Mike Bloomberg and the Rebirth of Lower Manhattan
WITH THE 20th ANNIVERSARY of the September 11th attacks approaching, my mind has been drifting back to the horror and heroism of the day, to the “MISSING” signs posted all over the city, showing faces of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. To the steady drumbeat of funeral announcements, and the people I knew and those we read about. To the pall that shrouded Lower Manhattan for months. And to the guy I spent that awful day with, the guy who would play the central role in the rebirth of Lower Manhattan, and the entire city.
Tuesday the 11th was primary election day in New York City, and Mike Bloomberg was running for mayor. He knew little about politics but a lot about airplanes: He had been a pilot since the 1970s. When he saw news coverage in our campaign office on East 56th Street of the plane that crashed into the North Tower, he knew instantly from the size of the gash and fire that it was no twin-engine accident. Shortly thereafter, one team member consoled a distraught colleague who worked closely with us, and whose brother worked in the North Tower. Later I would learn that a friend and three colleagues were there as well, none of whom we would ever see again.
In those first few minutes, none of us knew that a second plane was on its way toward the South Tower. Or that terrorists had hijacked two other planes. Or that Al-Qaeda was behind the attacks. Or that the Twin Towers would collapse. Within two hours, we would know all that. But in the darkness that followed and that stretched on for months, we did not know what the future held for the city.
The unease and uncertainty that hovered over the city after 9/11 and in the months that followed — a sense of foreboding that we might be on the brink of returning to the “bad old days” — was captured in the press. The Daily News looked back on the city’s mid-70s nadir — when bankruptcy loomed, neighborhoods burned, crime exploded, subways deteriorated, and parks were dustbowls — and asked: “The real question — a quarter-century later — is: Can this urban nightmare happen again? Eight million New Yorkers are about to find out.”
Fifty-six days after the attack, when New Yorkers went back to the polls, they put their faith in a business leader they hoped could rebuild and renew the city — and prevent it from sliding backwards. A week after Mike’s improbable come-from-behind victory, the New York Times ran a front page story entitled, “Recalling the 70s, Warily,” that captured the city’s zeitgeist: “The slowing economy, the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the impact of September 11 have raised the specter of the city’s enduring another period of austerity, a return to the days of dirtier streets, legions of the homeless, an increase in the welfare population, a rise in crime, a plummet in the quality of life so sharp that people fled town. Those days seem so distant. Could they come back?”
They did not come back. Just the opposite. The city began a period of broad-based renewal unlike any in history, and Lower Manhattan underwent the kind of rebirth that city and state leaders had been striving to create since the 1940s, when downtown began to be eclipsed by Midtown as the city’s premier business district — and when government and civic leaders began attempting to revive an increasingly depressed Lower Manhattan.
In 1959, a local civic group founded by David Rockefeller produced a plan for razing and redeveloping 564 acres south of Chambers Street. That plan didn’t happen, thankfully, but it led to a different one: a 16-acre superblock to house a World Trade Center anchored by two enormous towers. But the Trade Center was plagued by low occupancy rates for many years, and it never achieved the redevelopment plan’s primary objective: revitalizing downtown into a thriving and vibrant neighborhood. In fact, by cutting off the street grid, it added to the area’s sense of desolation. On September 10th, 2001, Lower Manhattan was still mostly a ghost town at night.
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LOOKING BACK on the past 20 years, three things are clear: Lower Manhattan’s rebirth was spectacular. It wasn’t inevitable. And the person who, more than anyone else, drove and shaped its success is the one public leader who was the constant throughout the tumultuous political period when the die was cast: Mike Bloomberg.
Of course, many people share in the credit, and Mike is the first to say that. That starts with the dedicated and highly skilled workers who reclaimed and rebuilt the site and gave the city strength and hope, and the families and friends of those who were killed, who helped lead the charge to bring new life to the site and transform it into a place of tribute and remembrance and learning. And it includes the talented people Mike hired to carry out his vision, a team I was lucky to be a part of as a deputy mayor; the many governors Mike worked with during his 12 years in office — nine in all, four from New York and five from New Jersey; the five executive directors of the Port Authority we worked with, and their teams; Senators Schumer and Clinton, who were essential in obtaining more than $20 billion in federal aid, which President Bush supported; the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and dozens of other agencies that played a role; civic groups like the Alliance for Downtown New York, the Partnership for New York, and the Association for a Better New York; and many, many more.
