The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  I’ll never forget it, we talked to David Steiner: “David, you gonna build this thing or not?”

  He said, “I’ll build it!”

  I said, “We haven’t seen any workmen here.”

  He says, “It’s being built. Shut up. Leave. Now. I’m in charge. I’m building this thing in Pennsylvania.”

  And he did, and it showed up in a truck. That’s pretty amazing. Big hunks of walls showed up one day.

  Quang Bao told me that in New York, artists “remain the only ones that are actually making something,” which is certainly true to a point—the Steiners show that even New York buildings aren’t always constructed in the city. But it’s also true that several businesses leasing space in the navy yard are manufacturing operations. In fact, the development corporation’s initiative mandates “reusing Navy-built buildings for their original industrial intent.” Tenants are making sprinkler systems, lighting fixtures, and—a direct link to the past—stainless steel air-conditioning units for warships.

  Several navy yard tenants tend toward small scale, artful manufacturing—goods like clothing and textiles—and some are Quang Bao’s people exactly: the artists who took his advice—“go get the money”—fast enough to hold on to that quaint, if not vanishing, idea of the studio.

  There is also a small museum in the development. Here visitors can learn about the land’s past and read about visions for its future, eagerly shared by entrepreneurs and real estate developers standing in line to do business with the navy yard.

  These guys in the bowels of the budget department, they began to allocate capital to the yard for the first time. And we would make real economic arguments, not pseudo economic arguments. And then, you know, from there, hundreds of millions of dollars later, billions of dollars later—here’s an example, this is how versatile these Bloomberg guys are: so we get wind of this crazy idea where if you’re a foreign national and you invest in an approved project in America in a distressed neighborhood, you get a visa for you and your family. It’s called EB-5. We went to the city and said, “We can get all this money. You guys should take this money.”

  And after a week of thinking about it and looking at it, they said, “We’ll help you get this money.” This all took a week, two weeks, whatever. You know, in other administrations this would be a year or two years worth of cogitation. And literally in days, we raised $50 million. It’s Chinese people, or Vietnamese people, or whatever people, Korean people, whatever the hell, Indians, I don’t know. And again, this is all with no fuss, no muss, and no memos.

  Alan digresses into a swirl of celebrity investor names, all casually referred to like he’s pointing to guys around his poker table:

  Bruce Ratner used the program to raise $225 million. I think I’m in for a hundred and a quarter now, so that’s 350, and I think Doug Steiner’s in for more than a hundred, so that’s half a billion dollars of money that never would have showed up. In one corner of Brooklyn!

  The residency-for-capital program showcases the global sprawl of investors trying to decide where to park their money. As Neil Smith writes in The New Urban Frontier, globalization changed gentrification: “Not only has gentrification become a widespread experience since the 1960s but it is also systematically integrated into wider urban and global processes … In the context of globalization, national and international capitals alike confront a global ‘frontier’ of their own that subsumes the gentrification frontier … Cities find themselves competing in a global market.”

  Bloomberg did it all without any huff or puff. It just happened because he’s so verbal in the language of business. The problem with politicians of course is they can’t just call it like it is. They can’t describe it. That’s why they hate Bloomberg so much—the anti-Bloombergs—because he tells the truth all the time. He basically describes it.

  He is the linguist of American business, or global business really. He invented the language of business! Bloomberg system is the language of today’s modern business. The Bloomberg administration spoke the language of business so fluently, they were able to supercharge the economy without anybody realizing it. And most governments are so labored in the way they talk about business. You can see with the Obama administration, the guy’s never done any business in his life. When he talks about stimulus it sounds so stupid! To be blunt. Whereas you listen to the mayor and he sounds so smart. I’m not making a political statement but a substantive statement: the contrast is overwhelming!

  Both of Alan’s hands are open and out in front of him, emphatic, just like his widened eyes.

  Bloomberg oversaw the most successful stimulus plan in the history of time in my view. He hasn’t gotten nearly enough credit for it. It’s incredible. And then he goes and picks the pockets of these guys and makes them contribute to support these private sector initiatives, most recently this massive gift to Central Park.

  Alan is referring to a $100 million donation made by hedge fund manager John Paulson. The money will be split equally between Central Park’s endowment funds and the park’s capital improvement projects. The New York Times announced the gift underneath a photograph of the pensive Mr. Paulson looking out over the spot where he “hung out at the fountain as a teenager, beneath the bronze statue Angel of the Waters, which was then scrawled with graffiti and bone dry.” I wonder if Michael De Feo—or even Raul—knows whose writing filled that spot and whether its absence is to be lamented, or if the statue’s new visage should be treasured.

  Now I have a lot of issues about what the mayor did, didn’t do, bad or worse or whatever. But in terms of his economic development plans, you gotta be in awe of what he did. This isn’t by accident. This is pure genius. The city has put itself in a position to live, to compete, to continue to fight the issues that they haven’t gotten on top of—and those are big issues. He certainly hasn’t eradicated poverty. He hasn’t turned the education system into a grand, shining example. But he certainly has allowed the city to have resources to go fight those fights. Whereas, go look at Chicago. Go look at Philadelphia. Go look all around the country and there’s no money. You know, at least in New York City there’s money. And if New York State was any good, which it isn’t, there’d be more money. That’s the easy one, to give him the super high marks for building an economy, diversifying the economy, seizing on hi-tech, seizing on tourism—you know, to really make this change in the city. And Brooklyn has been the huge beneficiary of all of that.

