Here's The Thing with Alec BaldwinIt’s time for the final episode in our Summer Staff Picks series, highlighting favorite conversations from the Here’s The Thing archives. This week, we revisit Alec Baldwin’s conversation with Andrew Berman. He has been called one of the most powerful people in New York real estate, but not because he's a deep-pocketed developer. Berman is the Executive Director of Village Preservation, where he advocates for the protection and conservation of historically important buildings and sites in Greenwich Village, the East Village and NoHo, including the cultural touchstone The Stonewall Inn. Alec first spoke with Berman in 2015 regarding his background and what led him to this field, how the changing zoning laws affect his work, and his wish for the city’s future. Berman joined Alec again earlier this summer for an update on his work since last they spoke, including the recent wins that Village Preservation has achieved, the ways the city has changed since covid and the challenges involved in solving the city’s affordable housing crisis.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. Over the last few weeks, you've heard from some of our staff as they showcase their favorite episodes from our archives. Now it's time to hear mine. Since conservation and the enduring character of New York are topics close to my heart, I wanted to share with you an episode with someone fighting the good fight.
Andrew Berman.
Berman is the executive director of Village Preservation, a nonprofit that works to document, celebrate, and preserve historical and significant buildings in downtown New York. Named one of the one hundred most powerful people in real Estate by The New York Observer, Berman is a lifelong New Yorker whose work led the charge against development plans by NYU and Donald Trump and secured landmark protection for over one thousand buildings. We'll have an update with Andrew Berman later in this episode. We began my twenty fifteen conversation with Andrew Berman discussing the One that got Away, the one building he wasn't able to save that still haunts him.
You know, this is gonna sound sort of strange, but one of my personal favorites that we lost. Was this beautiful building called the Tunnel Garage, which, believe it or not, was a parking garage which you would never think who would care about a parking garage. It was one of the first purpose built parking garages in New York. It was this beautiful Art Deco building that had a medallion on it that was an image of a model t Ford emerging from the Holland Tunnel, which hadn't even yet been built. When this tunnel, which was built near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, where was this. This was on the corner of Broome Street and Thompson Street, so sort of at the edge of soho the South Village. Beautiful building. I mean it really, if there's a parking garage anywhere on Earth that people would raize about, it was this one. And it had been on sort of lists for years of a building to be saved. A developer came along and bought it and said, you know, I just want to tear it down and build a slightly larger condominium building. Here.
How many stories eight stories? How many units?
I think about thirty or so, you know, a pretty a bland, you know, sort of you'd never look at it a building, you never look at it twice.
What's another example, Well.
Here's one where sort of the opposite. There was a vacant lot at the northern end of the Greenwich Village Historic District and there was a plan to develop it, which we had no objections to. You know, vacant lots are there to be developed. But the developer put forward a proposal for this thirteen story curving, entirely glass walled building in the Greenwich Village Historic District and we thought that's ludicrous, that would never never be approved. What does that have to do with the Greenwich Village Historic District. The notion is new development in these areas should kind of fit the character. They don't have to mimic it. It doesn't have to be some bo town, some compatibility. The Commission unanimously approved it, which we were really taken aback by.
What's one that was a tremendous victory for you Where's Where's something where you guys really fought and you scored.
I'd say one of the ones that we're most proudest of is the part of Greenwich Village south of Washington Square, what we often call the South Village the part of Greenwich Village that everybody associates with, you know, the folk Revival, the beat Nicks in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. Bleaker McDougal. That area amazingly was not protected by landmark protections. Any of those buildings could have been demolished and replaced with pretty hitty beach in New York. Yes, very much so. And after really fifty years of people trying to get that area of landmarked, we were able to get it landmarked in two stage shake. It took thousands of people really coming together and pushing the city. One part of it is we actually had to almost sort of blackmail the city. They wanted to get an area adjacent to that rezoned as basically a sort of a stop to a developer, Trinity real Estate in this case, and we pushed the city council to say, we won't approve the rezoning that you the city want, unless you move ahead with this landmarking that the community has been asking for for years. So we really kind of backed them into a corner. And to be honest, we sort of used election year politics as a bit of a cudgel. You know, people were trying to look like they were being friendly to the community. So we were able to make them do something that they had not wanted to do and had been unwilling to do for years.
