William Zeckendorf

American real estate developer who assembled the largest real estate deals of the post-war era — developing the United Nations headquarters site, Place Ville Marie in Montreal, and Century City in Los Angeles — before his empire collapsed in bankruptcy.

Pioneered the assemblage of large urban real estate parcels for transformative development — creating mixed-use urban complexes decades before the concept became standard — and executed deals of a scale and complexity that defined what real estate development could be.