Business

Hidden Tampa: The Best of an Often-Overlooked Florida City

Published

3 years ago

March 18, 2022

Hidden Tampa: The Best of an Often-Overlooked Florida City

I stay quarter-hour from Tampa, Fla., however I rarely visited the Gulf Coast metropolis once I moved to close by St. Petersburg in 2019. My pals in St. Pete dismissed the place as a sprawling, sun-baked assortment of strip malls, and the site visitors on the Gandy and Howard Frankland bridges connecting the 2 cities was an incentive to remain on “our” facet of the bay. Then the pandemic got here and with it extra time within the space and lots much less site visitors.

My preliminary forays to “their” facet of the bay have been aimed toward discovering issues my new hometown lacked, starting with tennis, Turkish meals and tamales. I found Racquet Heads, an exquisite little tennis store hidden beneath a freeway overpass. Then I turned hooked on the kebabs and lahmacun (Turkish pizza) at Istanbul Mediterranean Grill & Restaurant close to the Busch Gardens theme park, and the irresistible tamales at Lolis Mexican Cravings, a superb fast-food Mexican restaurant with 5 places in Tampa.

I wasn’t the one one testing Tampa. In 2020, Tom Brady got here to city, and it hasn’t simply been the realm’s wonderful sports activities groups which have been on a profitable streak of late. The flood of Northerners looking for sandals-and-shorts winters accelerated throughout the pandemic. Zillow, the true property web site, not too long ago forecast that Tampa would be the hottest housing market within the nation this 12 months, and Forbes named Tampa the primary rising tech metropolis within the nation final summer season. Town’s revitalized downtown will get one other enhance with the eco-friendly Water Road Tampa undertaking, which can carry 3,500 new downtown condos, together with retail and lodge developments, together with the soon-to-open EDITION, a putting luxurious lodge, steps from the Hillsborough River.

Lengthy overshadowed by Miami, Orlando and Key West, Tampa is rising as a cool place to stay. However is it actually a spot to spend your trip?

From a tourism perspective, this metropolis of 400,000, tucked right into a metro space of about three million, stays a little bit of a secret, regardless of its latest progress. Many guests nonetheless fly into the Tampa’s award-winning airport and head straight to the seashores in St. Petersburg and Clearwater. However as I’ve present in my latest travels, they might be lacking one thing.

The early days

William Drysdale was a peripatetic author who wrote greater than 50 “journey letters” from Florida within the late nineteenth century for The New York Instances. On his first journey to Tampa Bay in 1884, the 12 months the railroad magnate Henry Plant launched rail service to Tampa, Drysdale prolonged a one-night keep right into a fortnight. “After visiting practically all the nice and cozy international locations frequented by Individuals, Cuba, Mexico, Bermuda, Yucatan, Texas, Louisiana, and most of the smaller West India islands,” he wrote, “I just like the West Coast of Florida better of all.”

Florida Historic Quarterly credit Drysdale’s Florida dispatches with serving to “create a winter tourism bond between New York and the sunshine state which has remained firmly in place for greater than 100 years.”

Earlier than Plant opened the Tampa Bay Lodge — his lavish, “fireproof,” 511-room, Moorish-style palace — in 1891, Drysdale was given a preview and wrote a gushing dispatch, claiming “its domes and spires … its 150 acres of groves, its 2,000 electrical lights, its brick partitions and metal beams” made it, together with Henry Flagler’s Ponce de Leon lodge in St. Augustine, one in every of “two nice lodge wonders of the world.”

The Tampa Bay Lodge put town on the map, however it fell on onerous occasions inside a decade of Plant’s dying in 1899. In accordance with the ebook “Tampa’s Folks with a Goal,” the once-grand outdated dame turned “a crimson elephant that was at occasions occupied by vagrants who burned a few of (Plant’s costly) furnishings to remain heat.” It closed its doorways throughout the Nice Melancholy and is now a part of the College of Tampa.

