Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

The great thing about living in New York used to be that you didn’t have to give a damn about the natural world.

Sadly, those days seem to be gone. Even in my neighborhood, which was lucky enough to be high and relatively dry, things began to resemble a zombie movie by last Wednesday. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, hordes of Upper West Siders staggered about the sidewalks, searching for brunch instead of brains: “Rrrrrr ... smoked fish ... rrr ... hollandaise!”

Now, it seems, we’re all ready to give ourselves a big pat on the back for how we weathered the storm.

Not so fast. Yes, the firemen, cops and emergency workers deserve all the gratitude their weary bones can carry. Yes, plenty of average New Yorkers helped their friends and neighbors.

But as for the institutional response, public or private ... Sorry, but 85 dead and counting, over $60 billion in damages, a subway system still not fully operational a week after it shut down, massive blackouts throughout the region, days of gas-line fistfights and raging fires in Queens just doesn’t add up to a good response. (Note to ConEd: when a piece of equipment that’s absolutely vital to keeping the lights on blows up in the first hours of a storm everyone was predicting for days ... you’re not doing your job.).

New York has been under assault, human or otherwise, pretty continually for almost 20 years now. And yet the response of our leaders remains basically reactive.

Yes, it’s nice that FEMA is now run by people with detectable brain patterns, and that Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg have become staunch believers in climate change. But more needs to be done—much more. And it is probably up to us to do it.

IT’S NOT THAT NO ONE could see this coming. Scientists have been talking about global warming for a generation now. The dean of the city’s investigative reporters, Wayne Barrett, warned five years ago that Bloomberg deputy Dan Doctoroff was deliberately and grossly minimizing the possible effects of hurricanes and rising sea levels in putting together the administration’s much-vaunted blueprint for the future, PlaNYC.

Nonetheless, the Bloomberg administration did all it could to promote massive new developments in nearly every part of the city that ended up underwater last week: the West Side of Manhattan, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, the Queens riverfront, Red Hook, the Rockaways. And plenty more is coming. Remember watching the flood waters sweep over Coney Island? Thanks to an elaborate masquerade the city played with developers, Coney was rezoned two years ago to allow the development of 30 30-story buildings. That’s enough luxury condos to spark a financial crisis as well as an environmental one.

And while global warming is new, New York has been bedeviled by similar weather patterns throughout its history. In the past, we generally managed to learn something from them. The question is if we’ll do so again.

Back near the end of the last Little Ice Age, fierce winds off the Atlantic frequently combined with cold fronts from Canada to batter the city. The “hard winter” of 1779-1780 brought snowdrifts 18 feet deep and a record low temperature of 16 degrees below zero, and froze the harbor solid for five consecutive weeks. New Yorkers adjusted by harvesting the waterways for ice to get them through the summer, and turning them into roadways to get out of town. In the winter of 1821, they even set up makeshift taverns on the Hudson to attract the foot traffic crossing to Jersey.

In March of 1888, a cold front combined with—surprise, surprise—heavy winds off the ocean to suddenly turn a warm spring rain into a howling snowstorm. “The Blizzard of ’88”—or as it was known at the time, “The Great White Hurricane”—became shorthand for natural disaster. In the city, some 40 inches of snow fell, and severe flooding and conflagrations swept New York. The fires alone caused $25 million worth of damage, or more than $600 million in today’s money.

When temperatures dropped to 6 degrees—the coldest ever recorded here in March—the region came to a standstill. New York’s vast webs of telegraph and telephone wires were encased in ice and its many elevated railroads ground to a halt. More than 200 New Yorkers died, some of them freezing to death in the street.

In response, the city began to bury its wires, cables and trains, and professionalized its street-cleaning department. But today, the city’s underground is more vulnerable than ever.

So what to do?

The good news is that many very smart people have already spent a good deal of time thinking about this. Some of their ideas were all over last Sunday’s New York Times, ranging from gigantic, high-tech solutions—vast barriers or gates to seal off much of the city at key chokepoints—to incredibly inventive, low-tech solutions, such as “absorptive streets,” or natural barriers of marshes and oyster beds.

The bad news is that they require leadership and money to be implemented. Neither is likely to come from Washington anytime soon. So we’ll have to do it ourselves. A special tax on, say, stock transactions, or luxury items, or the very highest incomes might raise enough cash—though the usual suspects are likely to balk at a tax for even such an urgent and worthy purpose.

So here’s another idea. Once upon a time, when no government would shell out the money for a pediment on which to place the Statue of Liberty, a newspaper started a campaign to raise the money through thousands of individual donations. In exchange for donations of as little as a penny, Joseph Pulitzer would print their names in the pages of the New York World.

Maybe some newspaper today could start the “Keep Lady Liberty’s Head Above Water Fund,” dedicated to not only preserving our city and region, but also to making it the hub of global climate research and solutions. (Then again, maybe someone else should take this on, given how busy newspapers are trying to keep their own heads above water.)

