Rezoned!

This afternoon, the City Council voted to approve the Hudson Square rezoning. The rezoning—a plan five years in the making that allows for the creation of a denser, mixed-use district with significantly more residential and retail development—is now in effect. Bordered by Tribeca and Soho, there's little doubt what the rezoning will mean for Hudson Square's future. Behold New York's next hot neighborhood.

Full Council approval was largely a formality after the Council's land use and zoning and franchise committees voted to approve the plan last week, but it was significant: the last step in a lengthy approval process that will transform a neighborhood currently characterized by old printing plants and quiet sidewalks.

The rezoning process—initiated by Trinity Real Estate and the largest privately-initiated rezoning in the city—was largely uncontroversial. Nonetheless, Trinity had more to gain from the rezoning than any other developer, given that the church owns roughly 40 percent of the neighborhood, an area that is bounded by Houston and Canal streets to the north and south, Sixth Avenue and Washington Street to east and west.

But even the proposal's detractors admitted that the existing zoning was problematic and needed to be overhauled—it barred residential development but not hotel/condo towers (like the much-maligned Trump Soho). Moreover, the neighborhood has, in recent years, drawn a number of tech and media companies to its loft-like commercial spaces, increasing demand for dining and nightlife options.

Nonetheless, the Trinity plan was altered considerably since it was first proposed. As a condition of City Council approval, the land use committee negotiated changes to increase affordable housing (the rezoning is expected to bring between 2,000 and 3,000 new apartment units to the area) and open space funding. The Council also garnered an agreement with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to vote on the northern section of the South Village Historic District by the end of the year—an area that many (including the city's own impact report) say will be adversely affected by spillover development from a newly-rezoned Hudson Square.

The City Planning Commission and Borough President Scott Stringer also made additional changes to the original plan—adding a 444-seat elementary school, reducing the height of the buildings down from 320 feet to 290 feet and requiring special permits for any hotels with more than 100 rooms.

Last week, Community Board 2 chair David Gruber told The Observer that the modified plan was “a win all around." He singled out the landmarking of part of the South Village Historic District, the $5.6 million in open space funds that will go to fix the roof at Pier 40 and more affordable housing as changes that the community was particularly pleased with.

Meanwhile, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has been a rare critic of the plan because of its potential impact on the South Village, faulted the council for not securing landmark hearings for the entire district and for allowing buildings to rise as high as they did.

“The commitment to vote upon landmarking part of the South Village before the end of the year reduces substantially but by no means eliminates the negative impact this rezoning, as approved, will have,” executive director Andrew Berman wrote in a statement.

Still, the rezoning plan that passed today was rare in its widespread popularity. It was also, to no one's surprise, very popular with Trinity.

"The rezoning has benefitted from the ideas and close participation of the community board, the oversight of the City Planning Commission and the contributions of the Borough President, " Trinity Real Estate president Jason Pizer wrote in a statement. "The result is a winning combination for the neighborhood and the city. Trinity has a long history in Hudson Square and, especially recently, has seen it evolve and grow as a home for many creative companies so important to the city's economy."

Mr. Pizer added that Trinity felt that the rezoning would, as had been intended, "strengthen this vital and dynamic area while preserving its special character."

kvelsey@observer.com

Lofty goals. (Trinity Real Estate)

Last Friday night on far west Spring Street, the Ear Inn was crowded as usual. A mix of neighborhood regulars and happy-hour-indulging co-workers from the nearby loft buildings—architects, ad execs, programmers, writers—were crammed around the mahogany bar imbibing. Others were gathered outside around benches on the uncrowned sidewalk two blocks from the West Side Highway.

The bar has been there for 195 years, but forget asking for some sort of mixological cocktail that could be found at hundreds of establishments citywide pretending at this sort of authenticity. Above the bar, beyond the shelves of dusty liquor bottles, are glass carboys, ruddy green and brown glass, the size of harbor buoys. They held wine more than a century ago and disappeared into the bowels of the basement, only to be excavated in the 1970s when the bar was made over by a band of eccentric artists. One of their rank tended bar until five years ago. He has since moved upstate. Things change, then they don't.

