The West Side Stadium is nearly two-thirds complete, its massive foundation nestled between fresh pockets of open space and parks. On the sidewalks surrounding the development, merchants already sell shirts and hats emblazoned with the Olympics “NYC2012” logo. Oblivious to the cranes and construction equipment surrounding the stadium, commuters stream in and out of the newly opened No. 7 subway station at 11th Avenue and 34th Street. Construction crews have finished decking over the Hudson Rail Yards. Atop the deck, a host of new skyscrapers have begun to grow.
This was the way it was supposed to be. This was Dan Doctoroff’s vision. Instead, Manhattan’s far West Side looks much the way did before Doctoroff—perhaps Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s closest confidant—became the city’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding six years ago. The Javits Center is there, yet to be renovated, although plans are underway. The rail yards remain there too, uncovered and gleaming in the cold December sun.
It is four days before he will announce his resignation, and Doctoroff stands in the piercing wind on a rooftop, surveying what he will soon leave behind. Although he remains silent about his imminent job change, he knows where he has been and where he’s headed—he will move in January from being Bloomberg’s point man on economic development to the president of Bloomberg LP, the mayor’s $5 billion financial news company. Despite his move to the private sector, he will—at Bloomberg’s behest—retain his chairmanship of the Hudson Yards Development Corporation and continue to play a role in the development of Queens West and the implementation of PlaNYC.
But today, Doctoroff rests for a moment on the rooftop, reflecting on the changes he has wrought, what he failed to accomplish, and what he has yet to do. He traces the buildings yet to be built with his finger, describing what would be in place by 2013, a year after what would have been the closing ceremonies on the site, had his Olympic dream come true.
“In six years, you’ll have the whole thing basically decked over on both sides,” he says. “The FedEx building will be gone. There’ll be a boulevard between 10th and 11th that extends up between 33rd and 36th streets. I believe you’ll have a hotel that will be across the street from Javits.”
Doctoroff continues to draw his finger across the imaginary skyline.
“The High Line will be done,” Doctoroff says, his finger now trundling along the grass-strewn elevated train track that makes up the southern edge of the yards. “Maybe you’ll have construction underway—I don’t know how much—on the western rail yards. We’ll be pretty far along actually. I’d say the eastern rail yards will be landscaped. Javits, whatever renovation and expansion needs to be done, by 2013. The subway will be open.”
In five years, the Olympics were supposed to have descended on New York, transforming the city’s skyline and economy.
Instead, a far different vision will come to pass on Manhattan’s dormant West Side.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,” Doctoroff says, his arms crossed, the wind chopping at his 6-foot-2 frame. He speaks confidently about the planned development, but his mind appears to be elsewhere; of course, as it turns out, it is.
Doctoroff’s first pass at a transformation of Manhattan’s West Side ended in disaster. Bloomberg hired him as his fifth and final deputy mayor largely based on his credentials as head of NYC2012, a nonprofit authorized by the city to compete for the Olympic bid.
Doctoroff parlayed a stint at Lehman Brothers into a partnership at Oak Hill Capital. He even put up $4 million of his own cash for his Olympic dream, and crafted what he thought was a winning sales pitch.
But the $1.4 billion stadium plan faced a stiff and diverse opposition. Community groups, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the police union, the New York Yankees and Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden, all vehemently opposed Doctoroff’s plan. Then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver voted to block the plan in the Public Authorities Control Board.
Doctoroff still believes the opposition was rooted very much in misunderstanding his vision, for which he takes responsibility.
“The stadium, which we really viewed much more as an extension of the convention center, we never managed to convey that very effectively,” Doctoroff says now.
Doctoroff dismisses the long-term costs of the debacle. Aspects of the original plan are still in place, he says, and moving steadily forward, including the extension of the No. 7 line, the Javits expansion, the rezoning for millions of square feet in new residential and commercial space and the investment in infrastructure, including parks and open space.
He acknowledges the obvious: The defeat was huge and highly visible. But he notes that the city had a safety net built in to allow a majority of the projects tied to the Olympics to go forward in case the bid was defeated.
“We still focused on Flushing,” he says. “We still focused on Fresh Kills. Downtown Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Waterfront. The West Side. Willets Point. Up in Harlem. The areas that we picked for Olympic focus, we didn’t stop just because we didn’t win the Olympics.”
“In fact,” Doctoroff adds, with his characteristic optimism and fondness for phrases that sound like talking points, “in many ways it just encouraged us to move faster and more aggressively.” Aggressiveness and speed—those are viewed by some as Doctoroff’s assets, by others as contributing factors to his failures.
