Spin Doctors

I squirmed in my seat inside the Shed as my neighbors chatted excitedly about the Memorial Day weekend and all the use they’d now get from their summer homes. We were there for the launch of The Urbanist: Dan Doctoroff and the Rise of New York (Monacelli), which is exactly the kind of vanity publication (complete with hosannas from the likes of Paul Goldberger, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Adams) you’d expect from the former deputy mayor for economic development (his old chief, Michael Bloomberg, penned the foreword). In addition to lobbing favorable comparisons to Robert Moses, a panel of former collaborators crowed about Doctoroff’s singular achievements in citybuilding; of these, the consensus went, the highs are undoubtedly the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park, the redevelopment of Ground Zero, and Hudson Yards’ mitigated victories. The 2012 Olympic bid, meanwhile, was simply too “visionary” for its time, and no one thought to mention the scuttling of the Toronto “smart city” Doctoroff championed during his subsequent post as CEO of Sidewalk Labs. According to Purnima Kapur, a longtime city planner, he was the first official to “realize that we live in a city of neighborhoods.” Likewise, he apprehended that New Yorkers would actually want to live on waterfronts such as those at the edges of Greenpoint and the South Bronx, now littered with showy residential developments claiming to trade on the histories of their respective nabes.

The remarks toggled from vapid to nauseating, not unlike the attendees moving to and from the Hamptons in the coming months. At times, it became hard to hear over the consultant speak and self-congratulatory backslapping; even so, I don’t recall anyone discussing Doctoroff’s decision to downzone nearly every wealthy and white neighborhood in the five boroughs. There wasn’t a peep about the $1.2 billion that was redirected from low-income communities to fund Hudson Yards and the Shed, the latter of which, we were reminded, “welcomes innovative art and ideas” about making “a more equitable society.” Milling around the Doctoroff Lobby for postpanel cocktails, I couldn’t deny that we were indeed living in the city Dan built.