Jerry I. Speyer (born June 23, 1940) is an American real estate developer. He is one of two founding partners of the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer, which controls the Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building.
In 1964, Speyer married Lynn Tishman, whose great-grandfather Julius Tishman founded Tishman Realty and Construction, of which Tishman Speyer is a spinoff. In 1987, they divorced (Lynn later remarried to Harold R. Handler who is retired as a senior partner in the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett). They had three children:
In 1991, he married Katherine G. Farley whom he hired in 1984 to oversee international development. They have one daughter, Laura Speyer (born 1992). Farley graduated from Brown University in 1971 and with a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1976. She served as manager of new Business development for East Asia and the Pacific for Turner International Industries, before joining Tishman Speyer in 1984. She is a senior managing Director at the Tishman Speyer, responsible for the company's real estate activities in Latin America and for the company's expansion into other emerging markets, chairs the company’s Compensation Committee, and is a member of the Management, Investment, and Executive Committees. She is chairwoman of Lincoln Center's redevelopment and is on the executive committee of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief and resettlement organization; is chairman emerita of Women in Need, which helps homeless women and children in New York City; is a vice President of the Brearley School, and a member of the Board and Executive Committee of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Farley served on the boards of Lincoln Center Theater and the New York Philharmonic.
Speyer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Germaine M. and Ernest A. Speyer. According to a 1998 profile in The New York Times, "[Speyer's] mother is Swiss, and his Father comes from one of the old Jewish families of Frankfurt" (however, there is only very distant connection to the Speyer banking family, if any); his Father, a shoe manufacturer, fled Germany in 1939, established a Business in Milwaukee, before moving to New York when Jerry was three months old. Speyer grew up in a cultured German-Jewish household on Riverside Drive. He graduated from the private Horace Mann School. At Columbia University, he majored in German literature and joined Zeta Beta Tau, a Jewish fraternity. "Speyer was one of those people who were solid, and even solemn, at an age when others are still flailing and unsure of themselves." Speyer graduated from Columbia College in 1962 and received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1964.