Our local universities could be persuaded to open new climate change centers, in exchange for the vast amounts of land and legal support we’ve given them lately. Abandoned or underused facilities, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Governor’s Island or the Kingsbridge Armory could be devoted to this purpose. The unemployed could find work building these wondrous new projects. The Bloomberg administration could finally find a reason for its third term.

Of course, simply getting their names in the paperwould hardly suffice for people today. The enterprise I have in mind would operate as an investment fund. As the new technologies, devices and clean energy solutions we produce are put into place around the world—as they surely would be—each investor would get a return on his dollar, once the city’s safety is secured.

New York has been reacting to storms for almost four centuries now. It’s time we got ahead of the next one.

Wavy gravy, baby. (Wikimedia Commons)

We already know Mayor Bloomberg favors waterfront development, come hell or high water—literally—and so, too, does his former development czar Dan Doctoroff, now head of Bloomberg LP.

It was Mr. Doctoroff, in his capacity as deputy mayor for economic development, who thought up many of the schemes that have led to new apartment towers on the waterfront in Williamsburg and Hunters Point. Thousands of units have been built, tens of thousands have been planned. Mr. Doctoroff still believes that is a good idea, so long as appropriate measures are taken.

"I am obviously a believer in waterfront development," Mr. Doctoroff said, "but development that is buttressed by strong building codes and is done in conjunction with a smart adaptability strategy. That was a major reason why we made adaptation to climate change a pillar of PlaNYC."

Not that there is any kind of causation here, but in spite of PlaNYC, the city still got clobbered yesterday. There is only so much New York City, big and important as we like to think we are, can do about something like global warming, which is, you know, global.

Furthermore, for all the mayor has done, he made it clear there are some things he is not willing to undertake to protect the city, telling us, “We cannot build a big barrier reef off the shore to stop the waves from coming in, we can’t build big bulkheads that cut people off from the water that they’re trying to do."

We asked Mr. Doctoroff that even if the buildings were secured, wouldn't there be additional issues pertaining to evacuations, that encouraging people to live in flood zones is always a risk? "As for people who refuse to leave when warned, they are just fools," he responded.

These success suggest that even though Mr. Doctoroff is no longer in command, might it still be possible to see a gondola stretch across the East River between Lower Manhattan, Governors Island and Brooklyn? Or a light rail line running the entire length of the waterfront from Astoria in Queens to Brooklyn’s Red Hook? Or, most audacious of all, tearing down the Javits convention center and moving it to yet another decked-over rail yard, this time in Sunnyside, where it would be surrounded by apartment and hotel towers and a sizable retail complex?

These were among the proposals Mr. Doctoroff put forward on Friday during a speech at the Municipal Art Society’s MAS Summit 2012. They were meant as examples for the next mayor to latch onto in order to “extend the achievements of the Bloomberg Administration by knitting new connections among emerging communities, amenities and institutions.”

Among the 90 speakers—including quite a few probable mayoral candidates—at last week’s cities conference, Mr. Doctoroff was asked to address what New York would need to do in order to succeed in the coming century. He decided to build his speech around the importance of the mayor and the priorities he believes any mayor (but especially those looking to succeed his boss) should have.

“I decided to frame it in terms of leadership because I have watched Mike Bloomberg over the past 11 years be a great leader and I do believe that mayors (for better and worse) truly make the biggest difference in the fate of the city,” Mr. Doctoroff wrote in a follow-up email. “I also believe that we can lose what we have gained quite quickly, as we saw in the 1970s.”

Mr. Doctoroff said he had three central questions that New Yorkers should ask of their would be mayors:

• "Does he or she truly understand what makes New York unique in an increasingly competitive world?"
• "Does he or she fervently believe in what I call the 'virtuous cycle of the successful city?'"
• "Does he or she have the vision to fuel the imagination of this stunning city and then the courage and decisiveness to get things done?"

Of course Mr. Doctoroff himself had an answer, often lengthy, to each of these questions. To the first one, of uniqueness and global competition, he stressed that the city should not pine for the past, for legacy industries like manufacturing, for outdated ways of thinking, building and taxing. “If we begin to send signals, any signals, that we are not going to remain the most open city in the world, we will surely lose our edge,” Mr. Doctoroff said.

Mr. Doctoroff explained his “virtuous cycle” thusly: “We are a remarkably compassionate city. We believe that we need to help those in need, that we have to make the city more affordable, that we have to provide the tools for people to capitalize on opportunity. All of that requires money. That's why our leaders have to have to truly get―and then they have to effectively manage―the virtuous cycle.”

He then, only half in jest, copped what sounded like a line from Gordon Gecko. “It starts with the core belief that growth―growth―is good,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “That the additional resident, business, or visitor generates net new revenues, which, if invested wisely, enhances the quality of life, which, in turn, helps to attract more residents, businesses and visitors, thereby perpetuating the cycle.”

