President’s Letter: October 2024
Monthly observations and insights from MAS President Elizabeth Goldstein
When I look out the windows in my home office there is a bare tree on the right and one with all its green leaves on the left. Beyond the bare tree is one in a full blaze of fall yellow practically lighting up the street.
This scene seems to be nature’s reflection of how the world is a bag of mixed signals right now. On every level we seem to be confronting simultaneous signals to go forward, go backward and stay in place. New York City is its own version of this right now with the Mayoral administration marching forward into long-planned projects and policy while simultaneously shedding high level staff.
MAS members have benefitted from a wonderful set of experiences over the past month that illuminate the complicated ways that the city has been shaped over the decades. The Department of Design and Construction hosted a hard-hat tour of the Eastside Coastal Resilience Project recently. The ECRP is the result of the lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy, which hit New York City twelve years and two days ago. Our tour happened at a moment where the project is balanced between the infrastructure work and becoming the finished park, allowing us to see both in parallel.
Several days after our tour, I walked the East River Greenway, a MASterworks Award winner, which is closing some of the critical gaps in the esplanade around Manhattan AND creating coastal protections. I worked on aspects of the East River Esplanade further south in the mid-80s when we weren’t thinking about coastal flooding or extreme precipitation events. But even then, there was a long-term vision for a way to fully circumnavigate the island of Manhattan from the Battery to Inwood and back. A lot of that vision has been achieved and now pieces of it are being altered to consider impacts we couldn’t have imagined and are now a day-to-day reality.
We as a city have to be committed to the long-term projects that span the generations of Mayors and politicians who will come and go as the projects are accomplished. Without long-term planning we have no drinking water or coastal protection or expanded mass transit or housing. We are the denizens of a city that must find ways to be better at embracing change but also protective of what we already have and savor. The balancing act of seeking the future while honoring the past is critical to our vitality as a city.
Earlier in the month I boarded a Classic Harbor Cruise line for a trip through the New York City waterways honoring the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. It was a glorious fall day, and the tour guides, John Kriskiewicz, Nicholas Bloom, and Charles McKinney talked about The Power Broker and the impacts of Robert Moses on the city. The edge of the city is stamped over, and over again by Moses, from expressways, tunnels and bridges to housing, so much housing, and parks. The Moses legacy is marked by horrible trauma and displaced neighborhoods. But it is hard to ignore the parks and playgrounds that millions use every year.
Clearly, in any democracy there needs to be an orderly transition of power between generations of elected and appointed leaders. There also needs to be respect for the balance between elected power and the folks who are working deep in agencies across many years and multiple administrations. We count on those appointed leaders to steward the long-term projects –the water systems, the protections against climate change, our transit system — that keep our city healthy. We have a love-hate relationship with them, too. Some of these experts are moving key infrastructure along, collecting and analyzing weather data over the long haul and doing the science that improves our living conditions, from public health to the public realm.
As we all ease into the anxiety of next week’s national election, as well as the State and local initiatives, I will be holding on to the need for respectful balance across many different plains of our electoral landscape. I wish us all well in a world full of mixed signals.
Thanks for your continued support for MAS.
Elizabeth Goldstein
President, Municipal Art Society of New York
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