What area do you live in yourself?
I actually live in Hill's Kitchen, so I'm a bit further to the north. But I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I've worked in the village. I grew up in the Bronx, but I've been working in the village and on the West Side of Manhattan since for over twenty years.
Now, where'd you go to schools?
I went to Bronx High School of Science, so I've lived in New York my whole life.
What about college? Where did you go?
I went to Wesleyan University. Well, do you study art history with a focus on architecture and urban planning?
Talk about, if you would, what happened to Christine Quinn with the Chelsea Market, because of my understanding is correct, that was in her district. Yes, And I want to be very clear that during that political race, I endorsed Deblasio and worked for Deblasio and did not support Quinn. And this is not, you know, to bash Quinn at all, But describe what happened in that Chelsea Market thing and what you think was going on from pressures that were on her.
Yeah. Well, so you know, Chelsea Market is this old industrial complex built by Nabisco in Chelsea that was a Nibisco factory. Bisco Factory is where the oreo was invented. It was a bakery. Yeah.
And who developed into the current Chelsea Market how long ago?
It was originally another group of people, including a guy named Irwin Cohen, and that was in the late nineteen nineties that had been sitting there basically abandoned, and he came up with this idea that everybody thought was crazy at the time because this was a real backwater fifteen years ago, of turning it into this huge retail market with offices and things like that, I mean.
The food equivalent of a show.
Yes.
Yeah, and it was wildly successful. You know, the neighborhood around it transformed. It's a huge building. It's a beautiful old building, but it's a huge building. They have above they did not have air rights up above, and that that's that's where the key comes in with this. So they wanted to build basically two towers on top of this lovely old building, but they couldn't because they had no development.
On top of the eight stories that are already.
There, on top of the building that already exists. So they came to the city and they said, we want you to rezone us to give us.
These developed stories. Did they want they Originally.
It was going to be the addition was going to go up to something like two hundred and fifty feet in the air or something like that. I mean huge, and one on the west end, one on the stories. Yeah, yeah, huge building, huge building. And you know, at this point Quinn had already kind of shown herself to be very willing to be accommodating to developers, so we knew this was going to be an uphill battle at best. Although Chelsea was where she was from and a lot of the people who were very adamantly opposed to it were people she'd known and worked closely with for years, we were opposed to it as well, and she did eventually approve it. A slightly scaled back version made it a little less little less bad.
As the work started already.
No, and it's not been clear to us why they haven't moved ahead yet, but they have all the approval, so it's really up to them to go any time that they want. But this was definitely a disappointment. And what was particularly disappointing was that there were commitments that were quote unquote made as part of this approval about how it would have to remain all independent businesses, there couldn't be chain stores and all these other kinds of things, which it turned out none of these agreements were enforceable. It was really just sort of window dressing to this approval that the city gave them. And that's disappointing when you see things like that happen. When do buildings need to come down? Things have to change, We need to make room for more people. For you, oh, it's absolutely reality, and you know we would never do you acknowledge that one you wanted to save ultimately didn't need to be saved. I'll give you an example. There's areas of our neighborhoods where we've fought for new zoning that we thought would encourage good development as opposed to bad developments, which meant the expectation was things will get built.
Yes, give us an example of an area where this came into play.
For instance, in the East Village, we working with a coalition, we were able to get almost the entire East Village rezoned. So the old zoning would have encouraged big, tall towers, it would have encouraged building things like dormitories and hotels.
Believe it or not, but as an NYU, that's where NYU went to build a lot of their.
Dormitories along Third Avenue in that area. Yes, and we didn't want to see NYU take over the East Village, so we pushed for and got a rezoning that said, yes, there can be new development here, but the size and scale of it is going to be more like what you think of the East Village. Seven story buildings, six story buildings. This is what zoning does. You can get these what are called contextual zoning disc that says you can build but to a certain height, certain number of square feet, things of that nature. So we've seen a lot of developments go up in the East Village under this new zoning that are so much more in character with the neighborhood than what would have been built under the old zoning. So we weren't pushing there to say no new buildings or nothing can ever be torn down, but that there should be new buildings, but it should really reinforce the character of the neighborhood. Just around the corner from our office, there was a huge parking lot that was just built on with an eight or nine story building. Right next door to it is a dorm that NYU built a couple of years earlier. That's twenty six stories. There have been quite a few new buildings closer to the traditional campus, but this will be a whole additional campus for the university.
