It’s an action plan that might turn into actual action if only Doctoroff were available to carry it out. The result was New New York, a detailed survey of where people still walk, work, and shop in pre-pandemic numbers (everywhere except midtown and lower Manhattan), plus a litany of wishful thinking and small-bore items. When Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul needed a strategy for coping with that pileup, Doctoroff was tapped to help formulate it along with Richard Buery, CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation and deputy mayor under Bill de Blasio. The post-COVID city is still struggling with a dormant midtown, plummeting tax revenue from commercial real estate, a flood of migrants who have overwhelmed the shelter system, a housing drought, a retreating tech sector, soaring rates of fatal overdoses, and a magma of rage that regularly bursts through the crust of civilized mutuality. New York was in crisis when Doctoroff took office, and it is again now. I thought about it so much that I never enjoyed any accomplishment because I was on to the next thing.” Yet for someone who plotted out his own life and New York’s trajectory in multi-decade chunks, coping with a short time horizon has meant redefining the principle that shaped him: the future. He fends off pity with an anti-pathos shield of good cheer. He’s had to relearn his changing body, and when we leave the café, he pushes up from the table and propels himself to a waiting car like someone who has practiced a tricky maneuver until he knows he can nail it in public. The notoriously smooth talker enunciates more slowly than he used to, pauses for breath, and can walk only short distances with a brace on his right leg and hiking poles in his hands. Some symptoms of the disease are evident. “Nobody’s ever raised that much money for ALS before,” he says with obvious pride. Doctoroff has now set a goal of raising $250 million for Target ALS, the research foundation he co-founded after his uncle’s diagnosis. Then, in October 2021, he himself was diagnosed. Both men had inherited a genetic predisposition to it at the time, Doctoroff declined to have himself tested for that mutation. A few years later, his uncle was diagnosed as well, and he died in 2010. “I pushed aggressively.”įew people in government knew that Doctoroff’s father was dying from ALS. “We set deadlines, and I pushed,” Doctoroff acknowledges. The enemy was inertia, a toxic substance that asphyxiates good ideas. “He’d blow up 15 minutes into any meeting.” He argued with opponents, cajoled skeptics, shouted at staff, and recruited supporters to his vision of a future New York, which seemed obvious and urgent to him but infinitely postponable to many. “He was a hard-charging guy who thought nothing of calling your cell phone at 2 a.m.,” recalls the architect Vishaan Chakrabarti, who was the Manhattan director of city planning during the Bloomberg years. He quickly developed a reputation for relentlessness. He wasn’t, as some have claimed, the 21st-century Robert Moses he was Moses in a hurry.ĭoctoroff was a 43-year-old finance guy with abundant self-confidence but zero experience in public service when he stepped into the second-most-powerful job in city government on January 1, 2002. His stint in government lasted from 2002 to 2008, surely among the most consequential half-dozen years of any city builder’s term in New York history. Every time someone sees a show at the Whitney, scans a brain in Columbia’s Greene Science Center, runs a mile at the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex on Staten Island, buys a saw at the Home Depot in Bronx Terminal Market, watches the Mets play at Citi Field, commutes by subway to Hudson Yards, boards a ferry to Governors Island, or watches the sunset from Brooklyn Bridge Park, that person is animating parts of the city that once existed only as documents on Doctoroff’s desk. Even so, it would be hard to spend a day moving around New York and not encounter at least one item on his long list of urban accomplishments. His role as deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding in the Bloomberg administration was to adopt ideas (some his, many not), convince others that they were feasible and good, then maneuver those fantasies into reality. He didn’t create, plan, launch, reclaim, envision, or dream up anything single-handedly. Eventually, I leave him by Citi Bike, which he dreamed up. On the day I meet Dan Doctoroff, I walk across Manhattan from the Shed, which he created, to the East River Esplanade, which he planned catch a ferry, which he launched get off at the Long Island City waterfront, which he reclaimed from industrial neglect and enter a café overlooking Hunters Point South Park, where he once envisioned an Olympic Village.
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