  The more complicated stuff is having to undo the hospital system, having to undo the public housing system and remake it. Having to undo the education system and remake it. It’s one thing to build a cultural empire in New York, which he’s done with money basically. It’s quite a different thing to have to undo bad hospitals, public housing, the education system. You know, that’s been much more difficult for him, it seems to me. Basically you’ve got dysfunctional systems in these operations, and they don’t provide the right product and they don’t provide it at the right price, and they don’t provide the right value.

  It is hard to remember that Alan is still talking about schools and hospitals and public housing, but the language of business knows no boundaries. In Bloomberg’s New York, economic wisdom can override any other public service wisdom and so should serve as a rudder in all cases.

  This sensibility is evident in Bloomberg’s various appointments over more than a decade. After Joel Klein’s run as schools chancellor ended without, as Alan puts it, “getting it across the goal line,” the mayor appointed Cathie Black to the position in 2010. Black had spent the previous fifteen years running a magazine empire and had no professional experience in education. Michael Stocker, Bloomberg’s appointment for chair for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, was a former health insurance executive. And John Rhea, whom the mayor put in charge of the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, was formerly the managing director of the global consumer retail group at Lehman Brothers. NYCHA is responsible for the biggest stock of public hous
ing in the country—most of it is still in brick high-rise buildings.

  Public housing’s gotta get sorted out. I think that’s way easier said than done. I don’t know where you get the money for it. I don’t know the answers. I’m not smart enough. I do know that the existing stock of public housing needs to be really maintained better and that’s very hard. The basic tenet around which it was built as these closed enclaves is very, very counterintuitive—in today’s world it’s a really bad idea. I have spent a lot of time looking at the complexes themselves and they’re just not built for today’s society. What I would do is see whether I could gather up private capital—and public capital, obviously—and really try to build out the fringes of these entities into a more open, retail-oriented, low-rise, mixed-use, mixed-income environment so you’re dealing with this in a different way. To have lower-middle-income and lower-income people in their own world is just horrible. And if you’re getting into the pathologies, which are vast, those pathologies need to be changed, you need interventions there and you can’t do that the way it is now. I mean, you have no traffic going through these places. There’s no street life. There’s only bad guys out there at night. It’s just all bad. I mean, it’s all wrong. Half the kids are bad kids. Not half, I shouldn’t say that. You know, 90 percent of the kids are good kids, and 10 percent are bad kids, or whatever the numbers are. And it’s just a bad pathology. Cops with stop and frisk, and the kids who don’t want to be stopped and frisked. And the nice people that live in these places are stuck in their houses, in elevators that do or don’t work. It’s just a bad idea! The whole thing’s bad! I have no idea what to do!

  Just as Alan raises his voice, more emphatic by the moment, there is a knock at the door: lunch is ready. Time’s up. He smacks his desk with his open hand, as if gaveling the session closed. We shake hands, standing in the middle of his gravel driveway, before Alan heads into the kitchen for warm soup with the family.

  12.

  On the Sunday afternoon ride back from Alan’s compound in Ghent, the train car is abuzz with overheated mobile devices, their weekender owners desperately emptying clogged inboxes before “beginning” work tomorrow morning. The Hudson River Valley passes in the periphery. We approach Manhattan by way of the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, a rickety swing bridge built in 1900. It runs parallel to the Henry Hudson Bridge, which pierces a forested bluff at the northernmost tip of the island; the panoramic view on that green perch, once enjoyed by the seventeenth-century Lenape and whoever else might have wandered those heights before them, is now reserved for car traffic.

  Northern Manhattan has a complex topography where glaciers left behind caves, ridges, and valleys. Much of this landscape is still preserved, still blanketed with trees that don’t give much notice to the occasional bridge or road weaving through.

  The train passes under the George Washington Bridge—the busiest bridge in the world, leading out to New Jersey and, beyond, the continental United States—and rolls down the western bank of the island. We pass several more ridges, including one to the east known as Coogan’s Bluff. For over seventy years the rocky precipice overlooked a baseball stadium, the Polo Grounds, home to the New York Giants until 1957 when they bolted for San Francisco, the same year Alan Fishman’s Dodgers bolted for Los Angeles. On the patch of land where Ebbets Field once stood, shining its lights into Alan’s boyhood bedroom, now stands the Ebbets Field apartment complex, an underfunded, under-maintained cluster of towering brick buildings, which grown-up, banker Alan described as a bad idea with no clear fix. Likewise, nestled below Coogan’s Bluff, the land known as the Polo Grounds retained its name but was otherwise transformed: a sun-splashed green diamond became a series of monolithic brick buildings, apartments stacked on top of each other, casting shadows onto the streets and neighbors below. Approximately four thousand people live in this north Harlem complex and the president of the residents’ association—the RA—is Barbara Williams.