“We’ve gotten the holy trinity of Pret a Manger, Starbucks and Hale & Hearty soups, but otherwise the neighborhood looks the way you imagine it did 100 years ago,” said James Parvin, a segment producer at NBC who lives in a loft he converted himself on nearby Charlton Street.

With the exception of those at the Ear Inn and down the block eating at 508 Restaurant & Bar, by 7 o’clock the surrounding streets had largely emptied out. The only real activity was the wall of cars creeping, honking, into the Holland Tunnel. Empty is how the streets would largely remain until 7 o’clock Monday morning, when the workers would begin filing back into their postindustrial warrens along Hudson and Varick Streets.

This is how vast swaths of downtown Manhattan used to look, dead in all but daylight, from Soho to Chelsea to the Financial District. Hudson Square, as developers began calling the area bounded by Houston Street, Sixth Avenue, Canal Street and the river in the 1980s, is all that is left. Or all that was.

Nothing but blue skies that I see. (gsz/Flickr)

On Monday Afternoon, the City Planning Commission certified a carefully crafted rezoning scheme furnished by Trinity Real Estate, the property management arm of the city’s oldest church, and once its largest landowner. Trinity’s holdings have been winnowed down over the years, confined largely to the plots it owns in Hudson Square.

For the past five years, Trinity has been devising a plan to turn a number of sites it controls in the area into housing, that most lucrative of New York City real estate ventures. Along the way, it has created the largest private rezoning in city history, twice the size of the massive 26-acre Hudson Yards development 40 blocks to the north, three times the size of Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus.

“Mixed-use communities, such as the Flatiron District and Union Square, which are attracting new businesses and residents, contribute significantly to the dynamic appeal and economic vitality of the city,” Jason Pizer, president of Trinity Real Estate, said in statement Monday. “The proposed rezoning would reinforce Hudson Square as a vital hub for the jobs which are so integral to the city’s future.” Trinity declined to publicly discuss the project until it goes before the local community board next month.

Will this effort really be able to transform the last untouched corner of Manhattan, to make it look, feel and behave like the rest? An earlier rezoning along Renwick Street a decade ago saw a spate of new condo projects that would portend much of the development that swept the city in the ensuing years. Philip Johnson’s last building is here, the Urban Glass House, completed after his death. His modern lofts were, until a few months ago, uniformly selling for less than the bankers and lawyers and foreigners had been paying when they first moved in a few years prior.

One of the most quietly beautiful couples in the entire city, Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany, traded Park Slope—Park Slope!—for Hudson Square. Now they are reportedly leaving, their West Street penthouse on the market for $8.5 million. Their neighbors include John Slattery, James Gandolfini and that other fabulous couple Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. All have said they were drawn here because of the quiet of this unassuming neighborhood, so hard to find anywhere else these days.

“We’ve gotten pretty used to construction over the past decade,” Gary Lawlor, an Ear Inn bartender for twice as long, said. “That hasn’t changed anything, so I don’t think some more new buildings will, either.”

The question has become: How much say should any one entity have over an entire neighborhood?

Arguably (even inarguably) Mayor Bloomberg and his planning commissioner Amanda Burden have exercised the power to reshape the entire city during the past decade, but they were elected and appointed to the job. Carl Weisbrod has Hudson Square almost to himself.

A City Hall hand going back to the Koch administration, Mr. Weisbrod arrived at Trinity in 2005 to run the real estate division. He spent a good part of that time very astutely filling the former printing plants, but his big task was going beyond business. He was focused on the streets, not the C suites. Mr. Weisbrod, who left Trinity last year to become a partner at planning shop HR&A, certainly had the experience. He spent 20 odd years cleaning up Times Square followed by a decade in Lower Manhattan as founding director of the Downtown Alliance. Half that time was spent helping to rebuild after 9/11. Reshaping a neighborhood like Hudson Square would be nothing.

