“He has injected tremendous young energy (only 34 when he was appointed as president) to reform the city’s planning department,” Judge Marrero said via email. “To do so, he recruited an impressive cadre of young planners and architects from outside the civil service, which meant making some very unhappy bureaucratic interests.”
A realist who believed in making a city more livable, Paul Goldberger, former architectural critic of the New York Times, said in an email: “Donald Elliott was a realist who used innovative legal tactics to try to balance the forces in New York. He changed New York’s entire approach to planning, playing a key role in nearly every innovation.”
Donald Harrison Elliott was born August 20, 1932 in Manhattan to Harrison Saket Elliott, Professor of Religious Education and Psychology at Federation Theological Seminary, and Grace (Lux) Elliot, National President of the Young Women’s Christian Association.
After graduating from New Lincoln School in Manhattan, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 from Carleton College in Minnesota and a law degree in 1957 from New York University.
In 1956, he married Barbara Ann Burton. She died in 1998. In addition to their son Drew, two other sons, Stephen and Douglas, and six grandchildren are survived.
Mr. Elliot, a reform Democrat, was responsible for urban renewal on the Upper West Side in the early 1960s. He served on John F.’s successful 1965 mayoral campaign. He then took charge of the transition from Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s administration and oversaw the poverty reduction and housing programs for the new mayor until his appointment to the Planning Committee and his appointment as director of the city’s planning department in November 1966. He served until 1973.
In this position, he created an urban design task force consisting of several architects – Jacqueline T. Robertson, Richard Weinstein, Miles Weintraub and Jonathan Barnett – who authorized Mr. Lindsay “to advance the cause of aesthetics in every area that a planning committee can influence, from street signs to skyscrapers clouds.”