Javits Unveiling Yields More Questions than Answers
If you arrived in the region this week from Mars (or the West Coast) you might think that the plans released Monday for expansion of the Jacob Javits Convention Center were created from scratch. The designs were unveiled with the typical pomp and the usual array of artist’s renderings, but not a lot of discussion about the compromises they represent and the plans from which they evolved. For those of us who have lived through the varied efforts to expand the convention center, it’s worth looking at the proposed changes and raising a few key questions before ground is broken.

The plan approved by the State Legislature last year called for a $1.4 billion northern expansion of the facility from 38th Street to 40th Street, with a convention hotel on yet-to-be-purchased land on 42nd Street and the facility’s truck marshalling yard reconfigured beneath a park between 33rd and 34th streets. The expansion would have added 340,000 square feet of exhibition space and 265,000 square feet of meeting space, mostly in horizontally contiguous space. A passageway along 39th Street was also envisioned to connect the growing Far West Side to the new ferry terminal on the Hudson River. The facility was to be funded through a $1.50 per night hotel tax, along with $350 million each from the State and City.

According to the plans unveiled Monday, the project has grown to $1.7 billion with several significant changes. The marshalling yard has been moved to the north side of the building, into a new six-story structure between 39th and 40th streets. This shift removes the possibility of a 39th Street passageway and also reduces the new meeting space by 20 percent. The land previously occupied by the marshalling yard, between 33rd and 34th streets, will be sold to developers for an estimated $339 million for the construction of two office towers and two residential buildings. These funds are necessary to close a gap presented by the increased cost of the project. The convention hotel has been relocated from 42nd Street to 11th Avenue between 35th and 36th streets, on property already owned by the State. While these changes were necessary to make the project cost effective for convention center officials, these alterations raise questions that must be answered before the project moves ahead, including:

Is the sale of the former marshalling yard feasible in the current market, or advisable in the context of the Hudson Yards development plan?
The biggest structural change in the plans involves the movement of the marshalling yards. This decision is predicated on the belief that the property can fetch more than $300 million from the sale of the lot for mixed-use development at a fairly high density. Given the current market for office space, it is not clear that developers will line up to build office buildings between the Javits Center and the open rail yard to the south. Even if demand exists, a new environmental review will be needed to change the current plan from park space to dense development, which could require taking a second look at the environmental and other impacts of the entire plan for the area.

A bigger concern is the impact that these buildings might have on the ambitious plans for the rest of the Far West Side. With the fate of the MTA’s Hudson Yards site still undetermined following the demise of the stadium plan for the western portion of the yards, the current proposal would seem to create an island of construction totally out of context of the yards and the surrounding district. It is also unclear if the development of this site would further complicate the financing plan for the larger district, which depends on rapid development elsewhere in the district. RPA has called for the creation of a master plan for both of the rail yards that sit between 10th Avenue and the Hudson River, an action which is even more urgent with these changes in the Javits plan.

How will the facility interact with the waterfront, including the new 39th Street ferry terminal?
Even if all of these obstacles are cleared, constructing a six-story marshalling yard to the north will ensure the removal of a promised connection between the district to the east and the brand new 39th Street ferry terminal. Instead, commuters will have to trek up to 40th Street and then move east between the marshalling yard and the existing Quill Bus Depot, hardly the Champs-Elysees. The new design doesn’t even attempt to improve the facility’s relationship with the revived Hudson River waterfront. The new expansion plan extends the wall between the district and the waterfront without proposing any new interventions. It also does nothing to improve the blank western wall of the Javits Center that currently turns its back on the waterfront.

Is the $1.7 billion plan a long-term solution for New York’s convention needs?
If convention center officials manage to solve all of these problems, we are still faced with what amounts to a $1.7 billion compromise. The new Javits Center would still be less than half of the size of its leading competitor. The addition of critical meeting room space would be curtailed by 20 percent to accommodate the new marshalling yard. That same marshalling yard probably precludes any further expansion to the north, as had been originally planned. And convention activities will surely be compromised by a lengthy construction period.

