11

Net Gain

The debate about the role of government over the last forty years has not proceeded in the right direction. Too many perceive government as ineffective and intrinsically corrupt and believe that only the private sector can solve societal problems and manage social responsibilities well. Years ago, when many of the people who ultimately worked in my administration were attending graduate school, all of those who chose to concentrate in government had burning causes. Some wanted to deal with discrimination, others with the issue of police brutality, still others with affordable housing; their interests were diverse, but every one of them came to my administration with a devotion to service. Many students today pursue careers in the financial services rather than public service, earning MBAs and law degrees, while graduate education in the public sector has become a default selection for young folks who are not certain of what they want to do. In addition, because people do not perceive government as a critically important part of their lives, we do not always have the best and the brightest sitting at the helm. President Clinton understood the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), for instance, and its vital function in assisting people in times of dire need. Under President George W. Bush, the position of administrator of FEMA became a political plum and went to International Arabian Horse Association commissioner Michael Brown, who did a heckuva job. Fortunately, President Obama has re-empowered the organization. When I teach my students at Columbia University these days, I tell them that I hope they will have an interest in public service, and I always say that public service includes both politics and government; when practiced properly, I believe, politics and government do indeed fall within that realm.

I entered the office of mayor with a vision of what I wanted to do with the city in trying times. My idea of government held that the viability of the city was intimately connected to the viability of its neighborhoods; how would government respond to individual neighborhoods? My director of operations, Harvey Robins, took this idea to heart.

Harvey graduated from George Washington University in 1968. Washington, DC, burned each year he was in school, which informed his choice of careers. These were extremely political times, and given that George Washington was within walking distance of both the White House and the Reflecting Pool, many civil rights and antiwar demonstrations were also within his immediate world. Harvey earned a graduate degree in government at the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate in government and in public policy from Union Institute in Vermont. He is one of those people who stayed the course.

Robins worked for Mayor Koch in the Office of Management and Budget, then joined social services and ultimately rose to the position of first deputy, the number-two person, at the Human Resources Administration, at the age of thirty-eight. People would say about him, “Well, Harvey’s so young. He’s a young Turk. You gotta give him a little room, you gotta give him a wide berth, but he really has good instincts.”

Harvey was given great responsibility at a young age, ranging from overseeing programs for the homeless to handling the issue of child abuse, to dealing with food stamps and welfare, and he got away with more than most. The AIDS crisis had only just begun in the mid-1980s, and amid the hysteria some individuals were hesitating to visit welfare centers to fill out their applications for fear of coming in contact with AIDS sufferers and contracting the disease. As a result, some who were entitled to benefits were going without. Recognizing this problem, social workers approached Harvey and said, “We need to create a special program for AIDS clients.” He in turn asked the health commissioner, “Is this a program that you would prefer to do rather than me?” and was told, “No, no, no, if you want to do it, you do it.” Robins and the social workers investigated and found that AIDS clients were being required to run through a gauntlet of lines, in different bureaucracies, in order to access welfare or food stamps or housing benefits. Not only were AIDS patients in desperate need, but they were being shunted from place to place by the very institutions that were supposed to serve them.

With this information, Robins and the social workers developed a case management program under which individual caseworkers would be assigned a specific number of clearly designated AIDS patients. Harvey went to the Office of Management and Budget for approval and was told by its deputy budget director, “Well, these people are going to die in three months anyway, we’re not going to approve it.” Undeterred, he returned to his office and said, “We’ve got approval. Let’s go.” Harvey recalls:

“Having decided to pursue a career in government service, shaped by the 1960s, I had hoped that I would be able to make choices and take risks for those who had no voice. The AIDS initiative is an example of this opportunity.”

The civil service union was initially opposed to the program, as they believed that consolidating the work and multiple service tasks under each caseworker would result in jobs being lost. He told them, “Get over it. This is an epidemic in its early stages; this is not about jobs, this is about improved services, and your caseworkers are the front line.” (As the caseload grew and the demand for case managers increased, the union’s concern was dropped.) He did not require workers to join the AIDS program—it was entirely voluntary—and it is a tribute to New York’s caseworkers that there were more volunteers than cases.

They served 647 clients the first year and kept meticulous notes on the specific needs of, and caseworker staff’s response to, each client so that Harvey could present an informed request for future funding in the following budget cycle.

After a year, Robins approached Mayor Koch and said, “Look, I gotta tell you something. I don’t want the deputy mayor in the room, I don’t want the budget director in the room, I need a one-on-one.” Koch agreed. With both pride and trepidation, Robins presented his results. Koch rose from behind his desk and said, “You made one mistake.” Harvey figured, that’s it, I’m done. Koch said, “You shoulda told me last year. I would have embraced this.”

“But, Mayor,” said Robins, “I didn’t have the data. I have the data now.”

It should be noted that the program continues today, some twenty-five years later, and serves more than thirty thousand HIV and AIDS clients annually.

Housing for the homeless was at the time also guided by the Human Resources Administration. Only Harvey and the agency’s procurement director knew the suggested locations of the proposed shelters, and they would canvass neighborhood sites in the middle of the night. Robins remembers, “The Mayor used to beat me up all the time: ‘You can’t do this, you have to have a process!’ I told him, ‘If we have a process, we’ll never open a shelter, and there are people who are lining up for them!’” If he did not create the term NIMBY (the catchphrase encapsulating the resistance of some people of means to the introduction of housing or services for the poor into their neighborhoods), Harvey created scenarios for its use.

Robins also spent a year working for schools chancellor Richard Green, rising to the position of deputy chancellor for finance and administration at what was then the Board of Education and is now the Department of Education. Mayor Koch, budget director Paul Dickstein, and Bobby Wagner, who was chairman of the Board of Education at the time, told him, “You’ll have the title of deputy chancellor for finance administration. Your first assignment is to tell us how many people are at central headquarters of the Board of Ed.” No one knew, it was one of the great mysteries of city government. “And then you’ll begin to dismantle it,” they told him. The Board of Education was well known as a large drain on the city’s finances, with many unnecessary expenses hidden in its budget. He said, “I’m on, but only under the condition that some of the money that we save goes back to the schools. I don’t want it to be just a pure gap closer for the city.” He was told this sounded like a fair deal.

Harvey literally did a desk audit. His staff moved from desk to desk collecting signatures every time each person at the Board of Education signed for his or her paycheck. Armed with this information, he analyzed the board’s productivity and proposed cutting 1,800 jobs. When Chancellor Richard Green died of asthma, his successor, Joseph Fernandez, asked Robins to stay on, with yet another mandate. Fernandez told him, “You can’t leave me unless you give me another six hundred cuts, because on my first day I want to announce that what you started under Chancellor Green continues.”

