From Banking to Boatswain, He Loved and Lived (and Helped Make) Local History
Lower Manhattan has lost a patron and patriarch. Jay Hellstrom, a banker who morphed into a civic champion, died after a brief but intense battle with acute myeloid leukemia, on January 26.
After a career on Wall Street during which he commuted from New Jersey, Mr. Hellstrom took early retirement so he could stop working here and start living here. Settling in the historic Captain Joseph Rose House on Water Street (which dates from the 1780s, and is believed to be the third oldest building in Manhattan), he embraced a broad range of local causes, working on the election campaigns of City Council member Christopher Marte, and serving as the treasurer for the Seaport Coalition, which seeks to protect the neighborhood from overdevelopment. His decades-long track record as a philanthropist also found local focus in supporting Lower Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra. In the photograph above, he is attending a rally protesting overdevelopment in the South Street Seaport District.
Although a fixture at Downtown protests and rallies in recent years, Mr. Hellstrom was no novice when it came to civic engagement: In the early 1970s, he cultivated a contrarian streak by slipping out of his Wall Street office to attend Lower Manhattan protests against the Vietnam War, in an era when corporate executives simply did not do such things.
His adopted home, the Seaport, was the perfect bridge between his prior career in the financial sector and the maritime history he both loved and lived, crossing the Atlantic and cruising the Mediterranean several times on his 54-foot sailboat with his beloved wife Linda. There was also a personal nexus: Decades earlier, as a junior banker, he was often tasked with overnight proofreading of financial reports from Bowne & Co.—known to Downtowners as the 19th-century-style print shop on Water Street that is part of the South Street Seaport Museum—back when the parent company was the oldest publicly traded company in America.
But for Mr. Hellstrom, the real virtue of living on Water Street was that it put him steps away from the Peck Slip School, where his grandchildren studied. His daughter, Seaport resident Emily Hellstrom recalls, “my father was remarkable, not because of what he did in life or how much money he made, or even his great adventures, like sailing. It was his simple and profound faith in humanity. His belief that people were worth knowing because that was the miracle of being alive.”
Mr. Hellstrom is survived by his wife Linda; his daughters Emily and Erika; his sons-in-law John Marino and Jude Allan; and six grandchildren: Lyall, Jasper, and Harriett Marino; and Jonah, Cassius, and Lennox Allan.