Do you feel like the city you turn around one day, you know, we have another subway tunnel, so we have water tunnels that are coming in. I mean, the city is constantly, constantly, constantly being changed. And if you had one wish, I mean, I'm sure you have a laundry and things. What's one wish of how you'd like things to change in the next twenty to thirty years, you.
Know, I mean, I think the biggest pressing issue facing New York is ensuring that it stays a place that's affordable and accessible for a broad range of people. So I'd say, if I had one wish for the city, it would be that that somehow we could it could be a place where, you know, sort of the most successful, you know, innovators and zillionaires can live there, and poor working folks and middle class people who are you know, sort of raising kids or starting out or living on their own or sort of whatever, and everybody in between, you know, the immigrants, the longtime residents.
And see some of the steps that were taken to allow for like Mitchell Lama that's.
Dying, that's.
Up in Mitchellama Housing, and it's it's tragic.
For those who don't know who were listening that don't know what Mitchell Llama Housing was. This was an attempt back then to have the city develop property where developers would build affordable housing and manage it as affordable housing. I'm being very shorthand with this, and manage it as affordable housing for a given period of time, like thirty years or something, and then after a certain period of time, it would slowly evolve, if you will, into or evolve into private housing. They would sell it as condominiums. And right now we're hitting that place where.
Especially in Manhattan, very few of them are left.
A lot of them. Mitchellama's rolling over now to private.
Co kindominiams, which is really changing the city.
But New Yorkers have resigned themselves to the fact that affordable housing itself, just like paythons, is a thing of the past. And now more and more people who never dreamed of going to Long Island City and to Astoria and to Brooklyn is just apart of Manhattan now in terms of how many people who live and work there and put their kids in school there, but who work in the city and commute. More and more and more people have resigned themselves or even are happy to commute.
Is that your experience as well?
Yeah, and you know, in some ways, I don't think it's such a bad thing that a lot of people who would have only considered living in Manhattan before now are living throughout the city. What I think would be a terrible thing is if Manhattan became a place that only the wealthy could live, and that more and more the other boroughs that became the case as well. I'm not sure that I know what the answer is. I mean, clearly, if we had a different political environment, we'd have things like mitche Lama programs and other things to create and build affordable housing, saying this is an investment in our city's future. The construction is good, it creates jobs, the fact that we give good, affordable housing to people who we need, you know, to be teachers, to be firemen, to be sanitation.
We don't have housing for those people. Now, you know.
One of the first things that happened in New York years ago was the police were successful in argument against the residency requirement because they said, you can't force me to live here because I can't afford the rent here on a policeman's salary. So they did away with But of course this is a city where rather than build affordable housing for people like the police and have them invested in the community they live in, they all leave, which makes them somewhat less invested, I think in the community they live in, although many of them come from the city. It seems we could do a whole hour about the power of the real estate development community and the landlords forth in this. I mean they run the city. Sure, they run the city in so many ways, and they run the city. I mean what gets built, what doesn't get built? Guys like you fight them and win because public outrage and public passions about these things still have some power.
Right Well, Ultimately government makes the decisions, and while certainly the people with money and access have enormous influence over them. The average people do because they vote, and if you exercise that strength that we have, and it's the only thing we have, is the power of the vote, that's the way that we can affect these.
I want to finish with this.
The society has an LGBT initiative for some of the preservation.
They do talk about that.
Look, sure, New York and especially the village really has such a wealth of sites connected to the LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender civil rights movements. I mean the one that everybody knows, of course, a Stone Wall where the riots took place in nineteen sixty nine, which in many respects kicked off the gay movie exactly. But there's many other ones as well. I mean, just around the corner from there, there's Julius's Bar, where in nineteen sixty six there was this sit in or sit in as it was called, the first planned civil disobedience for gay rights. At that time, few people sort of know or remember this. It was actually illegal to serve alcohol to someone who you knew was a homosexual, so it in essence made gay bars illegal. That's why they were all.