There was, of course, friction among these groups. A lot of media focus during that time centered on the inevitable tension between the Port Authority, which owned the site, and its lessee, Silverstein Properties, which had the right and responsibility to rebuild. Silverstein controlled the insurance proceeds essential to rebuilding, and the governors controlled the Port Authority. The diffusion of power and the battles it produced made for great copy. But in fact, the Port and Silverstein shared a core business objective: replacing the revenue they lost. Each just had different strategies and timelines for achieving it.
The Port needed to replace its successful underground shopping mall as quickly as possible, because it was such a vitally important revenue stream for the agency. Meanwhile, Silverstein wanted to build only the towers he could reasonably expect to rent out. He could not afford to construct everything at once, because doing so would glut the market and depress rental prices below costs, which would be a bad outcome for everyone. If Silverstein went bankrupt, progress would stop and the public would be on the hook for subsidizing white elephants — an outcome all wanted to avoid.
While both the Port and Silverstein had vital roles to play in rebuilding the site, their positions were grounded in their bottom lines. Mike was always sympathetic to their often-conflicting views, but at the same time, his priority had nothing to do with rental revenue. His primary objective was creating a neighborhood for future generations that would transcend the buildings.
From the beginning, Mike understood a truth about the redevelopment that few others recognized: Ultimately, success didn’t depend upon completing a certain number of buildings by a given date. It depended on people, and how they would perceive the experience of working and visiting the site, and living nearby. He recognized that public places — the future Memorial, Museum, and now soon-to-be-completed performing arts center — would matter more than the private spaces, which most people would never enter.
Early in his first term, Mike caused a storm of controversy by saying that the redevelopment should be designed as a neighborhood, with parks, schools, and housing. Back then, many people, including Mike’s predecessor in City Hall, believed strongly that the entire 16 acres should be turned into a memorial. Others believed that the World Trade Center should be rebuilt exactly as it had been before the attacks. Mike understood that the greatest gift we could give to future generations was to create a living, breathing, vibrant neighborhood — one that looked forward, even as it took time to gaze backward. Water falling into two reflecting pools — the largest human-made waterfalls in North America — would become a perfect symbol of how we could do both. But long before they were selected as the design for the Memorial, Mike was working to create that sense of community not only at the World Trade Center site, but across all of Lower Manhattan.
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ABOUT A YEAR after the attacks, and just a few blocks from where they had taken place, Mike gave a speech that outlined his vision to not just rebuild the World Trade Center site but transform Lower Manhattan from a 9–5 business district into a 24/7 residential neighborhood. That comprehensive plan included major investments in new parks and waterfront access, affordable housing, schools, transportation, and the arts. As he explained then:
“We have underinvested in Lower Manhattan for decades. It’s been 70 years since we built a new transit line downtown. There is far less open space here than in other places around the city. There aren’t enough schools either. The time has come to put an end to that — to restore Lower Manhattan to its rightful place as a global center of innovation and make it a downtown for the 21st century.”
Mike used the city’s influence to ensure that the Port Authority did not repeat the original error of sealing the World Trade Center off from the rest of the city. As a result, the design of the site included a re-opening of Greenwich Street, helping to connect the buildings to the neighborhood around it, and vice-versa.
While the Port controlled the 16 acres of the site, the city’s authority extended across the hundreds of blocks around it. Mike made sure he used that power to transform the area, accomplishing what generations of political leaders had failed to do: create a vibrant neighborhood that was designed around people, not office buildings.
In the years that followed, Mike used city resources — and pushed for state and federal resources — to transform the Lower Manhattan waterfront, with riverfront esplanades and bike lanes; new baseball and soccer fields; basketball and beach volleyball courts; playgrounds and picnic gardens, kayaking programs, outdoor concerts, public art, and even mini-golf — all along the waterfront. In addition, he created an East River ferry system that his successor expanded into NYC Ferry, and he convinced the federal government and then New York State to hand the city control of land that he would turn into a spectacular backyard not only for Lower Manhattan, but for the entire city: Governors Island.
Because of all these investments, Lower Manhattan became a people magnet. As Mike said in a speech in 2013, “The Lower Manhattan waterfront and beyond is more alive today than at any point since its heyday as a commercial shipping port more than 50 years ago.” When Mike left office, there were almost three times as many people living downtown as there had been on September 10, 2001 — and the population was more racially and ethnically diverse. There were also three times as many hotels, with more on the way. And there were five more school buildings, with 4,300 new classroom seats and another 700 coming soon. Many more would follow.
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ONE OF THE EARLY ECONOMIC DECISIONS Mike made upon coming into office, now long forgotten, was to cancel the prior administration’s plan to subsidize a new headquarters for the New York Stock Exchange. Mike understood that securities trading was increasingly electronic, that the physical exchange would soon be a relic, and that Wall Street was no longer the center of the financial world, since most of the largest financial institutions had moved to Midtown. He was right on all counts. Today, the building serves mostly as a backdrop for television cameras and Instagram selfies.
