New York was a refuge for Eric Kandel, who arrived in the city as a child after fleeing the Nazis, and grew up in Brooklyn, where his parents ran a clothing store on Church Avenue. It was in New York that he first found he had a mind for science. It was in New York that he received most of his education. And it was in New York that, as a professor at Columbia University, he did the research on memory that resulted in his being awarded, in 2000, the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
But the company based on Kandel's discoveries, which is called Memory Pharmaceuticals and has attracted more than $88 million in private financing, is not in New York. It and its 76 employees are across the river in Montvale, New Jersey.
"Because the company couldn’t find space here, we lost it," said Kathryn Wylde of the Partnership for New York City.
Wylde was testifying at a recent hearing on how to bring in, and keep, emerging industries. It is a common lament that New York has not been doing a very good job of this, and the biotech industry as a whole might stand at the top of a list of missed economic opportunities. But it does not stand alone.
At a time when the rest of the nation is worried about jobs shifting overseas, the city long has had experience with whole industries moving out (and taking the jobs with them), dating back at least to the early 20th century, when the film production industry, which was based in New York, moved to its new headquarters in Hollywood, California. And the city - like many urban areas across the country - has seen its manufacturing industries steadily decline.
More recently, New York lost millions of dollars and thousands of jobs when the dot-com boom went bust. The cruise ship industry, long a vital cog in the tourist trade, has recently begun to seek out other ports. And the city’s airports and cargo industry, national industries that New York once dominated, are rapidly losing jobs and business.
All this matters because, as many critics point out, the city needs all the industries it can get; its reliance on Wall Street makes it too vulnerable to fluctuations in the stock market.
"It’s becoming increasingly clear that New York City desperately needs to diversify its economy," said Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future, "and, more importantly, needs to identify new sources of employment growth in the decades ahead."
It would be too simple to blame the city government for missed opportunities. Some of what is happening may be beyond the city's control. And, putting aside general long-term strategies (such as beefing up education and job-training programs), there is certainly an argument to be made that sometimes the government's wisest course of action when faced with a new or departing company is to do nothing. There is, after all, substantial risk involved in the courting of any one industry, especially since such seduction often involves dangling large amounts of taxpayers' money. Bubbles burst; companies can implode; projected economic benefits might never materialize.
The Bloomberg administration is publicly committed to taking action, but says it is changing the focus of economic development in the city.
"We've essentially stopped the longtime practice of favoring a relatively small number of large companies with tax abatements and subsidies," Daniel Doctoroff, the deputy mayor of economic development, told the New York Times. "We have basically ended the era of corporate welfare, basically paying people to stay."
In its place, they are overhauling the Department of Small Business to make it easier for new companies to get city contracts, and promoting outer-borough business districts.
Nevertheless, in a study released last year, Bowles argued that New York City has lost traditional industries faster than other places, and has not attracted new ones to take their place.
Those New Yorkers who think they know nothing about the biotechnology industry have only to look to the trial of Martha Stewart, which ended last week in her conviction. The case revolved around her sale of stock in a company called ImClone System, whose viability seemed to be slipping until last month, when the Food and Drug Administration finally granted approval for its cancer-fighting drug. ImClone is one of New York's largest biotech companies, employing about 200 people.
Many think that New York City should be a center of the burgeoning biotech industry, an industry with well-paying jobs whose revenues nationwide have more than quadrupled in the past decade, to some $35 billion in 2001, according to industry statistics. The city has 46 medical schools and major research facilities. In the decade of the 1990s, according to one study, scientists in the New York City region earned the highest number of biotechnology-related patents - some 6,800. The next highest was San Francisco, which had fewer than 4,000. In 2002, educational institutions such as Columbia, Mt. Sinai and Yeshiva University received more than $740 million in government grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Yet, a study released this month by the the trade group New York Biotechnology Association put the number of biotech companies in New York City at about 34 with 1,350 employees. By contrast, Massachusetts, mostly in and around Boston, had 250 companies with 25,000 employees; the Bay Area in California had some 71,000 jobs. What's more, another study published in 2002 by the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy found that San Diego, Seattle and Raleigh-Durham were the other metropolitan regions that had managed significant growth in the biotech industry -- not New York City.
The main reason for the city's lag, according to critics, seems to be a lack of space for laboratories.
A study by the New York City Investment Fund in 2001 called for one million new square feet in laboratory space, which would be possible with about $300 million in public funding.
Since the study, about 10,000 square feet of lab space has been completed, opening last month at the SUNY-Downstate Advanced Biotechnology Incubator in Brooklyn, with the help of $4.4 million in state funding; another 13,000 square feet of space is scheduled to open there in September. The Lower Manhattan Bioscience Project, brainchild of the New York Bioscience Initiative, seeks to create 300,000 square feet in lab space for biotech companies, though the project would cost far more than the $5 million in state funding that has been granted. City officials have poured their efforts into designating seven zones in the city that could be converted into suitable space for biotech companies, though they have no definite timetables for specific sites.
There is ample evidence, however, that a lack of lab space is not the only reason for the stunted industry in the city.
More than eight years ago, Governor George Pataki came to Washington Heights to open the city’s first biomedical research and biotechnology park, called the Audubon Business and Technology Center, developed by Columbia University at a cost of $28 million. The city and state picked up more than two-thirds of that hefty tab.
There were five companies that were initially in talks to move into the facility. A ten-year lease couldn’t keep one of those companies, Dobelle Institute, from leaving for Portugal, where it has developed artificial vision technology that is commercially available in Europe.
Two other companies, Fluid Motion Biotechnologies Inc. and Health Sciences Consultant Group Inc. seem to have dissipated. Another, Vitex, after collecting almost $250,000 in New York State grant money, reportedly relocated its headquarters to Waterville, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The company reportedly has about 80 employees.
Of the five original prospective tenants, then, only one, Ortec International, remains in the city - and it reportedly employs just 35 full-time employees.
A current Audubon tenant, Acceptys, which is working on developing human antibody therapies, does not sound too happy either. In an article called "Starting A Biotech Company in New York," (in pdf format), Acceptys head Daniel Devine advised would-be entrepreneurs to expect some serious hardships if they decide to locate in New York City. "Don’t expect anything from the city," Devine wrote. "It wants to help, but can’t do so effectively." Devine thought it "very unlikely" that his company will keep its research facilities in the city; the cost of living, he said, is just too high to attract researchers.
Part of the problem is the fierce competition. From Singapore to Iowa, governments have launched major efforts to lure biotech to their area, in what some critics such as economist Joseph Cortright consider a misplaced "herd mentality" for an industry that employs about 190,000 people nation-wide, according to industry statistics, which is no more jobs than those in more predictable industries, such as the toy and sporting goods industry.
New York's biotech boosters, however, are not discouraged. They insist that patience is key, as several New York City-based companies are now nearing the end of clinical trials (which typically last more than seven years) that could lead to government approval of their biologics and perhaps spur some growth in the New York City biotech industry.
"I think the lack of a strong biotech industry here is largely a matter of historical accident and misperception," Harold Varmus, another Nobel laureate, wrote in the Times a couple of years ago. "Yet the prospects for biotechnology here could change, rapidly and dramatically, if we decided to promote our many strengths."
The cruise industry began in New York, with the first ship offering passenger service between New York and England setting off in 1818. The industry largely catered to the wealthy until recent years, during which the industry has seen explosive growth.
