Victor Habib, a longtime Great Neck resident and member of the Village of Great Neck Board of Zoning Appeals, died last week. He was 84.
Habib, a Brooklyn native and businessman who lived in the Village of Great Neck for 35 years, was an often skeptical voice on the village’s zoning board who challenged projects he felt could harm his community.
“I think he brought a different kind of outlook to the board than other people may have had,” his son Perry Habib said in an interview. “He just wanted to be true to himself and true to what he felt was appropriate and right for Great Neck.”
Village of Great Neck Mayor Ralph Kreitzman, who held a moment of silence for Habib at a board meeting last week, described Habib as a man who cared deeply about his adopted home.
“Victor simply was a great guy. Never afraid to speak his mind – complimentary or critically – he always had the Village at heart,” wrote Kreitzman in an e-mail. “He will be missed as a board member, long-distance dog walker, neighbor and friend.”
Habib was born in 1929 in New Lots, Brooklyn – a section of East New York which at that time was a working class Jewish neighborhood.
“His parents were immigrants,” Perry Habib said. “They were Sephardic Jews. His father came from Turkey and his mother came from Greece.”
Habib attended Thomas Jefferson High School, a now-closed facility that in its heyday graduated notables like entertainer Steve Lawrence and left-leaning historian Howard Zinn.
After studying business at City College and serving stateside in the army during the Korean War, Habib joined his family’s business – a woman’s clothing manufacturer in Manhattan called Twin Frocks.
“His brothers and his father started it and then he joined it,” Perry Habib said.
Habib started work at the business when he was about 20 years old, his son said, and stayed there for another 40.
He met his wife Annette, the mother of Perry and his brother Eric, through mutual friends in their Brooklyn neighborhood.
The two were married in 1956 and would stay together for 56 years, through Annette’s death from cancer last fall.
Caring for his wife was Habib’s top priority in the last years of her life, Perry Habib said.
“He was a family man. He loved my mother,” Perry Habib said. “He did everything that he could for her – all of his personal time.”
The couple moved to Briarwood in Queens, where Perry and Eric were born.
The family moved to Great Neck in 1978 – a long-held ambition, according to Perry Habib.
“They always wanted to move to Great Neck,” Perry Habib said. “He had it on his mind and she had it on her mind for several years.”
Habib retired in 1990 and was appointed to the village zoning board in 1998.
His style on the board – probing, sometimes confrontational and willing to ask tough questions – was a contrast to his personal demeanor, his son Perry said, and demonstrated his commitment to preserving the character of the village.
“He wasn’t actually outspoken in other areas. He always kept to himself,” Perry Habib said. “But he cared really, really deeply about Great Neck and the Village of Great Neck, so he had his opinions, from his point of view, about what he thought would be in the best interests of Great Neck – to keep the community the way it was when he first moved here.”
When he was not working with the zoning board, Habib could be found caring for his dogs, watching the Mets and Yankees on television and keeping up with the news, Perry Habib said.
But it was his family that was closest to his heart, and he possessed a loyalty and dedication to them that Perry described as “old school.”
“He always put his family first before he put himself first,” Perry Habib said. “That’s what made him happy.”