Over the last six years, New York has experienced its biggest residential and commercial construction boom in three decades. Larger-than-life building projects dot the landscape. And the boom is anticipated to only get bigger. Construction spending in the city will reach $83 billion between 2007 and 2009, the New York Building Congress, an industry group, predicted in October.
For Doctoroff, rezoning became a tool to transform the physical look of New York. During his six years, he oversaw 78 rezonings covering more than 6,000 city blocks.
Starting up north in the Bronx, a new Yankee Stadium is being built adjacent to the old one. In the stadium’s shadow will be the Bronx Terminal Market, 18 acres and a million new square feet of retail space that Doctoroff believes will reshape the South Bronx “in ways that are staggering.”
Across the Harlem River in Upper Manhattan, Columbia University’s massive and controversial expansion is beginning, with the City Planning Board’s recent approval putting the university on track to expand its campus 17 acres into Harlem. Skirting the island’s west side brings one to the Hudson Yards as well as the planned site for Moynihan Station, while on the opposite side of Manhattan, plans are underway to construct a $700 million commercial bioscience facility.
Over the East River, cranes and construction equipment have sprung up all over Long Island City in Queens, while to the southeast Jamaica is beginning to see a number of new housing and commercial real estate go up. Back west in Brooklyn, the downtown is adding 12,000 new units of housing. And the Atlantic Yards project, controversial in its use of eminent domain, will produce a staggering 16 new Frank Gehry buildings and an 18,000-seat basketball arena.
A short trip over the Brooklyn Bridge brings you back to Manhattan. Turn south and you will stand at the edge of the gaping hole in Doctoroff’s legacy: Ground Zero. Robert Harding, who held much of Doctoroff’s portfolio in the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R), carried the title deputy mayor for economic development and finance. Doctoroff’s title was amended to include rebuilding because Lower Manhattan needed to be rebuilt. The city unveiled its plans for Ground Zero to a resounding Bronx cheer in 2002. The plan was too dense and too lacking in respect for the victims, critics said. Doctoroff went back to the drawing board. Years passed and the hole in Lower Manhattan remained unfilled.
Doctoroff blames the lack of Ground Zero progress on too many participants in the process. The city, the state, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Port Authority, the MTA, the State Department of Transportation, Battery Park City and the victims’ families all had competing interests and all needed to be heard.
“Other than the fact that it was in New York City,” Doctoroff says, “we had virtually no real authority at all.”
But Doctoroff’s critics—and there are many—blame him for mismanagement, and fault the Bloomberg administration for ceding too much of the control over the area to Gov. Pataki (R). Notably, the only development news coming out of Ground Zero of late has been the continuing debates over the Freedom Tower design, the laying and then removing of a cornerstone for the building and the two firefighters who died in the August Deutsche Bank building blaze. Rather than being about construction, the news out of Ground Zero is about construction problems and a building that nearly everyone agrees should have been demolished long ago.
“The owners of the [Deutsche Bank] building,” Doctoroff now says, “didn’t want to cooperate.”
A childhood in suburban Detroit, an education at Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, a professional career in finance, a fortune made in investment—these are hardly the expected credentials of a New York City urban planner. “I’m not sure I felt unqualified,” Doctoroff says of his first year on the job. “I didn’t know how to get things done. That had to be completely learned from scratch.
As he looks back over his tenure, Doctoroff articulates for the first time what has been obvious to others for a while: the adjustment period wasn’t easy
“What I did feel for a long time was totally underwater,” Doctoroff says. “The image that kept coming to mind was being submerged, occasionally popping to the surface to get a quick gasp of air and then being pushed right back down again. I felt that probably for the first year.”
Doctoroff has skimmed The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s 1,344 page account of Robert Moses’ time as master builder in New York. With the title of Parks Commissioner, Moses reshaped the city with his own epic vision: He brought two World’s Fairs to the city, along with thew United Nations, while at the same time proposing changes that would have harmed the city’s future forever. Doctoroff has often been compared to Moses, and he says there are lessons to be learned from his predecessor about community input, about displacing people and about inclusiveness. He says that he learned them through counterexample.
One statistic he is fond of quoting: 200,000 people were relocated by Moses, while only 400 residents and 700 businesses will have been relocated by Doctoroff.
“Moses frequently went where people were,” Doctoroff says. “We’ve gone where people aren’t.”
Now that he has revealed his long-rumored plans to leave—and perhaps with the memory of Caro’s scathing, Pulitzer Prize-winning book in mind—Doctoroff says he will focus on his legacy. If he has his way, PlaNYC, the long-term sustainability blueprint announced by Bloomberg last winter, will be the main part of it—though some believe he fumbled negotiations with state leaders this spring, leading to the delay and possible demise of congestion pricing, a key element of that plan.