This growth, this net new revenue, naturally leads to the visions Mr. Doctoroff was so famous for cooking up, and where he outlined the plans previously mentioned.

"Over the past 10 years, we have rebuilt, rezoned, and refashioned huge swaths of the city," he declared proudly. "Rail yards are becoming New York's next great neighborhoods. A rail line has become New York's newest great park. A military base will become New York's next great park. We have reclaimed our formerly decrepit waterfront for housing and recreation. Roosevelt Island will become the intellectual center of a burgeoning tech industry. We are not a city that plays small ball."

In his email, Mr. Doctoroff explained the ideas, some new, some old, some variations on the old, were all designed to connect the progress that had come before. The gondolas would provide more reliable access to Governors Island, allowing it to become a 24/7 community, one that Mr. Doctoroff suggested would become "a hub for another emerging industry, like global health." As for the light rail line, it would run along Kent Avenue and Vernon Boulevard, among other generally quiet waterfront thoroughfares. "Brooklyn is hot," Mr. Doctoroff intoned. "It is Queens' turn next."

But the clincher was Sunnyside, demonstrating the kind of big-picture, nothing-is-impossible thinking that characterized Mr. Doctoroff's tenure at City Hall. He called it "a huge swath or rail yards," repeating the phrase three times, to laughter from audience, before pointing out that it "forms a scar through the middle of Queens." Indeed, this project, bigger than Hudson, Atlantic and the Hoboken PATH yards combined, reminded people all too well of the Doctoroff days.

Proposals for such a project have been in the works for four decades, but Mr. Doctoroff brought some new innovations to the table. For starters, he believes the time is finally right to justify the massive investment such a project would entail. The starting point would be dividing the plan up into parcels, so the entire yards would not have to be decked at once but could instead be done progressively. And the timing for that first parcel could not be better, Mr. Doctoroff suggested.

"Let's borrow an idea from Governor Cuomo and move Javits to Queens, this time, though, to a location that is one or two subway stops from Midtown," Mr. Doctoroff explained. "You could pay for a big part of it by selling Javits' land on the West Side, which is more valuable today because of the No. 7 extension, and we could draw a wider array of conventions to less expensive hotels in Long Island City are built."

He pointed out that while some might complain that the location is not Manhattan, it is close enough and has its clear advantages, including space and affordablility, an approach that Mr. Doctoroff said he witnessed this summer at the London Olympics, where a new convention center had been built in a formerly industrial part of the East End.

The final slide of the presentation, a joke, Mr. Doctoroff later insisted, was the one missing piece from his legacy realized at Sunnyside Yards. "You know, it could even be the site for a temporary Olympic Stadium," he said, to more laughs, "but I leave that to future visionaries."

The whole affair left us feeling dizzy. Many in the city, particularly in the business class, have been hungering for a candidate who could be the successor to Mike Bloomberg. Could this be the one? The rhetoric was certainly there, as Mr. Doctoroff's final words on stage made clear.

"Big visions like this are what have defined New York," he said. "But they don't happen by accident. They take guts and imagination. They require an intuitive understanding of what are New York's unique advantages in a competitive world. They demand the skill to generate the revenues so we can afford to be the kind of city we aspire to be."

Now who could have those qualities? Perhaps Dan Doctoroff?

"Just to be clear, I have zero interest in running for Mayor, so, if the premise of the story is that I am somehow putting myself out there, then I don't want to engage," Mr. Doctoroff said in response to the first email The Observer sent him asking him as much. "If it is about what I said on Friday, then I am happy to talk."

In a follow-up email, he explained that he gave the speech because he was asked, though he also admitted to constantly be thinking up new and far-out plans for the city.

"I visit all of the leading cities of the world on a regular basis, so it is hard to avoid what they are doing and I have always been fascinated with cities anyway," Mr. Doctoroff explained. "That said, I am quite focused on Bloomberg, so it is probably best to characterize my thoughts as musings."

For better or worse, bigger or badder, the city could use more of these kinds of musings.

Race for the prize? (Getty)

Dan Doctoroff, Olympic dreamer, got to attend an opening ceremony for the games this summer, even if it was not the one he had hoped for. It was from London, where Mr. Doctoroff was taking in the 2012 summer Olympics, that he fired off an email to his friends declaring “feelings of ‘what might have been’ are curiously absent.”

The Times got a hold of this email, where the former deputy mayor for economic development and current head of Bloomberg LP goes on to say that even without them, the Olympic bid was good for New York.

He pointed to the High Line park in Manhattan, which he called “one of New York’s premier tourist destinations,” as well as “a subsidized middle-income housing project in Queens, ferry service on the East River, new parks and even a new Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn.”

“I don’t know whether New York will ever host the Olympics,” Mr. Doctoroff wrote, “but I do know that no city has ever benefited so much from trying and that no city embodies the Olympic spirit more. As we always said, New York really is an Olympic Village every day.”

