Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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50 S C T / A U G U S T 2 0 1 7 Former president expanded ICSC at home and abroad By Anna Robaton Remembering John Riordan N E W S M A K E R S E X E C U T I V E M OV E R S A N D S H A K E R S J ohn T. Riordan, who as president and CEO of ICSC for nearly two decades brought strength, stature and global reach to the association, died last month at his home in Cotuit, Mass. He was 80. Riordan, a charismatic former teacher and publishing executive, knew, by his own admission, almost nothing about commercial real estate before he got in- volved with ICSC in the early 1980s. He initially served as a consultant to the as- sociation, tasked with improving its mag- azine and also with making operational improvements to the organization. Riordan joined the ICSC staff in 1982, at a time when the association, founded some 25 years earlier, had about 10,000 members and was inter- national largely in name only. By the time he retired as president and CEO in 2001, ICSC had roughly 38,000 mem- bers worldwide and offices on several continents, as well as affiliations with shopping center councils outside the U.S. Upon stepping down as president and CEO, Riordan was named vice chairman. He served in that role until 2003, when he became a lifetime trustee. "The spirit of ICSC's founders was still very much alive when John man- aged the organization, but through his leadership ICSC became more and more professional," said Bertrand Courtois-Suffit, a past chairman of ICSC Europe and a managing partner of Brus- sels, Belgium–based Mall & Partners. Riordan was born in Newark, N.J., and graduated from Bellevue (N.J.) High School in 1955. He attended Montclair State Teachers College (later renamed Montclair State University) on a full scholarship. There he studied French and Spanish, graduating with high honors in 1959. He spent the early part of his career working as a teacher, first in the Princeton, N.J., public school system and later at the university level. Meanwhile, he earned a master's in French language and literature from Université Laval, in Québec City, Canada, in 1963. His move into publishing began in the mid-1960s, when The McGraw-Hill Book Co. recruited him to develop and market textbooks for foreign-language instruction. Riordan's publishing career also included stints at the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) and other international tests, and at Houghton Mifflin Co., an educational