Coalition board member and legal adviser Mark Baker recommended Tensie Whelan, a gifted and highly respected young community organizer with whom he and former Coalition co-chair Tom Fox had worked on the Hudson River Park negotiations. Whelan, who had served as the executive director of the New York League of Conservation Voters and the vice president of the National Audubon Society, had impressed the Coalition board members during a recent consulting assignment that she had undertaken on behalf of the park project, and they soon reached a consensus that she was the best candidate for the position.
At first, Whelan did not share the Coalition’s conviction that she was the right person for the job. A resident of nearby Park Slope, Whelan was aware of the ongoing controversy surrounding the waterfront movement and the Coalition’s recurring conflicts with local elected officials and community leaders, as well as the internal conflicts within the waterfront movement, and she respectfully declined the offer.
Even after Whelan’s refusal, the Coalition board members still felt strongly that she was the best person for the position, and board member John Watts, a skilled negotiator who rarely took no for an answer, offered to make a second appeal. Watts encouraged Whelan to do a thorough investigation of the current situation and to identify the resources and organizational changes that had to be addressed. He assured her that the Coalition would do everything in its power to provide her with whatever she needed to do the job.
After spending several weeks speaking privately with elected officials, community leaders, and others involved in the Brooklyn Bridge Park movement, Whelan finally agreed to accept the Coalition’s offer, as long as two conditions were met. First, she would agree to work only half time for the Coalition (on a pro bono basis for the first six to nine months), while continuing her current commitments to the other organizations with which she was already involved. Second, Manheim would have to resign his positions as Coalition chair and board member.
From her conversations with the government leaders and elected officials with whom she talked, Whelan learned that Manheim was regarded as the driving force of the park movement, who “through sheer force of will had galvanized engagement around the idea of having a park on the waterfront.”1 She also learned, however, that through his increasingly strained relations with local elected officials and public authorities, Manheim had become the greatest obstacle to the realization of the dream of a park along the west Brooklyn piers that he, more than anyone else, had inspired.
According to architect Fred Bland, who had been involved in the piers negotiations since the earliest interactions between the Port Authority and the Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) Waterfront Committee in the mid-1980s and was also a close friend of Manheim, “The politicians, for whatever their reasons, said, ‘Get rid of him and we’ll go forward. Don’t get rid of him, and we don’t want to touch it.’ ”2
Faced with the stark choice between continuing under the leadership of Manheim, who (according to Baker) had begun to withdraw from Coalition activities since the lawsuit against the Port Authority over the Strober Organization’s use of Pier 3 and the creation of the Local Development Corporation (LDC), and turning to Whelan, who promised to bring desperately needed organizational, strategic planning, and fund-raising skills to the organization, the remaining board members made the painful decision to ask Manheim to step down.
Once the decision to remove Manheim as leader of the Coalition had been made, several board members contacted him individually to inform him of their plans and to try to persuade him to step down voluntarily. “I took Tony for a drink,” recalls board member Irene Janner, “and I said, ‘I feel terrible, but I would have to vote against you continuing on the board too, because it’s hurting the organization.’ I said, ‘You’ll be president emeritus. Your portrait will be on the wall of the Coalition. But you have to get out of the day-to-day stuff, because no one will talk to us.’
“Tony will go down in history as the father of the park,” says Janner, “because none of it would have happened without him. But he would not go, and we literally had to vote him out. And it was very, very upsetting.”3
Manheim repeatedly refused to consider the board members’ requests that he resign on his own initiative, and on the night before the next Coalition board meeting, Bland, who had continued to be involved in Coalition activities but was not a member of the board at the time, was enlisted to make one last, desperate plea for him to step down voluntarily. “Someone called me,” remembers Bland, “and said, ‘You know Tony well. We’re not getting through to him. He’s going to be fired or unelected or whatever the right term is at tomorrow night’s board meeting unless he resigns earlier. And we don’t want that to happen. It’s not fair for him to be fired. We don’t want to do that.’
“So I said, ‘I know Tony well, and I like Tony. Let me see what I can do.’ So I called him and said, ‘Would you have a drink with me?’ And we went down to the Knickerbocker [at 33 University Place in Greenwich Village], which is just two blocks away [from Bland’s office], and we each had a martini. I think it was probably around the end of the first martini, while we were eating, I said, ‘Tony, this isn’t right. It’s the worst thing that could happen. Can’t you just go gracefully and resign?’ And he said, ‘No. You want another martini?’ And we actually each ended up having three martinis. (I don’t think I’ve ever done that.) But he wouldn’t agree. He said, ‘I’m sorry. If they want to get rid of me, they’re going to have to bump me out.’ And the next night they did.”4
The following day, by a vote of 4 to 3, Anthony Manheim was officially “bumped out” of his position as Coalition chair, as well as his membership on the Coalition board. Once the vote was taken and the decision had been finalized, Manheim was civil and polite in accepting the will of his fellow board members. “We talked it over with Tony,” Whelan says of Manheim’s response to the decision, “and he was really gracious and said, ‘I will step down so we can move forward.’ ”5
After Manheim’s quarter of a century as a leader, visionary, and provocateur in the west Brooklyn piers movement, it was difficult for everyone who had previously been involved in the Coalition—and even of some of the elected officials and community leaders with whom he had occasionally quarreled—to imagine the park movement without him.
