Planning Chiefs Meet on Downtown

By Ronald Drenger

It was quite the exclusive club that convened one evening last month to discuss the city’s efforts, past and present, to shape the character of Lower Manhattan.

At a public forum organized by the Skyscraper Museum and held at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, five former chairs of the New York City Planning Commission, as well as its current leader, Amanda Burden, looked for lessons in their experiences with Downtown development projects and sought to apply them to current debates about the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.

They agreed that there is an urgency for the government to move faster.

Transit improvements, parks, theaters and other public amenities are needed quickly, they said, to save the financial district and draw residential, commercial and cultural development Downtown.

“Private developers have got to be satisfied that the environment they’re moving into is going to work,” said Donald Elliott, planning chair from 1966 to 1973 under Mayor Lindsay. “If the impression is that it will be a decade before decisions are made, it will be hard to get any private developers to build.”

“Many of us are concerned about dispersal and a lack of leadership,” he added. “It’s time for decisions to be made and we need to focus resources. The time has come for a serious narrowing down of issues.”

Joseph Rose, who served under Mayor Giuliani, said that the current planning process is moving too slowly for developers and Downtown residents and workers.

Burden echoed his call for quicker action. “The future of the commercial center is at stake,” she cautioned.
To lure developers Downtown and turn the area into a vibrant mixed-use community, the government needs to make significant investments to make the area attractive, the speakers said.

“You can’t force the market to build buildings, but you can stimulate the market to respond when circumstances are proper,” said John Zuccotti, planning commissioner from 1973 to 1975 and now head of Brookfield Properties, which owns the World Financial Center.

Burden, who was a vice president of the Battery Park City Authority in the 1980s, noted that during her tenure there, the Authority spent public dollars on parks and public spaces, including the construction of a quarter-mile waterfront esplanade.

“I don’t believe we would have gotten the investment, or the developers would have put up the money, if we didn’t do that. We needed to show what the public life would be.”

Now, she suggested, the government can develop the East River waterfront and create “green ribbons of parks, boulevards, playgrounds and open space.”

But for planning to be effective and unified, “City Planning needs a seat at the table,” said Sylvia Deutsch, the agency’s leader for two years under Mayor Koch.

Deutsch said the planning commission’s chair, and perhaps the heads of other city agencies involved in Downtown development, should have a seat on the 16-member board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the city-state agency overseeing rebuilding on and around the World Trade Center site.

Slinging one of the evening’s few direct barbs at the LMDC, Deutsch said the agency may lack the “staff, time, ability and depth of expertise” to make and implement the planning decisions required by its broad mandate.

Various commissioners pointed out that until now, city planners and developers lacked the space and money to make improvements that they knew Downtown needed.

“Tragically but realistically, we now have the physical capacity to plan infrastructure investments in Lower Manhattan,” Rose said.

“The several billion dollars it can cost to bring the LIRR to Lower Manhattan, to bring improved New Jersey connections, to make the subway system work somewhat better, is crucial,” he said. “If we don’t make these capital investments, we will encounter a catastrophe in the next decade, decade and a half.”

Panelists also warned against competition between city and state agencies and overreaching by planners with unaffordable ideas.

“It distorts the planning process and raises aspirations beyond people’s ability to build projects,” said Zuccotti.

In closing, Burden said that Lower Manhattan, with Wall Street at its heart, water on three sides, and a residential community that was growing quickly before Sept. 11, “is like no other place in the world.”

“This is a moment for decisive movement,” she said. “The potential is huge.”