What the Builder Built

Under Mayor Bloomberg, Dan Doctoroff remade the city with astonishing speed. Now, as New York is again mired in crisis, he faces his own

- JUSTIN DAVIDSON

On the day I meet Dan Doctoroff, I walk across Manhattan from the Shed, which he created, to the East River Esplanade, which he planned; catch a ferry, which he launched; get off at the Long Island City waterfront, which he reclaimed from industrial neglect; and enter a café overlooking Hunters Point South Park, where he once envisioned an Olympic Village. Eventually, I leave him by Citi Bike, which he dreamed up.

Those verbs are a shorthand, of course. He didn’t create, plan, launch, reclaim, envision, or dream up anything single-handedly. His role as deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding in the Bloomberg administration was to adopt ideas (some his, many not), convince others that they were feasible and good, then maneuver those fantasies into reality. Even so, it would be hard to spend a day moving around New York and not encounter at least one item on his long list of urban accomplishments. Every time someone sees a show at the Whitney, scans a brain in Columbia’s Greene Science Center, runs a mile at the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex on Staten Island, buys a saw at the Home Depot in Bronx Terminal Market, watches the Mets play at Citi Field, commutes by subway to Hudson Yards, boards a ferry to Governors Island, or watches the sunset from Brooklyn Bridge Park, that person is animating parts of the city that once existed only as documents on Doctoroff ’s desk. His stint in government lasted from 2002 to 2008, surely among the most consequential half-dozen years of any city builder’s term in New York history. He wasn’t, as some have claimed, the 21st-century Robert Moses; he was Moses in a hurry.