The hotel Tennessee Williams of a state and people were breaking the law.
I know. Yeah, So as a result of this, actually there was a legal case that more or less changed that, and.
So that was how to put that in a movie. I love that.
You know, back when there were very, very very few places that gay people could meet, almost all of them were in places like Greenwich.
Village Preservation executive director Andrew Berman. In late June twenty fifteen, just a few days before New York City's annual Pride Parade, and after many years of behind the scenes politicking, Andrew Berman and his colleagues celebrated early the Stonewall Inn won its New York City Landmark status, making it the first site designated primarily for its significance to LGBT history. Take a listen to the Here's the Thing Archives. I talk with another hard working advocate, Josh Fox, the environmental activist whose film Gasland exposed the dangers of fracking.
They would say, oh, your water's fine, and then they would go and get them a glass of water. Drink sor right, well, if you think this is fine for my mother to drink, then you go ahead and drink it. And they wouldn't drink it.
Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot Org. We'll have an update with Andrew Berman after the break. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. I spoke with Executive Director of Village Preservation Andrew Berman for an episode that originally aired in November twenty fifteen. Obviously, much has changed in New York since, and I wanted to sit with the Berman for an update on what has developed and not developed in that time. Two things come to mind. One of them is they say that New York is sinking under the weight of all the building too. I know you no doubt read that correct. Is New York actually sinking under the weight of man? And I know you're not a geologist.
Well we'll find out. I mean either it's sinking or the water levels arising. I mean, between the two of them, where we seem to be going underwater?
Is that true?
Well, certainly the water levels are rising. I mean that's a big problem for New York City, which they're still trying to figure out what to do about that.
When Sandy came. I'm in New Yorker. I've been here since.
I have had an address in New York since nineteen seventy, and then when Sandy came that was just so singular and so unprecedented. They're saying the water might come up to fourteenth Street, and I'm like, come on, I mean, get serious, all right, I could imagine this is not the Caribbean, and the water came up to fourteenth Street. Buildings wiped out in Tribeca, flooded, not just in the basement, but even the first floor were took in a lot of water. The impact of Sandy I was, I was just shocked, and I'm wondering if the city had done anything to prepare for that happening.
Again, well, I know they've done a bunch of things, but I think by any measure, they haven't done enough. You know, there are some new rules in terms of construction in flood zones that you know, have to have some greater level of precaution, but they're still really encouraging a lot of development in what everybody knows is the first places that are going to flood if there's another Superstar and Sandy or something like that. The other thing that they've done or they're doing, is they're building these berms and other types of protection along very We're going to build the big wall the river in the harbor. Well, there's been everything from the proposal to build a giant wall from New Jersey to Long Island that would you know, a floodgate that would keep it from coming in, and then you know, some more modest proposals. But right now East River Park in the East Village and Lower East Side has been completely leveled because they're rebuilding it at about fifteen feet higher, I believe than it used to be as a way of protecting the neighborhoods adjacent to it. Although a lot of people would argue that it's not the best plan and it's doing more harm than good, But there's piecemeal things going on throughout the city to try to address that.
In the years I've lived in the city, of course, I've seen tremendous change on a number of levels. I do notice that it's like, especially in midtown, I just see so many goddamn ugly buildings going up here, and I see those kind of those tall, thin shafts along the East fifties there, those big buildings went up there which are so ugly. Why do you think the city allows so much construction in Manhattan rather than diverting it out to like the Bronx, working with the state of New Jersey and so forth, to not have what we have. And part of that, of course, is the pressure on the village and what your organization is focused on to knock everything down and rebuild that. Why do you think the city it just thinks that, you know, the Manhattan's going to look like some obscene megalopolis like twenty five years from now.
Why do you think the city doesn't fight that? Well.
