George T. Delacorte, Jr.
George T. Delacorte Jr. CC 1913, like Alfred A. Knopf CC 1910 and Alfred Harcourt CC 1904 before him, founded a publishing company.
Over the course of his life Delacorte made numerous donations to Columbia. The most visible are the 116th Street Gates and the fountain in between Hamilton Hall and Hartley Hall. Delacorte also endowed two professorships and the George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at the J-School, which has honored with with a portrait in Journalism Hall.
Delacorte donated a number of fountains, statues and public spaces to New York City, including the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
He was known as a somewhat unorthodox philanthropist who didn't like positions on hospital or museum boards. When asked whether he had given any thought to using the $350,000 he spent on an ill-fated geyser in the East River to help the poor, he said, "People are poor because they're dumb or because they're lazy. If you feed them you just keep them in the same strata."
External links
- G. T. Delacorte, Philanthropist, 97, Dies NYTimes Obit, May 5, 1991
- Fountain Evokes Memories of Delacorte’s NY Impact, Columbia Spectator, December 10, 2007
