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Rebuilding NYC April 2003


FEMA To Stay Downtown, For Now - Apr 30, 2003

With the Federal Emergency Management Agency set to close its lower Manhattan assistance center Thursday, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and others took to the streets to protest .Except FEMA officials told a different story after Tuesday's event. The office won't close on May 1, but officials expect it to close in "the next few weeks." (Newsday)

Pataki Commits to Timeline, Downtown Reactions - Apr 30, 2003
Responding to criticisms that the Lower Manhattan rebuilding efforts are proceeding too slowly, Gov. George Pataki last week released an extensive timeline of short and long-term goals, such as a new Greenmarket, which will open across the street from the World Trade Center site this summer, and the last piece Ð a Downtown link to J.F.K. Airport and the Long Island Rail Road in 2013. (Downtown Express)

Chinatown Businesses Battle SARS Fears and Rumors - Apr 30, 2003
As rumor played tug-of-war with reality last week in Chinatown, community members voiced concern that an outbreak of the SARS virusÑactual or perceivedÑcould bring further economic damage to an area already struggling with fears of the illness. (Downtown Express)

In 9/11 Memorial Competition, Rules Are Set to Be Broken - Apr 29, 2003
Officials overseeing the competition to design a memorial to the victims of the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center promised yesterday that all entries would be considered, even those that stray from the official guidelines for the placement and content of the memorial. (New York Times)

WTC Memorial Design Contest Begins - Apr 28, 2003
Anyone anywhere in the world can register for the competition to select a World Trade Center memorial, starting Monday. While the guidelines require designers to be at least age 18, teens and children can participate, provided an adult registers for them and serves as designer of record -- no design, architecture expertise or experience needed. (Newsday)

Push for Second 9/11 Memorial - Apr 27, 2003
A disturbing photo of a firefighter walking to his death on Sept. 11, 2001, is being used in a public relations blitz by a group that wants special honors at the Ground Zero memorial for uniformed workers. Posters of the photo are going up around the city today, a day before officials launch the international competition for the permanent tribute to the nearly 3,000 people who died in the World Trade Center attacks. (New York Daily News)

Preserving Fulton Street's Historic Structures - Apr 28, 2003
Considering its chaotic buildings, anarchic signs and gritty facades, Fulton Street is an unlikely candidate for architectural sanctity, let alone salvation. It is, however, dense with historic structures, and its westerly verge is destined to be the home of a new Fulton Street Transit Center on Broadway. Students of the city's past see the street, and its environs, as a cornucopia of neglected architectural treasures, even though anyone who walks it will be confronted by a hodgepodge of building facades, some of which are undeniably shabby. Nevertheless, a consortium of leading preservation groups is concerned that new development could result in the obliteration of many non-landmark structures. (New York Times)

Request For Documents Exposes Terror Panel Rift - Apr 26, 2003
One member's attempt to review confidential transcripts exposed a rift Friday within the independent commission examining the Sept. 11 attacks. Tim Roemer, a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, criticized the panel's leaders for not demanding immediate and total access to documents compiled during a congressional inquiry of the terror attacks. (Associated Press)

Pataki Sketches a Timetable for Rebuilding of Ground Zero - Apr 25, 2003
Gov. George E. Pataki, promising "a renewed sense of urgency" in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, laid out a plan yesterday to complete substantial portions of the work at the World Trade Center site by the fifth anniversary of the attack of Sept. 11, 2001. By that time, Mr. Pataki said, the permanent PATH commuter station at the site and the new Fulton Transit Center two blocks to the east will open, the substructure for the memorial to the victims of the attack will be completed, allowing construction of the memorial to proceed, and the erection of steel for the 1,776-foot tower, a signature piece of Daniel Libeskind's design for the site, will be finished. (New York Times)