“Tony deserves a tremendous amount of credit,” Tom Fox insists. “He was the engine that pulled us behind him. He really was. Maria [Favuzzi] and I were sidecars, stoking the fire. I can see myself in the back car, covered with coal dust, throwing fuel on the fire. But Tony was the locomotive. There wouldn’t be a Brooklyn Bridge Park if it wasn’t for Tony.”6
“To my mind,” says Bland, “Tony Manheim is the key to the whole early part of the story. And it was a horrible thing that he was dethroned, but it was the only way we were going to move forward.”7
MANHEIM’S REMOVAL as president of the Coalition immediately strengthened the organization’s credibility with Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden and the other local elected officials with whom he had butted heads in the past as well as the leaders of the LDC, who were apprehensive of future confrontations. For many Brooklyn Heights residents, however, Manheim’s sudden and unexpected absence from the movement he had founded and guided for almost fifteen years raised serious questions about the Coalition’s priorities and purpose going forward.
“Manheim, the guiding dynamo of the park vision for so long, is evidently out of the picture,” wrote Brooklyn journalist Henrik Krogius shortly after the announcement of Manheim’s departure, “which may ease relations between the coalition and the LDC, but which also raises the question of the coalition’s continuing purpose.”8
At the Annual Meeting of the BHA in February 1999, several weeks after Manheim was voted off the Coalition board, a crowd of several hundred local residents gathered at Grace Episcopal Church at 254 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights to jointly honor Manheim and the Coalition with the BHA’s Community Service Award. The entire crowd,
including State Senator Martin Connor, Assemblywoman Joan Millman, and City Council member Ken Fisher, rose to applaud as Manheim’s old friend Fred Bland presented him with the award, citing the former Coalition leader’s “awe-inspiring” dedication, along with his ability to inspire commitment to “a compelling vision that won’t go away.”9
ONCE THE DIFFICULT ISSUE of Manheim’s departure had been resolved, Tensie Whelan wasted little time in taking the reins of the Coalition, immediately introducing the board members to a ninety-day strategy that she had formulated for reestablishing the organization’s importance and credibility in the park movement. Whelan’s strategy focused on three key areas: campaigning, coalition building, and organizational development.
The most pressing task that Whelan faced was working with the Coalition board to redefine the organization’s purpose for existing, now that the LDC had been designated as the legal entity in charge of the design and development of Piers 1–5, and identifying the most effective strategy for achieving that purpose. Whelan was immediately impressed by the board’s tentative decision before her arrival to focus on the property between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges not covered by the LDC mandate, as well as the work that Gary VanderPutten and others had already done to document the impact of commercial development on the site.
“We led Tensie through the whole history of what we had done up till this point and how the inter-bridge area had been left out of the LDC plan and how we wanted to take it back,” remembers VanderPutten. “And she flipped through the book of images that I had done, and she said, ‘Who have you shown this to?’ I said, ‘We’ve shown it quietly. We haven’t gone out there and flooded the neighborhood with leaflets or anything. We’ve been pretty kind to the politicians.’ And she said, ‘All right, give me a month. I intend to pursue this. I just need to do some due diligence, and I’ll get back to you.’ ”10
A month later, Whelan reported back to the Coalition board with a list of resources that she would need to gain support for the organization’s vision of a public park between the bridges, including 1,000 copies of the original images from VanderPutten’s book, aerial views of the inter-bridge area, an artist’s depiction of a public park in the inter-bridge area, and a professional presentation of the assembled images.
VanderPutten recalls the decisive manner with which Whelan communicated her instructions: “She said, ‘Gary, I want pictures of the park area from the air. Rent a helicopter. I don’t care how you get it. I’m not paying for it. You figure it out. I need to have about a hundred slides of what the waterfront looks like right now. Just get it done. Don’t send me the bill.’ ”11
“The strategy I proposed was around several things,” explains Whelan. “The first was on showing the negative impacts of the Walentas development plans for the inter-bridge area. He wanted to cantilever out over the water this huge multiplex and shopping source. And if you did that, it would totally screw up the whole view plane of everything.
“And the other was to create a positive vision in its place,” she continues. “So we wouldn’t just be against something, but would be creating a Coalition for something. So we devised these tools of taking aerial photographs and then putting green and all these other positive things to show what the park would actually look like, instead of all the crap that was there at the time. We also commissioned an artist to draw a beautiful watercolor of what it could look like if we achieved our goal of putting a park there.”12
Whelan’s next step was to reestablish and expand the Coalition’s connections with organizations within and beyond the communities that would be affected by the proposed commercial development of the inter-bridge area. An experienced community organizer with strong institutional connections, Whelan immediately began reaching out both to the city, state, and national organizations with which she had established relationships and to local community organizations with an interest in the park movement, many of which had interacted with the Coalition in the past but were uncertain of the organization’s appropriate role since the LDC had been established. Within a few months, the Coalition had gained—or regained—the support of an impressive roster of local, city, state, and national organizations that were not only enthusiastic about the goal of creating a park on the west Brooklyn piers but also supportive of the role that the Coalition had chosen to play in achieving that goal.