Since the idea was officially unveiled last April, Doctoroff has ping-ponged across the city, hyping PlaNYC to a variety of constituent groups. His stump speech, which he estimates he has given more than 50 times, comes laced with towering pronouncements about wanting the cleanest air, the most efficient subways, the greenest parks and the healthiest citizens.
“Cities go in one of two directions,” Doctoroff says. “They go up or they go down. It’s like companies. It’s same thing.”
If New York fails to move forward, especially in the face of global competition from London, Dubai, Singapore and others, the city will have real problems, Doctoroff says.
After the last PlaNYC speech he delivered before announcing his departure, given to the New York City School Construction Authority Dec. 3, he allows a couple questions.
Almost immediately, a man shouts from the front row, “Are you going to run for mayor?”
The crowd laughs and applauds.
“I’m almost afraid to repeat the question,” Doctoroff says, smiling. Then he answers.
“Absolutely not,” he says.
Talk of Doctoroff as a potential Bloomberg successor, once strong, has faded of late—perhaps a reflection of some of his high profile setbacks, perhaps because of his adamant denials. (Although Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has not succeeded in quashing the discussion about his own candidacy. with his insistence that he does not want to run). But with Doctoroff’s resignation, the speculation may finally be put fully to rest.
He says he first began discussing his departure with Bloomberg around three years ago, right when the Olympics bid and the stadium deal started to fall apart.
Four days before his resignation announcement, in his last official public act as deputy mayor, Doctoroff stands in the Times Square subway station in front of a bank of reporters and flashing cameras. He is flanked by Bloomberg, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and other top elected and appointed officials. They are “breaking ground” on the No. 7 subway extension—although unlike the Second Avenue Subway groundbreaking in April, when Doctoroff and some of the others present took pickaxes to concrete in an underground tunnel, today they simply pull a blue drape from a new sign pointing west on the No. 7.
Quinn, his former foe during the stadium war, thanks Doctoroff for his respectful treatment of her constituents on the Hudson Yards deal. Bloomberg calls him a “visionary” who has “done so much for this city.”
During the question and answer session, the mayor defers the first question—about a proposed station at 41st Street and Tenth Avenue—to Doctoroff. The station was never part of the plan, Doctoroff says. The next question is about cost overruns.
“Let me take that one too,” Doctoroff says, slipping seamlessly between the mayor and the microphones.
A third question is prefaced as “one that Dan Doctoroff hopefully can’t answer.”
“Uh oh,” Bloomberg says. “Now we’re in trouble.”
This was the way it was supposed to be. This was Dan Doctoroff’s vision. Instead, Manhattan’s far West Side looks much the way did before Doctoroff—perhaps Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s closest confidant—became the city’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding six years ago. The Javits Center is there, yet to be renovated, although plans are underway. The rail yards remain there too, uncovered and gleaming in the cold December sun.
It is four days before he will announce his resignation, and Doctoroff stands in the piercing wind on a rooftop, surveying what he will soon leave behind. Although he remains silent about his imminent job change, he knows where he has been and where he’s headed—he will move in January from being Bloomberg’s point man on economic development to the president of Bloomberg LP, the mayor’s $5 billion financial news company. Despite his move to the private sector, he will—at Bloomberg’s behest—retain his chairmanship of the Hudson Yards Development Corporation and continue to play a role in the development of Queens West and the implementation of PlaNYC.
But today, Doctoroff rests for a moment on the rooftop, reflecting on the changes he has wrought, what he failed to accomplish, and what he has yet to do. He traces the buildings yet to be built with his finger, describing what would be in place by 2013, a year after what would have been the closing ceremonies on the site, had his Olympic dream come true.
“In six years, you’ll have the whole thing basically decked over on both sides,” he says. “The FedEx building will be gone. There’ll be a boulevard between 10th and 11th that extends up between 33rd and 36th streets. I believe you’ll have a hotel that will be across the street from Javits.”
Doctoroff continues to draw his finger across the imaginary skyline.
“The High Line will be done,” Doctoroff says, his finger now trundling along the grass-strewn elevated train track that makes up the southern edge of the yards. “Maybe you’ll have construction underway—I don’t know how much—on the western rail yards. We’ll be pretty far along actually. I’d say the eastern rail yards will be landscaped. Javits, whatever renovation and expansion needs to be done, by 2013. The subway will be open.”
In five years, the Olympics were supposed to have descended on New York, transforming the city’s skyline and economy.
Instead, a far different vision will come to pass on Manhattan’s dormant West Side.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,” Doctoroff says, his arms crossed, the wind chopping at his 6-foot-2 frame. He speaks confidently about the planned development, but his mind appears to be elsewhere; of course, as it turns out, it is.
