Fred French Revisited--and not all of it complimentary....

Here we have memorial plaque for the French Building....French has his name on a lot of buildings around Grand Central, particularly some apartment buildings on Park Avenue...

This plaque was put in the sidewalk by the Kalikow corporation...a real estate business run by Peter Kalikow that was in the news a lot some years ago, often wrapped in bitter controversy about his attempts to evict tenants from rent controlled buildings etc.

I believe I have written about  Frederick French before...just a brief review: ( from Wikipedia)

He was born in Manhattan, New York City on October 14, 1883 and attended the Horace Mann School.^[1] He built Tudor City, a housing development on Manhattan's East Side, for the rising middle class in the 1920s.^[2] He also developed Knickerbocker Village, middleclass housing on the Lower East Side between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. His original intention for the project was to build housing for "junior Wall Street executives".^[3] His Fred F. French Building is a well-known skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Midtown.
French and his company served as the developer and landlord of Knickerbocker Village, important in the history of tenant rights. When the tenants were to take possession of their apartments, they found conditions to be unlivable.^[4] Facilities were either unfinished or poorly equipped, including non-working elevators and inoperable laundry rooms.^[5] The tenants formed the Knickerbocker Village Tenants Association and started a strike, withholding their rent checks until their grievances were dealt with. The conflict that arose from the tenants' dissatisfaction led to New York City's rent control laws. He died on August 30, 1936 in Pawling, New York of a heart attack.^[6][7]