“I designed a whole outreach strategy of bringing in key groups like the Brooklyn Heights Association and all the key neighborhood groups that were going to be affected by all of this,” explains Whelan. “Also, because of my work—I had run the New York League of Conservation Voters before and the National Audubon Society—I knew people at the state level that could get involved and some national chapters from the environmental and conservation community. We started to build a constituency for the park.”13
Finally, Whelan focused her attention on expanding the Coalition’s board (which had shrunk to seven members in the wake of the creation of the LDC and the forced departure of Anthony Manheim), while also redefining the skills and responsibilities associated with board membership. “I also wanted to focus on the institutional development of the Coalition itself,” says Whelan of her decision to adjust the composition and responsibilities of the board. “It had to be give-get. We needed to be clear about the board giving money. We needed to have a good fund-raising plan. We needed to have a strategic plan. We needed to have a staffing development plan, because there was no staff other than me part-time.”14
“Tensie told us, ‘You’ve got to change the board,’ ” remembers VanderPutten. “Forget the local community advocacy. You need people on this board who have experience and purpose. And with her knowledge of the whole political community and the funding community in this area, that’s exactly what she did.”15
The new board recruited by Whelan featured an impressive roster of individuals with extensive experience and connections in New York City politics, waterfront management, and urban-park advocacy and funding. The board members included Albert Butzel, chair of the Hudson River Park Association; Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society; Claude Shostal, president of the Regional Plan Association; Dick Dadey, managing director and government-affairs specialist with Malkin & Ross Strategic Services; Peter Davidson, publisher of El Diario and chairman of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; Marcia Reiss, deputy director of the Parks Council; and photographer and park advocate Lisa Barlow (daughter of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, founder and president of the Central Park Conservancy). “That these people would agree to be on our board just astonished me,” confesses VanderPutten.16
In addition to her decision to reform the Coalition’s board, Whelan recruited two new full-time staff members. Bianca Lila, with whom Whelan had worked at the New York League of Conservation Voters, was hired as the Coalition’s community-outreach director, and Marianna Koval, a Brooklyn attorney who had been consulting with the Coalition to help devise a strategy for the northern section of Brooklyn Bridge Park, was retained as deputy director.
“I had first heard about Brooklyn Bridge Park when I was with the Brooklyn Heights Association in 1995,” Koval recalls. “But it seemed like a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing, and people would roll their eyes when they talked about. But then sometime later, probably around 1996, I walked down to the piers and looked at the water and the pier sheds and the whole area, and I realized that the idea was incredibly visionary.
“So I contacted Mark [Baker, with whom she had worked at the law firm Dewey Ballantine], and I said, ‘I really think we could do something more with the park project here at the BHA to create a greater constituency for it.’ So I offered to create a series of ‘park parties.’ I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I organized a series of 10 ‘park parties,’ asking people to cut into their communities in various ways. Somebody could do a school network, and somebody else could do a church or synagogue network. And I invited different board members from the Brooklyn Bridge Coalition Board to come and g
ive a talk.”17
Whelan and Koval formed a close personal bond and an extremely productive working relationship from the start, sharing a vision for the inter-bridge property and the park development as a whole, along with a similarly intense commitment to getting things done. “The two of them went off like a house on fire,” echoes Gary VanderPutten.18
“We were really effective from the start,” says Koval of the whirlwind of activities that characterized her early working relationship with Whelan, “and raised about $400,000 to $500,000 very quickly from both foundations and individuals. We went around citywide, going from office to office, with pictures that Gary had taken of the site. Tensie and I went back and forth about what was possible. Buzzy O’Keefe, who runs the River Café, agreed to host an organizing meeting at the River Café, and we invited representatives of all the major civic organizations from around the city to a breakfast meeting, gave them a tour of the Brooklyn Bridge Park area, but particularly emphasized that we needed to include the inter-bridge area.”19
As Koval’s comments describe, she and Whelan set to work right away, raising public awareness about Two Trees Management’s new plan for the private development of the inter-bridge area, along with the Coalition’s new emphasis on developing and implementing a strategy for integrating the area north of Pier 1 into the waterfront park.20 The May 1999 issue of the Coalition’s new newsletter, Waterfront Matters, featured a “waterfront alert,” informing members and local residents of recent revisions in the Two Trees plan for the commercial development of the inter-bridge area, along with a lengthy profile of Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park, the small waterfront park between the bridges that would be separated from the park to be developed along Piers 1–5 by the proposed private development.21
A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park Page 15