Richard Riordan, Former Mayor of Los Angeles, Dies at 92
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Richard Riordan, the two-term Los Angeles mayor who helped rebuild the city in the wake of the Rodney King riots in 1992 and the devastating Northridge earthquake two years later, has died. He was 92.
Riordan died Wednesday at his home in Brentwood, his daughter Patricia Riordan Torrey announced.
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A venture capitalist and moderate Republican, Riordan served as mayor from 1993 — succeeding the retiring Tom Bradley and winning his first election ever — until 2001, when term limits ended his run. He defeated legislator Tom Hayden, former husband of Jane Fonda, to be re-elected.
Riordan also was mayor during the 1994-95 O.J. Simpson criminal murder trial that riveted L.A. and the world.
“Mayor Richard Riordan loved Los Angeles and devoted so much of himself to bettering our city,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “He always had a place in his heart for the children of L.A. and worked to improve how the city served our youth and communities as a passionate member of the Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners.”
His legacy, she added, includes the downtown Central Library, “which he saved and rebuilt and which today carries his name.” (He once proposed to sell it and lease it back, however.)
Riordan also enlisted his friend, philanthropist Eli Broad, to raise money to get Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall project back on track, and it would open in 2003. And he owned restaurants around L.A., including the Original Pantry Café, which dates to 1924, and the Tavern, both downtown; and Gladstone’s in Malibu.
When he campaigned in 1997, Riordan claimed that the city was benefiting from a “Hollywood Renaissance,” pointing to an expansion of Universal Studios and the planned $250 million DreamWorks studio development in Playa Vista, which was announced in 1995 but never happened.
The Queens-born Riordan, the last of 10 children in his family, ran for California governor in 2002 but lost in a Republican primary contest. (Eventual winner Gray Davis, a Democrat, would be recalled less than a year into his second term.) He then served as secretary of education under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003-04.
Riordan expanded the police department to 10,000 officers after King was seen on videotape being beaten by police officers, which triggered outrage and widespread damage to the city. He then took a private-sector, incentive-laden approach to get the Santa Monica Freeway back in action after the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake on Jan. 17, 1994, killed nearly 60 people.
To promote childhood literacy, he created the Riordan Foundation, which has given away more than $50 million.
Survivors include his fourth wife, Elizabeth Gregory, former head of admissions at Harvard-Westlake School (they married in 2017); his daughters Patricia, Elizabeth and Kathleen Ann; grandchildren Luca, Jessica and Elizabeth; and sister Mary Elizabeth.
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