Harvey had made a conscious decision never to participate in the electoral process beyond voting; he did not write a check to any candidate, and he never campaigned. He felt, “If they want a manager they’ll hire me, if they don’t they won’t. I don’t want to be appointed on the basis of my politics, I want it to be based on my work.” Robins did not think he had a chance of landing a job in my administration, so he was quite surprised to receive a phone call from Norman Steisel, saying, “If you want to be the director of operations, there’ll be no transition committee. If you want the job, it’s yours.” He certainly did want it.

The Board of Education is located at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. Harvey told the chancellor, “I gotta go back across the river.” Out of a continuing sense of duty, however, he worked the first eight hours of that day for Chancellor Fernandez and during the second eight hours participated in his first budget meeting with me at Gracie Mansion. Another of Harvey’s notable cost-saving achievements was the elimination of chauffeurs for all board members. This did not sit well with some but was a budgetary and symbolic victory. At the press conference announcing his appointment, a reporter asked me, “Well, Mayor, are you going to ask him to do the same here?” I said, “Yes, but not my vehicle.”

Several billion dollars needed to be eliminated from the city budget, and Harvey’s job was to be a significant factor in the making of those choices. Revenues had fallen in the tail end of my predecessor’s tenure, and though Koch had made cuts, he had not made enough.

Whenever there’s a recession, city revenues fall because of the downturn in the economy. The city is extremely dependent on Wall Street and the real estate market; when Wall Street starts to teeter, New York City takes the fall. Every real estate transaction has an associated tax; some of that revenue goes to the city, and some goes to the MTA for transit. If developers are not constructing new buildings, not only is there a decrease in payments for material and labor, but the income from taxes on these transactions is decreased as well. Any disruption of this lifeblood of tax revenue has a huge ripple effect across the government. Other administrations, preceding and following my own, chose to satisfy Wall Street first and hope the economic benefits would trickle down to the remainder of the city. Wall Street’s well-being was of vital importance to New York, and I had a group of advisers who tackled the Wall Street issues and responded to those concerns. My concerns were economic and social, and I saw it as my job to walk through that fire so we could have it both ways. The fact that New York City had fewer dollars did not mean we ought not be concerned about spending those dollars wisely.

Within the Office of Operations, Harvey Robins adopted this larger vision and considered the services that were being provided to neighborhoods and the best way to provide them. I felt strongly that every neighborhood in the city should receive its fair share of services and that we should eliminate what had been a de facto policy of being more attentive to some neighborhoods than to others. In this way alone we would be reinventing government. Our model for delivering services involved answering the question: is this the most cost-effective means to our end? If we found the city restricted in its ability to deliver, was there another means to achieve the desired results? For instance, could we create public-private partnerships? Sometimes this meant restructuring, sometimes consolidating, and sometimes investigating services that spanned several bureaucracies and demanded coordination and responsibility. Whether it was having the Sanitation, Transportation, Parks, Police, and Buildings Departments combine forces to make the parade route safer for the public when Nelson Mandela visited or making the city shine for the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Harvey was the man for the job.

Many in my administration strongly believed that certain programs were bedrock for the city’s physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual well-being. For Youth Commissioner Richard Murphy the priority was the Beacon schools; for Deputy Mayor for Human Services Cesar Perales it was public health; for all of us the concept of community was bedrock. For Harvey Robins it was libraries.

Libraries, Robins felt, span the ages. Use of each individual facility varies by day and by time of day; the elderly are not likely to frequent the buildings while kids are running around, however quietly, so they sit and read while the children are in school. Parents might arrive a little later in the day, with or without their offspring. On weekends, working people might use library computers to network for jobs or help their children with homework. As Commissioner Murphy said about the Beacons, Harvey didn’t care what went on under the roof. The library system had 205 branches spread citywide throughout every neighborhood in New York’s five boroughs, and every one of them, he felt, should have an individual emphasis and focus, from the selection of books to the variety of reading programs, because each neighborhood had its own personality. Harvey was insistent. Of course, it wasn’t hard to sell me; this was what I wanted to do as well.

New York City public libraries are not simply repositories for books and magazines; they serve greater purposes. They are safe havens for some people who have few places to go to escape the dread of the streets. I recognize this is not the libraries’ mandate, but let’s live in the real world and recognize the ancillary benefits of places of education. For some poor folks the library is the only place their kids have to go in the winter to get warm because it’s cold at home. Forget studying, just be warm. In the summer as a child in Harlem, I remember we used to hang out on the fire escapes. In summer the libraries are cool. For many children that was it—there was no place else.

In much the same way we insisted that health care clinics and Beacon schools be open at night and on weekends to serve all New Yorkers, we addressed the issue of library hours. Faced with cutbacks and the necessity to eliminate not only fat but muscle and bone from the city’s budget, the concept had been put forward to save money by curtailing library time. I felt this was a bad idea.

Harvey researched the issue and found that in 1901 when Andrew Carnegie offered New York City $5.1 million to create a branch library system throughout the five boroughs he mandated that it be open seven days a week, seventy hours a week, ten hours a day. Libraries, Carnegie said, were for the “industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others.”

In 1947 the city had cut public library availability to six days a week. It had fallen further since. When I came into office, Robins sent his staff to visit each of the 205 branches and report what the current hours actually were. “Why did you take staff time?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you just ask the libraries to send you their schedules?”

“If it was literally inked on the glass of the door,” he told me, “I believe that number more than what they would give me on a sheet of paper.”

When the information arrived, he appeared at my door. “Racism is alive and well,” he said. “We have four different library systems: New York, which covers Staten Island and Manhattan, then we have Queens, then we have the Bronx, and then we have Brooklyn.”

The Jamaica branch on Queens Boulevard, for example, was open three days a week. Five miles up the road, in Forest Hills, libraries were open every day except Sunday. “What we need to do,” he said, “is to fill the cup to get everybody up to five days, and the following year everybody to six days, and the third year to seven. Then we’ll worry about reaching Carnegie’s goal of ten hours a day and enough books and materials.” Harvey’s version of the Carnegie vision was to make it unnecessary to have a schedule on one’s refrigerator to know when the library was open. In the simplest terms, this was his ideal library system: no one should need a schedule. We formulated a plan to accomplish this goal.

Libraries in the school system are often the first program excised from the budget when a principal is faced with the need to cut back. “Well,” the principal figures, “we have to have somebody teaching English, and someone teaching math.” From that perspective, I suppose it makes sense; one has to cut somewhere. With school libraries being eliminated, however, the city’s public system became even more important. The question was: could we get the funding? Harvey said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get the money.”

Harvey’s research had revealed the cost of revitalizing the city’s library system to be approximately $47 million. Having been trained in the Office of Management and Budget, he was a demon budgeter, and through decreases in Police and Fire Department overtime and other judicious savings—from asking, as I have mentioned, questions such as “Do we need an annual report in color?” “Do we need another driver?” and “Do we need all these trips?”—he found what we truly needed. “The budget director wasn’t too happy with me going line by line through his budget,” he recalls.