I think it's a couple of things. There's obviously a tremendous demand from the real estate industry. They see the opportunity to make money. And you know, the city's always been controlled by the real estate industry, either directly or indirectly, you know, campaign contributions, lobbying, influence, etc. You know, So I think that's a big part of it. I think that's where the most money is to be made in many cases, although we've seen explosive development in places like the Long Island City waterfront and downtown Brooklyn Williamsburg, so that you're definitely seeing some of that kind of stuff in other parts of the city, even Bedford Stuyvesant has seen an explosive amount of development. But you know, this city is very hesitant to put restrictions on development. They want to encourage as much of it as possible. You know, our city has never done what some other cities have done, which is said, oh, certainly many cities in Europe, you know, where they say that we need to make sure that we hold on to the character of what makes our city distinctive and wonderful even as we allow it to grow. And you know, I don't think there's anybody of any reasonable mind that would say we shouldn't allow new development in New York City. We have to. There's more business. People want to live here, although shockingly, in the last two or three years, according to the Census Bureau of the population of the city has been dropping actually as opposed to to growing.
Is co related.
Well, it's continued after COVID, so you know, it remains to be.
A ripple effect of all the jobs leaving and the tax space leaving.
And my guess is probably a big part of what that's about is that now there's just so much greater ability to work remotely, so people don't feel as though they have to be as close to their jobs as they used to be for some types of jobs. Obviously, some don't have that flexibility. So you know, even though clearly new development needs to take place, the city has always been very hesitant about being too restrictive about that, having too heavy of a hand in terms of how they control that. And we've seen we have some of the ugliest new development that you can find anywhere. And I think a lot of people in New York would be less opposed to the new development if it just felt like it fit in contributed in some great way to the character of the area. When they're on the rare occasions when there is a building that's built that actually feels like this is a great new addition to the city. People actually do in Central Park West. Yeah, but these are these are.
Rarities now in New York where I've heard rumors and you know, a lot of bullshit obviously about how they're going to start converting retail space, abandoned retail space and office space into residential space.
They're going to.
Allow the old SOHO, the old evolution of SOHO. People don't realize that they used to make nuts and bolts and screws and wash machines or sewing machines or whatever that was in Soho, in the old cast Iron district of Soho. And then eventually somebody finally came to their senses and said, none of this business is coming back. It's gone forever. So they then became the great residential evolution of Soho. Well, I'm wondering, is that Do you think that's going to happen in other places as well?
Well?
So you know, it's interesting they started doing that in the Financial District about twenty years ago. They allowed some of those older office buildings there to be converted to residential. Wilworth, Yeah, exactly, the Woolworth Building one Wall Street. Usually these sort of tall, skinny towers, beautiful buildings, classic New York skyline buildings, and it's been incredibly successful. Now, what we have, especially post COVID, is these you know, nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, these massive office buildings that nobody seems to want to move into. The problem is they're not easily adapted to housing because the floors are so big that ninety percent of them are more than, you know, twenty feet from a window, and you can't have living space where you're nowhere near a window. People are not going to it's illegal, car aren't going to and people aren't gonna live in windowless spaces. Soup to code, yeah, exactly. So the opportunities there for turning these newer, bigger office buildings into residential space are much more limited. From a purely practiced level, what you can do is you can sort of like hollow out a core. So what they sometimes do with these big old buildings is they actually remove parts of it so that all of a sudden there's an open space where you can place windows facing like an inner core or something like that. But that's of course very expensive, and then you're losing the space. So I think it remains to be seen. There's clearly more opportunities to convert office buildings to residential but it's not like we're going to suddenly see all of that empty office space in New York converted to residential use. It's just not it's not going to happen.
Well, I don't see why governments that they don't work assiduously to build affordable housing and force them to do that kind of parody.
In that swap, you want.
To build a sixty story building in Manhattan, another ugly pencil box building to have a bunch of rich people. So we're going to all these lengths. Yes, I want people to have jobs. Yes, I want people to have construction jobs, good jobs, high paying jobs in New York. But what I also want is for them to start to explore where can we develop in the bronx to build affordable housing. And you've got to do both. You can't just sell the saudiast fifty million dollar apartments. They don't live here. And then you know, my doormaan can't get to work because now we have to move to Wanta into an apartment, not even a house.
You know, it's just crazy crazy.
Well, let me just say we need to have affordable housing all throughout New York City. The problem is that the approach that a lot of people take is instead of saying we need affordable house and let's build affordable housing, they say, well, we need to unleash the market and build as much market rate housing as possible, flood the market, and then that's going to bring the prices down for everybody, and you know trickle down economics. The way to get affordable housing is to build affordable housing and to keep the affordable housing that you have, which we're losing at a breakneck pace.
