Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 824

Heiskell:

Yes. After two and a half years.

Q:

Why don't you go in to a little more detail about the politics involved.

Heiskell:

I picked Werner Le Roy in part because I thought he had more staying power--he's wealthy--that he had more staying power and he understood the politics in New York. But after two years of having everybody, the parks council and Henry Stern and others, take pot shots at him, he said, “Hell, this isn't worth it. I'm going to give up.” It was a great shame because at one point he was going to actually make a sizable--to sort of give the restaurant in part, or give half of the restaurant to the Library. So now we're starting over again and sending out requests for proposals from a whole bunch of restaurateurs. We've got the approval of the Board of Estimate, the mayor, the legislature, to be able to sublease the land, Board five, which wanted it, and all the neighbors.

Oh! We also had to figure a way of supporting this thing. Part of the profits of the restaurant, or the lease of the restaurant, would go to the benefit of the park. We created a tax district, which is a district surrounding the park--there's about eight million square feet of office space there--and we got the people there to agree to create a tax district and to tax themselves an extra five cents a square foot, which would give us 400,000 dollars. The city would continue to pay 250,000, which is all they're spending on it now, if that. The restaurant would give us 300,000 and concessions would add up to some more. So we'd have about a 1.2 million, which





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help