Editorial: Segerstrom deserves latest award

Here’s to Henry T. Segerstrom.

On June 7, the 87-year-old patron of the arts and managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the company that built South Coast Plaza, will receive Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence. That venerated New York institution has bestowed the award, which recognizes leaders in arts philanthropy, on only three others. Segerstrom can add it to his others, which even include the royal Swedish title of Commander, Order of the Polar Star.

Segerstrom deserves the Carnegie medal. It helps that he sits on the Carnegie Hall Board of Directors and that he was instrumental last year in staging a bicoastal festival showcasing the best of Chinese music and performing arts, and which involved Carnegie Hall, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

Nonetheless, the recognition marks a crowning achievement for Segerstrom, who’s been a driving force in establishing classical music and the arts in Orange County.

This child of the Great Depression and son of Costa Mesa built South Coast Plaza on land where his family’s lima bean farm once stood. His shopping mall has grown into a hugely profitable one.

Yet Segerstrom isn’t a tycoon preoccupied solely with enriching himself even more. His family has donated land and money that made the Orange County Center for the Arts and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts possible.

Through his vision and philanthropy he has transformed the area along the northern edge of that stretch of the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa into something more soulful and uplifting than a shopping hub and magnet for materialism. And, for that, we say “Bravo, Henry.”