The previous lodge stays Tampa’s most Instagrammable landmark, although many guests go away with out visiting the wonderful Henry B. Plant Museum inside, which provides a colourful account of the lodge’s early days. (In case you plan to go to different sights alongside town’s Riverwalk, just like the excellent Tampa Bay Historical past Heart, the Glazer Kids’s Museum, the Florida Aquarium or others, think about shopping for the brand new Riverwalk attraction cross.)

To get a special perspective on the lodge’s iconic domes and Tampa’s skyline, you possibly can lease an electrical boat from eBoats Tampa and take a spin on the Hillsborough River, making pit stops at watering holes like Rick’s on the River and gliding by the Davis Island mansion previously owned by Derek Jeter and rented by Tom Brady earlier than it bought final 12 months for $22.5 million.

I bought the electrical boat advice and lots of others from Steven Hoffstetter, a fifth-generation Floridian and a Tampa native. “We hate St. Pete they usually hate us,” he joked. “Severely, I desire Tampa.”

Mr. Hoffstetter careworn that guests should spend time on the water to grasp the tradition. He recommends taking a constitution tour through Tampa Bay Enjoyable Boat to boozy Beer Can Island (a.okay.a. Pine Key) which has a bar (“open when the climate is sweet, the water is calm and the hangover is manageable”), however no everlasting inhabitants.

To know Tampa’s watery geography, you need to be taught the legend of José Gaspar, a Spanish pirate who seemingly stole a ship in 1783 and sailed to the Gulf of Mexico, the place he and his crew raided with abandon till 1821, when their ship, the Gasparilla, was sunk by the usS. Enterprise. Gaspar, the legend goes, wrapped himself within the ship’s anchor chain and threw himself out to sea, proclaiming, “Gasparilla dies by his personal hand and never his enemy’s!” Gaspar was largely forgotten till 1904, when Louise Frances Dodge, a society editor on the Tampa Tribune, cooked up the thought for a pirate-themed parade primarily based on his legend.

In case you occur to be right here in late January, you possibly can social gathering with 1000’s of revelers, many wearing pirate garb, who end up for the Gasparilla parade alongside Bayshore Boulevard, which is changed into a “moist zone” the place open containers of alcohol are permitted. Lots of of pirates carry out a ceremonial invasion, by which the mayor fingers over the keys to town. However what many guests don’t notice is that the Gasparilla revelry continues after the preliminary invasion with a season price of actions, together with music and humanities festivals and the Sant’Yago Knight Parade. The debaucherous celebrations are only-in-Tampa spectacles price anchoring a visit round.

One other singular Tampa expertise is taking a ship to the Sunday morning Thai market at Wat Mongkolratanaram, a surprising Buddhist temple with boat docks on the Palm River. Come early to beat the crowds who flock to this fashionable marketplace for low cost, do-it-yourself Thai meals and delightful orchids and different flowers.

Cigars, baseball and barbecue

In a contemporary metropolis, the pure tendency is to seek for one thing outdated. One of the best place to expertise Outdated Tampa is Ybor Metropolis, a neighborhood that was as soon as well-known for producing high quality cigars. Its predominant drag, East seventh Avenue, is town’s pulsating nightlife hub. Guests hardly ever stray off seventh Avenue, however a number of treasures are hidden across the neighborhood. Begin with the Ybor Metropolis Museum, the place you’ll be taught the fascinating story of the neighborhood’s founder, Vincent Martinez Ybor, a Spanish businessman in Havana who ran afoul of Spanish authorities in 1868 for supporting Cuban independence.

Dealing with the prospect of dying by hanging, he escaped to Key West, which lacked satisfactory transportation hyperlinks for his cigar enterprise. He constructed Ybor Metropolis in 1886 as a deliberate industrial neighborhood at a time when Tampa had simply 2,735 residents. (The realm’s earliest inhabitants have been the Native American Calusa, and the phrase Tampa comes from the Calusa phrase “Tanpa” which meant sticks of fireside, a reference to the realm’s legendary lightning strikes.)