Cruise ships left a port in the United States 6.5 million times in 2002, and cruise ship lines are pouring money into new ships, with about a dozen of them reportedly scheduled to make their maiden voyages this year. The Queen Mary 2, which will travel between New York and England, is billed as the largest and most expensive liner ever built - weighing 151,400 tons and costing $800 million. The industry has always dovetailed nicely with the city's tourism industry, making the city a natural port for cruise ships, and as a result annual revenues are put by the city at $600 million, and jobs at 3,300.
So it came as a jolt when, in December, the Royal Caribbean Cruises -- one of the three companies that make up the bulk of cruises departing from New York City - announced plans to dock two ships in Bayonne, including the mammoth Voyager of the Seas, which holds more than 3,000 passengers
The port facilities on the West Side of Manhattan are simply not big enough or new enough to accommodate the cruise ships that once carried several hundred passengers but now routinely carry several thousand. "When these new larger ships dock at the passenger ship terminal, space that in the past could berth two ships will only be able to accommodate one," Kate Ascher of the NYC Economic Development Corporation testified last month at a hearing on the industry.
The facilities, built in the 1930s, have not undergone a major renovation since the 1970s. Since taking over the port in 1996 from the Port Authority, the city has invested money into the facility only for emergency repairs and to stabilize the aging structure, which is in danger of sinking into the Hudson River.
It is not just the port itself, but the area around it. "On busy days last year, the terminal handled over 18,000 people," Ascher said. "On these days, traffic is backed up along the West Side highway, and shuttle buses and taxis cannot access the site, resulting in long delays, missed flight connections, and angry passengers."
In an attempt to stem further migration, the city announced a $50 million renovation of the port facilities. The city currently is deciding how to handle the size problem. A temporary facility off the coast of Brooklyn is being planned that would allow the larger ships to dock more comfortably, while an upgrade to the West Side facility would allow the cruise companies to keep a Manhattan home base. It would cost an estimated $250 million over ten years to complete these projects, according to Ascher. The city plans to announce its final plans this spring.
"What we don’t want is to look at our waterfront a decade from now, watching cruise ships depart from other nearby homeports and kick ourselves, saying â€we coulda been a contender,’" said Craig Hammerman, district manager of Brooklyn Community Board 6, in testimony last month before the City Council, perhaps intentionally echoing Marlon Brando's comments during the days of a very different waterfront.
City officials are, again, optimistic about the future. They say that the number of passengers that pass through the West Side terminal has jumped from 400,000 in the 1990s to nearly 900,000 last year, and expect the number to increase to 1.7 million by 2010.
This depends, though, on the amount of investment, and it is not clear whether the cruise industry itself will be willing to pitch in financially, though Carnival Cruise Lines did propose building a $100 million passenger terminal on Pier 7 in Brooklyn a year ago, a plan that the city rejected, at least for the moment.
At the height of the boom, in 1999, the New York New Media Association, a trade association, said that Silicon Alley - the name (a take-off on Silicon Valley in California) given to the cyber businesses that had largely set up shop below 23rd Street -- employed more than 100,000 people in the city, and had created an entire culture of the young, the intelligent... and the rich.
A few months ago, the New York New Media Association announced that it itself is going out of business. And it lasted longer than most.
When technology stocks collapsed in 2000, many of the high-tech businesses were exposed as mere ideas with no plan for producing a profit. Most of New York’s new media companies disappeared as quickly as they were born.
But the dot-com bust, some argue, was ultimately not a bad thing. It helped the city in the long run by weeding out the failures from the real businesses.
"The technology sector is not going to go away," Bruce Bernstein, president of the New York Software Industry Association told the New York Times. "Instead it will shake out some of the most extravagant pure Internet plays."
Information technology is still an industry that offers the possibility of job growth in New York. And the lure of Silicon Alley induced the city to upgrade some of its crumbling infrastructure.
It was during the dot-com boom that the Giuliani administration created a city agency of technology and came up with the idea of laying fiber-optic cable in the city’s underground abandoned pipes. The city also created programs like “Digital Districts”with hi-tech wired office space for technology businesses and tax breaks for business that relocate to these areas. Mayor Michael Bloomberg - who made his billions in the information technology industry - has continued that push in the hopes of attracting new businesses in the future.
For much of the last half century, LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports have been among the busiest in the country, and the air cargo industry in New York, the most lucrative.
The city’s airports employ nearly 50,000 people and thousands more related jobs like restaurant and hotel workers, warehouse employees, truck drivers, cab drivers and government workers in the surrounding area.
In the last decade, however, the cities airports have lost business and jobs at a dramatic rate, according to a report by the Center for an Urban Future.
Both JFK and LaGuardia have seen the number of passengers they see each day decrease. In 1991, JFK was the nation’s seventh busiest passenger airport in the country; a decade later it dropped to 14th. During the same time, LaGuardia dropped from 15th to the 22nd among the nation’s airports. The overall decline in air travel after September 11, 2001 hurt New York City particularly hard.
In 2002, 10,000 airport-related jobs in the city were eliminated - more than any other industry in the city.
The most critical area in aviation for jobs and business however is the cargo industry - shipping of domestic and international packages.
Kennedy was once the busiest cargo airport in the world, today it has dropped to number five in the country. This has happened at a time when the cargo business is booming.
In the last ten years, cargo traffic increased by 79 percent at Newark International Airport, by 68 percent at Miami International Airport and 49 percent at Chicago O’Hare Airport. During the same period, cargo traffic at JFK grew only by 26 percent.
New York City is falling behind other cities because its airports, warehouses, and most of all, its highways are outdated. The Van Wyck Expressway and the Belt Parkway - the only major highways leading to Kennedy Airport are often jammed up with traffic.
The city is trying to upgrade its airports. It recently completed the AirTrain, which will hopefully ease some traffic congestion. Kennedy has built two new terminals and LaGuardia is upgrading. But unclogging New York City’s highways are a long-term problem that will continue to cost jobs and business.
Proponents for business say there is much the city government can do to help attract and keep companies in the city -- streamlining regulations, upgrading technology and the city’s infrastructure, and creating better partnerships between educational institutions and business. Improving schools, reducing crime, and building affordable housing are also critical to making the city a place where people want to live and work.
However, some economic hardships - September 11, a national recession, a war overseas, a blackout - cannot be overcome by city or state government programs.
And when the city is competing with other cities or suburbs that offer large inexpensive space in hi-tech office parks, New York still relies on the less tangible qualities of life in the "greatest city in the world" to attract business and jobs.
"Perfect we're not," Mayor Bloomberg likes to say, "but who would want to live elsewhere?"
New York City Economic Development Corporation
Center for an Urban Future
Partnership for New York City
Related Article: |
Since taking office over two years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has avoided making a clear statement on gay marriage. Last week, the mayor's press officer said Bloomberg's opinion was "irrelevant." Last summer, the mayor said he believed that "the government should not get involved in who people marry."
When Bloomberg ran for office, he said he was going to be a leader and not hide behind politics. To this day, we still don't know the mayor's position on this critical civil rights issue. Dodging the issue of same-sex marriage isn’t leadership. Where is the leader Mike Bloomberg promised us?
I am calling on Michael Bloomberg to tell New Yorkers where he stands on gay marriage. It is important to know his personal position and his position as the mayor of New York City.
If the mayor feels that New York state law needs further clarification - as New York State Attorney Eliot Spitzer stated last week when he said that New York's marriage laws raise constitutional questions involving equal protection - then Bloomberg should make that known to state legislators in Albany.
The mayor has lobbyists working in Albany everyday to change the laws in ways that benefit the city and to change the laws in the ways that he wants them changed. His personal position does matter.
If the mayor is in favor of gay marriage, than he should immediately instruct the city clerk to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.
