Under Mayor Bloomberg, the power broker remade the city with astonishing speed. Now, as New York is again mired in crisis, he faces his own.
and lower Manhattan), plus a litany of wishful thinking and small-bore items. It’s an action plan that might turn into actual action if only Doctoroff were available to carry it out.Of the dozens of projects that Dan Doctoroff started or championed, a few fizzled and some disappointed, but many more have proved essential: Brooklyn rezoned , Barclays Center , the High Line , Brooklyn Bridge Park , Governors Island , Hudson Yards , Citi Field and Yankee Stadium , and Citi Bike .
The Olympics!” Doctoroff had no experience in international sports, urban management, transportation, event planning, or anything even tangentially related to the issue. But he did have money, connections, a sudden passion, and a limitless capacity for homework. While still working full time at the private-equity firm Oak Hill, he spent evenings and weekends learning everything he could about the Games, cities, real estate, and their zones of overlap.
It was always difficult to separate Doctoroff’s ideas from his personality. Those who opposed him found him high-handed and arrogant; those who joined him thought he was flexible and forward looking. “I was prepared not to like Dan at all,” the urbanist scholar Richard Florida says. “My image of him was a Machiavelli in a suit. When I met him, though, I thought,Dan was two steps ahead of his time. When you look at his quote-unquote failures, they’re because he was pushing too much and too far.
Dense cities like New York are environmentally both good and bad: Apartment dwellers who commute by public transit consume much less energy per person than suburbanites who have large houses to heat and cool and run errands by SUV. Cumulatively, though, cities churn out vast quantities of greenhouse gases. To Bloomberg and Doctoroff, this contradiction meant that cities had an outsize role to play in combating climate change.
It’s illuminating to read the coverage from the time and see how regularly Doctoroff was hammered for moving too slowly. “When the economy was burning white hot, as it did for several years, the mayor’s plan appeared to be bold and forward-looking,” thereported in 2009, when the city was starting to stagger back from the financial crisis.
The company’s plan for the new from-scratch neighborhood placed technology at the service of old-fashioned urban virtues. A network of plazas and pedestrian-first streets would be sprinkled with “lightweight, adjustable street furniture” — sort of like the peddlers’ carts and bicycle-powered knife-sharpening stations that are staples of improvised urban life across the developing world.
He has lived with the specter of the disease for a long time, but he says he doesn’t feel like fate singled him out. As he notes, ALS is not especially rare, and 90 percent of cases have no known genetic component. Doctoroff is the third member of his college class to be diagnosed — his roommate died in 2018 — and he’s pretty sure he won’t be the last. “I never believed I would get ALS, despite the genetic mutation in my family.
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