Mike’s decision on the New York Stock Exchange reflected his larger belief about the role of government in supporting the city’s economy. Unlike many mayors and governors, Mike’s strategy for convincing large corporations to keep their headquarters in the city didn’t involve handing them public subsidies and tax breaks — even though there was an enormous fear, particularly in the business community, that many companies would pull up stakes and move to the suburbs, if they were not given subsidies. Mike didn’t buy that fear. When other financial services firms demanded tax breaks to stay in the city, Mike said no. Instead, he picked up the phone and called CEOs, telling them the city needed them to stay — and virtually without exception, they did, because they had confidence Mike could bring the city back.
In fact, not only did Mike not shower them with subsidies, he actually raised their taxes, by hiking property taxes and income taxes on high-income earners. The city was facing a $5 billion deficit ($7.6 billion in today’s dollars), and Mike believed that the city needed not only to shore up essential services, including public safety, but also to invest in the future. And so he allocated scarce city resources to projects across the city, including Lower Manhattan, that would attract new residents: parks, schools, housing, and transportation. He understood that if Lower Manhattan became a place where more people wanted to live and work, the city wouldn’t need to bribe companies to stay. As Mike has often said, “In the information age capital follows talent.” And that’s exactly what happened.
When Mike left office, there were more jobs in Lower Manhattan than there had been before the attacks — many in the tech industry that the Bloomberg administration helped nurture. Through small-scale initiatives, like the incubators he created for tech entrepreneurs in Lower Manhattan, as well as through large-scale projects, like the creation of Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, one of the most ambitious city-driven economic development projects in generations, Mike laid the foundation for the tech industry’s downtown growth. Tech companies — established ones like Spotify and start-ups of every kind — now make up a substantial portion of the World Trade Center’s office space.
Similarly, the Bloomberg administration’s investments in the film and television industry, and media more broadly, has brought new jobs downtown. Starting with the creation of the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002, Mike — who built a media company and understands the industry — recognized the potential for New York to be a stronger rival to Hollywood. By reducing red tape and making it more attractive to film in New York, while supporting the growth of new studios, Mike helped the industry grow more than 40 percent during his time in office, creating more than 30,000 new jobs across the city, with media start-ups and established companies now situated throughout Lower Manhattan.
Mike’s involvement in and championing of the Tribeca Film Festival is just one example of a mayoral role whose importance he understood and embraced with passion: that of helping to restore the city’s spirit. In addition to bringing much-needed revenue and economic activity to small businesses in the area, the festival brought new energy and life to Lower Manhattan and filled streets that had long been shrouded in darkness and mourning with a celebration of art and culture and shared humanity.
It also helped to bring back another incredibly valuable ingredient in the city’s recovery: a sense of normalcy. It’s easy to forget just how much fear and uncertainty there was in major U.S. cities following 9/11 — and nowhere more than New York. The color-coded threat-level alert system had just been created, and it seemed like every major holiday or public gathering brought new warnings about possible attacks. Mike always believed that the best way to defeat terror is to refuse to be cowed by it, and to go on living our lives — and he used his bully pulpit to remind New Yorkers of that every opportunity he got. He encouraged people to go out, and be with friends, and enjoy all the things that make New York great. And he worked hard to attract more high-profile events to New York, to show the world that we were safe and moving forward — which also helped to attract a record number of tourists and the revenue they generated for local businesses.
At the same time that he was helping people to feel safe, he led the charge to strengthen the city’s defenses against another attack, fighting tirelessly for federal homeland security funding and establishing a local counter-terrorism operation, helping to thwart more than a dozen potential attacks.
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THE GUY from Wall Street who killed the public subsidy for a new stock exchange headquarters knew that the future of the downtown economy rested not on a particular industry, but on people. As he has said countless times, “Where people want to live, businesses want to invest.” Mike’s economic development vision always centered on people, and investing in the things they value most.
The old saying, “If you build it, they will come” depends entirely on what the “it” is. The World Trade Center was conceived in the 1960s based on the belief that iconic skyscrapers would attract people and revitalize downtown. It didn’t work, and the whole history of attempting to revitalize Lower Manhattan pre-Bloomberg had been doomed by excessive faith in office buildings. Mike, who worked in Lower Manhattan until 1981, realized that what downtown needed far more than private office space was beautiful and meaningful public spaces — and that started with what he believed should be the heart and soul of the neighborhood: an inspiring memorial.
