The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

by Eleanor Randolph

  It would be hard to argue too vigorously against taller buildings in a city where there is a limited amount of land. But the question often asked was whether there was a pattern for these towers or whether they simply sprouted without warning like weeds. The city’s Municipal Art Society raged about these structures in an interactive report called “The Accidental Skyline.” The report, which noted that too many of these towers were built without public input, lamented that New York could become a city that is “darker, drearier, and more austere than its people deserve . . . A place where ordinary New Yorkers can’t find an affordable apartment while faceless corporations stockpile vacant investment properties.”28 Their solution, repeated more urgently every year since the end of the Bloomberg era, was to change zoning laws that allow this swapping of air rights and other ways to build sky-high, to give the public a better chance to comment on a new tower, and to make certain developers live up to their promises to have plazas or parks open to the public or to build schools or affordable housing.

  Bloomberg encouraged this high-end development, primarily as a sign of vitality in his city. Billionaires’ Row, as the stretch just south of Central Park became known, brought good construction jobs. Those well-paid workers crafted $10/$50/$100 million Manhattan penthouses with views that said, “I’m really, really rich. Just look. I can see the Tappan Zee Bridge from midtown.”

  Bloomberg repeatedly welcomed the moneyed class to New York City. He did not want to discourage them with taxes or off-putting talk of the one percent. “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” he said, “because that’s where the revenue comes [from] to take care of everybody else.”29

  * * *

  As Bloomberg left office, the independent real estate publication Curbed NY catalogued the surge of architectural tower-envy in New York. There were more than twenty skyscrapers in various stages of development, some so tall they needed approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.30 Nine of them in Manhattan were taller than the Empire State Building’s historic 1,250 feet.

  One of the first to be completed rose to 1,396 feet at 432 Park Avenue (near Fifty-seventh Street). It is a tall thin box that could be seen around much of the city, which was obviously part of the point. Architect Rafael Viñoly said that the facade was inspired by a trash can—albeit a fancy Josef Hoffmann trash can that cost $225.31 Then came Central Park Tower, which soared to 1,550 feet and where apartments started in the eight-digit range. The SHoP Architects tower at 111 West Fifty-seventh Street rises to 1,428 feet and looks needle-thin. In midtown, One Vanderbilt climbs to 1,401 feet.32 At one point, Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic, wrote that the row of towers would create striped shadows on Central Park.33 But the upward trend was true across the city with new high-rises under construction in midtown Manhattan, Chelsea, Chinatown, and Brooklyn, with more being considered every month.

  * * *

  For all of Bloomberg’s efforts to “incentivize” the corporate world, the most important building site and the tallest office towers in his city were not under his control. The sixteen acres that were once the World Trade Center were still smoldering after the September 11 attacks when Bloomberg took office a few blocks away, but plans for its memorial and the tallest building in the city (at 1,776 feet) would be controlled by the state.

  Former mayor Rudy Giuliani and then governor George Pataki, both Republicans, had believed the polls in 2001 that suggested the next mayor would be Democratic candidate Mark Green, a fast-talking consumer advocate who might try to block their every whim. So they created a new group that would essentially allow the governor to oversee the rebuilding of the site. Called the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the new structure allowed Pataki to control the site and much of the federal money that Congress had given the city to rebuild.

  Early on, Bloomberg and Pataki were supposed to review the two finalists in a global contest to design the master plan for the site. But somehow Bloomberg was not told about the key meeting. The event did not even show up on the mayor’s calendar, and it34 was hard to believe it was a mistake, knowing the firecrackers on Bloomberg’s staff. So Pataki alone decided the master planner would be Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind’s proposal allowed five skyscrapers, the tallest one being a symbolic 1,776 feet. The losing plan by Rafael Viñoly featured latticework towers, and Pataki decided they looked like two giant skeletons. Bloomberg later agreed. He said they reminded him of “two beer cans,” supersized recepticles at the center of the now-hallowed site.35

  In some ways it should have been a relief to Bloomberg that others were in charge. At the time, he had his own troubles trying to keep the city from sliding back into the desperate 1970s. And the site was intensely complicated—a wall to keep out the river, trains that ran underneath, all kinds of pipes and wires and substructures, plus the need to please and pacify victims’ families and mourning New Yorkers, and even the security experts at the city police department. There were 19 public agencies, two private corporations, 101 contractors, and 33 designers eventually involved.36 And the developer Larry Silverstein, who had leased the towers six weeks before the attack, argued that he had the right to build the towers just the way they were.

  After a few years and endless conflicts, the site became as quiet as the tomb some wanted it to be. Only the wind stirred as politicians and Silverstein and the architects and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wrestled for control.