Pataki Pledges Direct Kennedy-Manhattan-L.I. Rail - Apr 25, 2003
Promising direct rail service from lower Manhattan to Kennedy Airport and Long Island, Gov. George Pataki Thursday laid out an ambitious schedule for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, the surrounding neighborhood and its aging transportation system. While transportation officials take the next year to select a plan to create a lower Manhattan rail connection to Kennedy Airport and Long Island -- and the next decade to build it -- fast ferry service would begin to LaGuardia Airport in 2004 and Kennedy in 2005, under the governor's plan. (Newsday)

State Bill Would Prohibit Peddlers At Ground Zero - Apr 24, 2003
Backed by Mayor Bloomberg, state lawmakers are moving to ban peddlers at Ground Zero, The Post has learned. Proposed legislation submitted by the city to state lawmakers for passage seeks to stop all vendors from peddling goods and food at Ground Zero "in recognition of the sanctity of the site." (New York Post)

Report: WTC Collapse Was Two Events - Apr 24, 2003
The twin skyscrapers of the World Trade Center collapsed because their inner cores were weakened by fire, but the south tower's destruction had no direct bearing on the later fall of the north tower, an engineering firm's study says. The analysis, made public on Wednesday, was conducted by Weidlinger Associates, a company hired by trade center leaseholder Larry Silverstein. (Associated Press)

Angry 9/11 Families Seek Federal Role In Memorial Plan - Apr 24, 2003
A coalition of victims? families groups is pushing the federal government to take a larger role in the September 11 memorial, driven by anger and mistrust toward the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and a desire to create a national monument. The "federal outreach" has begun already and will climax with a mid-May trip to Washington. (New York Sun)

Ground Zero Search Dog In Running For Top Canine Hero - Apr 23, 2003
Jake the black lab searched for signs of life at Ground Zero, scaling heaps of jagged rubble night after night. Now he's up for an award honoring heroic dogs. (Associated Press)

Pataki Wants Downtown Rebuilt Fast - Apr 22, 2003
Gov. George E. Pataki is expected to tell a group of business and civic leaders this week that the 1,776-foot tower that is a central part of Daniel Libeskind's design for the World Trade Center site will be one of the first construction projects to get under way there, according to people close to the rebuilding process. In an address on Thursday to the Association for a Better New York, a civic group, Pataki will lay out an aggressive schedule for construction in the first phase of the rebuilding effort, including the tower, a transportation hub joining the PATH commuter rail line and Lower Manhattan subway lines, and the memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the trade center, the people involved said. (New York Times)

Transit Hub, Rail Links Cited as Top Needs for Downtown - Apr 22, 2003
A transit hub near Ground Zero and a rail link to Kennedy Airport and Long Island are the highest rebuilding priorities for lower Manhattan's largest employers, according to two surveys released yesterday. (New York Daily News)

'After': Surviving Sept. 11 - Apr 20, 2003
Steven Brill's ''After'' is a book of great ambition. It sets out to describe America's reaction to the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001, an event so overpowering that given a year and a half of reflection and relentless commentary it can still seem utterly amorphous. How to define the American reaction to this horror story? One way is to examine the active response of some of the people whose roles in business and government require them to engage the attack without overinterpretation. Brill chooses about 20, mainly responsible officials, insurance lawyers, developers and politicians, but also a few ordinary folks whose lives came to be defined by 9/11 and its aftermath. (New York Times)

Ferry Operator Is the Target of U.S. Inquiry - Apr 18, 2003
Federal authorities are investigating allegations that the region's leading private ferry company defrauded the federal government of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack, according to investigators involved in the case. The investigators say they are looking into whether the ferry company, New York Waterway, which has come to dominate the burgeoning New York ferry market with a fleet of 53 boats, submitted inflated bills to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for ferry services it provided to replace the commuter rail link between New Jersey and Lower Manhattan that was destroyed by the terror attack. (New York Times)

Kids Can Submit WTC Memorial Plans - Apr 18, 2003
Children and teens with memorial designs for the World Trade Center can submit them, even though the competition requires would-be entrants to be 18 or older, redevelopment officials said. Anyone under 18 can enter, provided they work with an adult willing to register with the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. for the young person or group of people, and serve as the designer of record. (Newsday)

