By Lookout Staff
April 16 -- Wally Marks Jr., a philanthropist and human rights activist whose real estate firm helped turn the Third Street Promenade into a thriving international destination, died Monday after a bout with cancer. He was 78.
Marks -- who once said that "money is only a tool to do with it what you want and serve a purpose” – also served for 17 years on the board of the Santa Monica-based Liberty Hill Foundation, which funds community activism.
"He helped all sorts of people, but he always had the time to sit down and know you as a person," said former Mayor Michael Feinstein, who met Marks in the early 1990s.
"He gave away whatever he could because he always wanted to take his good fortune and help those who were less fortunate," Feinstein said. "He never wanted any praise."
A supporter of progressive causes and non-profit organizations, Marks helped keep the Midnight Special Bookstore on the Promenade for a decade by keeping the rent at next to nothing in the midst of a skyrocketing real estate market.
Marks envisioned the counterculture retail icon as an intellectual hub, a marketplace for ideas outside of the mainstream, according to Margie Ghiz, who owned Midnight Special.
Marks paid to expand and renovate the store -- which became a Santa Monica institution before shutting down five years ago -- because "it had to have a bigger mouth and a bigger face, to take on a bigger importance," he told Ghiz.
The vision, she said, spurred Marks and his family to underwrite the activist store's move to the fledgling Promenade in the early 1990s, where it survived one of the most expensive retail markets in Southern California and stiff competition from two major retail chains thanks to Marks’ generosity.
"Without him we never would have done this," Ghiz told The Lookout when the store left the Promenade in February 2003. "He said, 'Yes you can,' and we did."
The bookstore was forced to move the 2nd Street after members of Marks’ family-owned business said it was time for a change.
Marks took over Walter N. Marks Inc., the Beverly Hills real estate firm his father founded in 1956. The fiirm developed complexes all along Wilshire Boulevard, from Downtown LA to Santa Monica.
After his father helped transform Santa Monica’s Third Street into the Santa Monica Mall in the 1960s, Marks became a key figure in its next transformation into the Third Street Promenade in the 1980s.
Throughout his real estate career, Marks tried to give voice to the powerless and less privileged.
"He always felt that he never really deserved the good fortune that was bestowed upon him as a young man, and he developed a great sensitivity to the underdog," his wife Suzy told the Los Angeles Times.
Born in LA in 1930, Marks grew up in Beverly Hills. He earned a bachelor's degree and a law degree from Stanford University.
After spending two years in the Army, he practiced law for a year before joining the family business. His son, Walter Marks III, took over the company after he retired in 1996.
In addition to his son and wife, Marks is survived by three daughters, Laurie Wagner, Wendy Miller and Amanda Rondash; 10 grandchildren; and a sister, Marlene Louchheim.
Services will be at 10 a.m. Friday at Hillside Memorial Park, 6001 W. Centinela Avenue, Culver City.
