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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

That park had been a disaster ever since 1935, when Moses decided to do it over. He raised the level about five or six feet. Then the design had a lot of bushes, and paths, and a lot of hidden areas and so on. It was designed for crime, really, and there had been a lot of crime there!

So we had to do something about that, and I thought that was probably a simple idea. We got a designer to give us a new design. We decided the only way to solve the problem was to use a Jane Jacobs' theory. Jane Jacobs was a great urbanist, and she was the one who propounded the theory that the only way you can make a street safe is if you have somebody always watching, i.e. shops, preferably shops that are open until midnight, something like that, because you will never have enough police to police all of the city. The city has to police itself to a considerable extent. So, we dreamt up the idea, “What would be the thing that would be kept operating day and night?” Obviously a restaurant. So we cast around, we proofed a lot of restaurateurs, it finally came down to three, and then picked one, Werner Le Roy, who designed us a great marvelous sort of crystal palace restaurant that would be against the back wall of the Library.

Well even though I'd had a pert job made of all the steps that would be involved--pert job. P-E-R-T job is something you use in industry to try to schedule work over a period of years. When I looked at the pert job I began to see that we would have our problems because we would have to have everything we did, this being government property, approved by the mayor, of course, the Board of Estimate, the legislature in Albany, Board Five, the Arts Commission, the Landmarks Commission, and then all the outside groups that you





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