Garvin Departing after Clashes With Other Rebuilding Officials - Apr 17, 2003
The director of planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, who personally invited Daniel Libeskind to enter the design competition for the World Trade Center site, has resigned, officials said yesterday. Mr. Garvin had clashed sharply with other participants in the rebuilding effort, including officials from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, and representatives of Gov. George E. Pataki on the development corporation's board and staff. (New York Times)

Alex Garvin Resigns from LMDC - Apr 16, 2003
The lead planner for the agency overseeing the rebuilding of Ground Zero abruptly quit this week, just as the group hammers out a contract with a key architect. Alexander Garvin, chief planner for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., stepped down Monday. He had given notice only last week, sources said. (New York Daily News)

Libeskind Signals Flexibility in Memorial Process - Apr 16, 2003
Daniel Libeskind now seems willing to allow the kind of changes to his design for the World Trade Center site that he was unwilling to consider a few weeks ago. At a Community Board 1 meeting April 14, Libeskind said designers of the memorial for the victims of the Sept. 11 attack would be free to build pedestrian bridges over the 4.7-acre sunken memorial area he proposes in the design. "One competitor might envision 1,000 bridges," the architect said at the forum. (Downtown Express)

Relatives' Lawyers Ask Court to Rule Sept. 11 Fund Unfair - Apr 15, 2003
Lawyers representing the relatives of 10 World Trade Center victims asked a federal court yesterday to rule that the fund created to compensate families was unfair, arbitrary and tilted against those with high incomes, threatening to shortchange surviving families by hundreds of millions of dollars or more. After an all-day session of impassioned arguments by the families' lawyers, followed by rebuttal from a senior official with the Department of Justice, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of United States District Court for the Southern District said he needed more time to weigh the evidence. But he promised to rule by early May. (New York Times)

Doctoroff: City, Not Port Authority Is Best for Ground Zero - Apr 15, 2003
In City Hall's latest push for control of Ground Zero, a top official said yesterday that the Port Authority's ownership of the disaster site could stunt the overall redevelopment of downtown. Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff said the bistate agency is driven by "economic considerations" that would require it to rebuild as much office and retail space on the 16-acre disaster site as the market demands. However, if the city takes control of Ground Zero through a complicated land-swap deal with the Port Authority, Doctoroff said, city officials "would not care" if that commercial space is placed on the disaster site or spread elsewhere in lower Manhattan. (New York Daily News)

September 11 Compensation: The Impossibility of Making Whole - Apr 14, 2003
In the desperate days after the collapse of the World Trade Centre and the attack on the Pentagon, America's Congress enacted an emergency compensation plan. This would not only recompense victims of the attacks but also spare America's airlines litigation costs, likely far to exceed their insurance cover. The price tag is not yet known, but it will certainly run to billions of dollars. However, the plan has already raised many questions about how to compensate victims of such attacks. On April 14th it will be challenged in a federal court in lower Manhattan, not far from where the twin towers stood. (Economist)

Craftspeople Recreating Art Deco Verizon Building - Apr 14, 2003
Stone carvers and metalworkers are healing the gaping wounds in the Verizon building, at 140 West Street. The building was battered by not one, but three, of its neighbors at ground zero: the north and south towers of the World Trade Center and 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed next door. (New York Times)

Port Authority Sued For $20M - Apr 13, 2003
Michael Kenny, the city commissioner who oversaw cleanup at the World Trade Center site, filed a $20 million federal lawsuit Friday, charging that Port Authority Police officers beat him up when he tried to prevent them from making an unauthorized visit there. (Newsday)