I convened a meeting of the deputy mayors downstairs at City Hall. I began by asking them to consider what they would do if they found a pot of $47 million. Where would they spend it? I went around the room encouraging discussion, and in these intramurals each deputy mayor had a good use for such funds. Then I invoked the Lincoln Rule.

One immediate problem encountered was that library budgets were City Council member items: each borough president could decide where to spend his or her money. Queens borough president Claire Shulman was extremely invested in libraries and yet was allocating funds unequally between poor and middle-class neighborhoods. Harvey said, “Claire’s going to be very upset with you. She’s going to say, ‘I’m not going to get as much as some of the other boroughs because I’ve already invested in libraries for the last ten years.’” To which we replied, “Well, God bless you, you’ve done God’s work. You’ve made a good choice.”

Claire was indeed upset, but we did get the money, and for the first time since 1947 libraries around the city were open six days a week.

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Several of our lasting contributions to New York’s cultural life were created in preparation for our hosting of the Democratic Convention: Fashion Week, Restaurant Week, and Broadway on Broadway. Much like infrastructure or new housing constructed when a country hosts the Olympics, these civic advances served the community far beyond their initial purpose. Henry Miller, the CEO of New York ’92, the nonpartisan organization that managed the city’s hosting of the event, developed these ideas, and for more than twenty years they have stood the test of time.

The purpose of Fashion Week, originally called “New York Is Fashion,” was to publicize and promote the city’s $14 billion-a-year fashion industry, which employed 180,000 people, including 100,000 apparel workers, designers, illustrators, stylists, models, and marketing people. In an effort to involve our visitors, we invited the convention’s main audience of delegates, Democratic Party officials, and their families to mingle with fashion industry executives under a huge tent on the Great Lawn in Central Park. The initial show brought together established and up-and-coming designers and was broadcast on the Sony Jumbotron in Times Square. Sponsored by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and New York ’92, the show was funded by the union, American Express, and several Seventh Avenue fashion houses. What began as a single promotion grew into a semiannual event attracting over 115,000 attendees to each fall and spring showing in tents in Bryant Park; the total estimated one-week economic impact on the city in 2008, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, was $391 million. Now called Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, this staple of the fashion world has added to New York’s already estimable cachet.

Restaurant Week was a similar inspiration, created in coordination with restaurateur Joe Baum and Tim and Nina Zagat of the Zagat Guides. Ninety-five of New York’s world-famous restaurants offered a three-course lunch for $19.92. Not only did this extravagant bargain entice convention visitors, but the surge of customers expanded the restaurant business throughout the city. People visited establishments they might not have been able to afford otherwise, and they chose to return after excellent experiences. The program was such a success that it continued annually, the price increasing a penny a year—$19.93, $19.94 . . .—and participating establishments being added until 2006, when the price jumped to $24.07 for lunch and $35.00 for dinner. This is still a remarkable bargain for high-quality New York City meals. By the summer of 2011, more than three hundred restaurants participated during the two weeks of Restaurant Week.

Broadway on Broadway was conceived as a Democratic National Convention welcome party and turned into a free outdoor concert attended by fifty thousand people in Times Square. A high-energy presentation of singing and dancing selections performed by the casts of current and upcoming musicals, it was designed as free entertainment for our guests and the city at large. The extravaganza worked so well that it has since been incorporated into Broadway tradition. Held each September, Broadway on Broadway presents musical numbers and features appearances from almost every show on Broadway as well as sneak peeks at shows about to open. It attracts consistently good-sized crowds each year in what is a very large and showy advertisement for the upcoming Broadway season.

As the New York Sun noted:

The short-term economic impact of the 1992 Democratic National Convention was estimated at the time to be more than $300 million. That represented a ten-fold return on the cost of hosting the Convention. But New York created events for that occasion with lasting value, and the return on that investment continues to benefit all New Yorkers to this day. The economic impact of those events . . . runs easily into the billions. No other host city has created events with lasting benefits that come anywhere close to New York’s.

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Times Square had gone straight to hell. Through a combination of difficult economic times and civic neglect, what had been a central New York urban attraction filled with Broadway theaters, gaudy neon-lit movie houses, and hidden-treasure record stores had over the course of a generation fallen past hard times and directly into cultural devastation. Strip clubs and pornography shops abounded. Stories were rife about roving bands of young toughs terrorizing tourists and cops needing to patrol 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues three abreast in order to feel safe themselves. One of the priorities of my administration was to reintegrate Times Square into the civilized world of New York.

Carl Weisbrod joined my administration after overseeing the effort to revitalize Times Square for several years as director of the 42nd Street Development Project, a state entity. Not long after I was elected, the State of New York condemned the land and took possession of six of the nine historic theaters on 42nd Street in preparation for the area’s redevelopment. This was vital. A nonprofit organization, The New 42nd Street, was established to oversee the development of the neglected midblock theaters and begin to restore the area to something approaching its former glory. However, even with this economic opportunity, no improvement of significance to the entire area was going to take place unless a developer with financial wherewithal could be found to take charge. There were inquiries, but the economy was still struggling after the stock market crash in 1987, there was a high corporate office vacancy rate, and new office development—which was going to be the economic driver of the restoration—was simply not taking place, certainly not in such a notoriously dangerous location as 42nd Street. How could we resuscitate this fallen giant?

Several in our circle had connections to the Walt Disney Company and very much wanted to replace the seedy, squalid urban crime center with its antithesis. What could be more symbolic than getting Disney to participate? Getting Mickey Mouse to come to Times Square?

How would we approach Disney? One of the architects we were using in Times Square, Robert A. M. Stern, later dean of the Yale School of Architecture, was on the Disney board of directors. Stern reviewed the project and professed at a Disney board meeting that the organization really ought to think about Times Square, that it was worth a shot. Disney itself, after a significant fallow period, was in the process of a corporate reinvigoration and starting to think of urban areas as the centers for its entertainments, as opposed to the suburbs, as had been its strategy in the past. The concept of having a live theater, especially in New York, began to make sense to the company. The cross-marketing possibilities were excellent; the company could develop its film and musical properties into Broadway shows and own the theaters in which those shows would be produced. Clearly this was a good idea, as the success of The Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins, The Lion King, Aida, Beauty and the Beast, and Tarzan can attest. We approached Disney at the right time, and the Disney people started to work on it.

They were very tough. They essentially said, “We’re Disney—we can do whatever we want. You’re damn lucky to have us. You negotiate by giving us what we want or forget about it.”

They wanted to be able to buy a theater, and they wanted a very low-cost loan so they could pay for it. They wanted a guarantee that the environment around 42nd Street would be such that the Disney brand would fit comfortably and not be embarrassed. For instance, the sex businesses had to be removed by certain dates, and another major theater had to open on the block by another deadline. Furthermore, they wanted the right to cancel their commitment if these conditions were not met.

The New Amsterdam Theater, home of the Ziegfeld Follies, had potential. Built in the Art Deco style in 1903, it was a beautiful landmark theater. It had good bones but was a real mess. The New Amsterdam had never degenerated into a porno theater, but it was in horrible, dilapidated condition. Inside, it smelled like urine and cats. The Nederlander Organization, one of the big Broadway producers, had purchased the property in 1982 but was not prepared to finance the substantial renovation necessary to bring it back to life. After some negotiation, Nederlander had essentially told New York City and State, “We don’t want it. We can’t do anything with it on this block. Take it. Just pay us the bare minimum.”

Carl Weisbrod recognized that to attract Disney to Times Square we would be best advised to present them with a sweetheart deal. Such an arrangement would be controversial; although New York’s many business organizations wanted a high-profile tenant to anchor the area, none would be pleased if we, in effect, gave away the store. In a very clever fiscal negotiating maneuver, Weisbrod developed an offer based on the Disney demands and before taking it to Disney presented it to the three major Broadway theater chains: the Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization, and Jujamcyn. Carl can be extremely conversational. He told each of them, “Look, here’s the deal.”

As he expected, each organization declined. Shubert’s Gerald Schoenfeld, himself quite a conversational fellow, said, “Here? On 42nd Street? Forget about it. I’m not gonna do it, I don’t care what kind of loans you give me.” With these definitive rejections in hand, we went in and made the deal with Disney, which was pleased with the opportunity.

Our discussions took place over the course of my term, and those negotiations finally bore fruit. They were by no means easy, and they continued into the final days of my administration. I had planned on being mayor during groundbreaking and presiding over the restoration of Times Square. Sadly, this was not to be. Nevertheless, it was very important to me and to many in my administration that this deal be signed before we left office; we could only control what we saw in front of us, and anything left until January 1 would be subject to the whims of the next administration. Of course, Disney wanted to see the deal signed while I was mayor as well. With all of us wanting the memorandum of understanding consummated, we worked furiously that last week. On Friday, December 30, 1993, the deal was delivered by Carl for signature by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Barry Sullivan.

“And sure enough, after that all the theater owners squawked,” Weisbrod recalls. “They wanted 42nd Street improved, but they really didn’t want Disney on the block, because Disney wasn’t part of the club. So they said, ‘This is outrageous! This is a sweetheart deal!’ I said, ‘Look, I offered it to you; this is the same exact deal.’ And ultimately Disney did have a profound impact on making that block what it is today.”

...

In 1992 the large and influential financial institution Morgan Stanley was seriously considering moving its corporate headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut. The company had an option to buy a substantial plot of land in the downtown area on which to build. Of course, this was of tremendous concern to us. The economic issues that had loomed before I entered the race had only worsened in the months after I had been elected. The city relied on the revenue derived from its major corporate citizens to provide services to run its financial engine. We needed the taxes on profits, wages, and bonuses of everyone from the corporations themselves to their highly paid executives and their middle managers, secretaries, and mail room employees, to the ancillary businesses connected to each of these institutions: the companies that provided their copy machines, the neighborhood coffee shops that served them lunch, the upscale restaurants, the furniture and office suppliers that did business in the companies’ wake. We were concerned that a move by Morgan Stanley could create a domino effect that might induce JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and the other major players in the financial world to depart the city as well. The effect would be staggering, profoundly affecting the city’s bottom line. A financial services subsidiary of the First Chicago Corporation took one thousand jobs to Jersey City, and only after serious negotiations were we able to prevent four of the city’s five commodities exchanges and Prudential Securities from doing the same.

Morgan Stanley had concerns about its future with us. Crime was certainly a graphic issue, but the company’s chief concern was recruitment. It was having a hard time convincing top talent from around the world to come to New York City. “How do we get the quality workforce we need?” they asked. To their way of thinking, if they located in Stamford, they would be only an hour and a half from the city, they could attract executives and office workers who would enjoy life in the suburbs, and they would be safe from the danger that, so the story went, was everywhere in New York. I had heard they had already made the deal. One typically arrogant Morgan Stanley banker told us, “Forget about it—the train’s already left the station.”

Yet we were negotiating. Everyone in City Hall recognized that if an industry leader as distinguished as Morgan Stanley departed, not only would we lose the company’s 4,100 jobs and estimated $2 billion in annual economic activity, but it would be a terrible symbol for the city. We wanted to make clear to the entire corporate world that New York was where businesses did their best business, where the giants and the leaders chose to headquarter themselves. Carl Weisbrod took the lead for us. Along with the New York City Partnership, he organized a meeting with Morgan Stanley’s chairman, Richard Fisher, and brought to the table some of New York’s most notable citizens.

It became almost a matter of survival. Cardinal John J. O’Connor was in attendance, as were Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Al D’Amato, and Congressman Charlie Rangel. The scene still, to this day, brings tears to my eyes. We presented a united community of smart, distinguished business, political, and cultural leaders, one after another, very gravely and passionately telling Dick Fisher, “We love this city. You have an obligation to stay in this city.” Our arguments were factual and emotional. In suburbia, we argued, the pencils hit the desk at 5:00 pm as people headed for the door. New York had a superior talent pool, an intense concentration of business services, and communications and transportation centrality. The city was home to a preponderance of their potential clients, with whom they could interact face to face, a significant advantage. We had culture and opportunity and were at the heart of the workings of the world. The Rev. Timothy Healy, head of the New York Public Library and a Jesuit priest, said eloquently, “They’ve been burying New York for decades now. They’ve tried to say New York is dead, but they’ve never produced a body . . . and they never will.”

Fisher was listening. Finally, Pat Moynihan faced him directly. “Let me just make this clear,” said the senator. “I’m the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. My friend and colleague over here, Charlie Rangel, is the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee. If you leave the city, you’re dead.”

Dick Fisher as much as blanched. He said, “Well, I’m going to have to think about it.”

A week later, the same banker who had told us the train had left the station said, “All right, let’s negotiate a deal. Just keep the cardinal out of it.”

Morgan Stanley was projected to pay $911 million in combined city and state taxes over the next ten years. We agreed to freeze the city’s general corporate tax rate for the coming four years and offered tax breaks and financial incentives totaling almost $40 million. I found this a modest investment given the company’s importance to our financial future. Morgan Stanley ultimately bought two vacant buildings in Times Square and helped lead that area’s economic revival. They are good New York citizens, and their headquarters remain exactly where they should be.

Our plan to restore and rebrand Times Square was a striking success. Financial institutions now crowd the area, as do newly built hotels and restaurants and theaters, drawing business traffic and tourists in record numbers. In 2012 Crain’s magazine reported on findings by Cushman & Wakefield: “In the rankings of top retail strips in the Americas, Fifth Avenue still reigns supreme. It is followed by three other New York shopping magnets: Times Square, Madison Avenue and East 57th Street, which took second, third and fourth place, respectively. They were followed by Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive.” In hindsight, it looks obvious: of course tourists and entertainment-related companies would flock to Times Square—it has historically been the crossroads of the world. At the time, however, given the depths to which the area had fallen, this was radical thinking. The traditional economic development community was singularly focused on improving Manhattan through the financial services sector alone. Midtown was going to be a “one-trick pony.” Granting incentives to the tourism and entertainment industries was unheard of, except for convention center/sports arena developments.

Yet here we are, more than two decades later and despite the conventional wisdom, with Times Square beating all but Fifth Avenue, and performing well beyond Rodeo Drive, as the best retail spot in the United States—thanks in large measure to implementation of the economic plan created by my administration.

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Among our most pressing concerns during New York’s fiscal difficulty was the threat that major institutions would leave us for the tax breaks and various incentives offered by other cities around the country. The Morgan Stanley encounter had been intense, and now we were concerned about losing the Girl Scouts of America. We were also concerned about losing the United Nations! It is not written anywhere that the United Nations has to be in this country, much less in New York City. When New Yorkers discuss the UN, they are likely to complain about the diplomats who refuse to pay their traffic tickets and things of that nature, and they don’t see much beyond that. One of my predecessors even said that we should level the United Nations and make it a parking lot. I had a different attitude.

I was also extremely concerned about losing the US Open Tennis Championships.

The US Tennis Association (USTA) franchise, which runs the annual US Open, is more economically valuable to the city than the Yankees, the Mets, the Knicks, and the Rangers combined. Those franchises are culturally significant and play many games in their individual venues, but since the average New York sports fan already resides in the metropolitan area, most fans attending those games either live in the city, drive in, or take public transportation. A family of four may drive to the stadium, pay for parking, pay for their tickets, buy hot dogs and beer and souvenirs, and return home. The US Open, on the other hand, attracts tourists from around the world. They come to New York for a week, they rent hotel rooms, they eat in restaurants, they go to the theater. We are comparing a $400 family outing of people who already live in the area—and who, if they go to the Bronx or Queens, may never make it into
Manhattan—to 700,000 people, perhaps half of whom are coming from out of town, each spending between $5,000 and $10,000. Imagine having the World Series or the Super Bowl or the Final Four in the same place, year after year, and running, not for a week or a weekend or one day, but for two full weeks. That is the impact of the US Open on the economy of New York City. It is colossal. To lose it would have been devastating.

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I am known for being a tennis fan. I played ping-pong when I was growing up in Trenton, and I messed around with tennis in high school and college, but I really didn’t know how to play. Bill Hayling, Les’s brother who became a doctor and ultimately delivered Joyce’s and my children, was the first to put a racquet in my hand. I didn’t even hold it properly. But in 1974, when tennis became all the rage, I got bitten by the bug, and I have been crazy about it ever since.

I understand that it is relatively unusual for an African American my age to have a devotion to this particular sport—stereotype would have me be a baseball or basketball fan—but I enjoy tennis, I speak the King’s English, and I willingly wear a tuxedo when the occasion calls for it; if these traits are unsettling to anyone, so be it. One might deem these preferences aspirational, as my generation of African Americans, denied a smooth path into American life, made physical, intellectual, and cultural integration an important goal. One might roll that over in the mind. The media and others have often focused on these attributes, as if to imply that I am somehow attempting to live above my station. No, these are simply choices I have made based on the man I am. Or it may simply be that I like tennis, proper diction, and formal wear.

In one of his books, the first black Wimbledon/US Open/Australian Open tennis champion Arthur Ashe said, “If you want to see what a tennis player should look like, go look at Charlie Pasarell.” Pasarell was trained in his native Puerto Rico by coach Welby Van Horn, and in 1974 and again in 1975 I went to Van Horn’s Connecticut tennis camp and learned how to play. The instruction did not so much raise my game—as I had none to begin with—as create it. I continue to play tennis five times a week even to this day, and I have a list of sixty-four friends, men and women, to whom I send a weekly email blast to fill my rotation of partners. We play a spirited game. It is one of my consuming passions.

I like and admire tennis players, including Roger Federer, Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Monica Seles, Serena Williams, and Ilana Kloss, who plays in my game. A former number one–ranked doubles player and current commissioner of World Team Tennis, Kloss is also Billie Jean King’s life partner. There would be no women’s professional tennis without Billie Jean. She is a remarkable woman, an inspiration particularly to women in sports, but also to all of us. I had the honor to share a court with Billie Jean and was pleased and proud to be on the USTA Board of Directors when we voted to name the USTA National Tennis Center after her.

But most of all, I would be remiss if I did not mention my admiration for Arthur Ashe, a beacon of honor on the court and off. I was in Madison Square Garden during a match in which a shot at Arthur’s end was called out by the umpire in the chair. “No,” Arthur informed him, “that was good.” A rare occurrence indeed. He was such a gentleman. That’s the way he was taught by Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, the “godfather” of black tennis.

I am friendly with the whole McEnroe family—father, mother, and their sons Patrick, Mark, and John. I was having dinner out one evening when John’s wife Patty came over and told me, “My father-in-law is upstairs celebrating his birthday with the family and some of his law partners, and they’d love for you to join us.” I went upstairs to find two or three dozen people in the party. They asked me to speak, and I talked about my love of tennis and the National Junior Tennis League, an organization co-founded by Arthur Ashe that encourages tennis participation in poor neighborhoods and the inner cities throughout the United States. I said, “Over time, nationwide, perhaps millions of youngsters have come through the program. A handful become world-class players, like John and Patrick.” (Their brother Mark said, “What am I, chopped liver?”) “A greater number attain a degree of proficiency so they can get college scholarships, and given what it costs to go to college these days, that’s important. But more important to me is that nationwide, over a period of forty years, millions simply become better people through tennis.”

...

In negotiating with the USTA, one needed to understand its internal politics. The organization is divided into seventeen geographical sections, and according to its constitution, voting power is based upon the number of registered USTA members residing in each section. In the early 1990s, there was a movement afoot to take the US Open out of New York. Chicago and Atlanta were the leading alternative sites, with some consideration being given to locations in Connecticut, Westchester, and New Jersey’s Meadowlands. Understanding the workings of the USTA, one had to be extremely concerned. We were negotiating to keep the Open in town, but there was significant support within the association for a move.

As someone involved in the tennis world, I was aware of the USTA’s internal workings. At that time the players were challenging the governing bodies controlling the Grand Slam tournaments in an effort to increase their portion of the revenues. Tennis had a checkered history of financial dealings with its players, having come late to professionalism, and there was considerable interest among the pros in creating their own tour. Golf, a game and industry with a similar social and cultural background, was controlled not by the United States Golf Association but by the Professional Golfers’ Association, the players. If the US Open paid $30 million to the participants out of $120 million in profits, the players asked, why couldn’t they organize their own tour and make the profits themselves? The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) hired President Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, to assist in the creation of just such a tour.