Many believe - as do I - that New York law regarding marriage is gender neutral. Even Mayor Bloomberg’s top legal advisor - corporation counsel Michael Cardozo - approved a study that upheld the right of gays to marry in New York. When Cardozo was president of the New York City Bar in 1997, the association issued a report calling marriage a fundamental right that should be available to all couples, regardless of gender. Now he should advise the mayor accordingly.
Same-sex marriage is also consistent with New York public policy, which grants domestic partnerships for gay and lesbian couples. In 1983, Governor Mario Cuomo issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and providing health insurance to same-sex domestic partners of state employees. In 1986, Mayor Ed Koch signed legislation banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, and in 1993, Mayor David Dinkins established a domestic partner registry with the city clerk. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, including all city employees, already have access to domestic partnership benefits.
But at this point, I even question Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to domestic partnership.
I recently introduced legislation into the City Council, called the Equal Benefits bill, that would require companies who have contracts with the city of $100,000 or more to provide the same benefits to employees with domestic partners as they provide to employees with spouses. San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and the state of California all have similar measures. There is no reason for the mayor not to support this bill, yet the Bloomberg administration recently testified in opposition to it.
Marriage can be a religious institution, but it is not exclusively a religious one. New Yorkers go to city office – the city clerk or the county clerk – to get the government license that sanctions, affirms, and establishes a marriage. Government has the responsibility to protect the civil rights of its citizens and to make sure that lesbian and gay families are offered the rights, benefits, privileges, and respect that they deserve.
And as the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg has an obligation to speak up.
Christine Quinn represents the district 3 neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Midtown, Clinton, and Hell's Kitchen in the New York City Council.
The once-scruffy neighborhood of St. George, just opposite the ferry terminal on Staten Island’s north shore, has been experiencing an economic and cultural revival. But while places like Fort Greene in Brooklyn have broad, public-private initiatives pegged to the arts, cultural growth has occurred organically in St. George, without extensive involvement from an economic development corporation or public agency. Local artists and businesses have formed mutually beneficial ties, and residents have become consumers of art.
Economic development of any stripe in St. George is still in the earliest stages. But many are hoping that, when the new St. George Ferry Terminal opens, scheduled for 2005, the neighborhood will become the city’s next cultural destination.
In the Victorian era, St. George was an elegant suburb, designed to lure residents away from the smoke and clatter of Manhattan. Large, stately homes were built with towers and balconies to take advantage of the hilly landscape and harbor views. For much of the twentieth century the community suffered from crime and abandonment, but recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Africa have breathed life back into the neighborhood, as have several hundred artists, who were drawn by the neighborhood’s cheap housing and proximity to Manhattan. During the 1990s, crime in St. George fell dramatically and the population gained 18 percent.
The Department of Transportation promises that the new, $84 million St. George Ferry Terminal will be a “gateway” to the growing number of cultural and recreational destinations in the area. Each year, more than one million tourists ride the ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island, but few make it off the boat, in part because the current terminal, a dispiriting concrete bunker, provides no clue that a funky neighborhood lies just up the hill. Planners say the new terminal will take advantage of waterfront views and that a scenic walkway, retail stores, performance plaza, and restaurant will encourage tourists and commuters to linger. The Staten Island Yankees’ ballpark, opened alongside the terminal in 2001, provides a glimpse of the future redeveloped waterfront.
“Cultural development is a topic that causes excitement in the community; everyone’s thinking, can you be next Williamsburg?” says Laura Jean Watters, executive director of the Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island. In addition to providing artists’ grants, the council is working to lay the groundwork for arts tourism. Since 1998, the agency has partnered with the Downtown Alliance to operate V.I.S.I.T. (Vital Information for Staten Islanders and Tourists), an information kiosk at the Whitehall Ferry that distributes a cultural tourism brochure and map for a self-guided walking tour of St. George.
The newly restored WPA murals in Staten Island Borough Hall, just minutes from the ferry, are on the tour. So are the Victorian-era homes in the residential district, which won landmark status in 1994. There’s also the 2,800-seat St. George Theater, a Baroque movie house with every architectural flourish imaginable - murals, stained glass, chandeliers, fountains, statues, and pink marble staircases. The theater has housed poetry readings and other gatherings, and community leaders are lobbying to turn it into a performing arts center.
There are also plans to open a National Lighthouse Museum to showcase the island’s role in maritime history. For nearly a century, starting in 1862, St. George was the headquarters of the National Lighthouse Board, a place to test and inspect fuels, lamps, and lenses, experiment with new designs, and supply lighthouses around the country. The museum will include many of the original buildings, as well as a lighthouse, lightship, and newly refurbished pier.
While often neglectful of the “forgotten borough,” the city has begun to invest in Staten Island. An Alliance for the Arts report that analyzed capital spending on cultural construction projects from 1992 to 2002 found that the lion’s share of city funding was spent in Manhattan (49 percent)—more than twice what was spent on cultural infrastructure in Brooklyn (20 percent), three times more than in Queens (13 percent), four times more than in the Bronx (11 percent), and seven times more than in Staten Island (seven percent). But the city recently spent $8 million to upgrade the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, a former community for retired sailors that has been city-owned since 1976. Snug Harbor attracts 300,000 visitors a year to its botanical garden, children’s museum, art classes, galleries, and performances. Half of the funds went toward the renovation of the 1892 Music Hall, which opened just a year after Carnegie Hall and is thus the city’s second-oldest music venue. In the past, the 750-seat hall has been host mainly to graduation ceremonies and occasional concerts, but its directors now plan to produce a full season of Broadway-style musicals at prices affordable to all Staten Islanders—$25 to $35 a ticket. The first production, of the musical Fiorello!, opened in January.
St. George’s greatest strength lies in its local artists, who have proven both creative and entrepreneurial. While they’d appreciate bigger audiences, they’re not standing by waiting for tourists to arrive. A voluntary registry maintained by Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island includes more than 300 artists in St. George and nearby New Brighton, and there are signs of their activity in the many signs promoting performances and gallery openings in the neighborhood cafes, barber shops, and stores.
The Twisted Gift/Vlepo Gallery is a window into the local arts scene. Vlepo means “I see” in Greek, a tribute to the heritage of the sisters who run it, Martha and Tanya Trivizas. Tanya runs the business side, using the gift shop to showcase the work of local potters, jewelry makers, and designers. Martha, a painter, fills the gallery with work she finds through studio tours and word of mouth. “I thought the gift shop could help to subsidize the gallery,” says Tanya. “What’s been surprising is that, since Christmas, the gallery has become even more successful than the shop.”
Dan Icolari, a writer and St. George resident since 1977, hopes to create cultural aficionados among his neighbors. “I’m interested in developing a market for artists who are here and who have been here,” he says. “It’s not like Williamsburg, where someone blows a whistle and artists arrive.”
Together with Steve Mutt, a well-known redware artist, Icolari has played host to the Friends of Fire pottery exhibit in his back garden for the past three summers. “I want to make art immediate and accessible - not to lower standards, but to bring serious work to more people,” Icolari says, mentioning that he once hung paintings by local artists on the trees around his home.
It’s a warning about the dangers of viewing communities as “destinations,” of putting tourist dollars ahead of people. While it’s too soon to be worrying about this issue in St. George — rents are still cheap, and many storefronts sit empty — there’s now abundant evidence that cultural development often leads to gentrification and displacement, often of the very artists who helped to catalyze economic activity.
Through her work at Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island, Watters is laying plans to avoid this pattern. “Cultural development in St. George is at place where we can put in safeguards for artists and others," such as spaces specifically reserved for artists and cultural empowerment zones. “Ultimately,” she says, “development has to be driven by artists themselves.”
