When Leonard and Claire Tow were young New York City teachers, they loved the theater but couldn’t afford tickets over $20. If a play cost more, they lurked outside and slipped in at intermission to fill empty seats.
Mr. Tow eventually became wealthy in the cable television industry, all the while remaining devoted to the theater. Through a donation to Lincoln Center in 2012, two years before his wife died, he underwrote what became the Claire Tow Theater, a 131-seat black box space that supports new playwrights and cultivates new audiences. He endowed a fund to make sure that no ticket cost more than $20.
Mr. Tow, a veteran of the Wild West years in cable TV, who went on to make significant philanthropic contributions to higher education, hospitals, the arts and criminal justice reform in the New York City area, died on Sunday at his home in New Canaan, Conn., his family said. He was 97 and had continued to attend the theater several times a week.
Besides the Lincoln Center theater, Mr. Tow, once a member of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, funded a performing arts center at Brooklyn College (where he and his wife, both raised poor, had met); journalism programs at Columbia University and City University of New York; the Tow Center for Developmental Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan; and the Tow Youth Justice Institute in West Haven, Conn.
After an early career teaching economics at Hunter and Brooklyn colleges, Mr. Tow concluded that universities had “too many people fighting over anthills,” and he jumped to the private sector. In 1964, he landed a job at the TelePrompTer Corporation, a pioneer in the cable industry, where he was credited with expanding subscribers to 1 million from 50,000.
In 1973, he and his wife, who had been an elementary-school teacher, started their own cable business, Century Communications Corporation. It was launched from their dining room table on a line of credit. The timing was perfect: The federal government had just deregulated the industry, and homes with cable subscriptions began to grow exponentially.
New-Canaan-based Century became one of the country’s largest cable providers, with some 2,300 employees and 1.6 million subscribers.
In 1999, Mr. Tow, the chief executive, sold the company for $5.2 billion, in a mostly stock deal, to Adelphia Communications. He became Adelphia’s largest shareholder after the founders, the Rigas family of Pennsylvania.
Three years later, Adelphia filed for bankruptcy amid a corruption scandal that eventually sent John Rigas, the founder, and his son Timothy, the company’s former chief financial officer, to prison. Mr. Tow’s shares had declined by 70 percent.
He had also jumped into the telephone business, buying a stake in 1989 in Citizens Utilities Company of Stamford, Conn., a network of small phone companies that is now known as Frontier Communications.
The New York Times called Mr. Tow, who as Citizens’ chief executive grew the company, “an aggressive acquisitor and deal maker.” But when it was disclosed that he was paid $21.6 million in 1992, more than any other utility executive in the country, shareholders, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement Fund, sued. The lawsuits were eventually settled.
Mr. Tow retired from business in 2004 to focus on philanthropy through the Tow Foundation.
In 2012, he and his wife signed the Giving Pledge led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to have the world’s richest people promise to contribute at least 50 percent of their wealth to nonprofits. The Tows committed to give away nearly 100 percent of their assets.
The Tow Foundation reported $321 million in assets in 2024, a sum that will grow considerably with the addition of bequests from Mr. Tow following his death, according to his family.
Leonard Tow was born on May 30, 1928, in Brooklyn to Louis and Estelle (Weiss) Tow, Jewish immigrants from Russia whose family name derived from the Hebrew word for “good.”
Leonard and a brother grew up in a one-room apartment behind Tow’s Discount House, a store his parents owned in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. He received a B.A. in 1950 from Brooklyn College, where he met Claire Schneider, a member of the class of 1952. He belonged to the Longfellows Club, a group for male students over 6 feet in height, and she was in the Hi Hites, an equivalent group for tall female students. They married in 1952.
Mr. Tow earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in economic geography in 1960, both from Columbia University.
Survivors include his sons Andrew and Frank; a daughter, Emily; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
The Tows funded the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at City University of New York. The two journalism ventures aim to find ways for journalism to survive in the internet age and combat misinformation.
“I’m really worried about the print-journalism side of the business,” Mr. Tow told The Times in announcing the first grants of $8 million to the journalism programs in 2008. “There’s so much contraction of employment going on; every day you pick up the paper and this chain or that chain has laid off another 10 percent, and we’re watching advertising support slowly disintegrate.”
In 2016, the Tow Foundation donated $25 million to Barnard College to help build a new teaching center. Mr. Tow received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2019.
Criminal justice is also a focus of the foundation: It donated six-figure sums in 2023 to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing program, and the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
And as part of an overhaul of Damrosch Park on the Lincoln Center campus, which was announced in May, the Tow Foundation pledged $20 million toward an outdoor community stage. This year, the foundation underwrote the salaries of 14 resident playwrights at nonprofit theaters who received their first New York productions.
“My father was at the theater three weeks ago,” Emily Tow said. “He was interested in everything, it didn’t matter how avant-garde. Some weeks he’d see three or four plays, from a basement in the Lower East Side to the fanciest Broadway production.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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