Development Corporation Announces Memorial Jury, Calls for Victims to Be Honored Equally - Apr 11, 2003
Officials overseeing the creation of a memorial to victims of the World Trade Center attack rebuffed a request yesterday from a group of New York City firefighters for separate recognition of uniformed rescue workers on the memorial. The development corporation also announced the selection yesterday of a 13-member jury to judge the competition. The jury, which includes prominent artists, architects, scholars, a woman whose husband was killed and a downtown resident and business owner, will choose a design in late October or early November, officials said. (New York Times)

The 9/11 Killer; The Public Hearings On 9/11; Moynihan On Government Secrecy


The 9/11 Killer

It was the kind of violent crime spree that many New Yorkers thought was a thing of the past: over seven weeks, in Brooklyn and Queens, four men were killed and another seriously wounded by a lone gunman.  All the murdered men had been hard-working shopkeepers, holding down tough jobs on the night shift -- one at a laundry, another at a deli, two at small grocery stores. All were family men and immigrants -- from Russia, Guyana, India, and Yemen.  Photos of grieving family members filled the newspapers, along with murky photos of the killer, wearing a baseball cap.  The fact that the killer took little or no money simply added senselessness to the brutality of the crimes.

Now the police have a suspect, a 30-year-old Brooklyn man, Larme Price, who walked into the 77th Precinct station house in Brooklyn on a Friday night, offering to help find the killer. The following day Detective Tony Viggiani, a seasoned hostage negotiator, called him on his cell phone, asking for help. According to the New York Times, Price broke down, saying "I'm the guy you're looking for." Detective Viggiani kept talking while he and another detective jumped in a car and drove to the apartment on Eastern Parkway where Price's parents lived.  Still on the phone, Price said that he had killed the four men in revenge for the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. He was looking for men of "Arabic descent." As it turns out, only one of the four was of Middle Eastern extraction.

This tragically nonsensical story seemed to deepen as his mother, Leatha Price, said her son had a history of drug abuse and mental health problems, exacerbated by September 11.  The family's ongoing attempts to get him treatment were rebuffed repeatedly. On March 9, 2003, he had been seen and released by Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center.  On March 10, say police, he killed Albert Kotlyar, who had asked him to leave the Laundry King Superstore in Bedford-Stuyvesant since he was not doing any wash. Price told police he had been disrespected.

Price had eight prior arrests going back to 1989 for burglary, robbery, and assault.  He has been charged with four counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder.

The Daily News pointed out that this is simply the latest in a long series of cases to raise questions about whether hospitals are properly handling dangerous, mentally ill people. Andrew Goldstein, for example, was shuffled through at least six mental health facilities before he pushed Kendra Webdale to her death in front of a subway train in 1999, the News recalled.  Larry Hogue, the Wild Man of 96th Street, was finally institutionalized in 1997 after his one-man reign of terror on the Upper West Side.

When asked about Price, Roger Klingman, a spokesman for the state Office of Mental Health, said, "We are aware of the story, and we are looking into it."

HEARINGS ON TERRORISM BEGIN AT LAST

New Yorkers are finally getting their hearings. Nearly 19 months after the bombing of the World Trade Center, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks began public hearings downtown on March 31.  As the New York Times had pointed out on the first anniversary of 9/11, the government's failure to investigate was unprecedented for a disaster of this magnitude.  A public inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic began the morning after the survivors arrived in New York City. "No inquiry remotely similar in scope, energy or transparency has examined the attacks of last Sept. 11," wrote the Times.  "One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night."

Similarly, the Warren Commission felt compelled to report its findings by the first anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination.  Serious investigations were conducted into the military failure at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the explosion that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle, and airline disasters, such as the 1996 downing of the TWA Flight 800.

The Bush administration successfully blocked congressional hearings on 9/11 for six months, and repelled calls for a special commission of inquiry. While congressional hearings were eventually held behind closed doors, the promised public hearings were postponed time and again.  Now they have begun at the Custom House, with public testimony that includes bitter but cogent censure of the government's ineptitude in the face of the many warnings it received that a violent attack was coming.