So village preservation, when did the village become such a focus of yours?
You move there to live?
Well, So I've been working in the village since the early nineteen nineties. I was working for an elect official and newly elected city council member who represented the area, Tom Dwayne, Tom Dwayne, Yeah, guy, yeah yeah. He went onto the State Senate. I worked with him there and then from there I moved on to what's now Village Preservation used to be Greenwich Village Society for.
A Store Preservation.
And you know, it's funny. I don't live in the village. I live in Hell's Kitchen. I've never lived in the village. But like every New Yorker in a sense, but you know, like every New Yorker, village is part of what I love about New York City. And the work that I do is not because you know, I have an apartment and I'm trying to you know, preserve my view out my window or you know, make sure that only this happens on my street. There's none of that personal benefit for me other than that I think everybody in New York and the world benefits from beautiful places, historic architecture, places that have a distinctive character. We all benefit from that. That's a public good and that's what I work towards and fight for, and that's why I do the work that I do in Greenwich Village, East Village, No Hope, places like that, because these are some of New York's most historic, distinctive neighbors. So much history there, yes, so much history, civil rights history, artistic history, cultural history, and we we're the poorer if we lose that or we destroy it, which is what would happen if people don't push back.
Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Breman. We'll have more with Andrew Berman after the break. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. I talked with Executive director of Village Preservation Andrew Berman again recently to learn what gains had been made for his organization since we last spoke in twenty fifteen, including the recent successful restricting. Then whyu's efforts for expansion and my evolution has been kind of remarkable to me.
Very different school than when you went there.
Well, it's completely different now it's like this monolith.
But the thing is is that that I recently read in one of the articles that they had a plan for redevelopment that you successfully thwarted. Correct, what did they want to do?
Right?
So, for about sixty or so years now, they and any private university has been prohibited from most types of uses going into Soho and No Hoo. A year and a half ago, the city changed the zoning for Soho and No Hoo. But we successfully lobbied the city council to make it so that that restriction on private university expansion in that neighborhood stayed part of the zoning. NYU then sued to try to get that provision overturned.
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, they weren't allowed to go there at all.
They've never been allowed to go.
Right, and now the powers that be allowed them to go there, but you wanted them to be restricted by the indigenous zoning laws there.
Basically they were restricted before, and then they were restricted under slightly different but new rules, and they tried to take the city to court to say the new rules that restrict us are unconstitutional, and.
They wanted to be able to do whatever they wanted.
They wanted to be able to expand there as much as they wanted to, and a state Supreme Court judge threw their case out of court and said, Nope, this is perfectly constitutional. You have not been harms in any way. You were never able to locate here. You're still not able to locate here. So no harm, no foul, And at least as of today, those regulations can need to.
Say are they appealing that decision.
They haven't announced that they have yet, they haven't said that they won't, so we have to wait and see. But it was a pretty firm defeat that they suffered.
Well, you know, it's always a bit of a I'm not going to say conflict of interest, but it's always an interesting conversation for me because you know, it's my alma mater and I was in in large regard, you know, very proud to go there, and you know, went to that acting program in its earliest time. I think that they I don't know when the Tish family gave the money that they did the name and they created the school that it is now, but I do see that NYU and this, and I'm not singling them mouth like with many institutions in the arts, in medicine. People want a building they can put their name on. I'll give you one hundred million dollars if you're here to put my name on the front of the New York Public Library.
What was it Schwartz Shwortsman, And he wanted his name in.
Front of the library. They were like, no, that's not happening. He was like, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. You know, Gethen gets his name on the old Avery Fisher Hall. One hundred million bucks will buy you a lot.
You know, there's the new NYU building, Paulson, his name is on it. So you know that huge new building that's gone up on Mercer, the old coles Fieldhouse.
Exactly what do you think of that building?
Oh god, I mean it's it's it's like the Death Star, you know, I mean it.
Does look like a Star Wars movie.
Yeah, it's it's quite intimidating.
So it looks like something that landed there.
Yes, from someplace than ever.
Of shooting out and wind blowing everything up.
