HUNTER COLLEGE— Eliot L. Engel, a Bronx son of public housing who rose from a Hunter College classroom to the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, died April 10, 2026. He was 79. His family confirmed he had been living with Parkinson’s disease.
Engel was born Feb. 18, 1947, and raised in the Northeast Bronx. While he was around 12, his family moved into Eastchester Homes, a Mitchell-Lama development in Williamsbridge — working-class, mostly Jewish, the kind of neighborhood where union members raised families in modest comfort and argued politics over dinner.
He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, then enrolled at Hunter College’s Bronx campus. He graduated in 1969, the same year the campus separated from Hunter and became Herbert H. Lehman College. He and his classmates were the last cohort to graduate as Hunter students. He later earned a masters in guidance and counseling from Lehman in 1973.