Doctoroff’s first pass at a transformation of Manhattan’s West Side ended in disaster. Bloomberg hired him as his fifth and final deputy mayor largely based on his credentials as head of NYC2012, a nonprofit authorized by the city to compete for the Olympic bid.
Doctoroff parlayed a stint at Lehman Brothers into a partnership at Oak Hill Capital. He even put up $4 million of his own cash for his Olympic dream, and crafted what he thought was a winning sales pitch.
But the $1.4 billion stadium plan faced a stiff and diverse opposition. Community groups, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the police union, the New York Yankees and Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden, all vehemently opposed Doctoroff’s plan. Then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver voted to block the plan in the Public Authorities Control Board.
Doctoroff still believes the opposition was rooted very much in misunderstanding his vision, for which he takes responsibility.
“The stadium, which we really viewed much more as an extension of the convention center, we never managed to convey that very effectively,” Doctoroff says now.
Doctoroff dismisses the long-term costs of the debacle. Aspects of the original plan are still in place, he says, and moving steadily forward, including the extension of the No. 7 line, the Javits expansion, the rezoning for millions of square feet in new residential and commercial space and the investment in infrastructure, including parks and open space.
He acknowledges the obvious: The defeat was huge and highly visible. But he notes that the city had a safety net built in to allow a majority of the projects tied to the Olympics to go forward in case the bid was defeated.
“We still focused on Flushing,” he says. “We still focused on Fresh Kills. Downtown Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Waterfront. The West Side. Willets Point. Up in Harlem. The areas that we picked for Olympic focus, we didn’t stop just because we didn’t win the Olympics.”
“In fact,” Doctoroff adds, with his characteristic optimism and fondness for phrases that sound like talking points, “in many ways it just encouraged us to move faster and more aggressively.” Aggressiveness and speed—those are viewed by some as Doctoroff’s assets, by others as contributing factors to his failures.
Over the last six years, New York has experienced its biggest residential and commercial construction boom in three decades. Larger-than-life building projects dot the landscape. And the boom is anticipated to only get bigger. Construction spending in the city will reach $83 billion between 2007 and 2009, the New York Building Congress, an industry group, predicted in October.
For Doctoroff, rezoning became a tool to transform the physical look of New York. During his six years, he oversaw 78 rezonings covering more than 6,000 city blocks.
Starting up north in the Bronx, a new Yankee Stadium is being built adjacent to the old one. In the stadium’s shadow will be the Bronx Terminal Market, 18 acres and a million new square feet of retail space that Doctoroff believes will reshape the South Bronx “in ways that are staggering.”
Across the Harlem River in Upper Manhattan, Columbia University’s massive and controversial expansion is beginning, with the City Planning Board’s recent approval putting the university on track to expand its campus 17 acres into Harlem. Skirting the island’s west side brings one to the Hudson Yards as well as the planned site for Moynihan Station, while on the opposite side of Manhattan, plans are underway to construct a $700 million commercial bioscience facility.
Over the East River, cranes and construction equipment have sprung up all over Long Island City in Queens, while to the southeast Jamaica is beginning to see a number of new housing and commercial real estate go up. Back west in Brooklyn, the downtown is adding 12,000 new units of housing. And the Atlantic Yards project, controversial in its use of eminent domain, will produce a staggering 16 new Frank Gehry buildings and an 18,000-seat basketball arena.
A short trip over the Brooklyn Bridge brings you back to Manhattan. Turn south and you will stand at the edge of the gaping hole in Doctoroff’s legacy: Ground Zero. Robert Harding, who held much of Doctoroff’s portfolio in the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R), carried the title deputy mayor for economic development and finance. Doctoroff’s title was amended to include rebuilding because Lower Manhattan needed to be rebuilt. The city unveiled its plans for Ground Zero to a resounding Bronx cheer in 2002. The plan was too dense and too lacking in respect for the victims, critics said. Doctoroff went back to the drawing board. Years passed and the hole in Lower Manhattan remained unfilled.
Doctoroff blames the lack of Ground Zero progress on too many participants in the process. The city, the state, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Port Authority, the MTA, the State Department of Transportation, Battery Park City and the victims’ families all had competing interests and all needed to be heard.
“Other than the fact that it was in New York City,” Doctoroff says, “we had virtually no real authority at all.”
