Richard Ravitch, a politically savvy, civic-minded developer and public citizen who helped rescue New York City from the brink of bankruptcy and its decaying subways from fiscal collapse, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 89.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Kathleen M. Doyle.

Mr. Ravitch never won elective office. But he left an outsize mark on government at every level as one of the backstage wise men recruited to stave off the financial collapse of New York’s Urban Development Corporation in 1975 and, a few months later, of New York City’s own overdrawn municipal accounts.

By rallying public support for inventive means of raising revenue, he was also instrumental in rejuvenating the city’s mass transit system in the 1980s as the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

He later served as New York’s lieutenant governor, enlisted by David A. Paterson in 2009 to lend gravitas to his teetering administration. (Mr. Paterson had succeeded Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace after a prostitution scandal.)

Mr. Ravitch, who inherited a construction company, also left his mark on the cityscape with signature apartment projects like Waterside and Manhattan Plaza.

A progressive in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, he espoused an Emersonian faith in democracy as a dynamic symbiosis between politics and good government. Invoking a lesson learned from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose successful Senate candidacy he helped promote in 1976, Mr. Ravitch recalled in his 2014 memoir, “So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises,” “There is a more powerful connection than people think between the world of ideas and the world of practical politics.”

He relished the intellectual challenges posed by crises. “Like Cincinnatus of the early Roman republic,” Stephen Eide, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute wrote in the magazine City Journal in 2014, “Ravitch is best known for serving temporarily during times of great need.”

Together with Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, he formed the State Budget Crisis Task Force in 2011 to draw attention to the fiscal vulnerabilities of governments across the country. In 2014, he volunteered for another rescue mission: He was named to advise a federal judge and the governor of Michigan as Detroit clawed its way out of bankruptcy.

Mr. Ravitch was shrewd, guileless and so unambiguously blunt that he was sometimes dismissed as a doomsayer.

“As pessimistic as we were, he was always a darker shade of gray,” recalled Eugene Keilin, who was chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation during New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. Mayor Edward I. Koch labeled him a Cassandra. But Mr. Ravitch countered that only by relentlessly sounding the alarm could he galvanize the requisite political constituency to confront a given crisis.

“What distinguished him,” said State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, “was the credibility he had with stakeholders who knew his aggressiveness about issues he cared about wasn’t part of any political calculation, his depth of knowledge and experience, and a youthful impatience.”

Richard Ravitch was born in Manhattan on July 7, 1933. His father, Saul, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia who manufactured manhole covers, was a builder. His family company, HRH Construction, would redefine the city skyline with majestic structures that included the Beresford and San Remo apartment buildings. His mother, Sylvia (Lerner) Ravitch, was an accomplished sculptor.

Richard attended the Lincoln School and graduated from the Fieldston School. He then enrolled in Oberlin College in Ohio but transferred to Columbia College, where he graduated in 1955 with a degree in history. It was there that he received his formal introduction to party politics.

Drawn to Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign, he invited Eleanor Roosevelt to a rally at Columbia and, as her chaperone on campus, had a heady one-on-one lunch with her beforehand.

But he was bewildered to learn on the stump that the local Democratic organization was doing nothing to help Mr. Stevenson, because registering more voters would inject too much unpredictability into what really mattered to party regulars: the next year’s mayoral race.

“This was my introduction to the reality that politics is complicated, and that campaigns, for better or worse, are not necessarily driven by idealistic fervor or loyalty,” he wrote.

He graduated from Yale Law School in 1958, worked in Washington as assistant counsel to a House military operations subcommittee, and briefly served in the Army, where he was called up for active duty during the 1961 Berlin Wall crisis.

In Houston in 1960, he married Diane Silvers, who went on to become a prominent education historian and policy analyst. They divorced in 1986. His marriage to Betsy F. Perry, in 1994, also ended in divorce.

In 2005, he married Ms. Doyle, the chairwoman of William Doyle Galleries. She survives him as do two sons, Joseph and Michael, from his first marriage (another son, Steven, died in 1966); three stepdaughters, Carrie and Laura Doyle and Liz Doyle Carey, from his marriage to Ms. Doyle; and 13 grandchildren.

In 1960, Mr. Ravitch joined the family company, which he had inherited with his cousins, and which built the Whitney Museum of American Art and Citicorp Center in Manhattan, as well as the Ebbets Field Apartments and Trump Village in Brooklyn. But it was reform Democratic politics that opened the door to a lifetime of networking, both in private development and in public service.

He was a partner in the first desegregated housing project in Washington. One of its first tenants was Robert C. Weaver, who would become the nation’s first secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the first African American to hold a cabinet-level post.

