Peter just turned 75. He was born in 1931in Berlin, but left for Belgium with his family to escape an increasingly hostile Third Reich. When he was nine, he encountered the same regime, as Hitler’s Blitz Krieg in 1939 drove his family out of Brussels into France. His parents ultimately perished in Auschwitz, after being caught in the Pyrenees, trying to escape Vichy France in 1942.

Peter eluded the Huns and led a clandestine life as the purported scion of an old noble family living in its ancestral Chateau which served both as home and as an important center of French Resistance activities…while at the same time having been commandeered by the SS to serve as their regimental headquarters. This awkward living arrangement lasted until the end of WWII, when he found family in the US and was able to immigrate there in 1947.

In 1953, he graduated from City College of New York with a degree in Architecture and, after a happy two years in the US army and the completion of an MBA curriculum at Xavier University in Cincinnati, he was launched in a 17 year public service career during which he was credited, for better of worse, for the transformation of Cincinnati’s Central Business District and some of its neighborhoods.

He was then lured to New York in 1972, where he joined the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) to manage its commercial development operations. After the UDC’s Gotterdammerung in 1975, he returned to Cincinnati to continue his real estate development activities, but totally within the private sector, first with the John W. Galbreath Company and ultimately on behalf of his own Company.

In the process of all this experience, Peter Kory’s projects have been used as case studies by the Urban Land Institute, HUD and in a number of professional real estate development publications. He wrote articles published by the Journal of Housing and ULI. Many of his projects have earned national and local awards from the American Institute of Architects, HUD and civic organizations, including notably two National AIA Citations for Excellence in 1974. In 1975 he was granted Honorary Membership in the American Institute of Architects in consideration for his contributions to the profession.

Kory served as a consultant for such diverse clients as the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation in New York City, Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn NY, the “Nine Square Historic Limited Partnership” in New Haven Connecticut, Montgomery Ward, the Marriott Corporation and many others. His assignments have included management of real estate development projects for a fee, project feasibility studies, economic and financial workouts for troubled projects and strategic planning studies for such areas as Times Square, Downtown Buffalo and New Haven.

Kory was an Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati, and has guest lectured at the Miami University Graduate School in Ohio, Pratt Institute, and CUNY Graduate School in New York City.  He has been a Trustee of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and the Henry Bettman Foundation. He was Chairman of a National Transportation Research Board committee on Joint Transportation and Land Development. Kory served as an executive group member of the Urban Land Institute for over twelve years, participating in numerous Panel Assignments and advisory groups.

Peter married his first wife, Marianne Green, in ’55 and they have a son, Erich and a daughter Lisa who brings 4 grandchildren to the family. His second wife, Ruth Batchelor, died in 1992 and he married Joyce, his next door neighbor the very next year.

Joyce and Peter are now both happily retired and devote much of their energies to the good life.