Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Bookshelf

Is New York ‘Greater Than Ever’? Yes, a Former Official Argues

Daniel L. DoctoroffCredit...Scott Olson/Getty Images

“If the ends don’t justify the means,” Robert Moses liked to say, “what does?”

History has generally judged Moses harshly for both ends and means (favoring roads over rails, bulldozing neighborhoods) in transforming New York City in the 20th century.

In “Greater Than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback,” Daniel L. Doctoroff justifies both his own evangelical means and visionary ends in reshaping the city at the beginning of the 21st.

Mr. Doctoroff, Michael R. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, writes that he waited nearly a decade after leaving City Hall to write this book so that he might observe the fruits of his strategies ripen. His title speaks to the bountiful harvest since.

He also dismissively suggests that “there had been little physical change to the city for nearly a half century” in the desert of urban planning between Moses and himself.

After inheriting a city shaken by the 9/11 terrorist attack, Mr. Bloomberg boldly planned beyond survival and recovery, Mr. Doctoroff argues.

“On paper, we were probably among the least-prepared administrations in history,” he writes, but “by the time Mike Bloomberg completed his third term at the end of 2013, New York was in remarkable shape.”

His metric for that boom was growth, of the city’s population and its budget, to record heights. Inequality grew, too (“we could have done more to respond to the growing pressure faster,” Mr. Doctoroff acknowledges).

Taking a cue from Machiavelli if not Moses, he concludes that it is better for a statesman to be respected and trusted than loved (although Mr. Doctoroff writes that he was surprised at the supposedly coldhearted mayor’s response when asked whether the city’s collective scorn bothered him. “How could it not?” Mr. Bloomberg replied).

Moses left neighborhoods that were shells of their former selves. In contrast, Mr. Doctoroff writes that his plans to develop 130 million square feet of commercial and residential space, two stadiums, a subway extension, 2,400 acres of parks, affordable housing for about 500,000 people and reviving the waterfront displaced only about 400 residents.

Publicly, Mr. Doctoroff was most closely associated with a major public policy failure: an imaginative campaign to lure the 2008 Olympics to New York, in large part by shoehorning a combined football stadium and convention hall onto a platform over the Midtown West railroad tracks known today as Hudson Yards.

Mr. Doctoroff now allows as how the private commercial development of Hudson Yards could not have occurred had the stadium been built (and that the stadium, like a new convention center, should have been shifted to Flushing Meadows in Queens). But he insists that the stadium was more a means than an end.

“I am often asked if pursuing the stadium on the West Side was a mistake,” he writes. “I still think it was the right thing to do. I don’t think the Hudson Yards rezoning, the subway extension, and all of the other investment would have happened if the Olympic catalyst and its strict timetable, which got the rezoning and subway financing done by 2005, hadn’t existed – and our rationale for focusing on the West Side was the stadium.”

Mr. Doctoroff’s combined memoir and manifesto, written with Leslie Kaufman, a former New York Times business reporter, graciously shares credit with former colleagues and other public figures (Kevin Sheekey, Edward Skyler, Jay Kriegel, Richard Ravitch, to name a few).

He also points fingers at duplicitous antagonists in Albany, where his plans for the stadium and congestion-pricing were both scuttled.

His targets include Sheldon Silver, the former New York Assembly speaker (who had “a special relationship” with Madison Square Garden, whose parent company, Cablevision, opposed the stadium); Gov. George E. Pataki (“we had been screwed by the governor and never really knew it,” he wrote. “Albany is a hall of mirrors”); and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (“the city planning, housing and economic development agencies under his watch had atrophied.”)

For better or worse, Mr. Silver finally killed the Bloomberg administration’s hubristic and clumsy crusade for the stadium in 2005. Mr. Silver also later doomed congestion pricing, but only after City Hall had mounted a more constructive campaign in which Mr. Doctoroff enlisted his colleagues and, unlike Moses, solicited the views of affected New Yorkers.

“Maybe I had learned something over the past five years,” Mr. Doctoroff conceded. “I listened.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: In Praise of His Post-9/11 Vision. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT