Alan Fishman knows how to go get the money. For two-and-a-half weeks in 2008, he served as Washington Mutual Bank’s final CEO. He received either side of $17 million when the government seized the bank, which was eventually foisted onto JPMorgan Chase. Assuming a forty-hour workweek, this is an hourly pay rate of $163,461.54. But let’s assume Alan worked extra hard, say sixty hours a week—actually let’s just say he worked around the clock, he didn’t doze off once during those seventeen nights in September, so consumed was he by the doomed challenge in front of him. In that scenario, his hourly pay rate drops all the way down to $41,666.67.
We are sitting in Alan’s home office at his family’s upstate compound in Columbia County, two hours north of the city. Outside the windows that encase the room, I see a pond in one direction and a wooded road in the other. For weeks I have been trying to get Alan to meet with me but my requests have been beaten back by the relentless schedule he keeps at sixty-six. So I have chased him all the way up to the town of Ghent, twenty minutes from the town of Hudson where carriage houses have been revived and repainted by gallerists in whose hands artfully distressed walls frame sold-out shows. This county is a series of undulating fields—some cultivated, some grazed, some meadows of tall grass—interrupted here and there by towns and villages that, to varying degrees, swell in population on the weekends with the influx of part-time residents from New York City. Modern, multimillion-dollar estates, sometimes built using passive construction to limit the home’s ecological footprint, share property lines with mobile homes partially covered by blue tarps that supplement their ailing roofs. Three miles down the road from Alan’s house is a 150-acre modern sculpture park.
Many New Yorkers, this reporter included, live in the city with escape on the mind. A transient spirit prevails—many of us have, after all, escaped to New York, much to Raul’s chagrin—and the city can be unduly unkind for several hours or days or weeks or months at a time. For those like Alan who own a second home in the Hudson Valley or the Berkshires or the Hamptons, the fantasy of escape is replaced by the routine of escape.
Alan bought this property in the 1960s and has added to it at various points over several decades. In the kitchen on the other side of the compound, his wife and kids and grandkids are making soup. My time with him is limited and this fact stays central to our interaction—he alludes to the ticking clock with his posture (shifting) and fingers (tapping) and knees (shaking) and his hands, which grab at any desk clutter within reach of his swiveling chair. Yet from his steady eye contact, it is clear that his attention remains focused.
Alan has dark, bushy eyebrows that do not match his silver helmet of perfectly parted hair. The eyebrows take their own path, jetting straight out, as if a symbol of the electricity that runs through the man. In conversation he sometimes raises his voice while accelerating what he is saying, as though we’re in the midst of an argument, but he’s the only one who speaks as I sit listening.
I was born in Crown Heights, obviously dominated by Ebbets Field and the Dodgers. They used to let us in, you know, as the games were going on. My bedroom overlooked the third base side so during the night games I could see the lights from our house. My parents were both born in Brooklyn. My grandparents were refugees from Russia and Hungary, so it was classic: my grandfather had a shop in Williamsburg that made vests for high-end stores, Brooks Brothers and places like that. Fortunately I had a good education as a graduate student in economics at Columbia and I started in banking in 1969. I’ve been in finance and banking ever since.
Post-war, the city itself was very static. I think people were still very scared about lending money in New York City, in many neighborhoods. They were very uneasy. You still had an out of control landlord-tenant situation—you know, the owners basically didn’t trust the tenants and the tenants didn’t trust the owners. The city was a very static place. There was no mobility. That began to change as crime went down. You didn’t really feel that change until ’98 or something, during the latter part of the Giuliani years it became apparent. I think the drop in crime enabled people to move into neighborhoods. Then the mortgage business began to respond to that.
But 9/11 hit and nobody knew what the hell was going to happen, so a lot of stuff started to change at that point. The city needed a backup to Manhattan—separate power grid, separate this, separate that. And so, Downtown Brooklyn was the most ready because it was semi-baked before. And so the city decided that it had to make an investment in Downtown Brooklyn, and it needed some private sector guys to help oversee that. And just through the vapors of being a banker, I sort of knew some of the Bloomberg people and I had met the mayor once or twice: A, as a candidate, and B, just in business because I ran a trading operation. He was looking around for some people that could help him in the boroughs. And when you looked around Brooklyn there was only one private big bank left—the one I was running—and there was a public utility, the CEO was a great friend of mine. So we were two of the power structures that existed in Brooklyn.
You know, the city had underinvested in capital improvements for a very long time coming out of the financial crisis of the ’70s, and Bloomberg raised so much money. Under his stewardship, the city’s credit has become so stable and so shockingly strong that he was able to raise all this money and invest it so wisely. Among the unsung heroes in the city, I think, are the capital budget people. You know, nobody hears their names, nobody ever knows who the hell they are. They sit in the bowels of the budget department and oversee capital allocation. They’re fabulous public servants, smart guys—and tough guys—and they have real judgment. And so working with Bloomberg and his deputies, these guys supercharged the impact of the crime reduction, they supercharged it with this giant investment system that they’ve put in place. What they did at the Navy Yard is pure genius.
The navy yard Alan refers to is a 1.7-mile-long stretch of Brooklyn shoreline just across the East River from Manhattan. A military site since 1806, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a place where generations of New Yorkers made things—warships, to be exact. During World War II, seven hundred thousand workers were employed at the site. The navy decommissioned the facilities in 1966, and until the 1990s you could walk along the chain-link fence that encased the complex and see a wasteland of overgrown weeds subsuming cracked asphalt and giant, empty buildings hovering against the sky.
From 1966 onward it was essentially useless. I mean it barely survived and was really poorly managed, poorly governed, and poorly supported. You know, towards the end of the Giuliani administration they made this cockamamie deal with Doug and David Steiner to build movie studios. I’m not sure it was a real deal. You know, these things are always sort of head fakes on both sides, and nobody knows what the hell’s gonna happen. So when Bloomberg asked me to go and become chairman of the Navy Yard, we had a lot to do. We had to find a CEO, and the board had to be replaced—not completely but basically from top to bottom because the board was really a politically active board that didn’t know much about business. So we cleaned house and I sat down with the Steiners and took the measure of them and they of us and we made a deal. A real deal to actually do something. I think both sides got together and made a theory a reality.
The site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is now a sprawl of various businesses anchored by Steiner Studios, one of the largest movie production facilities outside of Los Angeles. New York is a place that insists on a grand scale for all endeavors. This was the greatest appeal of Robert Moses’s master plans: their seductive scale—the Verrazano Bridge was the longest suspension bridge when it was built in 1964, the secretariat on Forty-Second Street at the East River was built to house all 44,000 civil servants from 170 countries who work at the United Nations, and completion of the Triborough Bridge alone required 31,000,000 hours of work in 134 cities in 20 states. New York’s economic tentacles have always had a near limitless reach—the city has always been a prominent force in local economies across the county.
I’ll never forget it, we talked to David Steiner: “David, you gonna build this thing or not?”
He said, “I’ll build it!”
I said, “We haven’t seen any workmen here.”
He says, “It’s being built. Shut up. Leave. Now. I’m in charge. I’m building this thing in Pennsylvania.”
And he did, and it showed up in a truck. That’s pretty amazing. Big hunks of walls showed up one day.
Quang Bao told me that in New York, artists “remain the only ones that are actually making something,” which is certainly true to a point—the Steiners show that even New York buildings aren’t always constructed in the city. But it’s also true that several businesses leasing space in the navy yard are manufacturing operations. In fact, the development corporation’s initiative mandates “reusing Navy-built buildings for their original industrial intent.” Tenants are making sprinkler systems, lighting fixtures, and—a direct link to the past—stainless steel air-conditioning units for warships.
Several navy yard tenants tend toward small scale, artful manufacturing—goods like clothing and textiles—and some are Quang Bao’s people exactly: the artists who took his advice—“go get the money”—fast enough to hold on to that quaint, if not vanishing, idea of the studio.
There is also a small museum in the development. Here visitors can learn about the land’s past and read about visions for its future, eagerly shared by entrepreneurs and real estate developers standing in line to do business with the navy yard.
These guys in the bowels of the budget department, they began to allocate capital to the yard for the first time. And we would make real economic arguments, not pseudo economic arguments. And then, you know, from there, hundreds of millions of dollars later, billions of dollars later—here’s an example, this is how versatile these Bloomberg guys are: so we get wind of this crazy idea where if you’re a foreign national and you invest in an approved project in America in a distressed neighborhood, you get a visa for you and your family. It’s called EB-5. We went to the city and said, “We can get all this money. You guys should take this money.”
And after a week of thinking about it and looking at it, they said, “We’ll help you get this money.” This all took a week, two weeks, whatever. You know, in other administrations this would be a year or two years worth of cogitation. And literally in days, we raised $50 million. It’s Chinese people, or Vietnamese people, or whatever people, Korean people, whatever the hell, Indians, I don’t know. And again, this is all with no fuss, no muss, and no memos.
Alan digresses into a swirl of celebrity investor names, all casually referred to like he’s pointing to guys around his poker table:
Bruce Ratner used the program to raise $225 million. I think I’m in for a hundred and a quarter now, so that’s 350, and I think Doug Steiner’s in for more than a hundred, so that’s half a billion dollars of money that never would have showed up. In one corner of Brooklyn!
The residency-for-capital program showcases the global sprawl of investors trying to decide where to park their money. As Neil Smith writes in The New Urban Frontier, globalization changed gentrification: “Not only has gentrification become a widespread experience since the 1960s but it is also systematically integrated into wider urban and global processes … In the context of globalization, national and international capitals alike confront a global ‘frontier’ of their own that subsumes the gentrification frontier … Cities find themselves competing in a global market.”
Bloomberg did it all without any huff or puff. It just happened because he’s so verbal in the language of business. The problem with politicians of course is they can’t just call it like it is. They can’t describe it. That’s why they hate Bloomberg so much—the anti-Bloombergs—because he tells the truth all the time. He basically describes it.