If the USTA abandoned the New York market and moved the tournament elsewhere, what might New York do? Well, the USTA owned neither the land on which the tournament was played nor Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Open’s premier court; these were city properties. If the US Open was no longer being played there, why couldn’t the city negotiate with the ATP and the Women’s Tennis Association and create a new Grand Slam event on the spot? I met with Mr. Jordan to discuss the possibilities. This gave us considerable leverage as our negotiations with the USTA intensified as well.

Professional sports as a moneymaking industry was in its infancy in the 1970s and early 1980s. Even when USTA president W. E. “Slew” Hester moved the event from the historic West Side Tennis Club to expanded facilities in Flushing Meadows in 1978, the Open wasn’t an instant financial success. Within three or four years, as the tennis craze took hold and lucrative television contracts were negotiated, the USTA quite suddenly developed significant earnings. What would the organization do with this capital? An expanded tennis center at the site of the US Open was high on its list of priorities.

This was not immediately good news for us. First, a new tennis center would demand a large expanse of land, and New York City did not have an adequate new site to offer. Second, a stadium that cost $300 million to build in New York could have been built in Chicago for around $100 million and in Indian Wells, California, for $50 million. There were union issues and materials issues to contend with, but that was only a 20 percent factor. The major drawback to new construction was that if the new facilities were to remain in Flushing Meadows, they would have to be built on landfill, which would have to be made not to sink and settle. Such construction was extremely expensive.

In the interim, the USTA felt that it needed to build four more practice courts in Flushing Meadows—plain old-fashioned tennis courts. In the 1980s, one could build an individual asphalt court for between $25,000 and $30,000, but in its wisdom the USTA spent $2.2 million on four practice courts with a fence. Building on a landfill, its engineers found, was like building the courts in water: before contractors could even lay down a footing, they had to build a structure that could support it, they had to create a deck. The construction was obviously very expensive. Between the cost and the politics and the difficulties with the players, if from 1985 to 1990 one had asked a professional oddsmaker, “What’s the line that the USTA will stay in New York?” I think you would have gotten, at best, a 50-50 bet. Maybe 7 to 5 against.

We began negotiating with the USTA, which was represented by David Markin, the Checker Motor Company CEO who had just finished a term as the organization’s president. (His father had created the company that manufactured and supplied the city’s iconic Checker cabs.) Traditionally the city had been represented in these sorts of negotiations by the Parks Department, because the land on which the tennis grounds sat was Parks Department land. However, that department did not have the expertise to negotiate complicated economic development agreements, so Norman Steisel called in Carl Weisbrod, at that time the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, to lead our team. Carl’s mandate was to negotiate and come back to me with a deal, and he performed admirably.

There are two major reasons why stadium deals are rarely advantageous for municipalities. First, they often begin with a threat to leave by an existing franchise—“We are going to pull up stakes, and you will no longer be perceived by America as a major league city”—followed by a demand: “In order for us to remain, you must build for us a new, state-of-the-art stadium, renovate or create modern infrastructure around this edifice, and establish a business environment in which we can thrive. We will take all the revenue—including but not limited to parking, concessions, and ticket sales—while you earn only a highly negotiated rent and the taxes on the substantial revenue we earn. And since you own the facility and the grounds on which it stands, it is your responsibility to maintain them; as the building and surroundings age and require repair, we will pay for none of it. That’s the deal. Take it or we’re leaving.”

Second, stadiums have historically been located in downtown areas, the center of urban environments, and aside from game day, most of the time they are dead. A football stadium is used approximately nine days a year—ten or eleven if a team is fortunate enough to get into the playoffs. (Teams don’t even practice in these stadiums; they usually train at facilities in the surrounding suburbs, which are more than willing to trade civic funds for proximity to the major leagues.) Baseball stadiums are open eighty-one days a year and closed the rest. A casual stroll around any major league facility in the off-season will confirm the utter solitude of a building without a team. In some respects, these facilities are a blight on the urban environment, except around game time.

In this case, however, we were dealing with an organization that had a striking willingness to negotiate. New York was clearly established as the center of the American tennis world, and among the USTA’s primary goals was the expansion of the sport itself and the elimination of New York City as a stop on any tour the players might put together. The association wanted to grow the sport and needed a shining arena in which to showcase it. New York clearly possessed that potential, particularly as the base for much of the nation’s media companies, particularly all three major television networks. The deal was sufficiently expansive that there was room for give-and-take on both sides, and while other sites were being considered, the city and the USTA set about to fulfill each other’s needs. The negotiations were hard but not acrimonious, and Weisbrod felt that the USTA was exceptionally generous in understanding the city’s position.

Rather than demand that the city spend several hundred million dollars to build the new facilities, the USTA agreed to pay for the construction of the entire stadium. The land would continue to belong to New York, and the city would own the stadium as well. However, instead of sticking the city with what could be a sizable bill, as in other stadium deals, the USTA agreed to maintain the stadium as well. And it would be open to the public on a paying basis. The US Open Tennis Center would become a tennis hub, a gathering place for the city’s players. Lessons would be taught, games would be played, a community would be encouraged. The courts would be open. Unlike Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium (and now Citi Field), or Madison Square Garden, eleven months of the year any member of the public with a court fee could play tennis where the pros played. The effect on the sport itself would be profound. I perceived the USTA to be remarkably prescient in this regard.

Louis Armstrong Stadium, which the new facility would replace, was originally the Singer Bowl, erected for the 1964 New York World’s Fair and home to a series of music concerts, including those by Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. The new venue would seat 23,500 and might serve in a similar capacity, and a clause was negotiated that stated that the proceeds of any paying events scheduled during times when there were no tennis tournaments would be split evenly between the city and the USTA. The city would pay for improvements to the roads around Grand Central Parkway, which were needed in any case. The USTA would receive all parking revenues, which were significant only during the two weeks of the Open. We also agreed to support tax-exempt bonds so that the USTA as bondholders would pay a lower interest rate. The city, state, and federal governments would lose a very modest amount of money in taxes, perhaps $100,000.

Often the municipalities in stadium deals are paid a percentage of net earnings. This leads to the unseemly spectacle of corporate ownership throwing the kitchen sink into the expense list (one construction worker to hold the chair, one to screw in the lightbulb), deducting it from revenues, and presenting the city that built their stadium with revenue streams that trickle rather than flow. One heard this in the press as it covered city disputes from time to time with George Steinbrenner or the folks out at Shea over the amount of rent due from the Yankees and Mets, respectively. Rather than allow that to happen, we negotiated a deal in which the USTA paid New York City an annual rent of $400,000, which would rise incrementally, plus 1 percent of the gross. As revenues have grown, this deal has become extremely and increasingly lucrative.