Tampa got here to be known as “Cigar Metropolis” as legions of Cuban, Spanish, Sicilian and Romanian Jewish immigrants streamed into Ybor to toil in its cigar factories. The trade drifted right into a gradual decline beginning within the Twenties, however you possibly can tour the J.C. Newman Cigar Firm, town’s final cigar manufacturing unit, and luxuriate in stogies at many neighborhood institutions.

Across the nook from the museum, the not too long ago opened Tampa Baseball Museum chronicles the area’s baseball historical past within the childhood house of Al López, Tampa’s first professional ballplayer. Tampa has been the spring coaching house to seven groups, courting again to 1913 when the Chicago Cubs educated there. In the meantime, the legendary Yankees groups of the Twenties, ’30s and ’50s educated in St. Pete and have been in Tampa since 1996. Groups have been lured to the area to advertise tourism, and spring coaching video games, which run this season till April 6, are nonetheless a giant draw.

A great spot for lunch is Al’s Finger Licking Good Bar-B-Que, the place you possibly can sit on the counter and inhale the smoky goodness of pulled pork and ribs, or dine exterior, the place you’ll hear the neighborhood’s clucking chickens, which have their very own fan membership, the Ybor Chickens Society. One other close by hidden treasure is Barriehaus Beer Firm, which has wonderful German and Czech-style lagers and a kid- and dog-friendly beer backyard. You probably have a candy tooth, cap your Ybor Metropolis tour off on the century-old La Segunda Central Bakery, which is legendary for its three-foot-long loaves of Cuban bread, Cuban sandwiches and irresistibly buttery treats, however has an off-the-beaten-track location simply north of Ybor Metropolis’s historic district.

The easiest way to navigate Tampa’s sprawl of less-heralded neighborhoods is to eat and drink your method round city. Inflation is a buzz kill, however fortunately the immigrants who run the West Tampa Sandwich Store and the Saigon Deli haven’t obtained the raise-your-prices memo. The sandwich store is a hangout for Cuban immigrants, and their $4.50 Cuban sandwich is a discount, as is the $4 grilled pork banh mi at Saigon Deli (3858 West Waters Avenue), a wondrous, but humble, Vietnamese eatery hidden away in a strip mall alongside a Vietnamese market and cultural heart.

Whereas we’re speaking 4 buck treats in Tampa, put timeless Bo’s Ice Cream (7101 North Florida Avenue), a Seminole Heights establishment run by 4 generations of the Bosanko household since 1954, in your dessert itinerary. Bo’s has wonderful custard, and their ($4) “small” scorching fudge sundae with whipped cream and nuts is huge and appropriately sinful.

The Seminole Heights, Tampa Heights and Hyde Park neighborhoods are foolish with worthwhile hidden locals’ joints you must strive. Name forward to get a password to enter Ciro’s Tampa, a fantastically appointed speakeasy-style cocktail bar in an outdated hotel-turned-condominium constructing. On a residential avenue in Tampa Heights, you’ll discover maybe town’s greatest pizza and wings at Lee’s Grocery, a pizzeria and bottle store with a dog-friendly patio. And close to the airport, the standard, eight-table One Household Korean restaurant is hidden between a Korean grocery store and a Korean cultural heart on the finish of a strip mall the place you may get superior bulgogi (skinny, marinated slices of beef or pork) and scrumptious Korean barbecued quick ribs as a reward for locating the place.

Inexperienced areas

Tampa can seem to be a sprawling mess while you’re driving round busy six-lane roads looking for hidden $4 sandwich outlets, so make time to decompress in inexperienced areas like Lettuce Lake Park, the place you possibly can lease a canoe or kayak ($25 for as much as 4 hours, no reservations), and Hillsborough River State Park ($6 entry per automotive), the place you possibly can hike in an Outdated Florida jungle on a straightforward 2.5-mile loop through the Baynard and River Rapids trails.