Related Articles: |
Suddenly, in a New York minute, both houses of the New York State legislature last week passed a sweeping array of bills aimed at improving the election system. There are two separate packages, though, and they offer very different ways of reforming New York’s broken electoral process.
But at least they offer something. This flurry of legislation comes after two years of delays.
The legislature is acting because, as I wrote a year ago, New York, like every other state, is facing a deadline imposed by the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA. Thus far, the process for implementing the law has been tenuous, partisan, political, and vague.
To begin with, the statute is vaguely written and open to much interpretation by the states. But the problems in implementing it also start in Washington, where there have been numerous delays. Though the bill was signed into law in 2002, for example, no members were named to the Election Assistance Commission until a few months ago.
The delays in Washington have aggravated delays in New York State, which is required to come up with a plan that is approved by the federal commission. Because the commission was late in forming, New York has applied for a waiver until 2006 to be in compliance with the Help America Vote Act – and this includes purchasing new voting machines.
Assembly vs. Senate
The New York State Legislature has been responsive to the opportunity to reform the election system. Last year, the Assembly passed a great package of legislation that aimed to add details to the task force plan. The
legislation would:
All these bills died in the Senate last session.
But on February 23rd, there was much action in Albany on election reform. Assembly Speaker Silver held a press conference to re-introduce the Help America Vote Act package of legislation, which passed the Assembly that day. Senate Election Law Committee Chair Thomas Morahan countered by introducing six HAVA-related bills of his own, which passed the Senate that same afternoon.
The Assembly bills provide an urgently needed first step towards a uniform, cleanly administered voting system for every New Yorker. Provisions in the Senate bills allow for a better complaint procedure for voters.
Only if the two work together will New York become more accountable for its election system.
But even this would not be enough to provide a better and cleaner election system. That would require the passage of a few other bills that have been introduced in the Senate and Assembly:
Assemblymember Stringer is leading the fight for Election Day Voter Registration, a proven solution to low voter turnout and voter apathy among young voters. It has proven to increase voter turnout above the national average, made it easier for voters who move to register more easily, has led to fewer reported problems with fraud, administrative complexity, or excessive cost in the six states that permit same-day registration, and reduced the number of provisional ballots and accompanying cumbersome administrative demands on registrars. Election Day registration would allow New Yorkers who get interested in an election two weeks before Election Day the opportunity to vote.
Assemblymember Peter Rivera has introduced a bill that will eliminate the full-face ballot requirement - a procedure in which New Yorkers vote off of a huge page that includes the names of every person running for office in that election. The problems with full-face ballot are many: voters with disabilities have problems reaching the ballot, voters with cognitive disabilities have problems when confronted with the information on the ballot, and districts with more than one language on the ballot as prescribed by the Voting Rights Act are prone to a ballot in tiny print that makes it hard to read. The full-face ballot is also much more expensive than a regular ballot, and the full-face ballot limits New York to a few voting machine vendors - which also excludes machine vendors the disabilities community endorses. The reasons for changing the full-face ballot are many and necessary.
Jillian Matundan is the election reform associate of Citizens Union Foundation, the publisher of Gotham Gazette.
Related Articles: |
They call it Super Tuesday, but to too many voters, there is nothing super about it. These are the voters who will be barred from voting simply because they did not register in time.
The New York City Board of Elections requires registration at least 25 days before an election. That means that New York City residents wanting to vote in the March 2nd presidential primary had to be registered by February 6th. The effect of this rule is to lock out from the process new voters who had recently moved or just turned 18. But it also excludes people who did not become interested in the contest until things started heating up in the last few weeks.
This is why it makes sense for New York to follow the lead of six other states and allow for voters to register and vote on Election Day.
Unlike other states that are able to enact Election Day registration through legislation alone, New York must also amend its constitution to allow for it. It is worth doing it.
New York ranked near the bottom (41st in the nation) in turnout of voting age population in the 2000 presidential election, according to the Federal Election Commission. In the 2002 mid-term election, turnout was dismal: Only 32.3 percent of New York's voting age population bothered to vote, a four percent decrease from the 1998 mid-term election.
Election Day registration allows people to register on Election Day at their polling site and then vote by affidavit or paper ballot. The six states (Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming) that permit this have average turnout rates of 63 percent, which is as much as 10 percentage points higher than the national average -- and 13 percent more than New York State. These six states also have up to 90 percent of eligible voters registered and seven out of ten people actually vote, according to the FEC. The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate showed that Election Day registration states had an average turnout increase by about five percent between 1996 and 2000. By comparison, in all 50 states, the average turnout increase from 1996 to 2000 was less than half that – about two percent.
Opponents of Election Day registration cite fears concerning election fraud to argue that it does not belong in New York. However, this is not the experience of the six states that permit it. They have not reported any increased cases of election fraud since implementing Election Day registration. Instead, their experience demonstrates that Election Day registration is a proven method for increasing voter participation.
Election Day registration in New York would certainly include stringent requirements to protect the integrity of New York's voting process. An example may be the requirement that a new voter present two forms of identification when registering on election day, which is a more stringent requirement than the current regulations. New York should also allow for registration at the polling place, not the central board offices, to encourage new voters to feel more integrated into the electoral process.
No one can know, of course, how many more people will vote as a result of Election Day registration in New York, but by looking at the turnout rate of the voting age population in the six states that currently permit it, New York could potentially see the participation of more than a million new voters.
While a constitutional change is a lengthy process that presents a healthy challenge, it does create ample time for debate and consensus building. In order to become law, legislation amending the state constitution (the bill number is A.5800) will have to pass both the Assembly and the Senate in two different legislative sessions and, then, be put before the voters in a statewide ballot. This substantial requirement for enactment guarantees that the proposal will be vetted thoroughly and supported by a wide range of interest groups across the state.
The goal is democratic and the benefits are proven. Imagine having an election where everyone could participate and eligible voters could wait until Election Day to decide to register and vote. Candidates would have to campaign in all parts of their districts and take nothing for granted. Injecting this uncertainty into often-lackluster campaigns would make incumbents work harder to be more responsive to the needs of all of their constituents.
In the wake of the 2000 presidential election fiasco that led to mass confusion and doubt about vote counting procedures and the electoral system as a whole, New York State should take bold measures to restore and strengthen the public's confidence. Election Day registration is an appropriate and timely measure that will revitalize democracy in a state that has maintained a poor turnout record for years.
Scott Stringer is a member of the New York State Assembly, representing the Upper West Side.
Related Article: |
When the governor announced last Friday that the Deutsche Bank building, shrouded in an enormous black veil on the edge of Ground Zero, would be bought and then razed to make room for, among other things, a park, he also proclaimed it the last remaining piece of business having to do with the "clean-up" of Ground Zero after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. From here on in, it is all rebuilding.
Though the governor made no mention of it, his announcement was made a year to the day after architect Daniel Libeskind's "Memory Foundations" was selected from nine finalists as the plan to replace the World Trade Center.
Much has changed in the past year. Certainly the plans for Ground Zero have changed, though there is a debate as to whether the changes represent a natural evolution or a betrayal of the original design. (See "A Year With Libeskind" )
But those with ambitious ideas are not limiting themselves to Lower Manhattan. At least in part because of the excitement created by the redevelopment of the World Trade Center, there is now more long-term urban planning and large-scale development on the table that at any time since the Lindsay administration in the 1960s created a master plan for the city.
Before 9/11, Dick Netzer, a professor of public administration at New York University, lamented the lost ability of New York City to tackle large-scale projects. The sense of urgency that had propelled big projects in the past, he wrote, was gone.