Always a school, always. Here, part of a marquee development on Canal Street. (SHoP Architects)

It is the same thing Trinity has been doing for downtown for more than three centuries. The church was established in 1697 by the grace of King William III. The third church still stands at the top of Wall Street, its 281-foot steeple, completed in 1846, was the highest point in the land until the New York World building surpassed it 54 years later. Real estate has always been at the heart of the church.

Queen Anne made Trinity what it is to this day through the generous land grant of 215 acres, much of it farmland (the annual rent was one peppercorn). Over time, much of that land was given away, granted to churches, schools and other charities, most notably Kings College, today Columbia University. What remains of the church’s holdings is concentrated in Hudson Square.

The area has largely risen and fallen with the tides of the city. After the cows and crops moved on, it became dockland when Manhattan was ringed with piers. When wheels began to replace rudders, Hudson Square became a hub of printing, starting in the 1920s, primarily for Wall Street—contracts, prospectuses, research—though everything from books to greeting cards was common. They were perhaps the very first victims of the digital age.

By the mid-1980s, half of Trinity’s 6 million square feet of industrial space in the neighborhood was bankrupt. The church rectors decided something had to be done. In 1987, Tishman Speyer, building on Trinity’s land, completed 375 Hudson Street. Saatchi & Saatchi, which took nearly half of the 900,000-square-foot building, was the anchor tenant. One by one, the old printing lofts were remade, and many stalwarts of the creative class—MTV, New York magazine, Edelman, Rafael Viñoly architects—followed. Vacancies stand at 5 percent, the lowest rate in the entire city.

It would seem Trinity should be building more office space, but the church is going in a different direction. To attract the kind of vibrant retail that will truly make their tenants’ lives (and their rents) top-notch, some lovely loft apartments would surely help the street life. Many storefronts are perennial losers, especially the restaurants.

Trinity wants to transform some five undeveloped sites it owns, along with up to a dozen it does not, into grand new apartment buildings in the style of the neighborhood’s existing industrial buildings. A number of complex zoning regulations have been proposed. These are meant to maintain the bulky historical look of the area while limiting the slender hotel towers, most notably one bearing the name Trump, that have sprouted in the neighborhood over the past decade. Still, along the avenues, buildings up to 30 stories will be allowed.

In total, the rezoning is expected to create more than 3,000 new apartments in the area, spread across those dozen sites, with the possibility of additional smaller projects. Roughly one in five apartments will be affordable, through development bonuses offered in the zoning. Special measures have been put in place to discourage the demolition of the existing loft buildings or their conversation into apartments. Basically, any office space that is eliminated must be replaced in a one-to-one basis somewhere within the district. Special approvals are also required for new hotel construction.

It is largely the same playbook the Department of City Planning has been honing throughout the Bloomberg years to encourage development, preserve neighborhood character and foster affordable housing. And yet the plan does not sit well with many in the neighborhood, precisely because it is being undertaken by Trinity and not the department itself.

Occupy Hudson Square. (Getty)

Hudson Square has been through a lot in the past few years.

Before the rezoning, there was the hullaboo about the outsized Trump Soho, where 391 “condos” were for sale in the 46-story “hotel.” Residences are illegal in construction zones, so an eventual compromise was reached to restrict owners to 120 days a year at a stretch of no more than 30 days. It was this sort of out-of-context, out-of-bounds development that helped spur on the rezoning.

Then came Mayor Bloomberg with plans for a sanitation garage. The garbage trucks have to park somewhere after all, and the mayor had rightly vowed to stop dumping them all in the outer boroughs, especially the South Bronx. Each borough would have to take its fair share. Messrs. Gandolfini, Slattery and Reed were far from O.K. with this—think of the property values!—and they hosted rallies and benefits, replete with red carpet, even commissioned a local architect to offer an alternative. Mr. Gandolfini was among the plaintiffs of a lawsuit attacking the city for the plan. It passed anyway, and steel currently rises to five stories at the corner of Spring Street and the West Side Highway. Trinity seems to have embraced the building as a mark of the neighborhood’s mixed character.