There were ancillary issues. Flushing Meadows Park was huge—it encompassed four or five different community boards. One of the great multicultural parks in the city, Flushing Meadows was used daily by Asians, Latinos, Caucasians, African Americans, the poor, everyone from relatively low-income people to the fairly well-off. It was close to middle-class neighborhoods like College Point, blue-collar white neighborhoods like Maspeth, and Latino neighborhoods like Corona. The park was so inviting that people would travel to spend time there. Many Pakistani and Indian families who did not live in close proximity used it fully nonetheless. Because it was a large and very much a family park, many felt that they had a stake in it. This became an issue when we declared the intention to eliminate a Flushing Meadows pitch-and-putt golf course in order to accommodate the needs of the tennis center.

Although it occupied a tiny section of the park, the pitch-and-putt course, we came to find, was much beloved. Local residents complained to their legislators, who complained to us. Here we were, building a huge stadium to generate substantial revenue at a time when the city desperately needed it, revenue that would increase as the years progressed, and a pitch-and-putt was standing in the way. One would think this could have been easily resolved, but in New York State a city government cannot simply appropriate parkland, even to lease it to a responsible commercial tenant, without getting approval from the State Legislature. The entire tennis center development project had to go through the public approval process, be the subject of hearings, and be discussed before the various community boards. Betsy Gotbaum, whom I was proud to have appointed to be the first female commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation, secured the support of the local legislators to de-map the parkland and was vital in facilitating this process.

There was, as there always is with any public project in New York, a degree of contentiousness. The neighborhoods were upset; they wanted the pitch-and-putt course relocated, they wanted free tennis lessons for neighborhood residents, they wanted reduced prices for seniors and children when the complex was open to the public, they wanted a cap on the fees charged for court time. Their list of demands was extensive. Ultimately, we found another location within the park for the pitch-and-putt course, we accommodated several community requests, and the issue was resolved.

The major bone of contention hanging over the entire deal, however, was the issue of flyovers. Louis Armstrong Stadium and the entire US Open Tennis complex lay directly in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport. During takeoff and landing, planes regularly flew over the courts, rocking the area with a noise that would rattle one’s insides. The tradition of tennis demands silence at key moments, both for decorum’s sake and to allow the players to concentrate. The screaming jet engines during matches were more than disconcerting—they were extremely disruptive. Conversations were forced to cease, and more to the point, players could not hear the ball hitting the court or coming off their racquets, which affected their ability to gauge its power and fashion their response. The noise affected the game itself; it affected who won and who lost.

The players were unhappy with the USTA over the game’s economics to begin with. When they learned that a new US Open Tennis Center was planned to stay in Flushing, they complained bitterly, particularly eight-time finalist and three-time winner Ivan Lendl, who said, essentially, “Either solve this or we’re out of here!” USTA representatives told Carl Weisbrod, “The facility would be cheaper elsewhere. We will admit, we would rather keep the Open in New York, but ultimately we are dependent on the players. If we cannot get peace and quiet from LaGuardia, the players will not come to the tournament and we will have to move.” For all the economics, this was the one overriding issue. They as much as told us, “Look, we want to do this, but we can’t be locked into a deal where the planes are going to fly and our players are going to boycott this event. It’s just not going to work for us.”

Claire Shulman was the newly elected borough president of Queens, the home of Flushing Meadows Park. Nick Garaufis, a young attorney in her office, was helpful in contacting the appropriate people within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), with whom we held several extensive conversations. (Garaufis went on to become the FAA’s chief counsel and is now a federal judge.) We explained our position and asked that they change the offending flight paths, if not universally, then during the two weeks in which the Open was played.

 We were extremely fortunate. It developed that the flight path that brought planes over the stadium was not the one actually favored by the FAA. A safer pattern preferred by the agency had the aircraft coming in and out from the north and east, over Long Island Sound. However, pressure was being brought to bear on the FAA by federal elected representatives protecting the suburbs: planes were being routed over Queens only because these politicians did not want them disrupting their constituents on Long Island and in the bedroom communities of Connecticut. The thinking was that if you fly over a park, you disturb fewer people than if you fly over a neighborhood. Residents of Queens might see it another way.

Hearing our concerns, the FAA was happy to say, “The city insists! The US Open is so important to our economy that we must respond! Great!” They agreed to reroute the planes for the entire duration of the Open. We were very pleased to bring a positive response to the bargaining table; the players would be satisfied, and it appeared not only that the Open would remain in New York but that we would be the beneficiaries of a wonderful new athletic facility.

Sadly, the USTA was not satisfied at all. While they appreciated the immediate statement from the FAA, they wanted a long-term commitment in writing, which the FAA, in order to maintain its own options, was not willing to make; the FAA would give us assurances and commit its best efforts to us, but it could not bind its successors to such a policy. The USTA expressed concern that succeeding mayors might not be so solicitous of the association’s feelings and might not lobby the FAA so hard the next time such a problem arose. Having been locked into a long lease and invested half a billion dollars in a facility, they would be utterly lacking in leverage. More than the agency’s assurances, they wanted a firm commitment that the FAA was not going to change its mind. Failing that, they demanded a stronger commitment from us.

This was the point at which the negotiations became difficult. Carl Weisbrod met with David Markin in Markin’s posh apartment on Fifth Avenue in the 70s, where the USTA demanded a default provision—the right to walk away from our contract in the event of a specified number of flyover incidents. Markin told Carl, “There will be a deduction from the rent for flyover violations, particularly during the semifinals and finals, other than for reasons of safety.” (All of us understood that safety concerns such as weather conditions or security held primacy over issues of sound level at the Open.)

“This is outrageous,” Weisbrod told him. “We’re never going to agree to this. This is totally outrageous!”

“We can’t live without a penalty,” Markin said.

“We can’t commit to something we don’t control!” Carl responded. “We can’t give you a penalty. We’ll do our best, we’ll commit to best efforts, but we can’t commit to suffering a harm if we don’t control it. We don’t control this! The FAA controls this, we don’t, and we’re not going to agree to this!”

Negotiations became nasty. Carl said, “We are immovable on this issue. I don’t care if it’s ten cents, I’m not gonna even present this to the mayor.” At that point he stormed out. The men stopped speaking to each other. The silence lasted several days. Finally Weisbrod told them, “Look, I’m not even going to deal with this issue until I know it’s the only one left on the table.” When the two sides had finally agreed upon every other outstanding point, Carl walked into my office and said, “Mr. Mayor, I think we’re pretty much there with this USTA lease, except for one modest issue, which is this flyover thing. The USTA is insisting on a penalty, and honestly, Mr. Mayor, my view is that they’re not going to agree to this without one.”

I was quite clear in my response: “No damn way.”

“I think it’s a deal-breaker,” he told me.