To design the memorial, Mike and Governor George Pataki created an open competition and selected a jury to choose a winner. Submissions poured in from around the world, but ultimately in 2004, the jury selected — with support from the mayor and governor — a design by a city employee, Michael Arad: waterfalls dropping into the footprints of the Twin Towers. But by 2006, costs for the memorial had ballooned to a billion dollars. Donors balked. Construction plans stalled. Mike grew deeply worried that it might never get built.
The problem, as he explained at the time, was that the ideal way to erect a memorial is to fundraise for it when passions are high and design it when passions are low. But at the World Trade Center, the order was reversed: the memorial was designed when passions were high — with little concern for costs — and fundraising for it was happening when passions had ebbed. Mike was the memorial’s largest private donor, but it was still short of the projected budget by over $800 million in private donations. He knew costs had to come down, and he knew saying so wouldn’t be popular. And it wasn’t.
Before Mike went on his weekly radio show one Friday, he called Governor George Pataki and gave him a heads-up: He was going public with his call to cut the memorial budget almost in half, to $500 million, to get construction plans back on track and prevent further delays.
A storm of protest followed. “How could anyone put a price tag on the memorial?” critics demanded. But Mike held firm and brought in a construction industry leader to help get the project under control. Some hard decisions were made that Mike took heat for, including scrapping the original idea of ramps leading to underground galleries. But the review worked, bringing the budget back under control.
Still, fundraising for the memorial lagged, and it was not at all clear that the project would be completed. One morning, Mike came into City Hall and told us he had decided he needed to take over as chair of the Memorial board. We were stunned — he had been “one of the sharpest critics of the planning and fundraising for the 9/11 memorial,” as the New York Times would write reporting the news. And now he wanted to take over responsibility for the deeply troubled project?
One of my fellow deputy mayors said out loud what the rest of were thinking: “Why would you ever want to do that?!” Mike said he didn’t want to, but the debates about what would be built were now over, and if someone didn’t take over responsibility for raising the money and pushing it forward, it would never happen. He couldn’t stand by — he knew how important the memorial was to the city, and to the nation.
A lesser leader would have been content to remain on the sidelines, avoiding responsibility for the project’s completion and all the enormously complex difficulties it presented. But Mike has never been one to sit on the sidelines. He wants to be in the huddle, calling the plays, and moving the team forward. Where others would’ve walked away, Mike dove in head-first.
With Mike as the new chair, public confidence in the project increased, including among potential donors. Mike made daily phone calls, convincing more people and firms to give, and existing donors to give more. Within 18 months, the Memorial foundation reached its capital campaign goal: $350 million.
Mike’s role as chair also involved listening to family members, with many different opinions on the Memorial, and mediating differences. For instance: The Memorial design called for the names to be presented simply and arranged randomly, reflecting the indiscriminate nature of the murders. But many families of uniformed services members wanted the names of their loved ones to be accompanied by their rank and the name of the unit in which they served. Other family members wanted their loved ones to be identified by their employer. Both desires were entirely understandable, but either would have detracted from part of what made the Memorial so powerful: the common humanity it conveyed.
After many conversations with family members and Michael Arad, Mike helped broker a compromise that all accepted — the concept of “meaningful adjacencies,” with names placed near those with whom a person shared a personal or professional bond.
Resolving that matter took patience. Getting the Memorial built in a timely fashion required blunt force, which Mike delivered in 2008, by publicly announcing that the Memorial must — must — open by the 10th anniversary of the attacks. He knew nothing sharpens the work of government agencies like a public deadline, and without one, delays might go on for years.
It worked. When differences arose between the Port and the Memorial board, the deadline helped to force resolutions, and the Memorial opened on September 11th, 2011. At the ceremony, Mike called it “a place where we can touch the face of history — and the names of all those we lost. We also remember, that out of a day of unspeakable horror, came an endless outpouring of human kindness that reaffirmed our connection to one another.” The Memorial is now visited by more people than the Statue of Liberty — and nearly every other attraction in the city — and it serves as a powerful connection with the rest of the world, a global symbol of the sacrifices that a free society will endure to remain free. The Memorial has welcomed presidents, prime ministers, queens, popes, heads of state, and foreign leaders.
Announcing a deadline for the Memorial was hardly the only time that Mike inserted himself into the process to keep progress at the site moving. In 2008, when the Port Authority wanted the new shopping center in its transportation hub to include skylights, Mike opposed it and pushed for the space be landscaped with trees, as part of the Memorial Plaza. Who today would prefer to look down at a mall rather than sit under the shade of a tree?