He is the linguist of American business, or global business really. He invented the language of business! Bloomberg system is the language of today’s modern business. The Bloomberg administration spoke the language of business so fluently, they were able to supercharge the economy without anybody realizing it. And most governments are so labored in the way they talk about business. You can see with the Obama administration, the guy’s never done any business in his life. When he talks about stimulus it sounds so stupid! To be blunt. Whereas you listen to the mayor and he sounds so smart. I’m not making a political statement but a substantive statement: the contrast is overwhelming!
Both of Alan’s hands are open and out in front of him, emphatic, just like his widened eyes.
Bloomberg oversaw the most successful stimulus plan in the history of time in my view. He hasn’t gotten nearly enough credit for it. It’s incredible. And then he goes and picks the pockets of these guys and makes them contribute to support these private sector initiatives, most recently this massive gift to Central Park.
Alan is referring to a $100 million donation made by hedge fund manager John Paulson. The money will be split equally between Central Park’s endowment funds and the park’s capital improvement projects. The New York Times announced the gift underneath a photograph of the pensive Mr. Paulson looking out over the spot where he “hung out at the fountain as a teenager, beneath the bronze statue Angel of the Waters, which was then scrawled with graffiti and bone dry.” I wonder if Michael De Feo—or even Raul—knows whose writing filled that spot and whether its absence is to be lamented, or if the statue’s new visage should be treasured.
Now I have a lot of issues about what the mayor did, didn’t do, bad or worse or whatever. But in terms of his economic development plans, you gotta be in awe of what he did. This isn’t by accident. This is pure genius. The city has put itself in a position to live, to compete, to continue to fight the issues that they haven’t gotten on top of—and those are big issues. He certainly hasn’t eradicated poverty. He hasn’t turned the education system into a grand, shining example. But he certainly has allowed the city to have resources to go fight those fights. Whereas, go look at Chicago. Go look at Philadelphia. Go look all around the country and there’s no money. You know, at least in New York City there’s money. And if New York State was any good, which it isn’t, there’d be more money. That’s the easy one, to give him the super high marks for building an economy, diversifying the economy, seizing on hi-tech, seizing on tourism—you know, to really make this change in the city. And Brooklyn has been the huge beneficiary of all of that.
The more complicated stuff is having to undo the hospital system, having to undo the public housing system and remake it. Having to undo the education system and remake it. It’s one thing to build a cultural empire in New York, which he’s done with money basically. It’s quite a different thing to have to undo bad hospitals, public housing, the education system. You know, that’s been much more difficult for him, it seems to me. Basically you’ve got dysfunctional systems in these operations, and they don’t provide the right product and they don’t provide it at the right price, and they don’t provide the right value.
It is hard to remember that Alan is still talking about schools and hospitals and public housing, but the language of business knows no boundaries. In Bloomberg’s New York, economic wisdom can override any other public service wisdom and so should serve as a rudder in all cases.
This sensibility is evident in Bloomberg’s various appointments over more than a decade. After Joel Klein’s run as schools chancellor ended without, as Alan puts it, “getting it across the goal line,” the mayor appointed Cathie Black to the position in 2010. Black had spent the previous fifteen years running a magazine empire and had no professional experience in education. Michael Stocker, Bloomberg’s appointment for chair for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, was a former health insurance executive. And John Rhea, whom the mayor put in charge of the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, was formerly the managing director of the global consumer retail group at Lehman Brothers. NYCHA is responsible for the biggest stock of public housing in the country—most of it is still in brick high-rise buildings.
Public housing’s gotta get sorted out. I think that’s way easier said than done. I don’t know where you get the money for it. I don’t know the answers. I’m not smart enough. I do know that the existing stock of public housing needs to be really maintained better and that’s very hard. The basic tenet around which it was built as these closed enclaves is very, very counterintuitive—in today’s world it’s a really bad idea. I have spent a lot of time looking at the complexes themselves and they’re just not built for today’s society. What I would do is see whether I could gather up private capital—and public capital, obviously—and really try to build out the fringes of these entities into a more open, retail-oriented, low-rise, mixed-use, mixed-income environment so you’re dealing with this in a different way. To have lower-middle-income and lower-income people in their own world is just horrible. And if you’re getting into the pathologies, which are vast, those pathologies need to be changed, you need interventions there and you can’t do that the way it is now. I mean, you have no traffic going through these places. There’s no street life. There’s only bad guys out there at night. It’s just all bad. I mean, it’s all wrong. Half the kids are bad kids. Not half, I shouldn’t say that. You know, 90 percent of the kids are good kids, and 10 percent are bad kids, or whatever the numbers are. And it’s just a bad pathology. Cops with stop and frisk, and the kids who don’t want to be stopped and frisked. And the nice people that live in these places are stuck in their houses, in elevators that do or don’t work. It’s just a bad idea! The whole thing’s bad! I have no idea what to do!
Just as Alan raises his voice, more emphatic by the moment, there is a knock at the door: lunch is ready. Time’s up. He smacks his desk with his open hand, as if gaveling the session closed. We shake hands, standing in the middle of his gravel driveway, before Alan heads into the kitchen for warm soup with the family.