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 then-new Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue, among other projects.

Willen’s work continued to evolve as he began to take on large-scale development plans through his position at Whittlesey, Conklin & Rossant beginning in the mid-1960s. His obsessive passion for transforming much of the city’s river-adjacent areas into tree-lined pedestrian parkways eventually formed what many people see as the basis of key future developments such as Battery Park City and the $109 million West Side Highway improvement project, which in turn provided precedents for similar schemes in Brooklyn and Long Island City.

Willen is survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Marie Madeleine Saphire, son Paul, daughter Marija, and four grandchildren. His personal friend Kent Barwick said he should be remembered for his “inventive itch.” Paul Wilen was 93 years old.