The Times notes that both Atlantic Yards and the new Yankees Stadium were already well underway by the time the Olympics bid was announced, but Mr. Doctoroff counters that those projects were spurred on by the bid.

And yet the counter argument could also be made: Look at everything that remains unfinished. While it is true that the Bloomberg administration held onto much of the bid as a blueprint for the development of the city over the past eight years, think of how much further along many of these projects would be had we actually won the games.

Hunters Point South, instead of waiting to break ground on two towers sometime this year would be built, some 6,000 affordable housing units that would have, in the interim, served as the Olympic Village. Ditto Hudson Yards, which would have to be finished, instead of just begun--never mind the plan for a West Side stadium had already been scuttled by the City Council before the International Olympic Committee had made its decision.

A new Javits Center would probably have been undertaken, as well, on top of other projects that have since been forgotten or never would have materialized. And the Barclays Center might just be finished, along with some of those apartment towers. Would Dan Goldstein really have dared to stand up to the Olympics? (Probably, rightly, yes.)

Indeed, it is these hiccups, on the West Side, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, that likely left the New York at the bottom of the IOC’s list. Ask any developer, this is not an easy place to build. Mr. Doctoroff questions whether we will ever host an Olympic games. He is probably right to ponder such a question.

Nevermind that things are reportedly very quiet in London this summer, driving off the normal tourists in favor of the Olympic variety, of whom there are apparently far fewer. Meanwhile New York continues to see record numbers of visitors (we know, we tripped over them on the way into the office today). And there is the general fact that Olympics tend to be expensive boondoggles, costing nations and locations more than they are worth. The city might have gotten more money from the state and federal governments to realize the projects that are still undone.

Still, as the mayor, unlike his deputy, expresses disappointment at not hosting the Olympics this summer, despite the losses for a few developers on still unrealized projects, we cannot help but wonder if New Yorkers won the real gold in losing out.

“I work on a lot of the same issues,” said Ms. Pinsky, who married Economic Development Corporation head Seth Pinsky last summer. “The thing about the real estate industry, it’s very civic minded. Many owners are family businesses and there’s this strong tradition in the industry of wanting projects and policies that are best not just for the industry’s own interests, but for the entire city.

Angela Pinsky. (Photo by Kiki Conway)

Landlords know that their success and the health of their investments depend on the health of the city as a whole.”

Ms. Pinsky joined the mayor’s office during the heady first years of the Bloomberg administration, a period of sweeping vision, and bore witness firsthand to how real estate could provide government with the levers for urban change.

Starting as then-Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff’s chief of staff, one of the first projects she worked on was the rezoning of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods in Brooklyn, a process that would eventually allow a wave of residential development to sprout in the area. The neighborhood’s potential wasn’t as easy to see then. Ms. Pinsky lived in Williamsburg at the time, near the waterfront, an area that was a forlorn stretch of derelict-looking industrial buildings.

“If you didn’t get dinner by 6:00 you weren’t going to eat that night,” Ms. Pinsky said. “It’s hard to believe looking at the neighborhood today, but there weren’t grocery stores or restaurants back then.”

The area was already gaining momentum as a place for artists and hipsters and for its proximity to Manhattan. The rezoning, though, kicked that transformation into high gear and made the neighborhood the magnet for living, culture and nightlife that it is today. The project was just one of many seeds of revitalization that the administration sought to plant around the city, a bold agenda that galvanized Mrs. Pinsky’s view of real estate as a tonic that could cure the city’s ills.

“I worked on the Olympic bid and PlaNYC,” Ms. Pinsky said. “There was the feeling that you were never doing enough.”

Mayor Bloomberg arranged the office in City Hall as a large bullpen with everyone sitting at open workstations. His was, and still is, at the center of the room. Ms. Pinsky sat near the periphery, but the layout avoided isolation and permitted everyone in the room to feel within the fold of the office’s work.

“You could hear what the mayor was talking about on the phone and you always had an awareness of what was going on,” Ms. Pinsky said. “There were no silos. That was one of the great things about the administration—it was transparent.”

She remembers Mayor Bloomberg as having a photographic memory and a talent with data. “Numbers are part of his body,” Ms. Pinsky said. “But he was also very instinctual. The mayor would do the research and then trust his gut.”

Mr. Doctoroff, who left city government in 2007 to become the chief executive of Mayor Bloomberg’s financial information company, Bloomberg LP, was more analytical. “Dan wanted analyses down to the penny and he would ask you little details to see if you knew about a project inside and out,” Ms. Pinsky said.

Ms. Pinsky grew close with Mr. Doctoroff. She said he still checks in on her. “I had a very strong attachment to Dan,” Ms. Pinsky said. “I was young and had a lot to learn. I was timid. Working in that situation makes you learn about decision-making. I grew up a lot in that role. Dan still calls all of us. He’s very protective.”