“It can’t be.” I sent Norman Steisel and Judge Mollen back in there with Carl, who said, “All right, guys, see if you can change it.” They returned the next day and told me, “Look, this is a problem, and here’s why this is a problem. They really want to permanently hold the next mayor and the next mayor and the next mayor’s feet to the fire. We eliminated the default provision, but the best we could all do was negotiate a cap on the penalties in any one year.” That maximum was $325,000. The base rent was $400,000.

I spoke with David Markin personally. He was a hard-bargaining, hard-driving guy, fierce but fair. I tried to explain the impossibility of the City of New York being made responsible to pay the USTA several hundred thousand dollars annually as a result of a decision in which we had no part. “Politically,” I told him, “how am I going to explain that we’re going to pay you if a plane flies over a damn tennis match?!”

“It’s a deal-breaker,” he said.

“Dave, you’re killing me!” I told him.

“It’s a deal-breaker.”

Finally we acquiesced; we needed the Open, and we felt that the FAA had our back and the penalty provision would be rendered moot. But the problems were far from over. The deal required the approval of what seemed like everyone in public service: the legislature had to approve the alienation of the parkland; the federal government had to affix its approval because federal money had been involved in the creation of the park itself; and the entire plan had to go through the laborious public approval process before the borough community boards, the Queens borough president’s office, and ultimately the City Council.

In the heat of the 1993 mayoral campaign, there was great pressure on many City Council members to oppose this plan. The race was too close to call, and officeholders had to make choices as to which candidate was the one with whom they wanted to curry favor. To mollify detractors and speed the process we made the ready-to-sign lease available to the City Council. This was unprecedented; the executive branch of New York City government simply does not open its books to the legislative. The City Council’s responsibility in a parks case such as this was simply on the land-use side. They had no power over the economic deal; that was the mayor’s prerogative. Given the controversy and public misstatements and wrong statements, however, we took this unprecedented action, even though our outside counsel and many in the administration disapproved.

At its hearing, the City Council got to ask David Markin, who turned out to be quite a good witness, all manner of questions concerning the lease. Ninety percent of the members didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about. Nevertheless, it was as if there were fifty-one lawyers in the room questioning Markin, who managed, despite the fact that he has a temper, to maintain his cool throughout. One member asked how many gay people were included on the USTA board of directors. Markin said, “How do I know? I don’t ask people if they’re straight or gay.”

“Well, how many stated gay people are on the USTA board of directors?”

Markin didn’t know, and that was the end of that. Ultimately, the City Council gave its assent as well.

After two years of negotiation and government approvals, we had a deal. During any single year, a breach of a specifically defined quiet would cost the city a maximum of $325,000, but the new US Open Tennis Center would be built, including a new stadium and fifteen new courts. The USTA would pay $172 million for the expansion, the city would add forty-two acres of parkland to the site, and the US Open would remain in New York for twenty-five years—with a series of incremental rent increases and options that could extend the lease to a total of ninety-nine years. The USTA would maintain and operate the center, the public would have access to it, and the city would own it.

I postponed the signing of the lease once because borough president Claire Shulman and City Council speaker Peter Vallone were not available to stand by my side that day. I finally signed with them sharing the glory and standing in support in December, two weeks before I would leave office. Parks commissioner Betsy Gotbaum and Norman Steisel’s chief of staff, Ellen Baer, were extremely helpful in getting the site prepared quickly so construction could begin on my watch and mitigate against Rudy Giuliani reversing the deal, as he had promised he would do during the mayoral campaign and indeed attempted to do when he was elected. He tried to scrap the deal! Needless to say, the agreement was sound, the USTA stood its ground, and the Open continued with much success in spite of Rudy’s objections.

In 2010 the city had an estimated economic impact from the tournament of $756 million, up from $420 million in 2001 and $145 million in 1991. It’s the best-attended annual sporting event in the world and a real showcase for the city, viewed by 85 million people in the United States and broadcast to 188 countries worldwide. The flyover penalty remains $325,000, but in nearly two decades it has never been brought into play. Mayor Bloomberg visited my radio show and on the air called the contract that my staff and I negotiated “the only good athletic sports stadium deal, not just in New York, but in the country.”

I have been privileged to sit on the USTA’s board of directors. I was very vocal in promoting the naming of the center after Billie Jean King, one of the sport’s greatest players, the person who single-handedly saved women’s tennis, and a pioneer in equalizing the economic and social treatment of not only women tennis players but of women around the world. The USTA has proposed building, at an estimated cost of $500 million, an expanded facility with the capacity to sell an additional 10,000 tickets for each of the Grand Slam tournament’s first several days. It is a big deal.

I recognize that there is a long list of deserving people for whom a court or building could be named at the Tennis Center, which is why I was so supremely moved and proud when, in recognition of my efforts to expand the game of tennis in New York and guarantee that the US Open would have a place to call home for decades to come, the suggestion was made by my friend and tennis proselytizer Skip Hartman to name the plaza directly in front of the East Gate entrance to the center, the David Dinkins Circle.

Skip and I had met in the mid-1970s during an effort to bring tennis to low-income black and Hispanic inner-city children. Not only did he attempt to bring me some recognition at the US Open, the man saved my life. I had previously had a minor heart attack in 1985, and in 1996, when Skip and I were playing together at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, I suffered another incident. Skip doesn’t like to play doubles because he likes to run. I always tell him, “If I’m your partner, you get to run a lot.” So we were playing doubles, and it was hot, and I felt something was wrong. Serious tennis players don’t quit in the middle of a game. Maybe at the end of a set, if not the whole match, but not in the middle of a game. I said, “I gotta sit down.” I took a seat courtside and fainted. I was out for five or ten seconds. When the doctors examined me, they concluded I had three or four blockages and needed a triple-bypass operation. Joyce was in New York, and during that time Skip Hartman became my protector. If anybody came anywhere near me, Skip wanted to know, “Where’s your board certificate? Are you board-certified?” Skip was zealous and would not leave my side.

I wanted to go home to my own doctors but was told, “You can’t fly.” The question then became, where would the surgery be performed? I was given a list of hospitals reachable by ambulance and picked Charleston, because the surgeon was reputedly the third-best in the country and because I knew the mayor, Joe Riley. (In one campaign I supported Joe before I knew whom he was running against. “I should tell you,” he said, “my opponent is black.” “A black Republican?” I said. “Screw him!”)

It develops that the Medical University of South Carolina was one of the best hospitals in the country, and the surgery was successful. When Joyce flew down, Skip stepped away, but his care and caring was vital to my survival, and I am extremely grateful.

The USTA accepted Skip’s suggestion in 2008, and David Dinkins Circle is the gateway through which hundreds of thousands of tennis fans pass each year to attend the US Open and during the fifty other weeks of the year to play their personal matches. In 2008 a dedication ceremony was held, and I was gratified to see many friends gathered in the plaza that brings together so many things that I love. I love the tournament, I love the sport, and I love the city. I am deeply grateful that my name will forever be associated with the Billie Jean King USTA Tennis Center and the US Open. It is a true honor.