  She and her husband, Arty, live on the nineteenth floor. Arty answers the door when I knock. He takes his time—I can hear him just the other side of the door for a few moments before the sound of a series of locks being opened echoes down the empty, dimly lit cinder-block hallway. And when the door does open it happens slowly, cautiously, eventually revealing a man with blue-tinted glasses—sun? prescription? both? neither?—and a perfect two-inch sphere of hair. He asks me to name the person I’m there to see. I say Barbara Williams and he motions for me to enter.

  I step into a room with two sofas wrapped around a blaring television. Just as I start to ask where I should sit—Arty seems like the kind of guy who has a usual spot—he points to a place on the couch up against a mirrored wall. He takes a chair on the fringe of the room that is straddling the adjacent kitchen. He clicks his way through a few channels while I try to think of a starting point for a conversation. Barbara enters and I stand to shake her hand. We sit across from each other and once we start talking, Arty flicks off the television. He stands up and announces he’s going back to the bedroom to watch television. Only it’s a short hallway and, as Arty has proven, he likes it loud, so still we hear gunfire and fight sequences playing out in the background approximately every four to five minutes.

  Barbara sits at attention, wearing glasses, possessed of calm even with the sounds of violence in the background. Originally from James Island, South Carolina, she prefers to be called Mrs. Williams—Barbara requires some common ground and history and time—and she seems to reciprocate such honorifics for everyone she meets. She came to New York at eighteen, staying with family, looking to enter a work environment where a dark-complected woman like herself might still be allowed to work the reception desk where everyone could see her. She retired five years ago after a career as an office clerk cum office manager at a handful of small businesses.

  I’ve been in New York for going on fifty years—this year I will be sixty-six. My husband’s family was the first residents in this apartment. When my mother-in-law passed away we moved in—1988, I think—and we’ve been here ever since.

  I worked most of those years so I was out early in the morning and in late. I didn’t really take too much stock in the community because, trying to raise a family, you only have weekends to take care of your personal things. I have four children so it was here and there and all over the place—it was running.

  As time went by and the children grew up, it was just the husband and I, and I thought, okay, it’s time to start doing things a little bit differently—give some attention to your community because this is something that I’ve always wanted to do. I didn’t know what talents I had to offer but whatever I have, I can share it. You don’t have to be a family member to be support for someone—just a neighbor. If I’m out in the street and I see one of my neighbors going through some problems, I’m going to step in and say, “Do you need some help?” They’re coming home with too many bags: “Can I help you with your bags?”

  Today you don’t walk up on a stranger and say, “Can I help you with your bag,” and think that it’s going to be welcomed.

  ’Cause they look at you like, “Why do you want to help me?” They know they need the help but, “No thank you,” because they think you’re going to run away with their bags.

  She laughs.

  People have lost trust in each other. You know when I was coming up I was told when you get lost you go to the police. Today nobody trusts the police. And they’re supposed to be the guys that protect you. The children, they’re like, “Are you kidding?”

  I don’t know what the police department is going to do but they need to do something about changing the perception that the public has of them. Like this stop and frisk thing. I never agreed with that. The police department always had the right to stop and frisk—that was a part of their duties to begin with!

  She laughs.

  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it—that’s a part of your job, to stop and frisk if you think that something is wrong. That’s how you
protect me. But don’t write it in the policy so you can just—“Oh, I think …” Naw. There was a message that was not being said. It didn’t happen to everyone. It was happening to a group of people and that was it.

  My son, he was twelve, coming home from school, walking the block. He was stopped and frisked. He came home in tears. “Mom! I didn’t do anything. They just stopped me, had me kneel on the ground, put my hands behind my head. Why? I didn’t do anything. I’m not a criminal.”

  First of all I said, “Come over here. Let your mom comfort you. Let your father and I talk to you.” And I told him, “It’s not because you did anything, honey.”

  I went to the precincts. Yes, I did. It didn’t go well.

  She laughs.

  I had my say.

  They gave the same reason they give everybody else: he fits a profile. A twelve year old and he fits a profile so they had a right to stop him.

  So, no, we don’t need that. And now that they’re stopping the policy, I fully agree with Mr. de Blasio. It needs to stop.

  Bill de Blasio ran for mayor as one of the most vocal opponents of the stop and frisk policy. Shortly after taking office, he dropped the city’s appeal of a judgment against how the policy was being implemented and announced that law enforcement would no longer rely on profiling for stop and frisk. And to display some ideological balance, or to demonstrate the complexities of the job, or just to contradict himself, de Blasio appointed William Bratton as police commissioner—the same William Bratton who, two decades earlier, worked with Rudy Giuliani to pioneer the “zero-tolerance” policy, which is as aggressive as the branding makes it sound. Bratton describes policing as something that needs constant attention like “weeding a garden.” Small infractions—loitering, tagging—are snuffed out on each stoop to ward off the bigger stuff like gunfights and drug deals.