Through the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, with whom he participated in the 1963 March on Washington, Mr. Ravitch was introduced to A. Philip Randolph, the illustrious labor leader, with whom he created an apprenticeship program to prepare young Black men for union jobs.

He also met Joseph A. Califano Jr., who would join Lyndon B. Johnson’s cabinet and become a lifelong friend, and Lewis Davis, an architect with whom he would collaborate on major projects.

Two projects that were built in the 1970s severely tested Mr. Ravitch’s problem-solving skills while creating new neighborhoods.

One, Waterside Plaza, was built along the East River on rubble from the World War II Blitz in Bristol, England, that was used as ballast in ships coming to the United States. He had to overcome concerns that the project, by protruding into the estuary, would impede navigation.

The other, Manhattan Plaza on West 42nd Street, was conceived as a luxury apartment complex but was hobbled by financial woes. It was transformed with heavy government subsidies to attract low- and moderate-income performing artists.

In 1975, Mr. Ravitch was enlisted by Gov. Hugh L. Carey to rescue the Urban Development Corporation, which had been created by a predecessor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, to override local zoning constraints and build housing for low-income New Yorkers.

The corporation defaulted on its short-term borrowing, but Mr. Ravitch persuaded the Legislature to create the Project Finance Agency to issue new debt backed by federal subsidies to repay old borrowing.

That new agency not only allowed the corporation to complete its pending projects, but also served as a model for the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which spared New York City from bankruptcy later in 1975 by assuming the city’s crushing debt.

On Oct. 18, with the city facing a deadline later that day to repay short-term notes, Albert Shanker, the leader of the teachers’ union, balked at an earlier agreement to buy $200 million in Municipal Assistance Corporation bonds with his union’s pension funds. Mr. Ravitch, playing the honest broker, persuaded him to honor his agreement and then contacted the comptroller of the currency in Washington to keep the banks open beyond their closing time so the city could pay its debts before the midnight deadline.

In 1979, Mr. Ravitch was again enlisted by the governor, this time to salvage the transit system. He was uniquely qualified: A rarity among public officials, he was a regular subway rider.

He warned that fares would rise unless legislators approved a tax increase. They complied. He weathered an 11-day transit strike in 1980 and lived with a police escort after an intruder shot his police bodyguard in the thigh at Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters.

Lobbying for long-term financing to rebuild the transit system, Mr. Ravitch fashioned an $8.5 billion plan under which private corporations would buy buses and railroad cars from the M.T.A. and lease them back at a saving to the authority, and the companies would receive tax benefits.

“In terms of having a vision,” Robert F. Wagner Jr., a member of the M.T.A. board, said at the time, “in terms of what the system needed, putting together a plan and overwhelming the odds, he produced one of the extraordinary legacies a public official will have left behind in the past 50 years.”

Mr. Ravitch retired from the transit agency in 1983, but not from public life. He led a group of investors who restored the ailing Bowery Savings Bank to profitability in two years; was the chairman of a New York City charter revision commission that strengthened ethics and public campaign financing rules; and remained active in Jewish philanthropies.

As Major League Baseball’s chief negotiator, he proposed a revenue-sharing plan that placed a cap on players’ salaries, which helped precipitate the strike of 1994 and 1995.

When he sought the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1989, he received critical acclaim as a cerebral and politically independent civic savior, but he ran a distant third, behind David N. Dinkins, who came in first, and Mr. Koch, the incumbent.

Two decades later, Mr. Ravitch became the state’s lieutenant governor by appointment, filling a vacancy created when Mr. Paterson succeeded Mr. Spitzer, who resigned after being identified by federal investigators as a client of a prostitution ring.

Because the appointment was subject to challenge by Senate Republicans (who were seeking a court order to block it), Mr. Ravitch was sworn in hastily over steak, tomatoes and creamed spinach at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn. (Steak from Luger’s was served on May 2 at an early 90th-birthday party for Mr. Ravitch, held at the New-York Historical Society.)

Mr. Ravitch took the job seriously, winning a hearing among legislators for his proposals for a payroll tax and tolls on East River bridges to support mass transit. He also recommended borrowing to help close a $9 billion state budget gap, coupled with stringent fiscal and accounting controls. The governor rejected most of his advice.

But the underlying budgetary demands persisted, in New York and in other states. The challenge, Mr. Ravitch wrote in “So Much to Do,” is “how a free society can reduce benefits for some and increase burdens for others without tearing unacceptably at the social fabric.”

“In a democracy,” he argued, “if you insist on being above politics, you cannot govern well.”