In the meantime, New York’s global competitors are building new facilities outside of the city center, unhampered by the space limitations of the central business district. From Milan to Tokyo, these massive complexes are being sited in transit-accessible locations between the CBD and regional airports, freeing valuable land for development in their central cities. Convention and trade show participants enjoy all of the benefits of a modern convention center, and then hop on a short train or bus ride to the airport or their downtown hotel. In most cases, a smaller “congress center” remains in the city center, allowing for special meetings and events on a much smaller footprint.

Several alternative proposals for the Javits expansion have hinted at similar solutions here in New York. It remains unclear whether an alternative expansion on the site – or moving the facility altogether – is financially or logistically feasible. But these questions must be asked and answered before New Yorkers make an investment that will commit us to the site and facility for another generation.

– Jeremy Soffin, Vice President for Public Affairs, RPA

Suburbs and Sprawl, from Midtown to Mesa

As one of the half dozen or so regular columnists who write weekly for The New York Times, David Brooks occupies some of the priciest and most coveted real estate in journalism, akin to a Park Avenue penthouse. Brooks uses this position to write about the usual stuff – the Iraq War, Supreme Court nominations, and other national issues that arise.

But Brooks also uses his position to comment on something less seen or heard about on the Sunday talk shows: the suburbs and exurbs, and their growth. Brooks is unusual in having an interest in this subject and in going out to a shopping mall or subdivision and observing how people actually live. In his magazine writing and in books like Bobos in Paradise, and Paradise Drive, he has reported how the suburbs are a far more diverse and rapidly evolving place than the stereotypical conformist, white-bread image. He has brought back stories of subdivisions of Hasidic Jews, and other strange new life forms.

His latest foray into what might be called the “real world” was into the burgeoning suburbs outside Phoenix. In his recent column, “A Nation of Villages”, Brooks states that a million people may soon live in what is now an empty patch of desert. Brooks stands back and applauds this future, because he says the developers are embracing the model of New Urbanism or “New Suburbanism” that will combine the best of suburb and city, and will be the antithesis of “the centerless landscapes of strip malls and tract homes” that have formerly constituted and plagued the suburbs.

Brooks is one of the more astute observers of American life. When he strolls across the parking lot of a shopping mall, you can practically taste the asphalt. He doesn’t usually swallow wobbly generalizations. But in the deserts of Phoenix, Brooks goes astray. Even allowing for compromises that must be made to fit ideas into an 800 word column, he is essentially wrong when he suggests that on their own these new products of developers will cure the nation of its suburban ills.

Without commenting on the specifics of any single development outside Phoenix, what Brooks misses, with his conservative anti-government focus, is the vital work done or not done by the local city hall, the state department of transportation, and the federal government. Brooks talks of the growth of “exurbia” as if it were largely a consequence of community-minded Americans wanting homes in the desert, and developers opting to sell them these homes. Actually, it’s government that is building roads, sewers and water lines, and providing schools, fire stations, libraries and policing. That’s true even in Arizona, which has managed to shrink government’s role to the smallest in the nation, with large penalties for doing so.

What Brooks misses is that absent regional cooperation, and a focus on the impact and placement of public infrastructure, the new sprawl will be, to quote The Who, same as the old sprawl. We’re about to be fooled again. Brooks with this column reinforces the typical and childish American belief that we can buy or build our way out of any problem, including that of sprawl. It’s akin to eating your way out of obesity.

Even on their own small terms, this new breed of suburban, exurban places don't tend to work. Their attempted “downtowns,” which are what makes them different than standard suburbia, usually fail because these places don’t have enough residents per square foot to support walking-based shops. Building such retail centers out by the main highway might work, but that would violate the whole idea of walking-based retail.