  Meanwhile, the mayor did not keep quiet about how the Trade Center should fit into his city’s landscape. He told his team in city hall that the future of finance would not be confined to Wall Street—there was also midtown, where his own offices were built, and there was already excitement about the possibilities of a new business district on Manhattan’s West Side. To Bloomberg, the idea of immediately building back the ten million square feet of office space destroyed in the attack seemed daft.37

  Bloomberg was one of the few people who dared to be blunt about what it meant to lose the two now-iconic towers. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he told the Association for a Better New York in late 2002, “we will recognize that the impact [of the Trade Center] on our city was not all positive.” The World Trade Center megaliths and their gale-swept plazas had added to the sterility of the neighborhood, especially after trading hours when the financiers of Wall Street rushed to the suburbs. And he reminded the crowd of business leaders that the unrented space at the Twin Towers had for years “weakened the entire downtown real estate market.”38

  He and his staff did come up with a plan to revitalize the rest of Lower Manhattan—to make it, as they said repeatedly, a working part of the twenty-four-hour city. That would require public amenities to attract private development, the Bloomberg people decided. Their plan, which took many of its ideas from such urban experts as Alexander Garvin of Yale,39 included extensions to the waterfront parks, ten thousand new apartments, libraries, schools, a new transit hub, ferry service, and a one-seat ride to New York or New Jersey airports. Much of that eventually got done in Bloomberg’s twelve years—although the ferries were on and off and the uncomplicated, one-seat rides to the airports never happened.40

  Bloomberg’s downtown did begin to thrive, however. Population in the area more than doubled from 22,700 in 2000 to 49,000 in 2014, and there was suddenly more available housing with Frank Gehry’s dramatically torqued skyscraper and other apartment complexes. At least a third of the residents made $200,000 a year and two-thirds of them were under forty-five years old. It was a retailer’s dream, a demographic group that could easily drive the economy at full speed.41

  Finally, in 2005, Bloomberg got his chance to intervene at the Trade Center site. Silverstein, the developer, needed money to build his towers, and he asked for some of the city’s $3.35 billion in tax-free Liberty Bonds that were part of the federal effort to help New York after the attack.42 Bloomberg and Doctoroff quietly commissioned Lehman Brothers to run the number
s on what it would cost for Silverstein to rebuild the World Trade Center site. What they learned was alarming. The analysis found that Silverstein would not have the money even with help from the city and the federal bonds to construct the elaborate arc of tall buildings as proposed by star architect Libeskind. Bloomberg and Doctoroff saw that the hole in the center of Bloomberg’s city could remain a wound for years to come, especially if Silverstein went bankrupt and walked away.43

  It took a while, but in 2006 all parties signed onto a “watershed” agreement to get back to work.44 Even more important for Mayor Bloomberg, he would take command of the foundation that was supposed to raise money to build the central memorial—two massive voids and waterfalls where the towers had been. Big donors knew about the chaos, and it sounded like an uninviting way to burn money.

  Mike Bloomberg, the philanthropist, knew just who to grab by the shoulders to get the necessary millions, and he would, of course, reach into his own bank account for $15 million in seed money.45 Bloomberg, the engineer, was also anxious to oversee the complex mechanisms needed to build and maintain giant waterfalls almost three stories high that were at the center of the memorial. And the manager-mayor knew how to get things done. Not in twenty years. Tomorrow.

  That impatience was on display one day when Bloomberg met with families of the victims. This was a group of people who felt they had a lot of say about what happened on this site, and officials went out of their way to be solicitous. In this case, the family members were arguing about how to arrange the names of the victims around the edges of the great voids. Should the dead be listed alphabetically, clustered by floor? Randomly? Bloomberg talked to—and listened to— the families. He had learned about how names were listed on other memorials like Maya Lin’s poignant monument to those lost in Vietnam. Then, listening to the back and forth and then back again that day, Bloomberg suddenly erupted. Red-faced and clearly annoyed, he lectured the mourners about how it was time to move on. He had moved on when his father died while he was in college, he told them. Now it was their turn.

  The people running the meeting for the Port Authority were stunned after Bloomberg marched out, leaving behind a roomful of family members as angry as hornets. The Port Authority experts would spend a good hour trying to calm the crowd, but they knew he was right. It was time to move on, and as one official said, “Maybe that’s what it’s like to be a billionaire and you can say anything. Whatever you think, you say it.”46 It was certainly classic Bloomberg. Whining and malingering and even extended mourning were not part of the Bloomberg way.

  Bloomberg, who believed in the power of deadlines, also wanted the memorial to be finished on the tenth anniversary of the attack—September 11, 2011. Soon, however, he began hearing about delay after delay at the site. The design called Reflecting Absence by Michael Arad, a young Israeli-American architect then working for the city’s Housing Authority,47 was as complex as it was dramatic. The Port Authority had started working on Arad’s massive waterfalls dropping into the footprints of the old Trade Center, but there were also so many other pieces of the site being built at the same time. Each piece seemed to depend on another part like a huge interactive puzzle. The museum would not be ready, that was a given—but, the waterfalls? The names of the victims? The rows of nearly four hundred swamp white oak trees designed to give life to Arad’s severe but stunning memorial?

  Early in the fall of 2008, Christopher Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority, was summoned to city hall. It was not a friendly request. When Ward arrived and the mayor escorted him to the balcony overlooking his famous bull pen, Bloomberg was primed for battle.

