Amy Zander, sculptor, former Roslyn Heights resident, dies at 91

Married in 1955, former Roslyn Heights resident Amy Zander was a wife and mother who both embodied her era and broke through it to become an accomplished amateur sculptor and give her two daughters a love of art, culture and intellectual freedom.

"She was a second-wave feminist," said her elder daughter, Judith E. Zander, referring to her mother's involvement in the late 1960s and 1970s movement for women’s social and economic equality, adding metaphorically, "She did not bake cakes."

She did, however, throw dinner parties, and was "good-natured, optimistic, interesting. She was a conversationalist who listened well and was really, really elegant. Amy had a sense of style."

Wife of the late Newsday political reporter, columnist and editor Dick Zander — who worked for the paper from 1956 to 1990 before becoming communications director for the New York State Court of Appeals — Amy Zander "was strong-willed and she was kind," said Judith Zander. "On weekends she would take us, with our dad, into the city to the Guggenheim and the Met and the Museum of Modern Art," as well as hiking in Bear Mountain State Park. "All these places were a part of our cultural heritage."

Following Dick Zander’s death in 2012, mother and daughter lived together in Melbourne Beach, Florida. "Mom was in the master bedroom and across the house on the other side was what I call the suite, my little group of three rooms," said Judith. "I really will miss sharing the household with Amy."

It was in that house, on a barrier island off Florida’s Space Coast, that Amy Zander died Nov. 4 at age 91 of congestive heart failure.

"She was living in Florida and she told me she was having a little swelling in her feet, and I told her to see a cardiologist," said her younger brother, Alfred Horowitz, of Manhattan and the Hamptons, with whom she would speak by phone weekly. Amy Zander did as advised and went on prescribed medication, but age had caught up with her, Horowitz said. "She died not very long afterward. She was my sister and I loved her."

Born Amy Judith Horowitz in Manhattan on Oct. 20, 1933, she was the third of four children of Dr. Edward A. and Rose Lippman Horowitz, of Jamaica Estates, Queens. Following education in New York City public schools, she attended Otterbein College, now Otterbein University, in Westerville, Ohio, where she met her future husband. While never obtaining a degree, the ardent learner would later take classes at Queens College and then Adelphi University in Garden City.

The couple married in 1955. Dick Zander, the son of two journalists, began writing for Connecticut’s Bridgeport Herald that same year, then joined Newsday in 1956. The family first rented a house in Roslyn before moving to Roslyn Heights.

In the late 1960s, Amy Zander took up sculpting, studying with Long Island artists and others and eventually producing work in multiple media — clay, wood, stone and metal. After the family moved in 1991 to upstate Averill Park, a hamlet within the town of Sand Lake, near her husband’s work in Albany, she shared a studio with sculptor and art history professor Arline Peartree.

She also volunteered at the Sand Lake Town Library, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, and elsewhere. Eventually she and her husband split their time between Averill Park and a winter home in West Bradenton, Florida.

A member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Albany and later of the Manatee Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bradenton, Florida, Amy Zander continued her volunteerism, serving on the amenities committee of her daughter’s gated community. For recreation, "My mother played a lot of bridge and also Rummikub and Scrabble."

In addition to her daughter and brother, Amy Zander is survived by another daughter, Jessica Page, of Joshua Tree, California; and two grandchildren She was cremated, and no memorial was held.