After John E. Toffolon Jr., GABELLI ’73, ’77, died on April 26 following a battle with cancer, his family asked for memorial donations to be sent to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and to Fordham—specifically, to its New Era Fund supporting the men’s and women’s basketball programs in their drive for national prominence.

About $400,000 in memorial donations has come in to date, a sign of the strong interest prompted by Toffolon’s leadership in advancing the basketball programs, said Fordham’s athletic director, Ed Kull.

“This strong community of donors is a testament to John’s passion for the University,” said Kull, adding that Toffolon’s memory will be honored at a home basketball game this season. “I want to thank all of those who have given to Fordham basketball in memory of John Toffolon. Thanks to our community’s strong support for the New Era Fund, his passion for the program will continue on.”

That passion took root in his student days, when Fordham basketball became a national powerhouse that sold out Madison Square Garden and fueled fierce pride in the University. In 2020, as a trustee fellow, Toffolon co-founded the New Era Fund as part of the University’s current $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, which seeks to enhance the entire Fordham experience. He brought many other supporters along through his example.

In fact, he had been setting an example of giving back and helping others for most of his life—and not just in the arena of basketball.

Forged at Fordham

During his student years, Toffolon was active in many areas of University life, including United Student Government, and seemed to be able to move in every circle of students, as described by two of his classmates, David and Don Almeida, twin brothers and 1973 graduates of the Gabelli School of Business. “He was very much a Fordham guy,” said Don Almeida, a Fordham trustee fellow, “and when he graduated, he remained that for the rest of his life.”

After graduating, Toffolon launched his investment banking career in the management training program of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and came back to Fordham a few years later to earn an M.B.A. That’s when he met his wife, Joan C. Toffolon, GABELLI ’77, a fellow student in the program. He went on to hold leadership roles at First Boston Corporation, Nomura Securities international, and the Cowen Group, among other firms.

He was board chairman at Cowen during its 2009 merger with Ramius LLC, and showed genuine concern for everyone in the merged company, said Jeffrey Solomon, who was a managing member and founder of Ramius.

“John was always well intended, thoughtful, and wanted to make sure that he was making a positive impact in the lives of others,” said Solomon, now chairman and CEO of Cowen, a New York-based banking and financial services firm. Toffolon “wanted to make sure that, through his board stewardship, we were doing the best things we could for everybody at Cowen,” he said.

Giving from the Heart

That care and concern extended to his philanthropy. “John was the real deal,” said David Almeida, a board member with the Making Headway Foundation, which serves families of children diagnosed with brain or spinal cord tumors. Toffolon was a longtime supporter, and “would actually call me up every year to make sure I got the check,” a level of personal attention that meant a lot to him, Almeida said.

Toffolon gave to many organizations supporting health, education, and youth development, and played a leadership role in Fordham’s fundraising efforts. He often gave in partnership with his wife, Joan; in 1995, they created the Joan and John E. Toffolon Jr. Presidential Endowed Scholarship Fund for women attending the Gabelli School of Business.

The first recipient of the scholarship, Cindy Vojtech, Ph.D., a 2000 graduate of the Gabelli School, periodically met Toffolon for lunch. “In any conversation, it was just very clear that he was very enthusiastic about this school and about giving back and trying to … help shift the industry” toward having more women represented in its ranks, said Vojtech, a principal economist at the Federal Reserve Board and a member of the Fordham University President’s Council.

The Toffolon scholarship made it possible for her to come to Fordham and pursue her career dreams in finance and economics, she said. Today, she is paying it forward by creating a scholarship of her own, so that future students can enjoy the Fordham community and support that she did. “It’s just such an amazing gift,” she said.

Another recipient, Samantha Barrett, GABELLI ’21, met John Toffolon on a few occasions, joining him for a Fordham basketball game and dinner at Roberto’s on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx in 2018. “He was just a truly wonderful man, with the kindest heart, and I am a better person for having known him,” she said.

It was humbling and amazing, she said, to learn that the Toffolons’ scholarship would be covering the full cost of her Fordham education. “In that moment, I knew that I needed to have a college career where I did my best—for myself, for John and Joan, for my family, for those around me,” said Barrett, now an analyst at Jefferies Credit Partners in New York City. “I kept John and Joan in mind in every decision I made at Fordham,” wanting to make them proud, she said.

Before the launch of the New Era Fund, the Toffolons made many gifts to support athletics. At the Lombardi Center on the Rose Hill campus, they funded the installation of a wood floor on a practice court—now named in their honor—that is sometimes used by the basketball teams.

That gift seemed to come out of the blue, said Frank McLaughlin, FCRH ’69, athletic director emeritus at Fordham and special advisor to the director of intercollegiate athletics and recreational sports.

“He would do a lot of things unannounced like that, to help people,” McLaughlin said.

Days of Glory

McLaughlin knew Toffolon for about six decades, since Toffolon was a student and he, McLaughlin, was a young assistant basketball coach at Fordham for one season under head coach Richard “Digger” Phelps.