Mrs. Pinsky stayed on when Mr. Doctoroff left, maintaining her position as a chief staffer for Bob Lieber, a former Lehman Brothers executive who was hired as Mr. Doctoroff’s successor in the role of deputy mayor of economic development. Mr. Lieber was less of a visionary than Mr. Doctoroff, according to Ms. Pinsky, but had a clear talent for negotiating deals, skills that Ms. Pinsky would also soon come to appreciate.

One of the first issues they handled together was what to do with Off Track Betting. The parlors were oozing red ink, Ms. Pinsky said, largely because the city and state took money out of its total revenue rather than its profits. “OTB expenses were rising and there was nothing to compensate it for that,” Ms. Pinsky said.

Mr. Lieber helped devise a solution in which the city and state would share a cut of OTB’s profits only, an approach that would pad its bottom line. He worked hard to align various interests in the state that would permit the idea to be implemented. But the negotiations bogged down and eventually he retreated, arranging a deal that would allow the state to take control of the organization. A year later, it was shuttered.

Mr. Lieber’s efforts had paid off in one sense; the city was no longer on the hook for OTB’s $500 million of pension and other liabilities. Still, it was demoralizing to see how such a common-sense solution could meet defeat when OTB’s inevitable demise had been so widely predicted.

By the spring of 2010, with the economy and government-spurred developed in slow gear due to the recession, Ms. Pinsky was ready for change. Mr. Lieber had left office to return to the private sector, taking a job at C3 Capital Partners. She soon got her own chance to switch over as well. “Mike Slattery, an executive at REBNY, called me in,” Ms. Pinsky said. “I wasn’t expecting it but they had an opening.”

For REBNY, Ms. Pinsky was a hugely attractive hire, as she had not only valuable connections in city government, but also a close feel for how it works. Having staff with Ms. Pinsky’s skill set and experience has been essential for the city’s real estate industry, whose health depends not just on economic winds but as much on the burdens and restrictions that government places on it too.

In recent months Ms. Pinsky has been working on a range of issues. Taxes on carried interest, an investment structure typically employed by hedge funds but also by some real estate partnerships, will likely be raised from the current capital gains rate. Ms. Pinsky and other lobbyists hope to segregate real estate from the issue, which has been focused at increasing taxes specifically for investment funds.

The outcome of their efforts could have a profound effect on how ownership structures are arranged in the real estate business. Closer to home, the City Council is grappling with whether to pass living-wage legislation, a regulation hotly opposed by the city’s real estate industry. The requirement primarily affects retail tenants, forcing them to pay higher wages to employees in buildings that receive city subsidies or incentives.

The issue is what brought down a bid by the Related Companies to redevelop the Kingsbridge Armory in 2009, when Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz backed instituting requirements that would have forced Related’s tenants in the project to pay the higher wage rate.

“Related couldn’t build under that requirement,” Ms. Pinsky said. “Retailers aren’t going to go to a building if they can get space across the street that’s cheaper. And developers know that and they’re not going to build if they can’t be as competitive.”

Ms. Pinsky, née Sung, got married to Seth Pinsky last summer. At least on the surface, the marriage seems like a well-suited match. Mr. Pinsky is the head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the pseudo government agency that the mayor’s office uses as one of its primary arms of economic development. Mrs. Pinsky said that she and her husband are actually quite different. “It really was a case of opposites attracting,” Mrs. Pinsky said. “I like dance music, he listens to nothing but classical. I’m very social and he tends to be more introverted.”

While Mrs. Pinsky would have preferred a getaway like Hawaii for their honeymoon, Mr. Pinsky chose the Sudan and then Egypt. Mr. Pinsky prefers exotic, out-of-the-way destinations that sometimes verge on risky. He was days away from visiting North Korea before the government there canceled his papers permitting entry. He went to Iran earlier in their relationship without Mrs. Pinsky.

“We had a safe word,” Mrs. Pinsky remembers. “Waffles. If he got captured and said that, I knew to send the U.S. government.”

The travel, especially in former Soviet countries, an area that fascinates Mr. Pinsky, has afforded her a perspective on infrastructure here.

“You can compare what they have in other cities and see where it has gone right and wrong and, also, what we do that is right and wrong,” Mrs. Pinsky said. “I still want to go to Hawaii.”

DGeiger@Observer.com

The Observer contemplated the turquoise Berber carpeting, the spare glass cubicles and an empty rolling garbage bin parked by the door until we were ushered into a bright corner office occupied by the alliance's president, Tim Tompkins. He greeted us with news that would eventually reverberate globally: Waiters could be coming to the bright red tables in Times Square.

In a tan suit with a brightly colored tie and thick brown hair, Mr. Tompkins perched on a child-size ivory divan. A counterpart of his, we recalled, was once dubbed the "mayor of midtown." Despite a humble profile, the Times Square Alliance deserves credit for transforming a neighborhood where a New York Times newsboy once had his face slashed into the throbbing international discotheque of today.