On Monday night, a few days after Brooks’ column ran, some people gathered at the Urban Center in Midtown Manhattan to discuss sprawl. The occasion was the release of a new book, Sprawl and Suburbia, edited by William Saunders of Harvard Design Magazine. One of the speakers was Professor Susan Fainstein of Columbia University. In countering the charge that the suburbs are simply “what people want,” she responded with the obvious but important idea that there are some things that people want badly, but cannot just purchase individually, no matter how wealthy they are.

“In some ways it all boils down to a tradeoff between individual freedom and collective values,” Feinstein said to the crowded room. “There are collective values that can only be created through collective action.” And the vehicle for that action is government.

This is the important thought largely absent from Brooks’ column. His best line was: "The story of American development is the story of a contest between privacy and community, and the tide is turning. Communal impulses are rising up to counter privatizing, decentralizing trends." But he doesn’t say, perhaps because he doesn’t get it, that the proper vehicle for these communal impulses is government. If people reject government, it’s doubtful whether they are interested in real community.

Book Review: The Works: Anatomy of a City, by Kate Ascher, Penguin Press 2005. $35.

The Works Reveals City’s Essential Systems
If New York City were a houseplant and you could lift it out of its pot, you would see an immense collection of tubes, wires and pipes, ranging in size from minuscule to mammoth, but in their collective importance greater than the city of towers above them. These tubes of various kinds bring in water, power and people, and carry away waste. Cut the city off from these systems, and like a plant segmented from its roots, New York City would die.

It is not a new idea to catalog and show this vital infrastructure, most of which is underground. There have been several books about New York’s underground environment over the last half century, and several in the last few years. They include photographer Stanley Greenberg’s excellent Waterworks, and the also excellent and more poetic New York Underground, by Julia Solis. I will add my own contribution to this growing pile of books with Beneath the Metropolis, scheduled for publication this fall, which tells the stories of the underground environments of 12 metropolises around the globe, including New York City. These books, including my own, do not attempt to exhaustively catalog the entire city’s infrastructure, probably because the task seems so daunting.

What makes Kate Ascher’s new book, The Works: Anatomy of a City, so impressive is that she successfully shows and explains virtually all of New York City’s vital infrastructure. She has tackled not only the obvious candidates, like the water and subway systems, but less obvious above-ground systems such as rail and maritime freight, garbage movement, telecommunications and air systems. Her vision does not stop at the borders of Manhattan, making The Works essentially about the region, not just New York City.

What allows her to succeed in this challenge is that rather than explaining such systems in traditional narrative-based chapters, Ascher lets illustrations take center stage, with the text around and beneath them playing the supporting role. In the tradition of the Underground series by David Macaulay, this reverses the usual hierarchy of text and art in a book. The absence of long, expository essays makes it difficult for Ascher to comment on issues in any depth, but the picture-book style of The Works allows Ascher to take the reader much deeper into complicated systems than would be possible in a narrative-based book.

Ascher has organized the city’s sprawling, conflicting and chaotic infrastructure systems into five categories: Moving People, Moving Freight, Power, Communications, and Keeping it Clean, with sub-categories under each one. Power, for example, includes Electricity, Natural Gas, and Steam, while Communications includes Telephone, Moving the Mail and the Airwaves. Each of these sections goes deep. The section on Streets, for example, includes a diagram of how a parking meter works, and illustrations of the various styles of street lamps, past and present, and street trees. The section on subways includes not only a two-page cutaway of the Times Square station, but a chart of the various signals used along the tracks and a page showing the different kind of “support” subway cars that remove garbage, collect revenue and vacuum away dust. The section on bridges has a page that shows how the underside of a bridge is cleaned.

With a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and experience at the Port Authority, Ascher’s background is more scholarly and more management-based than that of the usual freelance writer. I was curious about what prompted her to tackle such a book.

Contacted while driving along FDR Drive, one of the city’s many vital, if unattractive, infrastructure systems, Ascher said she conceived of the project after the 9/11 attacks. The interest shown in the exposed “bathtub” of the World Trade Center, of which Ascher knew intimately because of her position then at the Port Authority, made her realize, she said, that people were interested in these vital systems but ignorant of how they worked. So she conceived of a book on the subject, and landed a contract for it with Penguin Press.