Then there was the Occupation. One of Trinity’s main reasons for developing all this real estate is to fund the church’s charitable work. In addition to fighting to end apartheid by funding Reverend Desmond Tutu and providing brown bag lunches every Wednesday on the steps of the old church, Trinity gave greatly of money and resources to Occupy Wall Street, including office space in Hudson Square. When the eviction finally came from Zuccotti Park last December, the Occupiers briefly moved into Duarte Park, the future site of that marquee tower. After vandalism and other strains of lawlessness ensued, they were evicted from the space.

Now it is Trinity’s turn to stir things up a little.

At Monday’s planning meeting, some commissioners questioned why it was a private developer, and not the city itself, that was undertaking such a monumental planning effort. “This is a private application that very much looks and smells and feels like a neighborhood rezoning,” Commissioner Anna Levin said. “I’m curious about the degree of interchange between staff and the applicant in taking this up and shaping it. Also, the extent to which other stakeholders and other property owners have been consulted.”

Edith Hsu-Chen, director of the department’s Manhattan office, responded, “Certainly this is a neighborhood rezoning, one put forward by a private applicant. As we have many applications, certainly, with this amount of coverage, there have been discussions with the department. But again, this is a private application, as we want to make clear.”

There are the usual complaints from the neighbors, of course, about schools and affordable housing. The preservationists are worried not only about the integrity of the old loft buildings but also some Federalist-style townhouses sprinkled throughout the district. But the biggest bellows actually come from a number of prominent developers who own land in the area but do not bear the cross.

“The urban design regulations are too generic, they don’t apply well to Hudson Square’s unique grid, and they don’t accommodate the type of development the plan aims to produce.” Anthony Borelli, vice president of planning and development at Edison Properties, told The Observer. His firm owns a parking lot just above the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, a fact that makes its redevelopment difficult, as half the site is unbuildable—dig down for a foundation and you hit the dead space below. But the historical covenants in place make a setback tower impossible.

“On one hand, Trinity’s plan sets a goal for creating approximately 6,000 residential units, including affordable housing, to make the area a vibrant 24-hour neighborhood,” Mr. Borelli said. “But then on the other hand, its urban design regulations make it virtually impossible to achieve that many units or to fully use the city’s inclusionary housing program.”

Gary Barnett, head of Extell Development, placed much of the blame on City Planning. “I’m not sure Trinity really cares,” he said.

Since then, new super-luxe condos and even a controversial hotel have risen, along with plans for a new garbage depot that has drawn vehement opposition from the growing number of residential neighbors--among them a number of celebrities, including Lou Reed, James Gandolfini and Jennifer Connelly--who argue it will push the neighborhood backward rather than forward.

Most of the area's property has long been controlled by Trinity Real Estate, the development arm of one of the city's oldest churches. Its new president, Jason Pizer, summed up the rapid tranformation of Hudson Square rather succinctly in an interview with The Times this weekend:

Q You have a history of renting to media companies.
A It was primarily printing at one time. When I started here in 1999, we were still about 65 to 70 percent printers. Today we do not have any traditional printers in any of the office space.

Yet those many media companies may not last much longer, as Pizer revealed in the same interview that Trinity is currently pursuing a rezoning of the area that would further increase the number apartments in the area, likely through the transformation of some of those office lofts, a la DUMBO.

Q Where do you stand in your efforts to get the area rezoned to include more residential development?
A To go through a large rezoning like this you have to have the community board and city planning sign off. There's a lot of negotiating that needs to go on with city agencies, so we are in that process now.

Q Is it your goal to help turn Hudson Square into a bona fide downtown neighborhood?
A Yes. My goal is also to increase the value of our real estate. I want the buildings to become more valuable over time and the rents to rise, so the church can continue its mission in ministry, and the way to do that is to create a 24/7 neighborhood. If that requires a residential component, then that's the avenue we're going to pursue.

