Arthur L. Carter, a Wall Street investment banker who became a newspaper and magazine publisher — most prominently founding the cheeky and salmon-colored New York Observer — and had an unlikely third act as a sculptor, died in December 2025 in Manhattan. He was 93. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Mary Dixie Carter. In the 1960s, Mr. Carter partnered with his next-door neighbor Sanford I. Weill, who later became head of Citigroup, and made a small fortune as a pioneer in the leveraged buyout — borrowing money to acquire a company using its own assets and cash flow as collateral. Mr. Carter later amassed hundreds of millions of dollars through his private-equity holding company. In 1981, he started The Litchfield County Times, a weekly newspaper covering northwestern Connecticut, where he owned a 1,400-acre dairy farm. The Nation, with a reported circulation of 85,000, was losing $500,000 a year when Mr. Carter sold it in 1995, for a sum undisclosed at the time, to its editor, Victor S. Navasky. Carter added to his growing media holdings in 1987 by founding The New York Observer, an upscale Manhattan weekly. Carter was losing about $2.5 million a year when he sold The Observer in 2006 for nearly $10 million to Jared Kushner. Arthur Lloyd Carter was born on Dec. 24, 1931, in Manhattan, a grandson of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, and grew up in Woodmere, N.Y., on Long Island. After graduating from Woodmere High School, Arthur briefly attended the Juilliard School. He received a bachelor’s degree in French literature from Brown University in 1953, and then served in the Coast Guard. After his discharge in 1956, Mr. Carter joined Lehman Brothers. On leave from Lehman, Mr. Carter earned a master’s degree in business administration from Dartmouth College in 1959. Carter cashed out of the firm in 1970 to manage his own money instead of his clients’. Through his private-equity holding company, Utilities & Industries Corporation, Mr. Carter had stakes in scores of companies involved in printing, shipping, water utilities, shopping centers, real estate, banking, meat packing, music publishing and precision springs. His marriages to Linda Schweitzer, from 1957 to 1965, and to the actress Dixie Carter, from 1967 to 1977, ended in divorce. In 1980, he married Dr. Linda Kessler, today a professor of psychiatry at N.Y.U. They lived in Manhattan. In addition to his wife, Linda Carter, and his daughter Mary Dixie, from his second marriage, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Jon, Whendy and Ellen Carter; another daughter from his second marriage, Ginna Carter; a stepdaughter, the actress Ali Marsh; a sister, Ellen Wiesenthal; 12 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren
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