As I made one rewarding discovery after one other whereas cruising Tampa’s broad avenues, I concluded that town’s hidden charms are inconceivable to catalog in a scientific method. Make your individual tracks and canopy them properly. I desire to depart some close by terrain unexplored so I by no means really feel like there’s nothing left to find in my very own yard. However for 2 weeks, I commuted throughout the Bay, dwelling the lifetime of a Tampeño, all of the whereas feeling a bit like a spy, even perhaps a traitor. I discovered that Tampa isn’t the tasteless and forgettable metropolis I used to be advised it was, and I loved each minute of my subversive travels to the opposite facet.

Business

Wildfires Will Deepen Housing Shortage in Los Angeles

Published

4 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Wildfires Will Deepen Housing Shortage in Los Angeles

Each of the homes burned in the Los Angeles fires is its own individual calamity.

Collectively, the losses — whether in the hundreds or, as is far more likely, in the thousands — will weigh on the city’s already urgent housing shortage.

Fires are still raging, and with 180,000 people under evacuation orders as of Thursday morning, the degree of displacement in the city and its surrounding areas will take time to assess. For the time being, evacuees are holing up in public shelters in Los Angeles County, with friends or family members or in hotels.

But in the coming weeks and months, people whose homes are gone will have to find more stable accommodations while they rebuild. That will not be easy in a metro area that, as of 2022, already had a shortage of about 337,000 homes, according to data from Zillow. The number of homes on the market in Los Angeles was 26 percent below prepandemic norms as of December, according to Zillow.

“One of the biggest challenges ahead will be getting people who lost their homes into permanent, long-term housing,” Victor M. Gordo, the mayor of Pasadena, said on Wednesday. Pasadena, which is battling the Eaton fire, has already lost hundreds of homes.

The area’s tight rental market is likely to become further strained as many of the thousands of displaced residents turn to rental units, while figuring out their next move. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, as of Jan. 7, was more than $2,000, according to Zillow.

“You’re going to have a positive shock in demand, and a negative shock in supply, so this automatically means prices go up in the rental markets,” said Carles Vergara-Alert, a professor of finance at IESE Business School in Barcelona, who has studied the effects of wildfires on housing markets.

Any uptick in rental costs would affect tenants across the region, beyond those displaced by the fires, Dr. Vergara-Alert said.

Jonathan Zasloff, who lost his home in Pacific Palisades this week, teaches land use and urban policy at the University of California, Los Angeles law school, and is acutely aware of how his search for interim housing could affect the broader market.

Dr. Zasloff is staying with his brother for the time being, while a friend is putting up his wife and daughter. They evacuated their house, which they had lived in for almost 15 years, around noon on Tuesday, before the official evacuation order was issued for the area. That evening, Dr. Zasloff realized the severity of the crisis when he was watching television and saw a reporter standing on his fire-ravaged block.

His insurance agent told him it could take two to three years to rebuild his house. His family might try to find a rental in West Los Angeles near UCLA in the meantime, he said.

There aren’t many rentals in that part of the city, Dr. Zasloff said, so students and other renters could be displaced as he, and people like him who lost their homes, move in.

“It’s very possible that this event is going to cause a big increase in homelessness, even though the people who got pushed out of their homes are people of means,” he said.

California has been in the grip of an affordable housing crisis for a decade. Both state and local lawmakers have passed a raft of new laws that aim to make housing cheaper and more plentiful by making it easier to build. In Los Angeles, for instance, Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive order that streamlines permitting for projects in which 100 percent of the units are affordable. In response to state housing reforms, there has been a boom of backyard homes — called accessory dwelling units, or A.D.U.s — that homeowners often rent out for extra income and that have added to the housing stock.

