Influential New York architect Paul Willen has passed away at 93

2022-02-22T09:00:00-05:00

A prominent figure in the history of urban planning in New York City has passed away as The New York Times is reporting the death of architect Paul Willen at his home in Vermont on February 2nd.

Willen was a staple in the city’s high-stakes world of Manhattan development schemes after his involvement in the Trump-branded plan that turned a portion of the West Side’s waterfront between 59th and 79th streets into a mixed-use site now known as Riverside South.

A native New Yorker who came from a strong lineage of civic-minded progressives, Willen was educated at the Fieldston School and Oberlin College before earning master’s degrees in history and Russian from Columbia University and working as a journalist for Radio Free Europe for a number of years. Willen eventually returned to the city of his birth to study architecture at the Pratt Institute. After graduating in 1962, Willen went on to secure a job in the office of Marcel Breuer, which afforded him the opportunity to work on the ...

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Influential New York architect Paul Willen has passed away at 93