“In 1970–1971, it was a magical year where we were a national power, and he saw what that meant to everybody,” McLaughlin said. “There was a tremendous pride in the institution.”

The Rams went 26-3 that year, playing twice before sold-out crowds at Madison Square Garden—beating Notre Dame the first time and falling to Marquette a week later. Fordham advanced to the “Sweet 16” in the NCAA tournament and finished the year ranked ninth in the country.

“Everybody was coming to see us, and Madison Square Garden was full,” Don Almeida said. “I was scared the place was going to fall down, it was shaking so much [with]everybody standing and rocking.”

The school spirit had a unifying effect, he said. “You had ROTC marching in Edwards Parade and you had anti-Vietnam War demonstrations going on all over campus, and at night, everybody was at the basketball game,” he said.

“For the four years that [John and I were] at Fordham, we had very, very respectable basketball teams,” which set a benchmark for the team’s future efforts, Almeida said. “No matter what happened thereafter, we knew what we could do, because we had done it.”

Launching a New Era

Almeida and Toffolon were part of a group led by Fordham trustee Darlene Jordan, FCRH ’89, that started the New Era Fund to boost the basketball teams as a unifying source of Fordham pride and enhance the University’s national profile.

The fund pays for the recruitment of coaching talent and various supports to help student-athletes do their best in class and on the court. With its help, the men’s team improved to a 16-16 record last season under then-head coach Kyle Neptune, and it’s seeking further progress this year under Keith Urgo, who became head coach in April.

Toffolon “was very passionate about seeing the New Era Fund get off the ground” and cared deeply about helping the student-athletes, said Frank Aiello, GABELLI ’76, a supporter of the fund and member of Fordham’s Athletics Hall of Fame committee.

He kept coming to Fordham basketball games while undergoing cancer treatments. “He was all in,” Don Almeida said. Toffolon knew and interacted with all the players, and the entire men’s and women’s teams came to his wake, along with members of the coaching staff. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” he said.

Following a Mass of Christian Burial on May 5 at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville, New York, John Toffolon was laid to rest at Gate of Heaven Cemetery. Survivors include his wife, Joan, their daughters, Ashley and Allison, and his sister, Penley Kidd (Douglas).

“There isn’t a day goes by when I am not saddened that he is no longer here to support us. But he’s there in spirit, I’ll tell you that much,” McLaughlin said. “He was an inspiration.”

To ask about contributing to the New Era Fund, contact Kara Field, director of athletic development and assistant athletic director, at 973-223-2157 or [email protected].

Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student and make a gift.

It’s certainly the busiest. Hundreds of thousands of people hustle through Penn Station’s labyrinthine, low-ceilinged corridors every day. Amtrak owns the terminal but shares space and operations with New Jersey Transit, Long Island Rail Road, and the New York City subway. Problems have compounded in a system stretched beyond capacity. Minor delays become major headaches, and overcrowding erodes safety and security. The whole enterprise—and much of the economic vitality of the region—relies on crumbling, outdated infrastructure: narrow platforms, failing ties and switches, and tunnels that may be one major storm surge away from becoming permanently inoperable.

On top of it all, literally on top of it all, sits Madison Square Garden.

It wasn’t always like this.

For Samuel Turvey, FCRH ’79, LAW ’83, the way forward for Penn Station is through its storied past, a time when the station wasn’t a sunless maze but a shining symbol of New York grandeur.

“If we want to keep pace with London, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong, we need to stop using patently dangerous tunnels from 1910 and funneling 650,000 people daily under a basketball arena,” he says. “A train station can and should be located over what presently passes for Penn Station.”

Turvey leads the steering committee for Rebuild Penn Station, a project of the National Civic Art Society conceived by architect and historian Richard W. Cameron. They have been calling for a new and improved version of the original station, as well as a comprehensive transit plan to ease regional congestion.

A Majestic Past

The original station, designed by architect Charles Follen McKim, was a beaux-arts masterpiece inspired in part by Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla. Opened in 1910, it featured a stately colonnade on Seventh Avenue, with an arching glass ceiling above the train platforms and a massive, sunlit general waiting room where, as historian Jill Jonnes wrote in Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels, the “play of light and shadow in [the] high curved ceilings and pillared walls was evocative and deeply poetic.”

Built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the station was designed as a public space that would elevate the city’s reputation while honoring the engineering feat that made the station necessary—the construction of subaqueous railway tunnels linking New Jersey to Manhattan and Manhattan to Long Island. McKim said he designed the station as a “monumental gateway … to one of the great Metropolitan cities of the world.”

By the early 1960s, however, the Pennsylvania Railroad had fallen on hard times with the advent of the interstate highway system. “Ultimately, their duty was to shareholders, not to posterity,” Turvey says of the railroad’s decision to skimp on upkeep and sell the air rights to developers who eventually demolished the original building and built the Penn Plaza offices, a theater, and Madison Square Garden atop the station’s platforms and tracks.

