He began by buying Art Deco postcards when he was six.

Wikipedia also reported that in autumn, 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opened an exhibition of 700 of Lauder’s postcards, a tiny part of the promised gift he has made to the museum of 120,000 postcards: The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection. In an interview in The New Yorker, Lauder explained how postcards turned him into a collector, and how these “mini-masterpieces” remained his lifelong pursuit to the point where his late wife, Evelyn, called the collection his “mistress.” He donated his collection of Oilette postcards, published by Raphael Tuck & Sons, to Chicago’s Newberry Library, and funded their digitization; the Newberry launched the 26,000-item Tuck digital collection in 2019.

Lauder’s interest in postcards led him to be acquainted with one of the owners of the Gotham Book Mart, a Manhattan bookstore, and he sought to help the Gotham re-establish its presence in the city when the owner had sold its long-time building and needed a new space, according to the Wikipedia web site. Lauder bought a building at 16 East 46th Street along with a partner, letting the building’s storefront space to the Gotham.

Later, the Gotham fell behind on rents, eventually resulting in Lauder and his partner to file for eviction, as was reported by Wikipedia. In a much-publicized closure of the bookstore, the New York City Marshal later auctioned the store’s inventory, which was bought in a lot by Lauder and his partner to some protest from many other independent book sellers and collectors who were present at the proceedings and hoping to purchase some of the bibliophilic treasures.