Marshall Rose, Who Helped Revive Two New York Institutions, Dies at 88

Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his stepdaughter, Chloe Malle, said.

As chairman of the library’s board of trustees from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rose, along with his predecessor, Andrew Heiskell, and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s longtime president, engineered the resurgence of the Beaux-Arts landmark on Fifth Avenue and the derelict greensward just to its west.

Mr. Rose returned as chairman in 1997 for another two years after Elizabeth F. Rohatyn resigned to join her husband, Felix G. Rohatyn, the newly appointed ambassador to France, in Paris.

Mr. Rose played pivotal roles in the creation of the Science, Industry and Business Library in the former B. Altman emporium on Madison Avenue (it closed in 2016, after two decades, and was folded into a more high-tech incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan Library) and in the decision to construct vital new stacks for books, instead of a disruptive parking garage, under Bryant Park.

During his tenure as chairman, the library effected the dazzling renovation of the Deborah, Jonathan F.P., Samuel Priest and Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room in the research library on Fifth Avenue. The project was financed with a gift in honor of their children from Frederick P. Rose, who oversaw the renovation, and his wife, Sandra Priest Rose, members of a venerable New York real estate family unrelated to Marshall Rose.