At various points over the years, Mike stepped in to mediate disputes between all the competing stakeholders. For instance: In 2006, Mike helped convince Silverstein to renegotiate his lease with the Port Authority, which helped break a stalemate at the site. In 2009, when the Port Authority and Silverstein were again at an impasse over development, Mike brought them together at Gracie Mansion for talks that eventually led to a deal that included what Mike had always sought at the site: housing. The southernmost tower at the site will be 900 feet tall and be home to approximately 3,000 people in 1,300 apartments, a quarter of them subsidized below market rates.
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WHEN MIKE LEFT OFFICE, many of his closest advisors — myself included — recommended that he step down as chairman of the Memorial and Museum, to save himself from having to deal with government agencies without having any formal governmental authority. Let the next mayor take it on, we told him. But that wasn’t Mike. He was committed to seeing the Museum open, so he stayed on as chair. When it opened in 2014, a 9/11 family member who had been one of Mike’s long-time critics acknowledged, “If it were not for Mike Bloomberg, we wouldn’t have a museum opening this month.”
Mike has remained as chairman to ensure that the city’s overall vision for the site is fulfilled, and to keep the Memorial and Museum on a strong financial footing. In 2019, joined by Jon Stewart, Mike helped dedicate the Memorial Glade, in honor of all the first responders and citizens who selflessly came to aid in the rescue and recovery process, many of whom developed debilitating diseases as a result. One of Mike’s first acts as mayor after taking the oath of office had been to visit the World Trade Center site and thank the men and women working there.
Mike is now working to put in place the last big piece of the puzzle in the redevelopment of the World Trade Center: construction of a new performing arts center, which had been an integral part of the city’s vision for the site from the very beginning. Mike has always believed in the power of the arts to lift and strengthen cities and their neighborhoods. In 2020, he agreed to chair the performing arts center board as well and — once again — lead the campaign to raise the funds to get another vitally important downtown institution built. Once the pandemic hit, Mike hosted Zoom meetings to recruit supporters. In June, Mike led a topping off ceremony at the site, and the center is slated to open in 2023.
Over the past two decades, Mike’s leadership and fundraising efforts for the Memorial, Museum, and arts center — which have involved hundreds of phone calls, countless hours at meetings, hosting an annual dinner, and countless other events — have raised $903 million in donations. And of course, in addition to that, he has given generously himself: more than $192 million, including $30 million last year to help the Memorial and Museum weather the pandemic shutdown.
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AS TIME PASSES, all the interstate skirmishes and interagency turf wars that seemed so important in the moment start to look smaller and smaller. What increasingly stands out is what matters most: the end result. Not the process, but the product and its most important element: the experience that we have as we walk through the site, and through the entire neighborhood.
In a speech about Lower Manhattan on September 12th, 2013, Mike put the decade of rebuilding into perspective by comparing it to another construction project that had been controversial at the time. He asked, “How many people now talk about the fact that Central Park took three decades to complete? Or that it was expensive and over budget? Or that people sued to stop it? Or that its design process was complicated by politics? Or that the City Council then passed a law reducing its size by a third? The answer is: Not one person talks about those obstacles today, because none of it matters now. What matters is not Central Park’s cost or timeline. What matters is that it was done right, and it has stood the test of time. And so it will be for the World Trade Center site.”
What he didn’t mention is the one thing people do remember about the creation of Central Park: the visionaries who conceived it and brought it to life, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. So it will be with Mike Bloomberg and the reinvention of Lower Manhattan — and the renewal of the entire city. When Mike left office, the city had 350,000 more residents and 470,000 more jobs than it did when he started, and many of those jobs were in areas outside of Manhattan that — like downtown itself — had long been starved of public investments. And to help ensure that the investments would continue, he left behind a $2 billion budget surplus — the first time in recorded history that a New York City mayor left his successor a surplus.
As the obstacles and complications involved in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center recede into memory, and as the fullness of the picture comes into view, the person standing in the center of the story is the same person I spent that dark day with, when the world changed forever — the one who envisioned a full community, integrated into a vibrant neighborhood, bustling with activity, and who, through his leadership and force of personality, brought that vision to life, against the odds, and saved the city from the dire fears many were expressing.
My twin children were born seven days after September 11, 2001. One of their good friends was in the womb when her father died in the North Tower that fateful day. They have grown up in a city that I love. I’ll always be grateful to have had the chance to help carry out Mike’s vision. There is no greater gift I could give my children than to have been part of the team Mike assembled to lead the city back. Together with so many dedicated others, we worked to honor those we lost not only by remembering them, but by transforming the horror of that day into hope for future generations, and by bringing new life to the World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, and the entire city.