Still working full time, she carried out the project with a researcher, Wendy Marech, and a graphic designer, Alexander Isley. She particularly singled out Isley for praise, who she said led a team of designers from around the country in producing the book’s extensive graphics. In deciding what to investigate, she said she mostly followed her own curiosity.

“All the questions I ever had, I was able to get these answered in this book,” Ascher said. “I wanted to know what those nitrogen tanks were used for,” or that strangely shaped truck at work that one might pass while on one of the city’s major bridges.

Ascher is currently executive vice president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. This non-profit corporation reports to Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, and Ascher, as vice president in charge of infrastructure, helps oversee many of the systems she wrote about in The Works. Perhaps the knowledge gathered in preparing the book will help her safeguard and improve these many vital systems.

– Alex Marshall

Questions Or Comments On What’s In This Issue? Send Them To The Editor Of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall At alex@rpa.org


Jan. 26, 2006 \| Vol 5 No. 02

	In this issue of Spotlight on The Region: – Javits Unveiling Yields More Questions than Answers – Suburbs and Sprawl, from Midtown to Mesa *– Book Review: The Works: Anatomy of a City, by Kate Ascher* – Calendar Javits Unveiling Yields More Questions than Answers If you arrived in the region this week from Mars (or the West Coast) you might think that the plans released Monday for expansion of the Jacob Javits Convention Center were created from scratch. The designs were unveiled with the typical pomp and the usual array of artist’s renderings, but not a lot of discussion about the compromises they represent and the plans from which they evolved. For those of us who have lived through the varied efforts to expand the convention center, it’s worth looking at the proposed changes and raising a few key questions before ground is broken. The plan approved by the State Legislature last year called for a $1.4 billion northern expansion of the facility from 38th Street to 40th Street, with a convention hotel on yet-to-be-purchased land on 42nd Street and the facility’s truck marshalling yard reconfigured beneath a park between 33rd and 34th streets. The expansion would have added 340,000 square feet of exhibition space and 265,000 square feet of meeting space, mostly in horizontally contiguous space. A passageway along 39th Street was also envisioned to connect the growing Far West Side to the new ferry terminal on the Hudson River. The facility was to be funded through a $1.50 per night hotel tax, along with $350 million each from the State and City. According to the plans unveiled Monday, the project has grown to $1.7 billion with several significant changes. The marshalling yard has been moved to the north side of the building, into a new six-story structure between 39th and 40th streets. This shift removes the possibility of a 39th Street passageway and also reduces the new meeting space by 20 percent. The land previously occupied by the marshalling yard, between 33rd and 34th streets, will be sold to developers for an estimated $339 million for the construction of two office towers and two residential buildings. These funds are necessary to close a gap presented by the increased cost of the project. The convention hotel has been relocated from 42nd Street to 11th Avenue between 35th and 36th streets, on property already owned by the State. While these changes were necessary to make the project cost effective for convention center officials, these alterations raise questions that must be answered before the project moves ahead, including: Is the sale of the former marshalling yard feasible in the current market, or advisable in the context of the Hudson Yards development plan? The biggest structural change in the plans involves the movement of the marshalling yards. This decision is predicated on the belief that the property can fetch more than $300 million from the sale of the lot for mixed-use development at a fairly high density. Given the current market for office space, it is not clear that developers will line up to build office buildings between the Javits Center and the open rail yard to the south. Even if demand exists, a new environmental review will be needed to change the current plan from park space to dense development, which could require taking a second look at the environmental and other impacts of the entire plan for the area. A bigger concern is the impact that these buildings might have on the ambitious plans for the rest of the Far West Side. With the fate of the MTA’s Hudson Yards site still undetermined following the demise of the stadium plan for the western portion of the yards, the current proposal would seem to create an island of construction totally out of context of the yards and the surrounding district. It is also unclear if the development of this site would further complicate the financing plan for the larger district, which depends on rapid development elsewhere