The Toronto businessman who helped turn his family’s tile company into a multibillion dollar real estate empire is being remembered as an ambitious visionary.

Paul Reichmann, the man behind Olympia & York Developments, died Friday at the age of 83.

A spokeswoman for ReichmannHauer Capital Partners, a Toronto company run by his son-in-law Frank Hauer, and nephew, Phillip Reichmann, said Reichmann died shortly before noon.

She did not provide any other details, and said Reichmann’s family was not available to comment.

Reichmann and his brothers turned their tile company into the property development business behind some of the best known projects in the world before going bankrupt in the early 1990s.

Among the major financial complexes it built were Canary Wharf in London, the World Financial Center in New York City and First Canadian Place in Toronto.

“He was certainly a larger than life figure,” said Anthony Bianco, who wrote The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of Olympia & York.

Born in 193o, Paul Reichmann was the son of a Vienna egg exporter. His family fled the Nazis in the 1940s and ended up in the Moroccan port of Tangier for several years before arriving in Canada in 1956.

Devotedly Jewish, Reichmann was very formal, both in his dress and manner, Bianco said.

“He was always in a suit and tie.”

Faith was very important to Reichmann and the businessman donated millions of dollars to various Jewish organizations.

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The “tremendous” library in Reichmann’s Toronto home was filled with books, most of which were religious texts rather than the historic or political books that might grace another businessman’s shelf, Bianco said.

“He had really exquisite taste in material things for someone who was so spiritual.”

For years, Paul Reichmann and his brothers, Albert and Ralph, appeared in lists of the world’s Top 10 richest families. Their fortune was estimated as high as $12.8 billion (U.S.) in 1991.

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Reichmann made many shrewd business decisions, like buying eight Manhattan skyscrapers for $320 million (U.S.) during an economic slump where New York City flirted with bankruptcy. The value of the buildings soon tripled to more than $1 billion.

In the following years, Reichmann’s company built the World Financial Center in New York and acquired enough properties in Canada and the United States to rank as the world’s largest private landlord.

When the company took over the Canary Wharf project in London’s east end docklands in 1987, Reichmann believed London was on its way to a new era of prosperity under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

But Britain slumped and its commercial real estate market withered.

The $7-billion, 28.5-hectare Canary Wharf monopolized Reichmann’s time and money at a time when recession in North America was relentlessly shrinking property values and slashing rental revenues.

With his once-cordial relationship with bankers deteriorating by the minute, Reichmann tried to turn things around by hiring a respected New York banking executive to be president of his company. The banker soon quit amid rumours Reichmann was unwilling to hand over control.

Olympia & York filed for court protection from creditors in May 1992 with a debt of $8.6 billion. Canary Wharf was taken over by a liquidator shortly after.

Bianco said that, while Reichmann would talk about the collapse of his empire, he wouldn’t show emotion or express regret.

“I’m sure it was there. He just wasn’t the sort of person who would talk about his feelings rather than his thoughts to a reporter,” Bianco said.

“He was very clinical that way. He kept his feelings pretty well-hidden.”

Reichmann later returned as chairman of Canary Wharf, holding the position until 2004, when he resigned in a disagreement over its ownership.

There was some satisfaction in returning to the development, Bianco said, but it was bittersweet.

“There was no recreating the great empire that they built and lost,” he said.

Reichmann spent most of his final years in retirement, though he spent some time dabbling in business with a $4-billion fund called PR Capital.