On the morning of June 4, 2025, RPA learned of the passing of our dear friend and colleague Ellis Calvin, after a brave and difficult battle with cancer.
Ellis worked with us at RPA for over a decade, starting as an intern in 2014 and rising quickly to become the person we relied on to provide brilliant insights and analysis as our Data Research Manager. Over that time, I had the honor of being the person that Ellis reported to for the majority of his tenure, and so - on behalf of my colleagues - wanted to take a moment to celebrate his time with and contributions to RPA and the region.
From our earliest days together, Ellis quickly became an essential member of the team, helping to brainstorm project proposals, chart out our research, planning, and analysis approaches. He managed projects, and served as both a reality check on what we could do and a moral compass in all that we do, all while producing informative and beautiful maps that further RPA’s legacy of impactful graphic information.
Good data is the fuel of RPA’s research and advocacy efforts. Our reputation, earned over more than a century, hinges on us getting things right. With Ellis overseeing so much of our data-driven analyses, we all felt supreme confidence that his fastidious approach would ensure the research RPA put out into the world was as sound as possible. Ellis collected, studied and made sense of data across a wide spectrum of issues: tracking the return to work from Covid; analyzing the threat of rising sea levels and mapping the new shoreline that we need to plan for; ensuring that we adapt in a way that is equitable; studying usage of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway; envisioning a Five Borough Bikeway and other creative and meaningful uses of our streets; and understanding housing production and public health indicators; among many others.
As the small sample of his work above illustrates, Ellis believed that we could have a better, more just, and environmentally sustainable region, and he used his talents to help RPA advance those aims.
Perhaps, Ellis’s most enduring legacy will prove to be the generation of interns that he sought, selected, and mentored, as the manager of RPA’s intern program. This was something he volunteered to do in an effort to expand and diversify a program that brings us such skilled and dedicated students each year. Using insights from his own internship at RPA, Ellis worked to make our internship program smooth and rewarding, both for us and for the many interns who now share their talents at and beyond RPA.
As anyone who had a conversation with Ellis learned, he had interests and passions that ranged far from his work. He was a deeply skilled woodworker, crafting beautiful works of furniture – some of which grace our office; a gifted photographer; a weaver; and a baker, among other talents. Ellis could certainly be described as a true“Renaissance Man.”
In preparing to write this tribute, I dug deep into my email archive to look through the earliest emails that then“Fourth Plan Intern” Ellis had written. One of the first I came across - two months into his tenure - says everything about him. Titled“Homemade Bread,” it was an all-staff email letting everyone know that he had made and brought in homemade bread to share. Apologizing about it perhaps overlapping with those celebrating Passover, Ellis went on to say that he had brought in two kinds: millet porridge bread and rye porridge bread. Kind, thoughtful, giving, and yes, artisanal; this is the Ellis we all knew and still love.
In his note to the RPA Board on the day of Ellis’s passing, Tom Wright wrote the following:“We lost Ellis far too early. He was a wonderful friend and colleague and still had much more to contribute to this world. I will always treasure knowing that he loved being part of the RPA family as much as we loved him being part of it, and that his spirit remains with us.” Truer words have never been spoken.