in the district. RPA has called for the creation of a master plan for both of the rail yards that sit between 10th Avenue and the Hudson River, an action which is even more urgent with these changes in the Javits plan. How will the facility interact with the waterfront, including the new 39th Street ferry terminal? Even if all of these obstacles are cleared, constructing a six-story marshalling yard to the north will ensure the removal of a promised connection between the district to the east and the brand new 39th Street ferry terminal. Instead, commuters will have to trek up to 40th Street and then move east between the marshalling yard and the existing Quill Bus Depot, hardly the Champs-Elysees. The new design doesn’t even attempt to improve the facility’s relationship with the revived Hudson River waterfront. The new expansion plan extends the wall between the district and the waterfront without proposing any new interventions. It also does nothing to improve the blank western wall of the Javits Center that currently turns its back on the waterfront. Is the $1.7 billion plan a long-term solution for New York’s convention needs? If convention center officials manage to solve all of these problems, we are still faced with what amounts to a $1.7 billion compromise. The new Javits Center would still be less than half of the size of its leading competitor. The addition of critical meeting room space would be curtailed by 20 percent to accommodate the new marshalling yard. That same marshalling yard probably precludes any further expansion to the north, as had been originally planned. And convention activities will surely be compromised by a lengthy construction period. In the meantime, New York’s global competitors are building new facilities outside of the city center, unhampered by the space limitations of the central business district. From Milan to Tokyo, these massive complexes are being sited in transit-accessible locations between the CBD and regional airports, freeing valuable land for development in their central cities. Convention and trade show participants enjoy all of the benefits of a modern convention center, and then hop on a short train or bus ride to the airport or their downtown hotel. In most cases, a smaller “congress center” remains in the city center, allowing for special meetings and events on a much smaller footprint. Several alternative proposals for the Javits expansion have hinted at similar solutions here in New York. It remains unclear whether an alternative expansion on the site – or moving the facility altogether – is financially or logistically feasible. But these questions must be asked and answered before New Yorkers make an investment that will commit us to the site and facility for another generation. – Jeremy Soffin, Vice President for Public Affairs, RPA Suburbs and Sprawl, from Midtown to Mesa As one of the half dozen or so regular columnists who write weekly for The New York Times, David Brooks occupies some of the priciest and most coveted real estate in journalism, akin to a Park Avenue penthouse. Brooks uses this position to write about the usual stuff – the Iraq War, Supreme Court nominations, and other national issues that arise. But Brooks also uses his position to comment on something less seen or heard about on the Sunday talk shows: the suburbs and exurbs, and their growth. Brooks is unusual in having an interest in this subject and in going out to a shopping mall or subdivision and observing how people actually live. In his magazine writing and in books like Bobos in Paradise, and Paradise Drive, he has reported how the suburbs are a far more diverse and rapidly evolving place than the stereotypical conformist, white-bread image. He has brought back stories of subdivisions of Hasidic Jews, and other strange new life forms. His latest foray into what might be called the “real world” was into the burgeoning suburbs outside Phoenix. In his recent column, “A Nation of Villages”, Brooks states that a million people may soon live in what is now an empty patch of desert. Brooks stands back and applauds this future, because he says the developers are embracing the model of New Urbanism or “New Suburbanism” that will combine the best of suburb and city, and will be the antithesis of “the centerless landscapes of strip malls and tract homes” that have formerly constituted and plagued the suburbs. Brooks is one of the more astute observers of American life. When he strolls across the parking lot of a shopping mall, you can practically taste the asphalt. He doesn’t usually swallow wobbly generalizations. But in the deserts of Phoenix, Brooks goes astray. Even allowing for compromises that must be made to fit ideas into an 800 word column, he is essentially wrong when he suggests that on their own these new products of developers will cure the nation of its suburban ills. Without commenting on the specifics of any single development outside Phoenix, what Brooks misses, with his conservative anti-government focus, is the vital work done or not done by the local city hall, the state department of transportation, and the federal government. Brooks talks of the growth of “exurbia” as if it were largely a consequence of community-minded Americans wanting homes in the desert, and developers opting to sell them these homes. Actually, it’s government that is building roads, sewers and water lines, and providing schools, fire stations, libraries and policing. That’s true even in Arizona, which has managed to shrink government’s role to the smallest in the nation, with large penalties for doing so. What Brooks misses is that absent regional cooperation, and a focus on the impact and placement of public infrastructure, the new sprawl will be, to quote The Who, same as the old sprawl. We’re about to be fooled again. Brooks with this column reinforces the typical and childish American belief that we can buy or build our way out of any problem, including that of sprawl. It’s akin to eating your way out of obesity. Even on their own small terms, this new breed of suburban, exurban places don't tend to work. Their attempted “downtowns,” which are what makes them different than standard suburbia, usually fail because these places don’t have enough residents per square foot to support walking-based shops. Building such retail centers out by the main highway might work, but that would violate the whole idea of walking-based retail. On Monday night, a few days after Brooks’ column ran, some people gathered at the Urban Center in Midtown Manhattan to discuss sprawl. The occasion was the release of a new book, Sprawl and Suburbia, edited by William Saunders of Harvard Design Magazine. One of the speakers was Professor Susan Fainstein of Columbia University. In countering the charge that the suburbs are simply “what people want,” she responded with the obvious but important idea that there are some things that people want badly, but cannot just purchase individually, no matter how wealthy they are. “In some ways it all boils down to a tradeoff between individual freedom and collective values,” Feinstein said to the crowded room. “There are collective values that can only be created through collective action.” And the vehicle for that action is government. This is the important thought largely absent from Brooks’ column. His best line was: "The story of American development is the story of a contest between privacy and community, and the tide is turning. Communal impulses are rising up to counter privatizing, decentralizing trends." But he doesn’t say, perhaps because he doesn’t get it, that the proper vehicle for these communal impulses is government. If people reject government, it’s doubtful whether they are interested in real community. –Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region Book Review: The Works: Anatomy of a City, by Kate Ascher, Penguin Press 2005. $35. The Works Reveals City’s Essential Systems If New York City were a houseplant and you could lift it out of its pot, you would see an immense collection of tubes, wires and pipes, ranging in size from minuscule to mammoth, but in their collective importance greater than the city of towers above them. These tubes of various kinds bring in water, power and people, and carry away waste. Cut the city off from these systems, and like a plant segmented from its roots, New York City would die. It is not a new idea to catalog and show this vital infrastructure, most of which is underground. There have been several books about New York’s underground environment over the last half century, and several in the last few years. They include photographer Stanley Greenberg’s excellent Waterworks, and the also excellent and more poetic New York Underground, by Julia Solis. I will add my own contribution to this growing pile of books with Beneath the Metropolis, scheduled for publication this fall, which tells the stories of the underground environments of 12 metropolises around the globe, including New York City. These books, including my own, do not attempt to exhaustively catalog the entire city’s infrastructure, probably because the task seems so daunting. What makes Kate Ascher’s new book, The Works: Anatomy of a City, so impressive is that she successfully shows and explains virtually all of New York City’s vital infrastructure. She has tackled not only the obvious candidates, like the water and subway systems, but less obvious above-ground systems such as rail and maritime freight, garbage movement, telecommunications and air systems. Her vision does not stop at the borders of Manhattan, making The Works essentially about the region, not just New York City. What allows her to succeed in this challenge is that rather than explaining such systems in traditional narrative-based chapters, Ascher lets illustrations take center stage, with the text around and beneath them playing the supporting role. In the tradition of the Underground series by David Macaulay, this reverses the usual hierarchy of text and art in a book. The absence of long, expository essays makes it difficult for Ascher to comment on issues in any depth, but the picture-book style of The Works allows Ascher to take the reader much deeper into complicated systems than would be possible in a narrative-based book. Ascher has organized the city’s sprawling, conflicting and