« 18th-Century Ship Found at Trade Center Site | Main | The Hezitorial: Yonkersites Likes it ‘Nice and Rough’ »
July 15, 2010
Doctoroff posits justification for Atlantic Yards: Downtown Brooklyn “needed more of a center” (but there was no plan until FCR stepped forward)
Atlantic Yards Report
Former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff has to be feeling pretty good. He didn't bring the Olympics to New York, and that smarts, and he couldn't get the West Side Stadium passed.
But he got most of the Bloomberg administration's ambitious land use agenda passed during his six-year tenure, which ended in 2007.
Now, in his genial, confident way, Doctoroff can look back and contend, as he has before, that he managed to thread the needle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, to get projects passed with sufficient public input and without much displacement, to make omelets (in Moses's famous formulation) but without breaking eggs.
And if he's not challenged--as he was back in 2007 by Majora Carter, then of Sustainable South Bronx--he just might get away with it. Doctoroff had said, as he's said since, that he and the administration had gotten better at listening.
Carter said they hadn't done enough, that they had to "really, really listen." She added, "The interesting thing about listening is you have to do it openly and not have a predetermined idea set.”
And Doctoroff might get away with claiming, as he did last week, that Atlantic Yards was primarily a product of city guidance, rather than a project presented by a developer with good connections.
Posted by eric at July 15, 2010 10:05 AM