Yeah. I mean, you'd think that the university would make more of an effort to try to at least look kind of friendly, open, appealing. I mean, this building and several of their other new buildings are just so off putting, so fortress like, so, you know, sort of aggressive.
And do you find there's a reason for that, meaning energy efficiency, HVAC efficiency.
It's a good question, you know. I don't know, because I'll say it almost seems like they're trying to make them ugly. But I can't imagine that's the case. No matter what I think of the NYU administration, not the individual schools, which I think do incredible jobs, it's not in their interest to make their buildings look off putting. I think they just keep getting it wrong for some reason. And you know, let me say this about NYU. I think it's a great institution. I think it's incredibly important to the success of Greenwich Village and of New York City. Half of my staff and my board are NYU alumni. But what all of us agree about is we don't want to see the university take over the neighborhood. It's important that it be an ingredient, a part of the balance of the neighborhood.
And there is that perception that they indeed do want to take over the.
Guest and that at least parts of the neighborhood feel like a company town. That's not what we want. We want the university to be woven into the fabric of the neighborhood, feel like a part of it, but not the dominant presence.
My last question for you, one of the issues I face is that New York itself hasn't changed.
It's always the same.
It's always tearing down buildings and building new buildings and inspiring leaders who are not beyond some criticism, but and then like deadly dull leaders who have no who don't inspire anything. How has New York changed the most to you in your life? To me, you're from the Bronx. For me, what's changed is New Yorkers have changed, not New York. The people who come here to live have changed, and why they come here has changed. How is New York changed to you?
Well, you know, having grown up in the Bronx in the nineteen seventies, I would say one of the biggest things that I think I've seen change is New York has lost a lot of its edge. It was a much edgier place forty fifty years ago, and you know, that's where I think a lot of the spark of creativity and innovation and things like that come from, and it worries me that we're losing that in some way. I mean, there's still an incredible amount of creative people here in creative activity and energy and cultural institutions. New York to me feels less like it's kind of on the cultural frontier the way that it did a generation or two ago, and that concerns me because you know, New York is always, I think going to be a challenging, difficult place to live, but it gives certain rewards that you can't get any place else. One of those is this incredible spirit of innovation, and if we lose that, I think that's really the lynchpin of New York's success. That people come here because it's a place where you can see things change, happen, be created, be the first place where things happen that you wouldn't see anywhere else, and it worries me that we've lost some of that.
And the root of that, to me, but by the way, is about affordable housing. I remember many years ago and what was one of the most beautiful periods of my life, the late eighties. I was here doing theater in New York, and I was really enjoying myself, and I'd just really been working as an actor for a few years up to them, and as a member of a very well regarded society of sober people. I would go to the meetings at Trinity Church and in the book would list of the meeting directory said Trinity was the name of the meeting. And I go into this meeting and the room was just teeming with these old guard artists. I mean people who painted with wroth go. I mean these were people who had lofts in what was the Old Trap and they had affordable spaces to make art.
And I was around people. Then we're going to get in.
Like any of those meetings, they get up and share and talk about the conditions of their life and how well they're doing or or not. And then after the MENI I'd hang out with them and talked to them. I just was thrilled to be around these people who were artists with spaces they could afford in Manhattan, and they were part of a culture in Manhattan back when SOHO before it got flipped, and especially Tribeca was a little I wouldn't say ceed, but more of.
A kind of the wild West.
I mean it was really kind of a like an open plane, if you will, And that's gone. Artists are gone, people won't afford are gone. They built Manhattan Plaza and said to you, if your income taxes jive with our formula, our algorithm, you can get in an apartment here, and blah blah blah. We know we needed twenty of those. We needed so many more Manhattan Plazas in this town or out in the outer boroughs to help maintain. And there's no sense of to me of that. What makes New York is that career diversity.
Well, there's certainly a lot less affordability here as there are in other parts of the city, and that's the key. You need to have a place that you know, everybody can afford to live in. The workers, you know, the artists, the civil servants.
Well, let me just say this to you Downtown, the warmth and the buildings and the history and everything that we crave and covet about the village, I'm grateful that you're working so hard to protect that.
So thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for all your great work and for having me in here. Again.
My thanks to Village Preservation Executive director Andrew Berman. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Musso, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoben. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio Company,