Calls to Trinity have not been returned, but a City Planning spokesperson confirmed that preliminary discussions have taken place regarding a rezoning. When more news emerges from the tunnel, you'll hear it here first.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

When Queen Anne of England bestowed Trinity Church with a large land grant in 1705, the aim was to establish an Anglican foothold in the New World, not a commercial hub for New York City's creative underclass.

But with 6 million square feet of property situated, lucratively, in what is now considered the Hudson Square district, Trinity's real estate arm has indeed succeeded in luring not only the WASPs from ye olde England but the postproduction companies and advertising boutiques from Tribeca. Not bad for a 300-year-old church.

"It's sort of a younger, hipper feel, so, I think, really, that's what drew people here," said Jason Pizer, 45, the Trinity Real Estate executive who has been credited as a driver behind Hudson Square's emergence as a vista for the creative class. "But probably most importantly-and I don't want to kid myself-we were a lower-priced alternative to midtown. We were sort of off the beaten path."

Off the beaten path or not, the Hudson Square district is where Mr. Pizer, a relative newcomer to real estate, has earned his bragging rights. Indeed, since 2005, when he became vice president of leasing for Trinity, the 15-year real estate professional has nailed nearly all of his 3.3 million square feet in transaction activity to 16 acres of space just north of Tribeca and slightly south of the West Village.

While his transaction weight has been dominated by the independently owned businesses that are slowly becoming a calling card for Trinity, its heft has bulged from heavy hitters like Viacom and CBS, which broadcasts five of its radio stations-WFAN and Mike Francesa, anyone?-from its 17-story building at 345 Hudson Street. Both of those media industry behemoths inked big deals in 2007-Viacom for 400,000 feet; CBS for 112,000-that triggered an ambitious repositioning at the building that included lobby, window, electrical- and cooling-system overhauls, Mr. Pizer said. The renovations were completed in 2008.

And for Mr. Pizer and his colleagues, the push toward leasing bigger, more established companies continues, most recently with Horizon Media, a direct marketing company that last week signed a 15-year, 115,000-foot lease at 1 Hudson Square. The firm, which currently leases in midtown, will occupy swing space at 100 Avenue of the Americas until raw floorage at 1 Hudson is fully built out.

"They're looking to consolidate into one building," said Mr. Pizer of Horizon, which currently leases space throughout midtown. "It's a very large transaction for the marketplace we're in, and, for that, we're very happy."

By juggling the demands of the boldface corporations and scrappy boutiques alike, Trinity has turned what was once a neighborhood of bankrupt printing presses owned by the likes of Bowne of New York and Rosenbaum into the kind of trendy office space your 16-year-old son will someday turn into a terrific start-up. Indeed, several of the 18 buildings in Trinity's portfolio are expected to see ambitious renovations over the next decade, including what Mr. Pizer described as major face-lifts for 200 Hudson Street and 100 Sixth Avenue. Like recent work at 1 Hudson Square, the renovations will most likely be deal-driven, said Mr. Pizer.

"It's been a little bit slower than it might be, but the changes I've seen in 10-plus years, it's been like night and day," he said from his modern office at 1 Hudson Square, his floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Varick Street. "I remember showing space in these buildings that had been occupied by the printers, and they had the lights hanging down off the ceiling, and you knew you had to warn people to duck because there were wires and pools of ink on the floor from leaky machines, or ink that had spilled."

As if confronting a particularly horrid flashback, Mr. Pizer, after another moment of recollection, added, perhaps ruefully, "And the odors ..."

MR. PIZER WAS raised by his mother, Josephine, in Bayside, Queens, until the age of 13, when the pair moved to Great Neck. With no familial connection to the real estate industry, he initially sought to become a lawyer, even going so far as to earn a law degree from the University of Albany. But that plan changed shortly after accepting a construction management job that opened up his eyes to the real estate industry.

Mr. Pizer joined Trinity in 1999 as an assistant director of leasing and was soon promoted to director in 2002. But when the firm's president retired, the rising star took a step back to consider Trinity's uncertain future.