In an October 1963 editorial, The New York Times called the demolition a “monumental act of vandalism.” (The public outcry spurred the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which played a key role in saving Grand Central Terminal from destruction.) Years later, architectural historian Vincent Scully lamented what New Yorkers lost at Penn Station: “Once, we entered the city like gods,” he said. “Now we scurry in like rats, which is probably what we deserve.”

Turvey believes New Yorkers deserve better, and so does Gov. Andrew Cuomo, FCRH ’79. Last January, during his State of the State address, he reaffirmed his commitment to fixing the station, and left open the possibility of using eminent domain to do it.

Fixing a Troubled Transit Hub

Some changes are already underway. The James A. Farley Building, the former post office building across Eighth Avenue from Madison Square Garden, is being transformed into a train hall for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers (a project initially led by current MTA President Patrick Foye, FCRH ’78, LAW ’81, who was then working for Governor Eliot Spitzer). Funded by developers, New York, New Jersey, and the federal government, the renovations are scheduled to be done by late 2020.

For Turvey, that’s a good but partial step, one that will alleviate only about 20 percent of the pedestrian traffic at Penn Station and do little to resolve the bigger issues, congestion chief among them.

Rebuild Penn Station has supported a plan by Jim Venturi of ReThinkNYC to make Penn a through station instead of the last stop for New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad trains. Trains would no longer be “going back empty,” Turvey says. “Think of the subway: If the subway came down from the Bronx, stopped at 42nd Street, and went back empty, how much waste is that?”

The plan calls for adding or expanding transit hubs in New Jersey, Queens, and the Bronx, while eliminating some platforms in Penn Station and widening others to accommodate more escalators, Turvey says. The plan takes into account the $30 billion Gateway Tunnel Project, which would add a second tunnel under the Hudson.

For Turvey and a growing number of civic groups, however, relocating Madison Square Garden is key to renovating Penn Station. They recommend moving it to the Morgan Post Office and Annex, a five-minute walk west of its current location, by the time the Garden’s lease expires in 2023.

“Madison Square Garden really needs to move if you’re ever to get that location right,” he says. “It’s a historical accident that a basketball arena is on top of a train station. It’s illogical.”

Turvey knows the old Penn Station from books, photos, and Hollywood films. On a recent stroll through the current station, he pointed out some glimpses of its past: a cast-iron partition here, a brass and iron railing there, some glass-block tiles that were designed to allow natural light to reach lower levels but now bear fixtures for fluorescent bulbs. “Dreams die hard for me,” he admits. But he denies that he’s guided solely by nostalgia, and insists that classical tastes and innovation can go together, citing Grand Central Terminal and Washington, D.C.’s Union Station as examples.

“There’s a strain in the architecture community that doesn’t like the idea of rebuilding old buildings,” he says. But he points to recent examples of architectural reconstruction, like Moscow’s 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was torn down on Joseph Stalin’s orders in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s. And he argues that Penn Station could be rebuilt on the existing foundations “using modern, more cost-effective construction techniques with appropriate upgrades for expanding train and pedestrian traffic.”

The estimated cost, he says, would be between $3 billion and $3.5 billion.

A “Public-Spirited” Commitment

Turvey grew up on the north shore of Staten Island, where his grandfather worked briefly as a stevedore for the B&O Railroad. He moved to suburban New Jersey with his family when he was 10 and later enrolled at Fordham, where he developed an interest in urban studies as an undergraduate during the 1970s. “It was an interdisciplinary major, and it gave me the opportunity to take courses with some real prominent Jesuits,” he says, including sociologist Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., who later presided at the ceremony when Turvey married his Fordham classmate Patricia Evans, FCRH ’79, and who baptized two of the couple’s three children.

In 1983, Turvey earned a J.D. at Fordham Law School, where he was associate editor of the Fordham Urban Law Journal. And throughout his career in legal and financial services, he has been involved in what he calls “public-spirited” pro bono efforts. In the early 1990s, he established the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, a series of free outdoor concerts in East Village and Harlem parks. He serves on the board of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and he’s a trustee of the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug Harbor on Staten Island.

“I’ve worked in New York City my whole career,” says Turvey, a managing director at TIAA. “The city has given a lot to me and my family, and I’m interested in seeing it continue its upward trajectory.”

He sees “a transformative resurrection of the original Penn Station” as part of that.

“How we get the federal government and state governments to work together, I’m not entirely sure. I think the corporate community and the cultural and other communities in New York City need to learn about and rally around this plan, akin to how Lee Iacocca spearheaded the Ellis Island restoration,” he says, adding that “public-private partnerships need to be pursued with vigor.”

And he remains inspired by the democratic spirit of the original station.

“It’s very hard to get people to decide that Penn Station should be on the same plane as Central Park, but in a sense, this is a public space, and you need to think about the city’s need for public spaces,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s just the highest dollar and the region misses a once-in-a-century opportunity to get something so right.”