Mindy Kleinberg, for example, who lost her 39-year-old husband, asked, "Where was our government, its agencies, and institutions prior to and on the morning of September 11th?" She cited the cliché that intelligence agencies have to be right 100 percent of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. But this is wrong on its face, she argued, because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once: they were lucky over and over again. Her most startling accusation in her list of government blunders was that the Securities and Exchange Commission and American intelligence agencies failed to investigate the huge number of put options that were bought on American and United Airlines, the two airlines involved in the attacks, in the week before the attack. Speculators, who were gambling that in the short term the stock prices of both airlines would plummet, netted a profit of at least $5 million. The money remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account. Why, she asks, were these aberrant trades not discovered prior to 9/11? Who placed these trades? Have they been investigated?

Mary Fetchet, another witness, lost her 24-year-old son Brad, who worked as an equity trader on the 89th floor of Tower 2.  He called his father after the attack on tower one, shaken, but said that the Port Authority had told them to stay put in their office, "that the building is safe and secure."  She notes that Rick Rescorla, Director of Security for Morgan Stanley told their employees to leave the building - to disregard the Port Authority's commands to evacuees to "return up to their offices." What were the failures, she asks, and who is accountable?

Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation argued that we have to "accept that we will live with some level of risk for years." Terrorists are planning further attacks, and the government cannot eliminate all sources of terrorist danger.  But because intelligence is the first line of defense against terrorism, the New York Police Department in particular should be rebuilding its institutional intelligence capabilities. He argues that the rules put in place in the mid-1970s to correct the abuses of the 1960s impaired collection of intelligence by the early 1980s.  By the 1990s, there was increased concern about terrorism, but police "collection capabilities remained low." Building more effective local intelligence-collection might be better than creating another federal entity since "local police know their territory" and local forces better reflect local populations.

Noting that New York had received only $11 million of the $556 million allocated for homeland security, Mayor Bloomberg urged that funds be distributed according to risk and threat analysis.  If we distributed money for the military in the same way domestic security money has been allocated, said the mayor, "our troops in Iraq would have bows and arrows."

The commission was surprised by the low turnout of 60 or so people, which was far smaller than the 250 or more anticipated.  But then the commission did not make it easy for people to come.  Audience members were told to arrive at least 60 minutes before the start of the hearings, and that seating would be on a first-come, first-served basis.  Members of the press, who were required to register three days in advance, were told to arrive at least 90 minutes early.

NEW YORK'S SENATOR MOYNIHAN DIES

Even as public hearings on terrorism finally began, New York's most relentless opponent of government secrecy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

In Secrecy: The American Experience, he wrote that "government secrecy in its essence" produced its own pathology: "Departments and agencies hoard information, and the government becomes a kind of market. Secrets become organizational assets, never to be shared save in exchange for another organization's assets. Sometimes the exchange is in kind: I exchange my secret for your secret. Sometimes the exchange resembles barter: I trade my willingness to share certain secrets for your help in accomplishing my purposes. But whatever the coinage, the system costs can be enormous. In the void created by absent or withheld information, decisions are either made poorly or not made at all."  This, of course, describes precisely the bureaucratic rivalries among the many agencies charged with protecting New York.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.

Think Tanks


iotwDavid Frum's trip from the think tank world to the White House and back was brief but eventful. Frum left the New York-based Manhattan Institute in 2001 to join the Bush administration as a speechwriter. It was there that he coined the term "axis of evil" to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. This became the signature phrase of President George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and shorthand for Bush's war on terrorism.

Frum left the Bush administration for another think tank soon after -- some say as a result of a mass e-mail by his wife expressing her "wifely pride" at her husband's previously anonymous authorship of the phrase.

But his phrase lives on, as do other ideas borne of think tanks. The concept of "pre-emptive war" was pushed by another think tank, the Project for a New Century, and the New York based Council on Foreign Relations was developing plans for post-war Iraq months before the first bombs hit Baghdad.