Still, both the city and state remain well behind their housing production goals, and affordability has only continued to erode. The number of apartment units approved by the city of Los Angeles, for example, dipped to a 10-year low in 2024, according to data from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety compiled by Crosstown LA, a news site. That downturn in building permitting has raised concern about roadblocks to new housing unit creation.

“This is a place that had massive affordability challenges last week, and after this week it’s going to be that much more challenging,” said Dave Rand, a land-use lawyer at Rand Paster & Nelson in Los Angeles, who also serves on the board of directors of a statewide affordable housing organization.

After the fires are extinguished and the recovery begins, Mr. Rand said, there is hope that the common cause of rebuilding can be a catalyst for tackling affordability challenges by continuing to make it easier to build housing, particularly affordable rental housing, at a faster pace.

“This is such a devastating event that hopefully it rocks the system to the point where we can get real reform,” he said.

The Los Angeles City Council has aimed to build nearly half a million new units by 2029. But many people trying to rebuild all at once after the fires could lead to higher costs, and slow down the overall production of housing, said Jason Ward, a co-director of the center on housing and homelessness at the RAND Corporation.

A longstanding construction labor shortage in Los Angeles does not help. Andy Howard, a general contractor who has worked across the city for three decades, including in the areas affected by the fires, said many of the subcontractors he work with in the past have left California since the pandemic. And there are not enough young people entering the industry.

The fires are “going to make it worse,” Mr. Howard said. “It’s going to drive the cost up, for sure.”

Business

For Hollywood workers, L.A. fires are the latest setback as productions halt

Published

5 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

For Hollywood workers, L.A. fires are the latest setback as productions halt

As the market for documentaries and other content slowed and work dried up in Hollywood, producer Kourtney Gleason was already worried about making the mortgage payments on the home she bought last year with her boyfriend.

Now, as raging fires have halted film and TV production in Southern California and many in the industry have lost homes, she’s terrified that the entertainment business will be set back yet again. Though she’s been in the industry for 12 years, Gleason is now reluctantly looking at restaurant jobs to get by.

“The industry in the town is so fragile that every little thing becomes a bigger bump in the road,” she said. “Another bump that will push things back from getting ramped up.”

The destruction of the fires only compounds the difficult lot for many of Hollywood’s workers. Still reeling from the pandemic, they faced financial hardship during the dual Hollywood labor strikes in 2023, then were hit with a sustained slowdown in film and TV production that has driven many to rethink their careers in the industry.

“A lot of the below-the-line workers were already under an incredible amount of pressure,” said Kevin Klowden, executive director of the Milken finance institute. “For Hollywood workers, it becomes one more blow.”

The sheer scope of the region’s multiple fires means that nearly every echelon of Hollywood has been hard hit.

The Palisades fire, which has burned more than 17,200 acres and destroyed numerous homes, businesses and longtime landmarks in the Pacific Palisades area, is home to many Hollywood stars, studio executives and producers. Actors such as Billy Crystal and Cary Elwes lost homes in the blaze.

Across the region, the Eaton fire has now burned at least 10,600 acres in the Pasadena and Altadena areas and destroyed many structures. The San Gabriel Valley is home to many of the industry’s more modest or middle-class workers, who were already financially harmed by the production slowdown and relocation of shoots to other states or countries.

The fires could rank as one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. A preliminary estimate calculated by AccuWeather, the weather forecasting service, put the damage and total economic loss at $52 billion to $57 billion, which could rise if the fires continue to spread. J.P. Morgan on Thursday raised its expectations of economic losses to close to $50 billion.

Many affected homeowners reported the insurers had dropped their policies, as some of the biggest insurers have stopped writing or renewing policies in high-risk coastal and wildfire areas. The complications with fire insurance, combined with the region’s problems with housing affordability and supply, will only be exacerbated by these fires, Klowden said, leading some to reconsider whether they can stay in California.

“It adds up,” he said. “How many more people decide they can’t afford to stay?”

Hollywood workers had been holding onto hope that 2025 would be a better year for work, perhaps closer to the levels they saw before the pandemic.