The alliance's voting board reads like a roll call of the city's power brokers: Viacom, Marriott, Condé Nast, SL Green, the Durst Organization, the Schubert Organization and Cravath, to name just a handful. For years, they've paid annual fees into a multimillion-dollar budget used to provide additional security, pick up garbage and promote tourism. They've done so with robust cooperation from the Bloomberg administration-until recently.

Macy's last month announced it was rerouting its Thanksgiving Day parade down Sixth Avenue, which would deal a sizable blow to Times Square retailers, hotels and advertisers. Mayor Bloomberg, normally a lusty booster of BIDs, sided instead with Macy's. "People were dumbfounded by the announcement," a prominent member of the Times Square Alliance told The Observer. They "couldn't believe that the mayor was turning his back on all of the businesses in Times Square in favor of Macy's." 

Mr. Tompkins' stance is more conciliatory: He's met twice recently with Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, the administration's economic development czar, who listened respectfully to the BID's concerns. "We're encouraged by his thoroughness," Mr. Tompkins said.

Resisting our attempts to probe further, and after hours of media interviews that day (mostly because of the Times Square table service), he massaged the space between his eyebrows and looked out the window.

Clearly, our audience was at an end.

MILLIONS WHO LOUNGE on the patio furniture in Times Square, sip lattes unmolested in Bryant Park or browse for apples in Union Square do so thanks to benign shadow governments known as BIDs. There are 64 such capitalistic collectives and counting, each birthed by at least a 51 percent vote of area property owners. Every year, the owners, whether they voted for the BID or not, pay a mandatory annual fee (a tax by any other name) that can climb well into the thousands each and that goes toward additional garbage collection, street patrols and tourism promotion, in turn helping to boost property values in the neighborhood. Under the Bloomberg administration, BIDs have boomed, with 20 new ones formed in the past decade. Few give them the credit they deserve for transforming large swaths of New York City into pastoral urban paradises. Few know they exist at all.

The ceaseless grime and crime of 25 years ago prompted wealthier Union Square business owners, led by the chairman of Con Ed, Charles Luce, to unite to clean up the central green space. Their success in turning the neighborhood into a bustling center of commerce with some of the highest property values in the city inspired business owners in other neighborhoods to follow suit. 

"We have a big messy city that has to be taken care of," said Sharon Zukin, a Brooklyn College and City University Graduate Center professor and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. "So they allow and, under Bloomberg, encourage [businesses] to take on these common responsibilities."  

By the mid-1990s, BIDs had grown so influential that Daniel Biederman-once dubbed "the mayor of midtown"-rattled the honest-to-God mayor, Rudy Giuliani. The charismatic Mr. Biederman commanded three of the city's most powerful BIDS, covering Grand Central, Bryant Park and 34th Street, but Mr. Giuliani cut off funding to the Grand Central Partnership, forcing Mr. Biederman to resign that post. Some say the real mayor also quietly stymied the growth of BIDs all over the city.

In his first weeks, Mayor Bloomberg declared a truce with BIDs as part of a general thaw in the city government's attitude toward local business. The mayor took a walking tour with the inimitable Mr. Biederman around bucolic Bryant Park. "We wouldn't have the vaguest idea how to do this," Mr. Bloomberg said, according to Mr. Biederman's account. "The fact that you've done this with private money is great."

"One of the fundamental tenets has been smart delegation," Dan Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg's first-term deputy mayor for economic development and a major architect of the jump in BIDs, told The Observer. "We believe that up to a certain point the business community in an area had the best sense for what would work for their community."

Most credit the revival of the BID movement to a single brilliant appointment nearly 10 years ago: Robert Walsh, the former president of the Union Square Partnership, who took over as head of the Department of Small Business Services. Mr. Walsh replies that the mayor has been enthusiastic from the beginning, good-naturedly encouraging him to form more BIDs even where they'd previously failed: "The first conversation I had with him, in January of 2002, he ended up talking about Fordham and why isn't there a BID on Fordham Road," Mr. Walsh recalled of the area in the Bronx. "That's one of the BIDs that we've been able to create."

Mr. Walsh cites numerous neighborhoods where more BIDs could go: 116th Street near Columbia; Broadway and 168th Street near Columbia Presbyterian; Staten Island; numerous neighborhoods of the Bronx, such as Woodlawn; his own Brooklyn haunt of Carroll Gardens; everywhere!

Somewhat paradoxically, as their number and influence have ballooned, BIDs have faded from the public mind since the days when Messrs. Biederman and Giuliani sparred in the dailies. Their boards are dotted with names like Viacom, Disney, Grand Hyatt, Time Equities, Boston Properties and Tishman Speyer, but the people running them are usually longtime municipal hands with pragmatic-one could say modest (tulips! Benches! Slightly less graffiti!)-goals. The city's largest BID, the Downtown Alliance, is headed by Liz Berger, a lawyer by training who served as a City Council liaison under the Koch administration. She commands a budget of $17 million to pay for a 58-member sanitation team and a 59-member red-coated security force.

