After the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany, Samuel transferred his bank accounts to London and converted his wealth into gold, financing the family’s escape.
The Reichmanns moved to Paris and then to Tangiers, where Samuel became a currency trader. His wife led the family in packing and forwarding food and other supplies to concentration camp inmates in Europe during World War II, through the Spanish Red Cross. The family’s home in Tangier became a haven for other refugees.
Albert was mostly homeschooled, his grandson said.
He married Egosah Feldman, a Romanian immigrant who taught at the school, in Israel in the mid-1950s. In 1959, the couple moved to Toronto. This year she passed away.
Mr. Reichmann is survived by their four children, Philip and David Reichmann, Bernice Koenig, and Libby Gross; many grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and his youngest brother, Ralph, his only surviving sibling.
By the time Albert arrived in Toronto, two of these brothers, Edward and Louis, had founded Olympia Floor & Wall Tile in Montreal and his brother Ralph was in charge of the tile company’s branch in Toronto. His brother Paul ran a real estate development branch in Toronto.
With about $40,000 from his father, Albert York founded Factory Developments to build warehouses. In 1964, at the urging of their father, the brothers merged the companies into Olympia & York Industrial Development. A global real estate giant was born that would make the Reichmanns one of the world’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families.
Among the projects they built were Exchange Place in Boston, the Olympia Center in Chicago, and the 72-story First Canadian Place in Toronto, the tallest building in Canada when it opened in 1975.