"The position had been vacant for at least eight months," recalled Mr. Pizer, who also worked at a commodities exchange and, briefly, as a day trader before grounding himself in the real estate world. "I started wondering what was going on with leadership. There was sort of a lack of direction."

Partly as a way to be closer to his upstate home, he left Trinity in 2004 to take a job at W&M Properties' northern Westchester offices. He returned to Trinity-as the director of leasing-less than a year later, he said.

Since then, he has immersed himself in all things Trinity, including its historical roots and, most astutely, the neighborhood where the firm inks nearly all its real estate transactions.

"The history of Trinity ... is very interesting, and I do get a kick out of it," said Mr. Pizer, a self-proclaimed history buff who said he is currently reading 1491, a book about the Americas before Columbus' great discovery. "Many of the street names are related to the church, like Vestry and Rector. Varick was a vestryman and the current rector lives in a house on Charlton Street that was once owned by Aaron Burr."

But like all real estate professionals, Mr. Pizer is focused on the here and now-and the creative class and their particular real estate needs, to be sure-and looking ahead to the future, which he expects to be a bit brighter than the previous 12 months or so.

"We had some expansions, some early renewals and a couple new deals," said Mr. Pizer, the married father of a 6-year-old boy named Jackson. "So we're not gloating, but we're actually happy with 2009, and also happy that 2009 is over."

jsederstrom@observer.com

And so, in 2004, the church’s board appointed the Rev. Dr. James Cooper, a Florida pastor who had overseen his previous church’s entrée into real-estate development—and from there built the third-largest Episcopal congregation in the country.

Dr. Cooper knew just what to do. In his efforts to lure Carl Weisbrod to manage Trinity’s holdings, he threw in an extra title as well.

Mr. Weisbrod, an advisor to the city’s mayors for 30 years, would become the first-ever “president” of Trinity’s real-estate division. His predecessors had been mere “executive vice presidents.”

“He’s a shy guy and wasn’t that eager about it at the start, but that was my suggestion. I thought it would be helpful for all of us,” Dr. Cooper told The Observer. “We had already begun to look at making Trinity more market-driven in its approach to commercial real estate.”

So far, Mr. Weisbrod has performed as hoped for: In the past 15 months, Trinity’s laggard occupancy rate has swelled to 93 percent, well above the neighborhood’s average. New tenants have included Real Simple magazine, WNYC Radio, the Weinstein brothers and the Guggenheim Foundation. With the help of these small but noticeable leases lending him some cachet, Mr. Weisbrod is making the former printing district into the most expensive office market south of 34th Street—more expensive even than the financial district that he once championed.

But Mr. Weisbrod, 61, says that his mission is not to make money but to build a neighborhood (and in the process to make money), which is a skill he honed while head of the Downtown Alliance business-improvement district for 10 years, and before that in Times Square.

“We are part of the church, and our mission and the church’s mission is intertwined,” he told The Observer. “I am optimistic and confident that the church’s goals and its real-estate goals are pretty much in the same place: How does this neighborhood evolve to become as good as it can be? The specific elements of it remain to be seen. Most neighborhoods are vibrant and have a variety of uses and are quite exciting places to work, visit, to shop in and to recreate in—and, indeed, to worship in, too.”

Together, the two have displayed that enviable Episcopalian knack of doing well by doing good, which is made easier if you happen to own two dozen buildings in an up-and-coming Manhattan neighborhood. Still, that is but a fraction of the 215-acre farm that Trinity received as a gift from Queen Anne in 1705. The church gave most of it away, including one chunk that was used to found Columbia University.

Trinity Real Estate brings the parish, Dr. Cooper told The Observer, about $25 million a year in income. About $3 million is spent on grants here and abroad, he said, and another $4 million goes to diocese-wide activities, with the remainder going to maintain “two very old and very expensive buildings”—St. Paul’s Chapel on Fulton Street, as well as the namesake church near Wall Street—along with music and educational programs.