The Grand Central Partnership, which encompasses some of the most valuable commercial property in the world (think midtown's top-shelf skyscrapers), is overseen by Alfred C. Cerullo III, who has occupied the post since 1999 and also serves on the City Planning Commission. His current priority? "Spring is here and snow is going to be falling in the next 24 hours," he said, fretting this would make it difficult to plant thousands of flowers. After 32 years in the BID trade, Daniel Biederman continues to head the 34th Street and Bryant Park fiefdoms-though he recently ran into trouble over an alleged $120,000 gift to a Bronx skating rink out of the 34th Street Partnership's coffers.

They're now being followed by up-and-comers like the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership's Joseph Chan, Hudson Square Connection's Ellen Baer, and Brigit Pinnell, who recently moved from the Jamaica Center BID in Queens to the Montague Street one in Brooklyn Heights.

STILL, NOT EVERYONE'S ke
en on the increasing privatization of the neighborhood watch.

Longtime Soho residents gathered last Tuesday in the basement of St. Anthony's Church at 154 Sullivan Street and heckled Brian Steinwurtzel, of the major real estate company Newmark Knight Frank, and a consultant, Barbara Cohen. They were proposing-what else-a BID representing streets from East Houston to Canal on lower Broadway, one that would have an annual budget of $700,000. "Do you live here?" one person at the meeting shouted (many of the opponents, mind you, didn't live on Broadway, either).

Eighty percent of local business owners favor the BID, according to a vote, and so does the City Planning Commission. Margaret Chin, the local councilwoman, doesn't support it in its current form, but no matter: The owners are likely to get the support they need from the administration and the City Council. They will likely soon become the 66th BID (right behind Chinatown).

In the minds of die-hard Soho residents, the kind routinely freaked out by gentrification, it amounts to a garbage-collection coup by powerful landlords. But the alternative could be a Naples-like trash disaster in summer's dog days.

"How many times a day would the city be able to empty a trash can, or be so detailed to remove that graffiti off a post?" Mr. Walsh said of BIDs in general. "In a perfect world, BIDs wouldn't exist."

lkusisto@observer.com

“I think people are about to get scared,” said one aide to a New York official.

The seminal, chilling event, in the end, was simply Ms. Kennedy’s decision to get serious—and go public—with her desire to replace Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate.

Specifically, she hired a well-known New York consulting firm with close ties to Chuck Schumer, and began making calls to prominent Democrats around the state, including the man with the power to name Mrs. Clinton’s successor, David Paterson.

At around the same time, Mrs. Clinton—Barack Obama’s pick for secretary of state and arguably the only other official with the public profile to alter the neatly presented narrative of the nascent Kennedy campaign—gave what one of her former aides described as “explicit instructions” to her supporters not to interfere with the process in her name.

In one swift move—the hiring of consultant and former Schumer aide Josh Isay to run her behind-the-scenes bid for the Clinton seat was announced, naturally, by a leak to The New York Times—Ms. Kennedy signaled that far from being an outside celebrity venturing onto the turf of a host of more deserving state and Congressional Democrats, her mission was sanctioned at the highest levels of the state party.

“It’s one of these situations in which the renown of the individual simply clears the field,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

“Maybe she is a better strategic thinker than we giver her credit for—certainly it has worked out,” he said. “I think she has basically eliminated the competition.”

The unofficial announcement of Ms. Kennedy’s intentions followed nearly a week of increasingly loud complaints from members of the New York House delegation, a number of whom also covet the seat (and who doubtless remember being passed over in favor of an outside star the last time a seat was open, in 2000).

The blitz of publicity for Ms. Kennedy instantly overwhelmed those complaints, and at least temporarily collapsed the publicity bubble of the once-talkative attorney general, Andrew Cuomo—also the ex-husband of Ms. Kennedy’s cousin, Kerry Kennedy—who had received lavish credit in the media in recent days for remaining silent about his intentions toward the seat.

As Ms. Kennedy’s detractors are quick to point out, correctly, the decision about Mrs. Clinton’s successor rests solely with Governor David Paterson.

But the powers aligning behind Ms. Kennedy are hard to ignore.

“She has a broad spectrum of support,” said Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, with whom Ms. Kennedy has worked closely, pro bono, in her capacity as a fund-raiser for the city school system.

Several former advisers to Mr. Schumer, for instance, said that it was likely that the company consulting Ms. Kennedy, Knickerbocker SKD, would not have taken her on as a client if Mr. Schumer was opposed to serving with her. The firm’s co-founder, Josh Isay, is a former chief of staff to Mr. Schumer and remains very close with his old boss.

“My assumption is that Josh would have to call to check in,” said a former aide to Mr. Schumer, speaking on background.  

“Josh would probably think twice if Chuck was vehemently opposed to the idea,” said another former aide to Mr. Schumer. “My guess is that he’s not and might even like it.”