But Doctoroff’s critics—and there are many—blame him for mismanagement, and fault the Bloomberg administration for ceding too much of the control over the area to Gov. Pataki (R). Notably, the only development news coming out of Ground Zero of late has been the continuing debates over the Freedom Tower design, the laying and then removing of a cornerstone for the building and the two firefighters who died in the August Deutsche Bank building blaze. Rather than being about construction, the news out of Ground Zero is about construction problems and a building that nearly everyone agrees should have been demolished long ago.
“The owners of the [Deutsche Bank] building,” Doctoroff now says, “didn’t want to cooperate.”
A childhood in suburban Detroit, an education at Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, a professional career in finance, a fortune made in investment—these are hardly the expected credentials of a New York City urban planner. “I’m not sure I felt unqualified,” Doctoroff says of his first year on the job. “I didn’t know how to get things done. That had to be completely learned from scratch.
As he looks back over his tenure, Doctoroff articulates for the first time what has been obvious to others for a while: the adjustment period wasn’t easy
“What I did feel for a long time was totally underwater,” Doctoroff says. “The image that kept coming to mind was being submerged, occasionally popping to the surface to get a quick gasp of air and then being pushed right back down again. I felt that probably for the first year.”
Doctoroff has skimmed The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s 1,344 page account of Robert Moses’ time as master builder in New York. With the title of Parks Commissioner, Moses reshaped the city with his own epic vision: He brought two World’s Fairs to the city, along with thew United Nations, while at the same time proposing changes that would have harmed the city’s future forever. Doctoroff has often been compared to Moses, and he says there are lessons to be learned from his predecessor about community input, about displacing people and about inclusiveness. He says that he learned them through counterexample.
One statistic he is fond of quoting: 200,000 people were relocated by Moses, while only 400 residents and 700 businesses will have been relocated by Doctoroff.
“Moses frequently went where people were,” Doctoroff says. “We’ve gone where people aren’t.”
Now that he has revealed his long-rumored plans to leave—and perhaps with the memory of Caro’s scathing, Pulitzer Prize-winning book in mind—Doctoroff says he will focus on his legacy. If he has his way, PlaNYC, the long-term sustainability blueprint announced by Bloomberg last winter, will be the main part of it—though some believe he fumbled negotiations with state leaders this spring, leading to the delay and possible demise of congestion pricing, a key element of that plan.
Since the idea was officially unveiled last April, Doctoroff has ping-ponged across the city, hyping PlaNYC to a variety of constituent groups. His stump speech, which he estimates he has given more than 50 times, comes laced with towering pronouncements about wanting the cleanest air, the most efficient subways, the greenest parks and the healthiest citizens.
“Cities go in one of two directions,” Doctoroff says. “They go up or they go down. It’s like companies. It’s same thing.”
If New York fails to move forward, especially in the face of global competition from London, Dubai, Singapore and others, the city will have real problems, Doctoroff says.
After the last PlaNYC speech he delivered before announcing his departure, given to the New York City School Construction Authority Dec. 3, he allows a couple questions.
Almost immediately, a man shouts from the front row, “Are you going to run for mayor?”
The crowd laughs and applauds.
“I’m almost afraid to repeat the question,” Doctoroff says, smiling. Then he answers.
“Absolutely not,” he says.
Talk of Doctoroff as a potential Bloomberg successor, once strong, has faded of late—perhaps a reflection of some of his high profile setbacks, perhaps because of his adamant denials. (Although Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has not succeeded in quashing the discussion about his own candidacy. with his insistence that he does not want to run). But with Doctoroff’s resignation, the speculation may finally be put fully to rest.
He says he first began discussing his departure with Bloomberg around three years ago, right when the Olympics bid and the stadium deal started to fall apart.
Four days before his resignation announcement, in his last official public act as deputy mayor, Doctoroff stands in the Times Square subway station in front of a bank of reporters and flashing cameras. He is flanked by Bloomberg, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and other top elected and appointed officials. They are “breaking ground” on the No. 7 subway extension—although unlike the Second Avenue Subway groundbreaking in April, when Doctoroff and some of the others present took pickaxes to concrete in an underground tunnel, today they simply pull a blue drape from a new sign pointing west on the No. 7.
Quinn, his former foe during the stadium war, thanks Doctoroff for his respectful treatment of her constituents on the Hudson Yards deal. Bloomberg calls him a “visionary” who has “done so much for this city.”
During the question and answer session, the mayor defers the first question—about a proposed station at 41st Street and Tenth Avenue—to Doctoroff. The station was never part of the plan, Doctoroff says. The next question is about cost overruns.
“Let me take that one too,” Doctoroff says, slipping seamlessly between the mayor and the microphones.
A third question is prefaced as “one that Dan Doctoroff hopefully can’t answer.”
“Uh oh,” Bloomberg says. “Now we’re in trouble.”