Trinity has always been a savvy landlord; Mr. Weisbrod’s entrance merely opens the latest chapter. In 1983, the church rebranded the industrial district west of Sixth Avenue as “Hudson Square.” That name used to refer to a park south of Canal, while the new nomenclature referred to the area to the north. Slowly, taking a lot of flak along the way, the church refused to renew leases held by printing companies, choosing instead to renovate the buildings and turn them into higher-priced office space.

The new tenants at first were advertising firms (Saatchi & Saatchi came to Hudson Street in 1987), then Internet start-ups and back-office corporate operations—but somewhere along the way, according to real-estate brokers, Hudson Square got too ambitious.

“When the whole market went up in 1999-2000, the pricing there went up too,” said Marc Shapses, a senior managing director at Studley, a tenant-side broker. “After the economy changed in 2001-2002, it took them a couple of years to bring their pricing where it needed to be to make deals. Maybe they were holding out for the right deal, but it wasn’t priced properly. Carl has been a lot more flexible.”

The area right now looks a bit like an Edward Hopper painting: elegant but desolate. The 12-story granite prewar edifices make the neighborhood appealing to the so-called “creative industries” of graphic arts, media and publishing, while its large floor plates give it an edge over the other leading creative neighborhood, the Flatiron. Last month, Trinity hired Cushman & Wakefield to broker its flagship building, 1 Hudson Square—the first time the church has relied on outside help.

Don’t expect that “flexibility” to last.

“The reality is, when you are a landlord, you do not have a tremendous amount of information outside of your portfolio,” Cushman executive director Andrew Peretz said. “When you hire a brokerage house, you begin to know what your competition is doing and what you need to do to win business. I think Trinity has been getting in the high 20’s and low 30’s. We are asking for $45 now.”

A rent of $45 per square foot per year would put Hudson Square above downtown’s average of $42.65 for Class A and above other parts of midtown south for the second quarter. Midtown Class A rates were $57.85.

However, leasing is just part of Mr. Weisbrod’s job. Trinity Real Estate lists four potential development sites on its Web site, including a 35-story, 1.3-million-square-foot tower between Spring and Vandam streets, the rendering for which shows a vaguely International Style prism set back behind a plaza on Varick Street. He said the design predates his appointment.

“It is really premature to be discussing what we might do,” he told The Observer.

Mr. Weisbrod served as president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation under Mayor Dinkins before going to the Downtown Alliance, and he is now one of Mayor Bloomberg’s appointees to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. He once described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” (who is not Episcopalian), but has been adept at working both sides of the aisle.

“Carl is very smart and very shrewd,” said Joe Rose, who was chairman of the City Planning Commission under Mayor Giuliani. “One of the best things he is known for is being someone with brains and integrity, and the ability to navigate at both the local and state levels to accomplish things people would have thought would be very difficult.”

Real-estate insiders say his government background may well end up compensating for his lack of private-sector development experience. He also may well end up forming a partnership with an experienced developer to build on the sites, or hiring seasoned executives. One of his first moves as Trinity president was to lure Jason Pizer back from Peter Malkin’s W&M Properties in Westchester. Mr. Pizer, Trinity’s leasing director, had left Trinity for Mr. Malkin’s company just months earlier, during the dead time between the departure of Joseph Palombi, the former executive vice president of Trinity, and Mr. Weisbrod’s appointment.

But compared to Soho, the sidewalks of Hudson Square lack people, shopping and restaurants. In fact, the entire ground floor of the flagship 1 Hudson Square has been empty since Trinity renovated the building in 2001. Home Depot has been in negotiations with Trinity for a site a few blocks away, although, five months after the deal was first reported to be in the works, no announcement has been made, and Mr. Weisbrod wouldn’t comment on the negotiations.

He would say, however, that Trinity is trying to craft the right mixture of retail tenants, however.

“We want ground-floor tenants that will add to the neighborhood,” he said. “We want to choose them very carefully.”