Ted Lerner, a titan of real estate development in the nation’s capital who led the group that brought professional baseball back to Washington after a three-decade absence, has died. He was 97.
(Bloomberg) — Ted Lerner, a titan of real estate development in the nation’s capital who led the group that brought professional baseball back to Washington after a three-decade absence, has died. He was 97.
He died on Sunday at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the Washington Post reported, citing Nationals spokeswoman Jennifer Mastin Giglio. The cause was complications from pneumonia.
As managing principal owner of the Washington Nationals, Lerner helped resurrect a franchise that, in its final years as the Montreal Expos, had bedeviled Major League Baseball with poor results on the field and in public support.
Lerner and his son, Mark, led the group that spent $450 million in 2006 to buy the Expos franchise from the temporary custody of the league’s other owners and turned it into the Washington Nationals. They oversaw construction of the $680 million Nationals Park in Washington, financed by taxpayers and opened in 2008.
With then-team president Stan Kasten, who had previously led the Atlanta Braves, the Lerners then endured woeful seasons while accumulating young talent, using prized lead-off draft picks on pitcher Stephen Strasburg in 2009 and outfielder Bryce Harper in 2010. Their efforts finally paid off in 2019 when the Nationals won the World Series.
Building Patiently
“The Lerners made it clear: ‘We’re not in a hurry,’” Jim Bowden, the team’s first general manager, was quoted as telling Sports Illustrated for a 2012 article. He summed up the family’s thinking: “We want to build this through, just like we build our buildings, from the bottom up. We don’t build the penthouse first.”
In April 2022, the Nationals announced “an exploratory process” to seek additional investors or a possible sale of the franchise.
Lerner had a net worth of $5.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His real estate company, Lerner Enterprises, based in Rockville, Maryland, has developed and managed more than 20 million square feet of commercial, retail, hospitality and residential real estate. Its best-known projects include Dulles Town Center and Tyson’s Corner Center malls in Virginia and the Washington Square office and retail building at Connecticut Avenue and K Street in downtown Washington.
Immigrant’s Son
Theodore Nathan Lerner was born on Oct. 15, 1925, in Washington. He was the first of three children of Mayer Lerner, a clothing salesman who had come to the US from Palestine, and his wife, Ethel Lerner, an immigrant from Lithuania, who raised their family in a mostly Jewish neighborhood in Northwest Washington, according to a 2007 profile in Washingtonian magazine.
A childhood joy was attending Washington Senators games at Griffith Stadium.
“In Washington in the 1930s, that’s all there was — baseball,” Lerner said, according to the Washingtonian article.
In 1937, “I was an usher at the All-Star Game when Dizzy Dean was hit on the foot by a line drive,” he said. “He was never the same after that.”
He edited the student newspaper at Roosevelt High School, from which he graduated in 1944. Drafted into the Army toward the end of World War II, he went through basic training at a base in Texas and then, rather than being shipped abroad, was kept there to work as a typist.
Selling Homes
He enrolled at George Washington University in Washington on the G.I. Bill, earning an associate degree in 1948 and a bachelor of law degree in 1950. Having sold houses to help pay his law-school tuition, Lerner decided to forgo law for a career in real estate, according to a 1981 Post profile.
His wife, the former Annette Morris, whom he married in 1951, provided some of the startup funds for closely held Lerner Enterprises when it opened in 1952. Lerner helped build the ring of suburbia that surrounds Washington in Virginia and Maryland.
“I just worked,” he recalled, according to the Washingtonian article. “I took off for Jewish holidays and a Redskin game or two. It was nothing to do 18-hour days.”
The interview was one of the few given by a man the Post, in a 2006 profile, called “a conspicuous stranger to the public and to the politicians accustomed to the attention of big developers.”
His first bid for a big-league baseball team was in 1979, when the Baltimore Orioles were for sale. He lost out to Edward Bennett Williams, head of Washington law firm Williams & Connolly.
Lerner was an active philanthropist with his wife, giving millions to build a sports complex at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a law school building and health center at George Washington University. The Lerners were also founding members of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In addition to their son Mark, the couple had two daughters, Debra Lerner Cohen and Marla Lerner Tanenbaum, whose husbands also entered the family company.
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