The attacks of September 11 clearly created that urgency for one 16-acre site downtown; development at Ground Zero has moved forward rapidly. The major elements of that plan – the Freedom Tower, the memorial, and a transportation hub – have been designed in the year since Libeskind’s plan was chosen.
But that urgency seems to have spread throughout the city, where new projects are coming from a variety of sources. The City Planning Department, besides working to limit development in some areas, is promoting the development of three central business districts:
It has also developed an agency strategic plan, to examine its citywide goals.
Other public agencies have also come up with big plans, or have breathed new life into existing ideas. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Port Authority, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation are all eyeing large-scale transportation initiatives.
Private developers are also involved. Developer Bruce Ratner recently presented a plan for retail, commercial and residential development centered on an arena for the Nets in Brooklyn. The New York Jets have designed a stadium for the Far West Side.
The interest in planning and development projects, say planners, is coming largely from City Hall, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems determined to leave his legacy in physical form.
“We see the city out in front in promoting these projects,” said Robert Yaro, head of the Regional Plan Association. “Some of them are relatively modest…and some of them are really the biggest development projects in the history of the city.”
While most of New York focused on using the development at Ground Zero to revive downtown as the model of a functional urban neighborhood, city planning officials were quietly planning a much larger project several miles uptown. Starting in late 2001, the department began laying out a comprehensive plan for the Hudson Yards, (also known as the Far West Side or Midtown West), one of the largest planning projects in New York in decades.
At 360 acres, the Hudson Yards – the area between 8th Avenue and the Hudson River, from 28th Street on the south to 43rd Street on the north – is more than 22 times the size of Ground Zero. The city hopes to encourage residential and commercial development in the area, turning it into a western expansion of Midtown. The plan’s proposed stadium on the Hudson River, an idea that has been put forth before in several forms, is also a major part of New York’s bid for the 2012 Olympics.
The city will not do much building itself on the Hudson Yards. Instead, it hopes to install the infrastructure, including a costly extension of the 7-train, and the zoning that will encourage private sector development in the decades ahead.
Two major buildings are central to the plan. The first is the Javits Convention Center, which is slated to be enlarged; the second is a proposed football stadium for the New York Jets that would connect to the convention center as a further extension. The stadium’s design has titillated architects, but like previous stadium plans for the site has run into opposition.
The Jets and the city would split the cost of paying for the stadium. For the area as a whole, Doctoroff has proposed a funding strategy where the city will pay for the development by issuing bonds against future revenue, a plan that skeptics do not think will work.
Of all the aspects of the enormous plan, the Jets Stadium and the Javits Center have drawn the most fire. Critics describe the Javits Center extension as unnecessary, the Jets stadium as too expensive, and the plan to connect the two as unlikely to attract conventioneers.
In the plan’s defense(in pdf format), supporters have said that while the stadium has become the public symbol of the West Side development plan, it is the infrastructure investment and the rezoning that will make the greatest difference to the city and the region.
This January, the real estate developer Bruce Ratner presented a plan to develop the area near Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, centered on a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets, a team which he now owns. The plan proposes 2.1 million square feet of commercial office space, 4.4 million square feet of mixed-income residences adding 4,500 homes to the area, and 300,000 square feet of retail for the 21-acre site on the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.
Like the Ground Zero and Hudson Yards plans, Ratner’s plan uses architecture as a way to sell a larger development project. Frank Gehry, who designed the famous Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain – and who also envisioned a huge museum on the waterfront in downtown Manhattan that was never built – drew up preliminary plans for a wavy, glass-and-metal building that looks nothing like a conventional stadium.
Sports arenas have the reputation of sucking up public money, rarely producing the promised payoffs. This one, though, has won the support of many local politicians. Even some who regularly criticize such projects said that this one has promise because of access to public transportation – nine subways and several commuter trains meet at the site.
"The numbers work," Mark Rosentraub, a sports economist who regularly criticizes sports arenas, told the New York Times. "You'll have the best arena in the country to service a market of more than 6.3 million people."
Such arguments have not convinced those who will be directly affected, and local residents and businesses are opposing the plan intensely, skeptical of the plausibility of its financial promises, and reluctant to make the sacrifice that Ratner is asking them to make.
The major controversy surrounding the plan is Ratner’s intention to condemn four city blocks, displacing up to 1,000 people and businesses providing 200 jobs. Some have suggested that Ratner instead raze Atlantic Center, a shopping center across the street which he owns, to avoid using eminent domain.
While some worry about the plan because they may have to find new places to live, others are concerned that the public will have little to say as this plan – still in its preliminary stages – moves forward. If land is condemened and placed under the control of the state - as the plan calls for - the arena itself would avoid the city's land use review process, the major opportunity for public input.
After September 11th, the federal government gave New York $4.55 billion for transportation, about 60 percent of what state and city officials had asked for. Projects directly related to downtown Manhattan such as the new train station and the South Ferry subway station renovation have taken a large proportion of that money. Governor Pataki intends to spend about $900,000,000 more on burying a section of West Street, not leaving enough for another large initiative.
Other agencies have continued to make big plans as well, most looking for other sources of funding. It would take over $50 billion to complete all the transportation improvements currently being planned around the city.
The Second Avenue Subway is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the 1920s. The plan was tabled because of the Great Depression, and was not acted upon until the 1970s, when several miles of track were actually laid. The project stalled again because of the fiscal crisis.
The plan has re-emerged, complete with $1 billion written into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital budget. In its entirety, the idea envisions a subway running from 125th Street to Hanover Square, an undertaking that would cost $12.5 billion and take 17 years to build. A scaled-down version of the plan, estimated to cost about $4 billion and take about 7 years, is also being formulated.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority claims that it will begin construction on the project at the end of this year.
The city planning department’s plan for the Hudson Yards depends on a one mile extension of the 7 Train to 34th Street and 11th Avenue, a move that would cost $2 billion. By connecting the Long Island Railroad and Metro North to that site as well, the planning department wants to create a major transportation hub to spur development in the area.
Construction on the 7-train extension is slated to begin in the spring of 2005, and to be completed in five years.
The Empire State Development Corporation and Amtrak are promoting another idea for a transportation hub in the area, a five-year project to bring Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road passengers into the Farley Post Office, across from Penn Station, that would cost another $1 billion.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has already begun work in both Queens and Manhattan, constructing track to connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal through the existing 63rd Street tunnel. Besides creating better access to the East Side for commuters from Long Island, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects the plan to take stress off of commuter trains currently traveling between Long Island and Penn Station.
To fund the project, the agency is seeking $2.6 billion in “New Starts” funding from the federal government. In January, the Federal Transportation Authority has recommended that Congress allocate money for the project in the next fiscal year.
The project is slated to be completed in 2011, at an expected total cost of $6 billion.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair Peter Kalikow also said that it would help pay for a direct rail link between lower Manhattan, Long Island, and JFK, a project which the authority is collaborating on with the Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. In February, the groups presented four ways to pull off their project.
The plans differed in how they would get under the East River. Three called for use of existing tunnels, something commuter groups say would be impossible without causing serious inconvenience to straphangers. The fourth would construct a new tunnel, much more expensive but possibly less disruptive. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation said that a decision would come in April.
While its presenters were deliberately vague in talking about funding options last month, the direct-rail line has another supporter in Senator Chuck Schumer. Schumer said that 9/11 rebuilding money should be directed towards this project, instead of using federal funds to bury West Street.
While optimistic officials say that it is possible to build everything they have proposed, planners acknowledge that there are too many transportation projects vying for a limited amount of resources. Somehow, they say, the list will be narrowed down.