Mr. Isay, who also counts Michael Bloomberg as a client, and acted as a consultant for Mr. Cuomo in his disastrous 2002 campaign for governor, did not return a call for comment.

On his company Web site, there is one quotation, prominently displayed: “‘If you need television advertising, direct mail or communications advice, I can think of no better place to go.’ —U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer.”

According to an aide to another New York elected official, Ms. Kennedy’s hiring of Mr. Isay sent a signal to all comers for the appointment that “both the mayor and Schumer had to, at the least, not veto it, and at best, which is more likely, are totally on board with it.”

Referring to the mayor, Mr. Klein said, “I know he thinks highly of her.”

Perhaps just as important as who is backing Ms. Kennedy, is who is not standing in her way. Stories at the end of the week evoked the image of the Clintons activating local New York politicians and officials to try and thwart Ms. Kennedy’s candidacy before it launched. But former aides to Mrs. Clinton said those reports were blatantly false.

“The idea that Caroline Kennedy doesn’t have the experience to be a United States senator is as ridiculous as the argument that Hillary Clinton didn’t have the experience to be United States senator,” said a former aide to Mrs. Clinton, who added that, from a tactical point of view, Mrs. Clinton gained nothing from “picking a fight” with Ms. Kennedy.

“It only hurts,” said the former aide, pointing out that any appearance of injecting herself into politics now could endanger Mrs. Clinton’s appointment to the nonpolitical job of secretary of state.

“The notion that Caroline Kennedy is unqualified is ridiculous; she is absolutely qualified,” said Howard Wolfson, the former communications director for Mrs. Clinton during her presidential and original Senate campaign.

Meanwhile, Ms. Kennedy’s actual critics seemed to be regrouping.

In the days preceding the unofficial announcement, she had been mocked by Representative Gary Ackerman as a political J. Lo, Representative Anthony Weiner suggested to Politico that Clinton supporters still held a grudge against her for supporting Barack Obama in the presidential primary, Democratic National Committeeman Robert Zimmerman used the word “dynasty” on CNN, and plugged-in retail workers union president Stuart Appelbaum released a statement calling her a “blank slate.”

It was all enough to prompt Representative Louise Slaughter, who has since endorsed Ms. Kennedy, to remark that her colleagues in the House were reading off coordinated “talking points” and “were trying to get her out of the way.”

Mr. Appelbaum maintained his dismissive tone.

“The sense you get with Caroline Kennedy is that she is at a point in her life when she is deciding what to do with her life after her children have left for college,” he said.

He said that he was “offended that we look for celebrity rather than substance,” and added, “I think the governor has indicated he doesn’t want people campaigning. I don’t know if there is a Kennedy exception.”

Other critics didn’t immediately react to the big news.

Mr. Weiner, who frequently comments, declined. Even before the announcement, Representative Carolyn Maloney, previously the most outspoken candidate in pursuit of the seat, adopted a more restrained line. Representative Kirsten Gillibrand, who one member of Congress called “second only to Maloney” with the verve she has campaigned, has retreated back below the radar.

Representative Steve Israel, who is often mentioned by supporters in and out of Congress as a candidate for the job, is still actively seeking the appointment, according to a source familiar with his thinking on the matter.

According to the source, Mr. Israel made his interest in the job known to the governor soon after Mrs. Clinton’s official nomination as secretary of state and feels that there is still time to make his case to the governor, despite the Kennedy earthquake.

“This is an audience of one and it’s the governor,” said the source. “This is not an election—it’s an appointment.” 

Randi Weingarten, the leader of the United Federation of Teachers who has also been mentioned by Mr. Paterson as a possible replacement for Ms. Clinton, made a subtle dig at Ms. Kennedy’s educational qualifications. Ms. Weingarten said that she had been a point person in the city’s public schools for more than a decade, then said of her initial chat with Ms. Kennedy, “I’m glad she reached out yesterday.”

Republican Representative Pete King, who is considering running for the seat, said he thinks it will be hard for Mr. Paterson to say no to Ms. Kennedy, given the extraordinary lengths she has gone to show her interest in the position.

“My feeling is right now is that he is going to pick her,” said Mr. King. “I just don’t think she would be doing this much if David hadn’t given her a signal that she was going to be the choice.”

jhorowitz@observer.com

Jeffries slams the mayor for promoting so much development in the city, and jokes that there should be a movie called “Development Gone Wild," which Jeffries says would be "starring Mayor Bloomberg and co-starring Dan Doctoroff.”

(It’s not my favorite visual, either.)

Jeffries says his issue is less with safety than with the problems associated with gentrification.

"This year, we have seen an increase in accidents and injuries related to high-risk construction activities," acting commissioner Robert LiMandri said in a statement, "and we must make sure that as construction activity in the City continues to increase, the Department’s ability to hold the construction industry to higher safety standards keeps pace."

The department will spend $4 million to bring in outside engineers and others to oversee the review.

Press release below, followed by a statement from Council Speaker Christine Quinn.