BushThink tanks long have been associated with issues of war and peace. But an increasing number also deal with domestic and even local issues, none more prominently than the Manhattan Institute. President Bush credits the institute with inspiring his program of "compassionate conservatism." He also calls The Dream and the Nightmare, a book written by Myron Magnet, the editor of the Manhattan Institutes's City Journal, the most important work he has ever read, after the Bible.

The well-financed Manhattan Institute, whose "fellows" have gone on not just to the White House but to head the CIA and serve Margaret Thatcher, clearly has influenced domestic and foreign policy. But the institute, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, has had even more of an impact on former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who adopted the think tank's ideas (and phrases) on crime, "quality of life," homelessness, and welfare.

The effectiveness of the Manhattan Institute, the only sizable national think tank that has turned its attention to the policy of a particular city, is at a crossroads. Its long dominance in New York City is being undercut by a mayor who isn't nearly as partial to their ideas as his predecessor, and challenged by a group of liberal start-ups.

Most recently, 2001 Democratic mayoral candidates Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green both have joined the world of think tanks, Ferrer becoming the president of the Drum Major Institute and Green restarting a think tank he originally launched in 1981 -- the New Democracy Project.

"There is already a war going on in this country," Green told Newsday shortly before the war on Iraq began. "And it is a war of ideas."

FROM THINKING TO MARKETING

Defining the term think tank is a bit tricky. In America, the phrase first came into use during World War II, describing secure rooms where military planners could plot without being overheard. But the organizations to which the term is generally applied -- policy research institutes -- have existed since the early 20th century, when Progressive Era philanthropists established organizations designed to enable intellectuals to share their expertise with politicians.

While those early research organizations were intended to inform instead of persuade, think tanks' priorities have changed. The 1970s saw the start of a new generation of think tanks whose research sought to advance a specific ideological line.

Because of this, the once venerated role of the intellectual in policy making has been denigrated, in the view of Andrew Rich, a professor of political science at Wake Forest University in North Carolina who studies think tanks. "So many organizations right now have started to call themselves think tanks to cash in on the credibility associated with think tanks," said Rich. "There is no credentialing organization for think tanks, so if you want to start a research group and say you're a think tank, there is no one there to stop you."

In many ways, the defining goal of a think tank is no longer expertise, but impact. "We aim to influence the influential," said Larry Mone, the president of the Manhattan Institute, in a speech last spring. "In any process of social change, some people matter more than others. That's our constituency. . . .We make sure our ideas cross the radar screens of these key people."

Sometimes this means working directly with public officials. Other times it means advising leading professionals in the private sector or offering expert opinions to the press. Think tanks employ policy experts to publish reports and write books and articles in newspapers and magazines. Some publish their own journals, like the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, which are distributed to journalists and policy makers.

Conservative think tanks often focus on economic issues and look to the private sector to solve many of the country's problems. The left encompasses a wide range of groups with sometimes conflicting agendas, such as labor activism, environmentalism, economic justice and minority rights. But most of its policy organizations are more likely than their conservative counterparts to see government as able to provide solutions to many of society's ills.

The marketing of ideas, particularly to the press, often becomes as important as the ideas themselves, and in this respect conservatives have been much more successful than their liberal counterparts, according to a 2001 survey, by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a leftist media studies group. The survey found that 48 percent of media citations of think tanks were from right-leaning groups, 36 percent from centrist groups, and 16 percent from groups that lean left.

Both conservatives and liberals agree that this reflects a think tank community whose right is much stronger than its left. According to David Callahan, co-founder of the New York-based national progressive think tank DEMOS and author of several studies of think tanks, "The left can't get it together. . . .It has lost the war of ideas. And if you're losing the war of ideas then you face an uphill battle on every other front.

"New York City," according to Callahan, "is a classic microcosm of this broader phenomenon. There's a handful of conservative intellectuals who have been running circles around the liberal establishment."