Several independent organizations are trying to assess which projects are the most deserving of funding, and have issued competing studies. The Partnership for New York City, a group made of business leaders, found that transportation hubs, like the one at Ground Zero and a new Penn Station, offer the best benefits as a percentage of costs (in pdf format), while concluding that the Second Avenue Subway was the least beneficial of the New York City projects on the table.
The Regional Plan Association released a study the following month which reached the absolute opposite conclusion – that the Second Avenue Subway must be the top priority (in pdf format).
But as Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, a subway riders advocacy group, points out, there is a long-term project that, while less exciting, is more important -- basic repair. Repairs to the city’s existing transportation systems will cost about $2 billion, and are generally paid for with the same federal money that some have eyed for the new projects.
“If we were force to chose, we would abandon all these projects,” Russianoff said. “Because the top priority has to be fixing the existing system we have.”
Last month, a large group of New Yorkers from all walks of life gathered in a room to talk about urban planning. The event was the inaugural meeting of New York 2050, a project encouraging people to envision the city’s future. Its organizers were many of the same people who established the public forums to discuss the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.
The meeting looked like many of the meetings held to discuss Lower Manhattan, but the conversation sounded much different. It did not focus on specifics of a single project. Instead, the group encouraged regular New Yorkers to think about long term urban planning for the city, in the hopes of establishing a comprehensive vision for the region as a whole.
Expecting many people to participate in such a project would have seemed far-fetched before 9/11
”People are talking about planning now in ways that they haven’t before, in part because people are ready for it,” said Shiffman. “What Lower Manhattan did was unleash a torrent of imagination.”
2003 2004 Related Article: |
One year ago, Daniel Libeskind won a competition to design the former World Trade Center site. Some would hesitate to continue to describe him as a winner today.
Libeskind's plan has been changed significantly in the past year, as has his perceived role in the development of the site. But because it was never clear what Libeskind's role was in the first place, there is now disagreement as to whether these changes constitute the plan's evolution or its betrayal.
Even when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation first invited Studio Libeskind and six other architectural firms downtown, it was not clear what the corporation wanted from them. The public had rejected the original plans that architects Beyer Blinder Belle had produced for the site, and new ideas were needed. So the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation launched a 'design study' to gather ideas from the world's leading architects. It insisted that the study was not a competition, and would not result in a winner being chosen as the site's master planner.
Several months later, Libeskind was declared the winner of the non-competition, and was named the master planner for the site, largely because the Governor was inspired by his vision for a building he was not contracted to design. With that, Libeskind’s plan became the plan for Ground Zero.
But nobody really knew what that meant.
Officials began speaking about his design as if he would not only determine the size and shape of the buildings, streets and open spaces – as a master planner normally does – but also that the appearance of the structures built on Ground Zero would follow "the Libeskind vision."
Civic associations, like the Civic Alliance, New York New Visions and Rebuild Downtown Our Town, have been in favor of granting Libeskind a lofty mandate, because his plan had been chosen after intense public discussion that they helped organize. Civic groups have often been the loudest advocates of the inherent value of keeping each individual element closely in line with Libeskind's plan.
Despite the supposed support of public officials and civic groups, though, the plan has gone through major changes over its first year in existence.
Libeskind's original plan divided the former superblock of the World Trade Center into four smaller blocks by extending Fulton and Greenwich streets through the site. It envisioned a sunken memorial site on the spot where the Twin Towers stood, surrounded by irregularly shaped towers, the tallest of which was a 1,776-foot skyscraper with an asymmetrical spire that Governor George Pataki has dubbed the Freedom Tower.
Since then, the plan for the site has changed significantly.
Changes to the plan were made at four points throughout the year.
Libeskind presented a revised version of his master plan in September. The buildings forming the spiral around the memorial site became slimmer, taller, and squarer, providing more office space but a lessening the dramatic spiraling effect that Libeskind intended to create. The Deutsche bank building site was added to the plan, reducing density on the site and providing a place to provide additional underground infrastructure.
The Freedom Tower, which won over Governor Pataki, played a key role in Libeskind’s selection as the master planner for Ground Zero. The architect obviously wanted to play a major role in its design. But when Larry Silverstein appointed his own architect, David Childs, to work on the building, Libeskind was given the vague role of collaborating architect. What followed turned into a messy power struggle between the two architects.
In December, Libeskind and Childs presented the Freedom Tower -- essentially a building designed by Childs. The twisting tower was larger and heavier than Libeskind had wanted. Its major gesture to Libeskind’s original design, the asymmetrical spire, was generally viewed as a badly integrated afterthought.
The most significant change to the plan was made this January when the memorial jury selected Michael Arad and Peter Walker's 'Reflecting Absence' as the winner in the memorial.
Michael Arad's original design was the memorial finalist that changed the Libeskind plan the most. It eliminated the sunken pit for the memorial, and removed Libeskind’s proposed cultural buildings from the memorial site. The revisions that Arad and Walker made to the plan in the two weeks after it was picked as the winner brought it slightly closer to the plan, mainly by replacing the cultural buildings with smaller ones in the same location. But it still erased what had been the defining feature of Libeskind’s original design.
Jury members later said that they made their decision with the conscious intention of eliminating the sunken memorial, which they felt was the weakest part of Libeskind’s design.
While the architects of the Freedom Tower and the memorial strayed from the Libeskind plan, Santiago Calatrava, who designed the transportation hub, took one of Libeskind’s more fanciful ideas and used it as the basis for his building.
From the beginning, skeptics have singled out Libeskind’s 'wedge of light,' as a weak point in his plan. Many questioned whether Libeskind’s idea for the plaza – designed to be shadow-less on September 11 of each year between 8:46 AM, when the first plane hit the first of the Twin Towers, to 10:28 AM, when the second tower collapsed – was plausible. But Calatrava focused on it; the steel-and-glass train station he presented in January centered itself to allow the wedge of light to run between its two huge 'wings.'
Calatrava’s station did change the plan slightly. Because the station was a different shape than the one that Libeskind had planned, it created a plaza on one side.
At Ground Zero, the master plan’s influence was limited by the fact that it was never really finished. Usually if a master plan were to include a sense of how the buildings in the area should relate to one another visually – what might be described here as the "Libeskind vision" – the planner would make clear design guidelines for the architects to follow. But because of the swift pace of the site’s development, such guidelines were not produced before architects designed the defining features of the plan.
Still, some feel that Libeskind’s appointment implied the right to control each element of his plan.
"It was clearly my impression that they were dealing with a concept as well as a master plan," said Beverly Willis, head of civic group Rebuild Downtown Our Town. “If the public, the city government and the state government debate a series of proposed plans by the world’s greatest architects, and they decide on one, that decision should be final."
The question of whether the changes to the Libeskind plan represent its evolution or its erosion is most difficult in terms of its relationship to the memorial. Officials and civic organizations have found it particularly challenging to reconcile their views on two processes they supported: the public dialogue which endorsed a strong role for a master plan, and an independent jury process that selected a memorial that changes that plan significantly.
"A jury decided to pick a scheme that didn’t seem to work well with the master plan,” said Mark Ginsberg of civic group New York New Visions. "We're now in a position where we’ve done two things very well that have to be resolved."
Without a clear role, Libeskind's job has never seemed sure of what his job was. He fought bitterly to design the Freedom Tower, but praised highly a memorial that made much more significant changes to his plan. Today, Libeskind seems to see himself playing a much different role than he did a year ago. He now seems eager to cede responsibility for key projects to those architects who have been out in front on them.