But with yet another disaster, “it feels like it’s just another weight that’s been placed,” said Jacques Gravett, a film editor who has primarily worked in television on such shows as “Power Book IV: Force” on Starz and “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix.

Gravett was out of work for 13 months between the pandemic and the strikes, and said he’s concerned about how already struggling workers will be able to absorb the financial blow from the fires.

“At least when you’re working and something happens, you have resources to get you by, and a lot of people don’t have the resources now,” said Gravett, who is co-chair of the Motion Picture Editors Guild’s African-American steering committee. “Now we’re faced with another tragedy for those who’ve been displaced. What do you do?”

The effect of the fires on industry workers could give lawmakers a push to approve Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed increase to the state’s film and TV tax credit program, which aims to lure production back to California and increase jobs in the Golden State, Klowden said.

“Right now, the industry desperately is waiting on the incentives to be expanded,” he said.

In the near term, discussions about new projects are already hitting a wall. Gary Lennon, showrunner of various “Power” spinoffs, including “Force,” said an agent told him there will likely be a temporary pause before anyone wants to talk about new ideas.

“Buyers and meetings for pitches being sold will take a hit for a moment,” Lennon said. “People are focused on what is immediately happening in front of them.”

Even before the fires, he said he was already getting two to three calls a week from production designers, editors, costume designers and others looking for work.

But once the industry is ready to ramp back, he said he thinks it will move quickly.

“So much has happened recently, I think production will start right away again because people do need to work,” Lennon said. “And that’s a good thing.”

Business

Paul Oreffice, a Combative Chief of Dow Chemical, Dies at 97

Published

12 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Paul Oreffice, a Combative Chief of Dow Chemical, Dies at 97

Paul F. Oreffice, who as the pugnacious head of Dow Chemical grew and diversified the company at the same time that he rebuffed Vietnam veterans over Agent Orange, argued that the chemical dioxin was harmless and oversaw the manufacturing of silicone breast implants that were known to leak, died on Dec. 26 at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz. He was 97.

His family confirmed his death.

Mr. Oreffice (pronounced like orifice) spoke in staccato, fast-paced sentences, and they were often deployed in pushing back against environmentalists, politicians and journalists during an era, the 1970s and ’80s, when the environmental movement was gaining force by focusing on toxic chemicals in the air and water.

Under his 17-year leadership, which included the titles of president, chief executive and chairman, Mr. Oreffice weathered intense controversies.

His public relations instinct was for confrontation, not conciliation. He had an intense dislike for what he perceived as government meddling in business, which he traced to his having grown up in Italy under Mussolini. “I’ve seen what overgoverning can do,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “I was born under a Fascist dictatorship, and my father was jailed by it.”

Mr. Oreffice took the reins of the Dow USA division in 1975, when its public image was tainted from campus protests of the 1960s that had vilified the company as a maker of the incendiary agent napalm, which was widely used in Vietnam.

When Dow pulled out of apartheid South Africa in 1987 under pressure from shareholders, Mr. Oreffice said: “I’m not proud of it. I think we should have stayed and fought.”

In 1977, when Jane Fonda lacerated Dow in a speech at Central Michigan University, not far from Dow headquarters, in Midland, Mich., Mr. Oreffice canceled the company’s donations to the school, writing its president that he could not support Ms. Fonda’s “venom against free enterprise.”

Instead, Mr. Oreffice financed the campaigns of anti-regulation politicians. And he sued the Environmental Protection Agency for surveilling Dow’s sprawling Midland plants from the air when the company refused an on-site inspection.

The case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, which in 1986 ruled against the company, at the time the No. 2 American chemical maker after DuPont. (The companies merged in 2017, then split into three companies.)

In 1983, Rep. James H. Scheuer, Democrat of New York, disclosed that Dow had been allowed to edit an E.P.A. report on the leakage of dioxin, one of the most toxic substances ever manufactured, from the Midland plants into the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay.

