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Among the speakers were Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY); James Gill, chairman of the Hugh L. Carey Battery Park City Authority; Rachelle Friedman, president and CEO, J&R Music and Computer World; and Elizabeth Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. Arriving just in time for the ribbon cutting was Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York State Assembly.
The shuttles will now offer tourists and Downtown workers as well as residents of both Lower Manhattan and Battery Park City a chance to hop on one of the 22-seat jitneys at one end of the island, then hop off at the other end. Along the way, they can visit any of 37 stops. In all, six buses will run at 10-minute intervals from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. each weekday, with four running on the weekends.
The shuttle service extension will help funnel shoppers to some of the area's prominent retail stores like Century 21 and J&R. "The new extended route will link the entire community" and make it easier to "discover the many unique Downtown treasures," says J&R's Friedman in a statement.
Some see the service expansion as a bridge between two neighborhoods separated by the West Side highway. "This will help integrate Battery Park City with the rest of Lower Manhattan," Gill told the group on Friday. "This will be good for all of Downtown Manhattan."
Perhaps more significant, Friday's press conference sought to offer a small but significant proactive boost to the neighborhood long seen as the most submissive to the whims of Wall Street. Perceptions can be misleading; Lower Manhattan, the historic birthplace of New York City, has in fact been in a state of slow but fundamental transformation since the 1990s. These days, its demographic profile includes a growing stock of well-heeled residents who have helped diversify the area into a 24-hour community, according to the Downtown Alliance.
And it's not just an influx of residents changing the face of the area. Debunking an image of purely finance-related jobs, statistics from the New York State Department of Labor show that by 2007 only 30% of the neighborhood's private sector workforce was employed by the FIRE sector, those jobs classified as finance, insurance and real estate, the sector most associate with Lower Manhattan. As Berger explained to GlobeSt.com's sister publication--Real Estate New York--in the December 2008 issue, "this is not your father's Wall Street."
That sunny Friday Downtown--in the shadow of Whole Foods and rising new office towers, but only a few steps from the site of fast-falling stock markets--the speeches and interviews were filled with hope and what each proclaimed to be a can-do attitude.
Standing in front of the small white jitney bus, Berger told GlobeSt.com that despite the severity of the economic downturn, "we're doing what we can to make it easier for shoppers to visit our retail stores and restaurants. We're constantly evaluating what we do."
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