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May 14, 2005
Kutuzov’s Horse—and the City’s Future
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
After the fiscal boom of the 1990s that encouraged thoughts of expansion we now have a very different mindset at City Hall. For the first time since the Lindsay years a city administration is involved in the physical planning of the city. Not that there haven’t been significant developments in the meantime – Battery Park City on Hudson River landfill and Metrotech in downtown Brooklyn, for instance – but the first grew out of a state initiative and the second resulted largely from the interaction of the then Borough President Howard Golden with Polytechnic University and developer Bruce Ratner. But now we again have the City Planning Department mapping out broad zoning changes and targeting districts, particularly along the city’s immense waterfront, for special development. The current work, as was also the case with the generally well-regarded 1961 zoning revision during Wagner’s time, has proceeded with little obvious hands-on involvement of the mayor (in contrast to the Lindsay style). Curiously, as Mayor Bloomberg has mostly stayed in the background on matters such as Brooklyn waterfront and downtown development, he has become so involved in the idea of a West Side football stadium that he is accused of being fixated on that at the expense of other programs.
Posted by amy at May 14, 2005 10:29 AM