chaotic infrastructure systems into five categories: Moving People, Moving Freight, Power, Communications, and Keeping it Clean, with sub-categories under each one. Power, for example, includes Electricity, Natural Gas, and Steam, while Communications includes Telephone, Moving the Mail and the Airwaves. Each of these sections goes deep. The section on Streets, for example, includes a diagram of how a parking meter works, and illustrations of the various styles of street lamps, past and present, and street trees. The section on subways includes not only a two-page cutaway of the Times Square station, but a chart of the various signals used along the tracks and a page showing the different kind of “support” subway cars that remove garbage, collect revenue and vacuum away dust. The section on bridges has a page that shows how the underside of a bridge is cleaned. With a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and experience at the Port Authority, Ascher’s background is more scholarly and more management-based than that of the usual freelance writer. I was curious about what prompted her to tackle such a book. Contacted while driving along FDR Drive, one of the city’s many vital, if unattractive, infrastructure systems, Ascher said she conceived of the project after the 9/11 attacks. The interest shown in the exposed “bathtub” of the World Trade Center, of which Ascher knew intimately because of her position then at the Port Authority, made her realize, she said, that people were interested in these vital systems but ignorant of how they worked. So she conceived of a book on the subject, and landed a contract for it with Penguin Press. Still working full time, she carried out the project with a researcher, Wendy Marech, and a graphic designer, Alexander Isley. She particularly singled out Isley for praise, who she said led a team of designers from around the country in producing the book’s extensive graphics. In deciding what to investigate, she said she mostly followed her own curiosity. “All the questions I ever had, I was able to get these answered in this book,” Ascher said. “I wanted to know what those nitrogen tanks were used for,” or that strangely shaped truck at work that one might pass while on one of the city’s major bridges. Ascher is currently executive vice president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. This non-profit corporation reports to Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, and Ascher, as vice president in charge of infrastructure, helps oversee many of the systems she wrote about in The Works. Perhaps the knowledge gathered in preparing the book will help her safeguard and improve these many vital systems. – Alex Marshall Questions Or Comments On What’s In This Issue? Send Them To The Editor Of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall At alex@rpa.org
	January 31 The Greater New York Chapter of Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS-GNY) will hold its 26th Annual Meeting at Club 101 in Manhattan. Featured speaker will be Martha Ann Walther, Acting President, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, who will discuss “Crossing the Rivers: Current Plans for MTA Bridges and Tunnels.” The meeting will also include the 9th annual W/M/DBE EXPO. Doors open at 5:00 p.m. for the Expo, reception with dinner and the awards presentation following at 6:30 p.m. Ticket prices are $45 for WTS members, $60 for non-members, $5 for WTS students with ID and $20 for full time students. To register for the W/M/DBE EXPO or for more information, contact Donna Walcavage by January 12, 2006 at (718) 834-0224 or by e-mail at donnaw@walcavage.com. February 2 and 3 The Penn Institute of Urban Research hosts an interactive symposium on the rebuilding cities and their environs after a disaster. Please visit www.upenn.edu/penniur/rebuilding for more information and online registration. February 9 and 10 The Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) and its national coalition partners invite you to participate with other key leaders in a regional workshop. In this interactive workshop, you will learn to use federal surface transportation law, including recent changes under SAFETEA-LU, to expand transit, increase pedestrian and bicycle travel, improve safety of all system users and conform transportation investments to the context of your community. Amarante’s Sea Cliff, 62 Cove Street, New Haven, CT. For more information, contact Scott Kovarovics with ASLA at 202-216-2334 or skovarovics@asla.org, or go to www.transact.org/2006workshops and register on-line. February 22 New Jersey Future is hosting a full day of workshops at the Marriott Conference Hotel in Trenton for local leaders and citizen activists interested in strengthening their communities through good planning and high-quality redevelopment. For more information or to register, please visit www.njfuture.org. May 5 Come What May: Planning in an Age of Disaster. RPA’s annual Regional Assembly, May 5, 2006 at the Waldorf-Astoria. More details to follow soon.

	Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President, Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org