Matthew Bucksbaum Dies in Chicago

Matthew Bucksbaum, part of a pioneering shopping mall family, died over the weekend in Chicago. He was 87.

In 1954, three Bucksbaum brothers – Matthew, Maurice and Martin, then in the family grocery business – took over the development of a mall under development in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That was the seed from which General Growth Properties grew into a multi-billion-dollar business at its height.

By the mid-1990s, after his two brothers had died, Matthew led the company as ceo until 1999, and as chairman until 2006 after passing the day-to-day operating reins to his son, John.

In those years, after General Growth bought competitor Rouse Co. for $12.6 billion in 2004, its holdings numbered more than 200 malls encompassing more than 200 million square feet of space. The family ranked 105th on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans in 2007 with a net worth of $3.3 billion.

“People did not want to go downtown and fight traffic and parking ramps,” Bucksbaum told the New York Times in 1995. “We sometimes had some misgivings — you felt sorry for the downtown merchants and downtown landlords. But they had had their way for many years, and many of them didn’t reinvest in their properties. They just didn’t keep up with the times.”