Malcolm Chases Eisenberg

 Malcom C. Eisenberg, died at his home at 1942 Delancey Place, on Thursday morning, at the age of 87.  His accomplishments as a designer, a developer and a cheerleader for culture and the arts were very real – but his influence on countless creative and domestic lives was, truly, immeasurable.

      A designer, lawyer, and developer who left his mark on the city with countless interiors and two ahead-of-their-time developments, Bainbridge Commons at 4th & Bainbridge and Rivers Edge, on the Schuylkill banks, was above all a loving husband and father and a peerlessly engaged friend. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1956, a young man from Montgomery Alabama by way of the University of Chicago, driving his MG into town and determined to go into psychoanalysis and look at as much modern art as he could.  For the next sixty years, he was a Philadelphia fixture.  Not long after his arrival, he met, courted and married Ellen Speiser, and in 1960 they moved together into the house that her grandfather Maurice Speiser had renovated at 2005 Delancey Place, a masterpiece of modernist domestic architecture by George Howe, author of the PSFS building.  The house was one of Malcom’s special passions– not merely as an antiquarian project but because of his certainty that its elegant yet open spaces offered a model for living.  He raised both his and Ellen’s daughters, Erica Speiser Eisenberg and Martha Speiser Eisenberg in that house, and Martha and her family continue to live there, the fifith generation living there.
       His career as an interior designer, beginning in the early sixties, with the founding of his firm, Design Three, on Walnut Street, soon made him one of the leading design figures in Philadelphia and points well beyond, responsible for projects, earlier in his career, in institutions such as Muhlenberg College and Pennsylvania Hospital and later in restaurants such as DiLullo Centro, as well as countless private residences.    In the mid-sixties, he was one of the ambitious Philadelphians who struggled to bring repertory theater to the city as a key player in the founding of the Theater of The Living Arts on South Street (long before South Street was remotely fashionable.)  He and the company’s artistic director, the soon-to-be legendary avant-gardist Andre Gregory, became intimate friends and collaborators, and though the theater closed sooner than its admirers would have wanted, his friendship with Gregory persisted for the next sixty years.  The writer Adam Gopnik, then a child actor, was another friend who Malcolm made in the theater in those exciting years and never lost. Gopnik never failed to come back to Philadelphia, year after year, to give a talk at the university or a reading at the Free Library, but always with the principle motive of seeing Malcolm.
     After his divorce from Ellen Speiser, he met Sara Eissler Eisenberg in 1987, his constant companion for the next 30 years whom he married in 2008. In the mid-nineties, through his friendship with Gopnik when he was living in Paris working on the book that became “Paris To the Moon,” Eisenberg developed the practice of spending a month each summer in Paris.  In the years that followed, he brought one friend after another to share the French capitol and learn it as though it were a home -- becoming a permanent enchanted usher from Philadelphia to Paris. (He kept a Paris traffic sign, reading, “Jour et Nuit” on the front door of his garage.)  He loved the ocean, and spent a month every summer in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, often sailing there and around there. 
For all the charm of his nature and the effortless sophistication of his eye, what his friends and family will miss most is his constant, inclusive empathy. In addition to his wife Sara, his daughter, Erica & her husband Andrew Soloway, his daughter Martha & her husband Jeffrey Levine; he is survived by his sister Loraine Simons of Carefree, Arizona, and his 4grandchildren: Ethan & Dinah Soloway and Zachary and Rose Levine. A private celebration of Malcolm’s life is planned.  Donations in his name may be made to the Southern Poverty Law Center. https://donate.splcenter.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=463