After Arad and Walker presented their revised memorial to the public, Libeskind met with a group of downtown residents to discuss his plan. He deflected all questions about the elements of his plan that had been designed by others, and spoke of himself taking on the long-term task of organizing “the great complex puzzle of elements” at Ground Zero, not designing the individual parts:
"Long after the politicians are gone, long after architects have finished designing, long after people have moved on to other things, I’ll still be here."
Super Tuesday, on March 2nd, suggests the Tuesday to end all Tuesdays,the most important of all the Tuesdays in the presidential primaries.
And, in some ways, it is. Super Tuesday is the traditional “big payoff” day in the primary schedule, when this year, ten states are up for grabs in the contest for the Democratic nomination, and a grand total of 1,151 delegates. That is more than all the delegates awarded to all the candidates in all the primaries and caucuses held to date. New York and California are the two biggest prizes, with California’s 370 delegates and New York’s 236 delegates.
Much has been written about the seeming incongruity of small states getting all the initial attention; about the squabbles between states wanting more of the early attention; about how adamant New Hampshire is in keeping its primary primary status. But there is a certain rationale to the schedule of primaries and caucuses, which provides the small states with all the initial fun, but gives the big states the last word.
Or put another way, if this were the Academy Awards, Iowa and New Hampshire would pick the pool of four or five nominees, and New York and California would pick the winner.
The Presidential primary system isn’t a race to the finish line, with the fastest, fittest, best trained candidate winning by a nose. It’s an endurance contest. It’s a system designed to identify the sole survivor, the last one standing, the one who can take the most punishment over the longest period and still emerge ready for another round.
The New York Times website has a list of all the candidates who have ever been in the 2004 Democratic Presidential race. When one of them drops out, their name is literally crossed off the list. This process of elimination not only forces candidates to display perseverance and unwavering commitment, it has the slightly sadistic aspect of getting harder as it goes on, because as each name is crossed off, the white hot buzz of scrutiny and attention readjusts and redistributes itself among those still in the race.
By the end of February, the Democratic Presidential contest had resolved itself into a two-man race between John Kerry and John Edwards, though Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton were officially sticking around.
In theory, the New York primary could have been a time when Howard Dean blasted past his opponents and reinvigorated his national followers using the base of young New York liberals and anti-war activists who had been the beginning of his national Meetup.org successes. But instead, Howard Dean blasted through more than $40 million in campaign funds and withered under the mounting pressure to win something, somewhere.
Howard Dean is gone, but his supporters are still around, and they may not be as fired up about Kerry and Edwards as their one-time leader was about, well, about everything. But they are still in play, and they are being courted by both camps. Edwards seems to be concentrated more on Dean's grassroots supporters, while Kerry went after the traditional Democratic political clubs and the endorsements of Democratic elected officials.
And so, as I write this, when New York Democrats go the polls the first week in March, they will have the opportunity to cross Edwards off the list and send Kerry on down the pike with an insurmountable lead, to a series of now ceremonial primaries. Or they could reward Edwards for his tenacity and put him in a virtual dead-heat with Kerry on the delegate count. (Although Kerry is being talked about as the all but certain nominee, his lead in the delegate count at the end of February was just over 300, less than a third of the delegates that will be chosen on March 2nd).
New York State is, in many ways, a political dichotomy: a big state, with a diverse population, containing both the nation’s largest city and biggest media market. But particularly in New York City, it is also home to old-school politicking, traditions and sensibilities that date back to the days of ward bosses. Unlike California, where all campaigning is done over the airwaves (even rallies are only staged so they can be shown on the six o’clock news), New York voters still expect to see their candidates face to face. And unlike New Hampshire where candidates have been known to go door to door, New York has enough delegates to not just pick a winner, but choose one.
Susan Reefer is a Republican pollster and media strategist. She is based in New York City.
Although the "Super-Tuesday" Democratic primary on March 2 involves caucuses and primaries in ten states, the Democratic candidates are focusing considerable attention on New York. New York is rich in delegates (236 of the 2165 needed to clinch the nomination). The city is also a big fundraising stop (residents give twice as much to national campaigns as any other city). But while the candidates are eager to win New Yorker’s votes, it is not always clear just where the candidates stand on the critical issues facing the city.
As a guide for voters, Gotham Gazette presents an issue-by-issue breakdown of the candidates’ urban agendas. Compare the candidates on broad issues, then click on “more” for expanded details and a series of articles on federal policy and New York City. Then post your thoughts on our Democratic Primary message board.
|
This year -- as every year for more than a century -- New York has provided a compelling backdrop for some high-profile motion pictures. The most recent include several that will be glimpsed on the Academy Awards this Sunday, since they have been nominated in one category or another. "In America" portrays a grief-stricken immigrant Irish family that moves into a building full of mostly friendly junkies in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen; in "Pieces of April", an estranged daughter invites her suburban family to a Thanksgiving dinner in her Lower East Side apartment; "Something's Gotta Give", though taking place primarily in the Hamptons, includes several fast scenes of sophisticated city life. All these movies, while not always flattering, ultimately leave viewers feeling good about the city.
But New York is not just a place where movies take place; it is also where they are made -- which is not always the same thing. City officials like Katherine Oliver, Commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting, like to boast of New York’s multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, the second-largest in the nation. But they surely find the competition sobering. The film industry, according to the Los Angeles Entertainment Industry Development Corporation, spent some $32 billion in Los Angeles in 1999 -- more than a dozen times as much as what it spent that year in New York. If there are half a million square feet worth of sound stages in New York, there are seven times as much in Los Angeles (which was where most of "Something's Gotta Give" was shot.)
L.A. is far from the only competition. Much of "In America" was actually made in Ireland, in a film studio where designers constructed the Hell's Kitchen tenement. "Pieces of April" was originally scheduled for "on-location" filming in Toronto, where it is common for film crews to fake New York street scenes. Such Toronto-as-New-York scenes appear, for example, in both “Death to Smoochy” and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," and, more outrageously, Toronto was the base of operation for TV movies whose very titles are about New York, such as "Crown Heights" and "Eloise at the Plaza," and the TV pilot "111 Gramercy Park."
Even with a movie like the forthcoming “Spiderman 2” that bills itself as a New York movie – it was shot for real on location in the city – there is something of a catch. Out of a $200 million budget, only $14 million was spent in New York.
The city is anxious to give the big-budget pictures more reasons to do everything here. The city’s film office makes it easy to shoot in New York, promising quickly obtained filming permits, parking and police--all free. (Most places charge for such services.) The city and state offer tax breaks. The crews are expert, and most of their unions negotiate as a group. There are several studio soundstages for building indoor, period or futuristic sets.
And by the end of the summer, big productions will have less of an excuse to come to New York for location shooting but then leave for soundstages and post production (editing, etc.) in cheaper towns. That is when Steiner Studios is scheduled to open.
"New York is a location draw," Andrew Stern of the city's Economic Development Corporation told Variety. "But we can create a bigger pie. We want to make sure no one leaves because stages are not available."
Productions leave not just because they don't have stages. It's cheaper to make movies in other places, including Canada, Eastern Europe and Australia. U.S. dollars go farther, and, on top of that, the governments offer incentives; Canada rebates 27 percent of labor costs.
But New York has the irresistible draw of the city itself, as well as an impressive pool of talent. Actors, directors and producers want to stick around if they can. When it's easier to make movies here, they're more likely to do it.
