Franz S. Leichter, a maverick New York State legislator for three decades whose progressive views on abortion, gay unions and the decriminalization of marijuana eventually became law in the state, helped in no small part by his persistent prodding, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 92.

The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his children, Kathy and Josh Leichter. He spent years managing congestive heart failure and in recent days came down with pneumonia and experienced end-stage renal failure, they said.

First as an assemblyman and then as a state senator representing his famously argumentative Manhattan neighborhood, the Upper West Side, Mr. Leichter was regarded as one of the Legislature’s staunchest liberals and harshest critics of its own practices, though he was often dismissed as a Don Quixote futilely tilting at windmills.

But even if so, for him that was a badge of honor, rooted in a deep sense of injustice imbued in him during his childhood in Nazi-controlled Vienna and as a young, motherless Jewish refugee in New York. His mother, Käthe Leichter, a leading Austrian sociologist who had pressed for equal pay and job opportunities for women, was imprisoned in Nazi Germany’s Ravensbrück concentration camp and killed in 1942.

As a Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Leichter (pronounced LIKE-ter) joined with other “Reformers” to successfully weaken the Tammany Hall Democratic machine in New York. Then, in 1968, during the national ferment over the Vietnam War and civil rights for Black Americans and the assassinations of two progressive leaders, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, he won a seat in the Assembly. But he did so in an election in which Democrats lost control of that house, rendering them, and him, relatively powerless.

Yet two years into his first term, he teamed with an upstate Republican assemblywoman, Constance E. Cook, to draft a bill legalizing abortion in the state. It was a time when women of means would evade an almost nationwide ban on abortions by flying to Puerto Rico or another country to undergo the procedure while poorer women were risking their lives with quack practitioners or self-induced attempts with coat hangers and other makeshift devices. In the United States, only Hawaii had legalized abortion, but it had restricted the procedure to Hawaii residents.

Although the New York Legislature had just four women, with both houses controlled by Republicans, the bill managed to pass the Senate, in April 1970. Though it was amended in the Assembly to limit the procedure to the first 24 weeks of pregnancy unless the mother’s life was endangered, it passed there as well by a last-minute change of a single vote — that of Assemblyman George M. Michaels, a Democrat representing a rural, heavily Roman Catholic district in the Finger Lakes region; he correctly predicted that it would end his political career.

Signed by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican, the act had a shaping influence on the United States Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion.

In 1974, Mr. Leichter won a State Senate seat in an election in which Democrats reclaimed control of the Assembly. Again, he was consigned to the minority party, the Senate having gone Republican, but it seemed to suit his contrarian streak.

In 1990, Mr. Leichter wrote and introduced a bill sanctioning same-sex domestic partnerships when the possibility of same-sex marriage seemed remote. The bill did not pass, but it contributed to the momentum that led to the state’s same-sex marriage law in 2011.

He also introduced the so-called pooper-scooper law, which required dog owners in New York City to clean up after their dogs; and a law that required banks to promptly credit check deposits so that account holders could immediately start earning interest, a blow to banks that had been able to profit off the extra investment time.

Still, with Democrats in the minority in the Senate, most of Mr. Leichter’s legislative career seemed an exercise in futility. He wrote damning reports on banking practices and corporate tax breaks and exposed the common practice of using legislative mailing privileges on re-election campaigns, only to see bills passed that reinforced such opportunities for venality.

Taking on his own institution, he made countless speeches and held numerous news conferences inveighing against pork-barrel spending by legislators and closed-door deal making, labeling the Senate “a dictatorship” or a “tyranny by a few members.”

“It’s a tightly closed system that has crystallized and become even more a way of life since I came here,” he said after he announced his retirement in 1998. “This is not a time to be in government.”

Franz Sigmund Leichter was born to Otto and Käthe (Pick) Leichter on Aug. 19, 1930, and grew up in a highly assimilated Viennese Jewish household. His mother was a prominent labor researcher and political adviser to Austria’s Social Democrats, and his father was also a leading party member, editing its journal until 1934.

After the Anschluss of 1938, in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the party was suppressed, and Otto, to avoid arrest, slipped out of the country on a false passport. Käthe stayed behind to make similar arrangements for her mother and two sons.

Franz, then 7, was put aboard a train bound for Brussels with the family’s gentile housekeeper, Irma Turnsek. He was told to pretend to be her son. Käthe planned to follow weeks later, but the night before she was to leave, she was betrayed by an associate and arrested. Imprisoned at the Ravensbrück camp, north of Berlin, she was killed in early 1942 at the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, established to exterminate the sick and the disabled.

With the German army rolling through much of Europe, Otto managed to join Franz and Otto’s eldest son, Henry, and the three spirited their way first to Paris and then to an unoccupied zone in southern France.

After three months, helped by Austrian émigrés with friends in the White House, the father and sons received visas to resettle in the United States. They arrived in New York by ship in 1940. Otto found work as a foreign correspondent for an Austrian newspaper.

“It’s one of the millions of stories of what people endured in those difficult years,” Franz Leichter said, describing his wartime experience to Swarthmore College’s alumni magazine. “I was one of the fortunate ones.”

Franz was educated in a boarding school in Darien, Conn., in New York public elementary schools and the former High School of Commerce in Manhattan. He graduated from Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, magna cum laude in 1952.

After a stint in the Army that included a posting to Japan, he enrolled in Harvard Law School and received a doctorate of law in 1957. During the 1956 election year, he worked for Adlai Stevenson’s losing Democratic campaign and gravitated to the Reform wing of the party’s Manhattan organization, in which upstarts like Ed Koch successfully challenged the Tammany Hall machine run by the party boss Carmine DeSapio.

Despite his rebel image — Senator Guy J. Velella, a Bronx Republican, called him “one of the last beatnik types” — Mr. Leichter was a formal dresser, favoring double-breasted suits and starched shirts and had a scholarly mien accented by metal-rimmed eyeglasses.

Mr. Velella and other colleagues regarded him as warm and friendly. Mr. Leichter’s critique of the Legislature and its members often rankled, but he settled into the camaraderie of displaced New Yorkers marooned in Albany for the legislative season and was fondly missed when he retired from the body in 1998.

While serving in the Legislature, Mr. Leichter earned his living as a commercial and corporate litigator, usually representing foreign clients, including Brazilian and Mexican banks.

In 1958, he married Nina Williams, who was diagnosed as bipolar and endured severe bouts of depression. She died by suicide in 1995. He married Melody Anderson in 2001. She died in 2010.

In addition to his daughter, Kathy — who made a documentary film, “Here One Day,” about her mother’s life and death — and his son, Josh, he is survived by six grandchildren. After living for about 50 years on the Upper West Side, Mr. Leichter moved to the Upper East Side in 1997 and was living there at his death.

Parks were a particular passion of Mr. Leichter’s. He co-wrote legislation that transformed four miles of derelict and rotting piers below West 59th Street in Manhattan into the strips of greenery and concrete piers that compose Hudson River Park. He was also a leading advocate for building a 10-block-long park atop a water treatment plant on the Hudson River, now called Riverbank State Park. Both are among his most palpable achievements.

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

Joseph Berger was a reporter and editor at The New York Times for 30 years. He is the author of a forthcoming biography of Elie Wiesel. @joeberg

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