NEWPORT BEACH – Some say he was a visionary. Some say he was a bulldog. Some say he was the most important person ever born in Orange County.
Henry T. Segerstrom – farmer, philanthropist and salesman extraordinaire – died at his home Friday after a brief illness. He was 91.
Born in 1923 into a county that was still a backwater to Los Angeles, Segerstrom turned his backyard into a cosmopolitan center of shopping, culture and the arts.
In 1967, he transformed his family’s lima bean farm into South Coast Plaza, now the highest grossing retail center in the U.S. with annual sales of $1.7 billion.
In the early ’80s he spearheaded the drive to build the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and if that wasn’t enough, he later donated $51 million to expand it.
The center, renamed for Segerstrom in 2013, was a game changer.
Local arts patrons no longer had to drive to Los Angeles. And Orange County was no longer a backwater. It was a world-class cultural center that attracted orchestras from Vienna and Berlin; musicals from Broadway; and ballet from Russia.
The bean-farmer-turned-Stanford-MBA had changed the face of Orange County.
“He had a twinkle in his eye and a special optimism,” said Larry Higby, a longtime friend and recent chairman of the Segerstrom Center board of directors. “He was one of the few true Renaissance men.”
“He was without doubt one of the most extraordinary human beings I’ve ever encountered,” added David Emmes, founding artistic director of South Coast Repertory, which built its headquarters on land donated by the Segerstrom family. “Henry was completely in a class by himself.”
Segerstrom was a man who was praised by governors, who dined with royalty; a modern-day titan whose father, Anton, was a tenant farmer and a janitor.
His family’s rags-to-riches story is quintessentially American.
Segerstrom’s story starts with his grandparents, Swedish immigrants who bounced from Chicago to Wisconsin to Minnesota before leasing a 20-acre orange grove in Orange in 1898. Soon they bought a 10-acre parcel with payments made in gold as the owner required. Then they bought 40 acres in what is now Costa Mesa.
“Our family’s history was to buy, buy, buy. We never sold anything for the first 50 years we were here in Orange County,” Segerstrom told Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History in 2003.
By the 1940s, his family was the largest independent U.S. grower of lima beans and eventually owned more than 2,000 acres in what is now Costa Mesa.
Still, young Henry had no full-time position in the business.
“I went to Stanford when I was 17 and didn’t come back until I was 25,” he once said.
In between, war broke out. Soon after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Segerstrom interrupted his studies to enlist with the U.S. Army. In 1944, while serving with the 103rd Infantry Division near the Rhine River in Germany, he was nearly killed by artillery fire that killed a wounded comrade he was carrying. Segerstrom lost a finger, underwent 20-plus surgeries and learned to sign his name left-handed.
After the war, he returned to Stanford, earning an MBA, and at 25 joined the family business. The blue-eyed optimist quickly made a difference. One of his early decisions was to lease out 11 warehouses the family had bought as government surplus.
It was a defining moment for the family of farmers. They had no experience in commercial real estate, but Segerstrom’s gamble earned them $100,000 a year, or 25 percent of their farming income. Later they built two office towers in Santa Ana, setting the table for a watershed moment when they would give up farming altogether – when the San Diego freeway (I-405) arrived.
After being approached by Sears and May Co., the Segerstroms built South Coast Plaza in 1967, four years after the death of Henry’s father, Anton Segerstrom. South Coast Plaza was Henry Segerstrom’s baby. He became a managing partner, along with his mother and cousin, of the family development company, C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, when South Coast Plaza was built. He gradually turned the center into one of the most luxurious shopping malls in the world, today attracting 24 million annual visitors from around the globe
In 1978, he successfully courted Nordstrom, persuading the luxury department store to open its first location outside the Pacific Northwest. It took him 10 years.
“In my mind, that was his biggest accomplishment for retailing in Orange County,” shopping center analyst Greg Stoffel once said. “He always understood high-end shopping,”
Landing Nordstrom helped Segerstrom attract other posh department stores, such as Saks Fifth Avenue and I. Magnin, which opened in 1979. Segerstrom also brought a European couturier to Orange County when Courreges opened in 1975, the first of many designer boutiques to come.
Segerstrom hand-selected designer boutiques and exclusive tenants from France and Italy the way a jeweler might pick precious gems for a crown. He traveled the world looking for new stores, courted potential tenants and decided when and where existing shops should be shuffled. Upscale names – like Chanel, Prada, Hermes, Versace, Tiffany & Co., Cartier – turned South Coast Plaza from a mall into an international shopping destination.