  “ ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing,’ ” Ward remembered the mayor saying. “ ‘I just want you to know that my patience has run out.’ ” The memorial now had to be the number one priority for the site, Bloomberg demanded. Everything else could slide, but not the memorial. It had to be ready for the ten-year anniversary. Period. No excuses.

  That was exactly the kind of direction Ward needed. “That meant I could get back to [the developer, the governor, the families] everybody and when they asked for something else, and I could say, get the fuck in line.”48 The Port workers scrambled for the next three years, and shortly before the opening, the engineers and observers stood around the voids for a test of the giant waterfalls. After a momentary rumble, like a geyser gaining force deep within the earth, the water suddenly crashed down around the massive stone squares. The memorial had worked. Somebody yelled, “Yippee.” It felt like a miracle, a marvel of engineering and art after years of delay and disorganization. The powerful cascade also sent a spray of mist as cover for tough construction guys and a few outsiders who were trying unsuccessfully to maintain a tearless, professional reserve.

  On September 11, 2011, the memorial opened for the families and for the annual service remembering those lost at that site a decade earlier. On that first day, visitors sobbed as they touched the names of their loved ones engraved around the pools. They left American flags and roses, and some brought paper and charcoal to get a rubbing of a special name. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush and their wives came to pay their respects along with virtually every politician in the area. Soon as many as six million people would come every year to see the waterfalls and the names and, later, the museum. Bloomberg’s fierce deadline deserved much of the credit for that opening day.

  As Michael Arad said of his memorial and the city’s driven mayor, “It wouldn’t have happened without him.”49

  19

  TAKING THE HIGH LINE

  “It’s a no brainer.”

  —Bloomberg, in 2001

  In one of his last actions before leaving the mayor’s office in 2001, Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed an order to demolish a decrepit elevated railway that darkened the streets of Manhattan’s West Side Meatpacking District.1

  The merchants in the area were relieved. They saw only a seventy-year-old hulk, its rusting bits, crumbling concrete, and pigeon droppings landing on their sidewalks and discouraging their dreams of development. But a small group of enthusiasts, led by two young activists Robert Hammond, an entrepreneur, and Joshua David, a magazine writer, saw a different future for the structure. They were determined to turn the 1.45-mile elevated railway into a park stretching from Fourteenth Street to the Javits Center on Thirty-fourth. Pie-in-the-sky, local critics called it when they were being charitable.

  Giuliani’s jackhammers failed to arrive before Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as mayor. And the city’s new leader believed in parks, as he said repeatedly. They were the city’s lungs, as Frederick Law Olmsted once rhapsodized about his Central Park creation. And they were the “catalysts” that Bloomberg so often talked about to help revive his battered city. Parks were attractions that lured people and developers and money.

  Early in Bloomberg’s first term, Amanda Burden, his planning guru and zoning expert, joined a few early supporters of the High Line, imagining a park that would be unique in all of America. The old railway that Giuliani wanted to tear down could be the city’s version of the Coulée verte René-Dumont in Paris, a tree-lined elevated viaduct that had opened nearly a decade earlier. After much very-French disdain, the Coulée soon became one of the city’s treasured landmarks. In much the same way, New York City’s High Line park could help a fairly seedy area of Manhattan become a vital place with restaurants and shops and offices and apartments, Burden and the advocates argued. But, as she and the friends of the High Line knew, it would not be easy.

  In fact, in those first days of the Bloomberg era when the mayor was busy trying to balance a lopsided city budget and working to keep the city intact, the High Line looked like a goner.

  Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, who was in charge of development, said at the time that he was skeptical. (He later suggested that was something of a negotiating position.)2 Doctoroff was at the center of the campaign—one side pushing to get rid of the “blighting influence” of the old railway, the oth
er desperate to save it as a city treasure.

  The advocates even used what was usually the clincher in their attempt to convert a skeptic. They invited Doctoroff to see the High Line firsthand. Early in 2002, on an extremely cold, gray day, Doctoroff remembered that “you had to crawl through the chain link fence—it was authorized by CSX [the company that owned the rail bed]—and your first impression was it’s cold up here. It’s miserable. What’s the big deal?”3

  Doctoroff also worried privately that the High Line might somehow affect his plans for a stadium on the West Side and his obsession with bringing the Olympics to New York City in 2012.4

  In those early Bloomberg days, the opponents of the High Line—the merchants and landowners—felt confident they could get Doctoroff on their side. In 2002, a group of angry owners of the parking lots and other buildings in the area met with Doctoroff to argue that he must demolish the railway as Giuliani had promised. These Chelsea property owners were escorted by their lawyer, Randy Mastro, once Giuliani’s fast-talking deputy, who by then was working for one of the city’s biggest law firms.

  Mastro arrived dragging a little red wagon, like something borrowed from the children’s park nearby. On it was a large piece of concrete, a dangerous chunk that Mastro said had recently fallen from the High Line, the overhead railway.5