E.P.A. regional officials told Congress that their superiors in the Reagan administration ordered the changes to comply with demands made by Dow. Mr. Oreffice, appearing on NBC’s “Today” show, offered a sweeping dismissal.

“There is absolutely no evidence of dioxin doing any damage to humans except for causing something called chloracne,” he said. “It’s a rash.”

His statement brushed aside evidence that dioxin was extremely hazardous to laboratory animals and had been shown in some research to be linked with a rare soft-tissue cancer in humans.

One former Dow president, Herbert Dow Doan, a grandson of the company founder, told a public relations publication, Provoke Media, in 1990 that Mr. Oreffice’s style was not one fine-tuned to mollify critics. “The reason is part ego, part pride,” he said. “Paul is inclined to push his line to the point where some people say he is arrogant.”

There is no question that Mr. Oreffice’s strength of will also uplifted Dow’s businesses, which through the 1970s were overly dependent on basic chemicals like chlorine. When a glut of low-priced petrochemicals flooded the global market in the early 80s, he aggressively reshaped Dow by diversifying into consumer products, such as shampoos and the cleaning fluid Fantastik, and by moving into foreign markets. By 1987, Dow posted a record profit of $1.3 billion (about $3.5 billion in today’s currency).

At the same time, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 20,000 Vietnam veterans and their families against Dow and other makers of Agent Orange was further tarnishing the company’s image. The suit, filed in 1979, charged that dioxin in Agent Orange led to cancer in combat veterans and genetic defects in their children.

Dow argued that it had made Agent Orange at the request of the government and was not responsible for how it was used. But in 1984, the company and other makers of Agent Orange, without admitting liability, settled the lawsuit for $180 million, with the proceeds going to veterans and their families.

In another controversy, Dow Corning, a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Corning Inc., released documents in February 1992 showing that it had known since 1971 that silicone gel could leak from breast implants it made.

Tens of thousands of women had sued the company, claiming their implants had given them breast cancer and autoimmune diseases. Dow Corning agreed to a $3.2 billion settlement after the company had been driven to file for bankruptcy protection.

In 1999, an independent review by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that silicone implants do not cause major diseases.

Paul Fausto Orrefice was born Nov. 29, 1927, in Venice. His parents, Max and Elena (Friedenberg) Oreffice, moved the family to Ecuador in 1940 as Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. Paul came to the U.S. in 1945, entering Purdue University with fewer than 50 words of English at his command.

He graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1949, became a naturalized citizen, and after two years in the Army went to work for Dow in 1953.

“When I walked into Midland, Mich., this was ‘WASP’ country, and I was a ‘W’ but I wasn’t an ‘ASP,’” he told The Washington Post in 1986. “I spoke with an accent and combed my hair straight back, which just wasn’t done.”

Mr. Oreffice represented Dow in Switzerland, Italy, Brazil and Spain before being called back to the Midland headquarters in 1969 and appointed the company’s financial vice president. He became president of Dow Chemical U.S.A. in 1975 and was then promoted to president and chief executive of the parent Dow Chemical Company in 1978. In 1986, he added the title of chairman.

To the astonishment of many observers, Dow poured millions of dollars in the mid-1980s into a public-relations campaign to improve its image, including a new slogan, “Dow let’s you do great things.”

Under company rules, when he reached age 60, Mr. Oreffice stepped down as president and chief executive in 1987. He retired as chairman in 1992.

He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Jo Ann Pepper Oreffice, his children Laura Jennison and Andy Oreffice, six grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

In retirement, Mr. Oreffice pursued a passion for thoroughbred racehorses, investing in Kentucky Derby starters and spending summers at a home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was a partner in a Preakness Stakes winner, Summer Squall, and a Belmont Stakes winner, Palace Malice.

In 2006, he published a memoir about rising from an immigrant with little English to a corporate titan, titling it “Only in America.”