Segerstrom was also very hands-on. He walked the mall at least twice a week, quizzing store managers about business. Gordon Segal, the founder of Crate & Barrel, once called Segerstrom “the ultimate merchant.”
What really makes South Coast Plaza unique, however, it that it is still family-owned, a rarity in the industry, Stoffel said. This shielded the shopping center from a rotating cast of executives or the whims of a profit-hungry corporation.
Segerstrom was married three times. He told his wife, Elizabeth, whom he met and married weeks after the death of his second wife of 17 years, Renée, that he was a farmer when they met in 2000.
Renée and Henry Segerstrom were known as Orange County’s biggest supporters of the arts.
“He was warm, incredibly classy, he was a gentleman of the highest order,” said Terrence W. Dwyer, president of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. “But at the same time you knew you were dealing with a force of nature and a visionary.”
Segerstrom was the founding chairman of the performing arts center and the institution’s most generous donor.
In 2006, a new concert hall was added to the arts campus, built with the help of Segerstrom’s $40 million donation, which eventually grew to $51 million. It was named the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. In 2011, the entire Orange County Performing Arts Center was officially renamed the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in recognition of his historical support for the institution.
“He saw things and understood the importance of things long before others realized what they would mean,” said Carl St.Clair, music director of the Pacific Symphony.
From the beginning the arts center’s funding was entirely private, never government-funded.
“That’s because I knew that there wasn’t any public funding available,” Segerstrom joked in 2011. But there was a philosophical motivation to the private funding as well: community pride.
“If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it for yourselves,” he said.
His attitude toward the performing arts was much the same as that which drove the development of South Coast Plaza – he wanted to bring the best here. This, at times, put the area’s developing regional ensembles in direct competition with the world’s celebrated touring groups, but the competition challenged them as well. Segerstrom Concert Hall was envisioned, at least in part, as a home for the Pacific Symphony, which inaugurated the venue and has thrived there. Similarly, the Pacific Chorale, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and other local groups have benefited from the facility’s excellent acoustics.
He turned “from a visionary into a bulldog” to make sure his plans came to fruition, the Philharmonic Society’s former president, Dean Corey, once said of Segerstrom. “The cultural landscape of Orange County would be unrecognizable today without Henry and without his whole family.”
The Segerstrom family’s generosity was the main reason the performing arts complex became a reality. They donated the land and $6 million toward the construction of the 3,000-seat performing arts hall, which debuted in 1986, and also the land for South Coast Repertory’s Fourth Step Theater, which opened in 1978.
“The arts are important to humanity, and we’re all a part of that,” Segerstrom said in 2011. “It’s hard to define how art affects people, but for me, I find it inspirational and calming. You miss humanity’s evolution if you don’t understand and appreciate art, or try to understand.”
Since 1973, he and the Segerstrom family acquired and commissioned contemporary sculptures for South Coast Plaza and its adjacent properties.
They acquired outdoor and indoor installations of major works by artists including Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Henry Moore, Joan Miró, George Rickey and Tony Smith. In an effort to create an informal public sculpture park surrounded by office and hotel buildings, Segerstrom, on behalf of the Segerstrom family, commissioned Isamu Noguchi to create the sculpture garden “California Scenario,” completed in 1982, which is one of the artist’s most important works in the U.S. In 2006, he and Elizabeth Segerstrom commissioned Richard Serra to create the monumental “Connector,” Serra’s largest sculpture until that time, which is located in front of the concert hall.
One of Segerstrom’s dreams was to have the Orange County Museum of Art move from Newport Beach to Costa Mesa. The Segerstrom family and South Coast Plaza designated a 1.64-acre parcel adjacent to the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall for this purpose.
“The addition of the Orange County Museum of Art will create a unique arts complex, one of the largest and finest in America,” Segerstrom said in 2008. “The museum’s opening will mark the milestone of a dream come true: the Segerstrom family’s long-held vision of Segerstrom Center for the Arts as an internationally recognized home for the visual and performing arts.”
Segerstrom did not live to see that dream come to fruition.
Among his other accomplishments, Segerstrom also was responsible for the first official visit of a reigning monarch to the county. In 1988, King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden, who had conferred knighthood on Segerstrom, attended a luncheon at Segerstrom’s invitation. Always a stickler for details, Segerstrom spent several hours fretting over place cards before the gathering – just like he fretted over the shops in South Coast Plaza and the acoustics at Segerstrom Center.
“I doubt we would have the richness of the arts and South Coast Plaza without him,” said longtime friend Higby. “He spanned the history of Orange County.”
Segerstrom is survived by his wife Elizabeth, his children Andrea, Toren and Anton, their spouses, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
