KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) – A developer presumed dead with his wife in a private plane crash near Jamaica had an “uncanny instinct” for revitalizing properties and an “incalculable” impact on his western New York hometown’s resurgence from crumbling industrial center to trendy destination for young professionals, friends and colleagues said.
Laurence Glazer, 68, bought up dozens of properties in Rochester, on the shores of Lake Ontario, including landmark buildings belonging to the manufacturing giants Xerox Corp. and Bausch + Lomb. He converted abandoned factories into loft apartments and turned a shuttered hospital into offices.
Glazer had a way of “taking properties that were dead and breathing life back into them at a time when people were really skeptical about the ability to do that,” Heidi Zimmer-Meyer, president of Rochester’s Downtown Development Corp., said Saturday.
The U.S. Coast Guard said Glazer and his wife Jane were on a single-engine turboprop Socata TBM700 that flew on its own for 1,700 miles before running out of fuel and slamming into the sea off Jamaica’s northeast coastline. The couple apparently was incapacitated.
Rescue crews said Saturday they could no longer see debris spotted Friday evening by a military aircraft drifting roughly 24 miles off the coastal town of Port Antonio in a stretch where the water is up to 6,500 feet. A 154-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter and a helicopter crew aided in the search Saturday.