Robert Irwin Toll was born on Dec. 30, 1940, in Elkins Park, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. He was raised in a house built by his father, Albert, a Ukrainian immigrant whose brother, Herman, became a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania.
Albert was a real estate broker, a used-car salesman and an investor, but “he lost everything in the Depression and had to start all over,” Robert Toll wrote as a guest business columnist in The New York Times in 2005. His father later became a successful home builder and commercial property developer. His mother, Sylvia (Steinberg) Toll, was a homemaker.
Bob Toll received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Cornell University in 1963. In 1996, fulfilling his parents’ dream, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He loved law school, he said, but disliked practicing law.
One of his clients was his father, for whom he did some legal work on two lots that Albert Toll hoped to develop in Chester County, Pa. When Bob suggested developing the property on his own, his father balked. But his son conspired with Albert’s partner and Bruce Toll, who was just graduating from the University of Miami with a major in accounting, and his father relented.
In 2005, The Real Deal, a New York real estate magazine, asked Mr. Toll in an interview whether all of his homes at the time — including a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pa. — were McMansions. He replied: “No, not at all. The home in Bucks County has an eight-foot ceiling on the first floor. There’s no vaulted ceiling. It’s not a big home compared to many of the homes that we have built. I would guess that it’s under 5,000 square feet.”
Mr. Toll was a wide-ranging philanthropist. He was on the board of the Metropolitan Opera, and his company became the lead corporate sponsor of the Met’s International Radio Network after Chevron-Texaco stopped supporting live Saturday matinee radio broadcasts in 2005.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
