The Leonard N. Stern School of Business was founded in 1900 by Charles Waldo Haskins as the New York University (NYU) Undergraduate School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance at NYU's Washington Square Campus. The graduate business program was launched in 1916. Located in New York's downtown business district, it offered both full-time and part-time professional degree programs.

The School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance was renamed the College of Business and Public Administration and merged with the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration in 1972. The same year, the school's Tisch Hall opened to house the undergraduate college.

In 1988 NYU Business School alumnus Leonard Stern donated $30 million. The school was renamed the Leonard N. Stern School of Business (Stern School of Business) in his honor. The gift allowed the school to consolidate its graduate and undergraduate facilities to NYU's Washington Square campus. The Kaufman Management Center later opened in 1992 as a state-of-the-art facility for the Stern School.

Abraham L. Gitlow was born in New York City in 1918. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1939, and his masters and doctoral degrees from Columbia University in 1940 and 1947, respectively. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the South Pacific as an assistant historical officer. After World War II, Gitlow was a substitute instructor in economics at Brooklyn College. He left Brooklyn College in 1947 to teach economics at New York University (NYU). Gitlow served as a professor of economics at NYU until 1965, when he became the dean of NYU's School of Commerce, which would become the Stern School of Business. He retired from the position of dean of the College of Business Administration in 1985 and continued as Dean Emeritus and Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Stern School until his death in 2014. Gitlow married Beatrice Alpert in 1940. They had two sons, Allan Michael and Howard Seth.