THE MANHATTAN INSTITUTE AND NEW YORK

The sheer size of New York City's budget attracts policy advocates, who are after either their piece of the pie or a say in deciding how the pie is cut and served. In a historically liberal city, most New York policy advocates have been liberal. Groups working on policy issues from a liberal or leftist perspective include City Project, the Fiscal Policy Institute, the Community Service Society and Advocates for Children, as well as various research organizations affiliated with labor unions(such as the Five Borough Institute), and universities.

"There are dozens, hundreds, of liberal organizations and policy groups and institutions in New York that already exist and that already receive funding," said Neil Kleiman, director of the Center for an Urban Future. "The issue is that they are just so scattered - a thousand points of light as opposed to one focused beam."

The conservatives have that focused beam in the Manhattan Institute, which operates on a budget of $5 million a year. In 1978, as Tom Wolfe recently recounted, British millionaire Antony Fisher, who had already established a British think tank to promote free market economics there, founded the Manhattan Institute to push for similar policies in the United States. The institute first came to prominence when one of its staff, Charles Murray, published Losing Ground, a book arguing that the 1960s War on Poverty had hurt, rather than helped, low income Americans. (His later book The Bell Curve, which argued that differences in IQ scores between races are real and do matter, caused even greater controversy.)

As the group gained prominence, those active in its early days moved on, one to become head of the CIA under President Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, another to advise British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The think tank itself, meanwhile, started looking at urban issues, developing its position as the sole conservative voice in New York City's liberal choir.

Besides wanting a chance to change New York, the Manhattan Institute saw an opportunity to use the city as a testing ground for its vision.

"If you really wanted to have [your] ideas reach the cities, you had to become a think tank for the cities," said the institute's vice president of development, David Desrosiers. "So in the '90s we started looking in our own backyard."

At that time, New York presented an ideal laboratory for the Manhattan Institute to formulate an urban plan, according to Fred Siegel, who from 1992 to 1993 was both a Giuliani advisor and the editor of the City Journal. The city was struggling with a sinking economy, a soaring crime rate, and a mayor whose popularity was waning. It was this environment, more than anything else, Siegel said, that led Giuliani to the Manhattan Institute.

"There was a sense in the early '90s of complete collapse," said Siegel. "Crime completely out of control, the rule of law seemingly broken. There was a sense of panic in the city, a sense of complete breakdown. In that framework, there was a lot of ferment. The Manhattan Institute had the largest vision that emerged out of that ferment."

RudyOn the heels of his loss to David Dinkins in the 1989 mayoral election, Giuliani was looking for vision and attended a Manhattan Institute conference on crime. The premise of the "Quality of Life" workshop was George L. Kelling's Broken Windows Theory. The theory, which held that policing minor disorderly behavior like graffiti or fare beating in the subways would help reduce violent crime, would become one of the foundations of Giuliani's remarkably successful policing strategy for New York.

The institute also helped Giuliani reverse his position on the homeless, according to Jack Newfield in The Full Rudy, his new book appraising Giuliani. While the candidate at first "ran for mayor as a crusader for more humane treatment for the homeless," Newfield writes, late in the campaign Giuliani changed his position; "he began attacking the right to shelter...Overnight he started to sound like the Manhattan Institute...which had..been tutoring him...They gave Giuliani a way of looking at poverty through a filter of 'a culture of dependency,' and fiscal tough love."

After becoming mayor, Giuliani continued to borrow heavily from the organization. He was particularly influenced by Murray's ideas concerning welfare reform.

Giuliani hailed the Manhattan Institute for allowing him to challenge what he referred to as the "intellectual rigidity" of New York. In a 1999 speech, Giuliani stated, "The Manhattan Institute and the City Journal have helped to shake up that rigidity. It's allowed us to think thoughts that were impossible for New Yorkers to really embrace in large numbers in the past."

