Debartolo, Edward John, Sr.

(b. 17 May 1919 in Youngstown, Ohio; d. 19 December 1994 in Youngstown, Ohio), pioneer in the shopping-mall industry and one of the most influential shapers of American retail development in the second half of the twentieth century.

DeBartolo’s father, Anthony Paonessa, an Italian immigrant, died the year DeBartolo was born. His widowed mother, the former Rose Villani, later married Michael DeBartolo, who had immigrated to the United States from Bari, Italy, at the age of twenty-three. His stepfather was a mason and general contractor and had a construction company in Youngstown, where DeBartolo worked from an early age. While in high school DeBartolo took his stepfather’s last name as a tribute. After graduating from South High School in 1927, DeBartolo drove a truck and worked at construction sites, but his mother insisted he go to college, so in 1928 he entered the University of Notre Dame. Even as a young man, DeBartolo displayed the work ethic that was to frame his life. His energy would not be confined to a normal college schedule, so while pursuing a major in civil engineering, DeBartolo worked at various Indiana construction sites during evenings and weekends. In the summers he returned home to Youngstown to write contracting bids for his stepfather’s company.

After DeBartolo graduated from Notre Dame in 1932 with a degree in civil engineering, he spent the next five years working for the family construction company. In 1937 he set out on his own, building a series of innovative single-family residences in the Youngstown area. In 1941 he enlisted in the U.S. Army, earning the rank of second lieutenant in the Army Corp of Engineers. DeBartolo married Marie Patricia Montani on 18 December 1943. They had two children, Edward J. DeBartolo, Jr., who later served as president and chief administration officer of the DeBartolo Corporation, and Marie D. (DeBartolo) York, who was executive vice president of personnel and public relations. Following a tour of duty in Korea during World War II, he went back to Youngstown and founded the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation in Boardman, Ohio, a suburb of Youngstown.

DeBartolo quickly recognized that the postwar population shift to the suburbs was a business opportunity. While William and Alfred Levitt and others were constructing subdivisions for the burgeoning suburban population, DeBartolo was busy building strip plazas and malls where they would go to shop. “Stay out in the country,” was his motto, “that’s the new downtown.”

In 1949 the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation built its first shopping strip in the Youngstown area, the Belmont Avenue Shopping Plaza. In 1950 the company constructed the Boardman Plaza, a retail strip center eight miles from the company’s main office. According to his brother-in-law Frank Mastriana, DeBartolo purchased the property at a sheriff’s sale: “he… bought that corner for $75,000, and he didn’t have a dime. Then he went to the banks and said, ’Lend me money, I just bought that corner.’ I guess they admired his guts.” Over the next twenty-five years banks became enamored with DeBartolo’s drive and ingenuity, financing the construction of numerous retail centers, including the construction of what was then the world’s largest mall at Richmond Park, near Cleveland in 1976.

In 1997, having already acquired the Thistledown racetrack in Cleveland (1959), the DeBartolo family purchased the San Francisco 49ers football team. The DeBartolos were among the nation’s largest single investors in professional sports teams and businesses. Eventually their holdings included hockey and soccer teams as well as two more racetracks, Louisiana Downs in Bossier City, Louisiana, and Remington Park in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The profitability of sports businesses made them attractive investments, but the political side of these enterprises, particularly the racetracks, involved DeBartolo in some controversial business practices. In Oklahoma City, for instance, the DeBartolo Corporation consented to build a racetrack only after the state legislature passed a law effectively prohibiting the construction of new tracks, insulating DeBartolo’s Remington Park from competition.

In the late 1980s the real-estate market in the United States declined and so did the value of the DeBartolo Corporation. Banks became increasingly reluctant to lend money for big construction projects, and DeBartolo had to rely more and more on self-financing. This led to cash flow problems that forced the company to sell assets to raise cash, including the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team. An illadvised loan to Robert Campeau in 1989 for the doomed takeover of the Federated Department Stores chain saddled the DeBartolo Corporation with a mountain of debt that forced the company to go public in 1994 as the only way to survive. The once-mighty family that had owned and operated businesses became just another real-estate investment trust listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The downturn in real estate deflated DeBartolo’s net worth, but not his generosity. In 1989 he donated $33 million to the University of Notre Dame, the largest gift ever made to that institution at the time. The money was used to build the DeBartolo Quadrangle, a complex of buildings dedicated in 1992. DeBartolo also helped to establish the National Italian Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago and was often honored for his achievements and generosity. In 1984 Youngstown State University presented him with an honorary doctorate and designated the College of Arts and Sciences Building “DeBartolo Hall.”

A man of irrepressible energy, DeBartolo for years worked fifteen hours a day on weekdays, ten to twelve hours on Saturdays, and seven hours on Sundays. The shy dynamo could function with only four hours of sleep and would often be at his desk at 5 A.M. when he wasn’t visiting a construction site or closing a deal. “I love the action,” he said in 1973, when his company was in various stages of thirty-five different projects, “It stopped being work a long time ago.” By 1983 when Forbes magazine published its first list of richest Americans, the man who loved his work was listed as the forty-third richest man in the nation and the first richest in Ohio.

Despite his enormous wealth and the high-profile stake his family had in the world of professional sports, DeBartolo was a shy, complex, and intensely private person who shunned the limelight. His lifestyle was truly modest and unassuming. He could have lived anywhere and been one of the most famous, if not the most flamboyant, business professionals of his era. Instead he chose to spend most of his working life in his hometown, close to his family, living in a modest twelve-room ranch-style home. DeBartolo died at home of complications from pneumonia at the age of eighty-five. He is buried in Youngstown.

At its peak, DeBartolo’s retail development empire owned or operated nearly one-tenth of all the shopping mall space in America and was one of the world’s largest developers of shopping malls, orchestrating the opening of more than 200 centers in twenty states. In October 1994 just weeks before DeBartolo’s death, Forbes magazine listed him as the ninety-fifth richest American, with a personal fortune of around $850 million.

However, there was a downside to DeBartolo’s otherwise stellar career in real estate. DeBartolo was, inadvertently to be sure, one of the architects of the “mailing of America” and in his own way a major contributor to suburban sprawl. This was painfully evident in his own hometown, where the success of the DeBartolo Corporation’s Boardman Plaza, coupled with the demise of the steel industry in the late 1970s, reduced the once-thriving central business district of Youngstown into a virtual ghost town.

Jonathan R. Laing, “King of Malls,” Barrens (12 June 1989), gives a critical perspective on DeBartolo. S. Lubove, “The Disney Touch,” Forbes (16 Apr. 1990), is the story of how DeBartolo built and operated Remington Park racetrack in Oklahoma City. Steve Phillips, “Veil Lifted on DeBartolo Real Estate, Mall Empire,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (23 Nov. 1993), describes the magnitude of DeBartolo’s holdings and why his company had to go public. For a profile of DeBartolo when his company was near its peak constructing malls, see Isadore Barmash, “No. 1 Builder of Shopping Malls: A Shy Dynamo,” the New York Times (29 Apr. 1993). A brief obituary is in the New York Times (20 Dec. 1994), and a far more detailed and insightful obituary is in the Youngstown Vindicator (19 Dec. 1994).

James Cicarelli