That's why the city's Economic Development Corporation spent $28 million on the city-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard for infrastructure improvements, including new roads, water, sewer, electricity, and a gate on the 265-acre site, only 15 acres of which will be used for Steiner. The city doesn't get the money back directly. The payback is jobs. Steiner expects to employ 50 people full time, and says another thousand full-time workers will be on the lot, including actors, cinematographers, and artists, as well as people involved in food services and transportation, and in technical and mechanical fields.
The improvements also help the other 220 tenants and 3,700 workers in the former shipbuilding center along the East River. They include construction contractors, furniture makers and refinishers, trucking firms, warehouse distribution centers and manufacturers. These businesses started coming in after the Navy Yard stopped building ships and sold the property to the city, which turned it into an industrial park in 1971.
Some of the tenants complain about rent increases. They believe they are being driven away to make more room for the film studio. Eric Deutsch, head of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, the nonprofit agency that runs the site for the city, says rents that were "well below market" did go up when long-term leases expired, but that the Navy Yard continues to want, and attract, other tenants besides the new film production facility.
Steiner Studios, which is run by the privately held Steiner Equities Group, is investing $100 million in the new studios. They will own the largest modern production facility east of Los Angeles -- but not the only one.
Kaufman-Astoria Studios
Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens goes back to the silent era. The Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields filmed there when it was Paramount. Today the studios offer
65,000 square feet of stage space and provide a home to Sesame Street and Whoopi Goldberg's new television show. The studios housed the Cosby Show and more recently, the multi-Emmy-award-winning miniseries Angels in America.
Silvercup Studios
Silvercup Studios in Queenscelebrated its 20th anniversary in December. Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave his state of the city address at Silvercup this year, in which he hailed movie and television production as a "$5 billion-a-year industry in New York. Sure it means jobs for actors and actresses, but it also means thousands of jobs for
carpenters and caterers, musicians and electricians, and many other New Yorkers. By not recognizing industry needs and changes, we lost a lot of production to L.A. and Canada. No longer! It’s why the Suna family turned a bakery and a steel fabrication
plant into this movie studio, and why they plan to expand Silvercup Studios. It's why the city is helping finance an expansion of the Kaufman-Astoria Studios. And it's why, later this year, we'll help open Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard."
The Silvercup studios just had their best year and are planning expansion. From its first soundstage in a former flour silo of the Silvercup Bakery, the studio has already grown. Their 18 soundstages and 400,000 square feet have played host to such iconic New York movies as "Godfather III," "When Harry Met Sally," "Working Girl" and "City Hall." A film called "Birth", with Nicole Kidman, recently completed shooting there, and "Hide and Seek" with Robert DeNiro is now underway.
Television
Television provides the bread and butter to the studios. The final episode of the final season of "Sex and the City" was shown this week, capping six years housed at Silvercup.
But the studios still provide a home to “The Sopranos,” and "Hope & Faith," the comedy with Kelly Ripa and Faith
Ford.
Television employs the most people in the entertainment industry in New York. The four "Law & Order" TV series alone employ 1,200 people and spend a million dollars a week, says Commissioner Oliver of the city's film office. They work out of Chelsea Piers, but they're all over the streets of New York on location and put a lot of actors to work: The biographies in theater playbills are riddled with stints in "Law & Order."
Past Attempts
The new studio space should make it possible to pick some big-budget movie plums as well. But not all studios have led charmed lives. When city officials lose faith in the developers' ability to back a project, the results
are painful. Miramax's Harvey Weinstein and Tribeca Productions' Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal tried building a studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1990s, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani withdrew his support. Stapleton Studios on Staten Island, backed
by actor Danny Aiello and others, is floundering. The city tried to evict the studio from the city-owned site in 2002. An Economic Development Corporation spokesman told Variety that Stapleton didn't have their permits, insurance or proof of adequate
financing. Aiello said that he spent two unpaid years and he and his partners have spent $2 million on the project. In November, Stapleton brought a $30 million suit for breach of contract against the city.
For most independent filmmakers, studios don't matter. Auteurs are out shooting on the streets and in the apartments of friends and parents. Digital equipment is within reach of students and filmmakers of limited means, explains Eileen Newman, executive director of Film/Video Arts, a nonprofit media arts center that works with emerging artists. Her organization has 150 projects under its nonprofit umbrella, including "Shelter Dogs" which has been showing this month on HBO, "Farmingville," a documentary about the attempted murder of two Mexican farm laborers that won a special jury prize at Sundance this year, and "Brother to Brother," an award-winning first feature about gay, African-American artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day.
Newman would like to see diverse moviemakers become more of a community. Film/Video Arts and the Independent Feature Project/New York have gotten a grant from the state's Empire State Development Corporation to create a plan for an independent film community building downtown.
It will be "a place to go to meet people, to do some editing work, to take a class, to have a screening," says Newman.
She had to abandon her office six blocks from the World Trade Center after 9/11, but she is heartened by what's she seeing downtown now. "People are looking at arts when they're rebuilding community."
Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal created the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 in that same spirit of rebuilding downtown with the arts. They especially wanted to tout New York as a filmmaking center. Organized in just four months, the festival was wildly successful, showing independent features, documentaries and short films along with studio premieres. By year two more than 300,000 people and $50 million came downtown. This year, the festival will be held from May 1-9.
Tribeca and other festivals have plenty of local work to choose from. Spike Lee and Woody Allen bring out New York movies regularly. Several production companies rely on New York for inspiration and talent in small, personal films. Miramax, 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, Troma Entertainment, Open City, Greene Street and Killer Films not only shoot here but often do their post production in the city. "Almost half of the American films that make it to the Cannes Film Festival come from New York. And most of them are independents. Ditto for Sundance and other major festivals," brags the website for the New York State Governor's Office for Motion Picture and Television Development.
Most residents seem pleased to see the moviemakers. Randel Cole, the director of a just-completed indy film, "2BperfectlyHonest" with John Turturro, shot at 22 locations around the city including the Lower East Side, Midtown, Brooklyn, Greenwich Village and Chelsea. He found nothing but "great luck and cooperation" from residents. "I love shooting New York," he says.
He appreciated the free permits, parking and police. The one time the crew left New York and went to Pelham, they had to pay to shoot. But even with generous breaks from unions, businesses and the city, everything from wages to accomodations to food is expensive in New York. So the city has to rely on its character, deep talent pool and efficient film office to persuade moviemakers large and small that it's worth the extra cost. It's not always a hard sell.
"2BperfectlyHonest" had a very modest budget, but the film's producer, Jeff Mazzola, says he wouldn't go to Canada no matter what kinds of breaks they offer: "You shoot in New York, you feel New York."
Selling The Brooklyn Bridge
Meanwhile, for those filmmakers who don't automatically feel this way, the city has been developing several strategies. "Stay," a $50 million film
starring Ewan MacGregor and Naomi Watts, was eager to shoot the Brooklyn Bridge. "The Brooklyn Bridge is a central character in the film," explains Commissioner Oliver. The city allowed traffic to be diverted from the bridge for eight nights. What
officials asked for in exchange was simply that the rest of the movie be made in the soundstages and post-production facilities of New York. "What we were hoping to get across to Hollywood," Oliver says, "is 'If you shoot your entire film here, we'll
give you the Brooklyn Bridge.'"
Resources
Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF) serves film and videomakers, from documentarians and experimental artists to makers of narrative features.
Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting and New York State Governor's Office for Motion Picture and Television Development are filled with facts about moviemaking
in New York, contacts including details about the unions that work with movies, and a fast-track online permit process.
New York Production Alliance is a nonprofit trade organization that aims to get
and keep production in New York.
Women in Film and Television in New York works to make sure that women have equity and opportunity.
Women Make Movies is a nonprofit media arts organization based in New York that facilitates production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.