LIBERALS AND NYC THINK TANKS

With the Manhattan Institute proving itself to be so effective, many New York liberals wanted something similar they could call their own. In the mid 1990s, a set of meetings was put together by Ken Emerson and Sarah Ritchie of the Century Foundation. The organizers quickly realized they did not have the resources to launch a think tank that could counter the Manhattan Institute. To provide an alternative on the cheap, they started the New York Progressive Network. Based on the model of Moving Ideas, a national network of think tanks run by the American Prospect magazine, the goal of the New York Progressive Network was, according to Ritchie, to "thicken the progressive community."

"There were all these smaller research and advocacy groups, some of which were multi-issue organizations, others were more specialized, but they seemed to be less than the sum of their parts," said Ritchie. "So what we were trying to do was basically [create] an organization of organizations that had similar political orientation that represented a wide spectrum of policy issues."

While the network model has had some successes elsewhere, as with the Progressive Los Angeles Network, it does not provide a true substitute for a strong, singular think tank. New York Progressive Network now exists only as a largely inactive web site - a kind of online phonebook for progressive organizations.

A more successful effort was the Center for an Urban Future, which came out of City Limits, an urban affairs magazine, in 1996. Many progressives claim the center as an ally, the closest thing to a strong liberal think tank that New York has.

Still Neil Kleiman, who founded the group with Andrew White, insists that the group is not progressive per se.

"There were about a dozen living room conversations about how people can create a liberal alternative to the Manhattan Institute," said Neil Kleiman. "We decided to do something completely different."

(His comments mirror those of some people connected to the Manhattan Institute who insist that the Manhattan Institute is not conservative -- that its pragmatic scholarly research simply focuses on what works and what doesn't work, and what works tends to contradict conventional wisdom, i.e. liberal beliefs.)

Taking a lesson from the Manhattan Institute, whose City Journal had become popular among urban policy makers, the Center for an Urban Future focused on the presentation of its ideas. The center described its research as investigative journalism - a departure from the academic bent of most think tank research. It sent its staff members into "the field" to do research on New York neighborhoods.

The center's main focus is economic development. It explores the effect that different industries, such as aviation or the arts, have on New York's economy, and examines how state fiscal policy affects the city.

"During campaigns we get a lot of people running for office [calling]", said Kleiman. "Especially during the 2001 cycle when everyone was running. We'd have three [competing] candidates from Bensonhurst calling, with questions about ideas and policies and programs. They want fodder."

END OF AN ERA?

The election of Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York has added two high profile names to the ranks of New York's think tanks.

While it is only in the formative stages, Mark Green's New Democracy Project has begun the Monthly Exchange, regular meetings of progressive policy advocates in New York City, loosely modeled after the Wednesday Meeting, a series of strategy meetings of conservative activists in Washington, D.C.

Ferrer said he joined the Drum Major Institute, which was founded in 1961 by a lawyer for Martin Luther King, Jr., because it presented "the opportunity to take something that had a very good heritage and turn it into a progressive public policy institute" promoting social and economic justice.

Although the organization is small, "in the marketplace of ideas you don't need the resources of the Manhattan Institute," Ferrer said. "You need creativity."

This spring, the group will hold conferences on tax policy and on how population shifts affect urban politics. It produces ProgBlog, a weekly electronic newsletter offering a progressive viewpoint on political and economic news.

Mike BEarlier this year, the Drum Major Institute worked with Bloomberg on his education program, advocating measures to make schools accountable to parents. According to Andrea Batista Schlesinger, the group's executive director, Bloomberg was receptive to the initiative and included elements of it in his plan. After years of frustration working on education in New York, she said, having a mayor who listens is "landmark stuff."

Bloomberg's willingness to listen to a variety of policy experts is in sharp contrast to Giuliani's approach, many say, and reflects the new mayor's non-ideological openness to -- in the words of think tank founder Andrew White -- "finding out what works and what doesn't."

The Manhattan Institute would surely have a different interpretation for why its local influence seems, at least temporarily, to be on the wane. Representatives from the institute declined to comment on its relationship with Bloomberg, nor their view of him. A current City Journal article on the administration's taxation and spending policies, however, might offer a clue. Its title: "Bloomberg to City: Drop Dead."



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