50.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Gloria Klar, home developer and artist
She and her husband, Henry, were instrumental in founding Temple Emanu-El
Gloria Klar, a former East Meadow resident, who, with her husband Henry formed an extremely successful team streamlining the transition for veterans moving to Long Island after World War II, and who later in life developed a love for sculpting, died on Dec. 17, in Florida, of respiratory failure. She was 94.
Henry, who died in 2003 at age 88, founded Henry A. Klar Realty, and worked with Gloria in the years after the war representing developers who were building homes for returning soldiers. “They worked very hard to make the process easy,” said Steven, the youngest of Henry and Gloria’s three sons. Steven said his parents often altered their routine to accommodate to prospective buyers’ work schedules, working on contracts on weekends and evenings.
By the time his father handed the business to Steven in 1975, Henry A. Klar Realty brokered more than 40,000 home sales. “That’s how Long Island and suburbia really got moving,” said Steven, who lives in Lattingtown. “Lucky for [Henry], he was in the right place at the right time.”
The duo believed in a personalized touch in turning a home from an idea to a reality, working directly with builders, architects, contractors, decorators and salesmen to facilitate the process for new home customers.
Gloria worked with the builders to design homes the way customers wanted, her son said. “She helped bring the female perspective to the way people design their kitchens,” said Steven. His parents, he said, designed and popularized the “splanch,” or split-ranch home, a slight departure from the common split-level home.
“They did all sorts of innovative things as a husband-wife team,” he said.
Born in Brooklyn as Gloria Freedman, Gloria and Henry married in 1940 and lived in East Meadow from 1952 to 1957, before moving to Roslyn for 20 years. They relocated to Florida in the late ’70s. but always maintained a New York connection, either in Long Island, upstate or in New York City.
Henry opened the company’s East Meadow building, on 2580 Hempstead Turnpike, in 1969. Steven took over as president in 1975, renaming it to the Klar Organization. Since then, it’s sold another 20,000 homes.
