UpClose With Julie Menin of Wall Street Rising

This week, to mark the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, GlobeSt.com opted to take our UpClose to the streets of Lower Manhattan. This special interview will be augmented on Wednesday with two special editorial features, including a timeline of news events that chronicles the year that changed our lives–from the moment the planes hit the World Trade Center until today.

Life for Julie Menin was in a state of flux prior to September 11, 2001. A lawyer by training, she left her position as senior regulatory attorney at Colgate Palmolive to open a Lower Manhattan restaurant–Vine–in 1999. That move put Menin squarely in the face of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center–and primed her not only to witness the destruction but also to become part of the solution. As she tells GlobeSt.com, she passed the management of Vine over to one of her managers and launched Wall Street Rising, a non-profit group dedicated to “restoring vibrancy and vitality to lower Manhattan and making it a 24/7 community.” She’s not alone in the task, of course, and the board and advisors of Wall Street Rising include some heavy-hitting players, including directors Mark Weiss of Goldman Sachs, Frank Vella of JP Morgan Chase and Jonathan Mechanic of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Menin also counts Charles Gargano of the Empire State Development Corp. and Carl Weisbrod of the Alliance for Downtown New York among the group’s advisors. Neither is the fledgling group pushing its mission in a vacuum, and Menin sits on both the Development and Small Business and Restaurant Advisory committees of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. With the determination made that redevelopment plans should now go to a global competition, we thought this week an appropriate time to gauge the analysis of someone intimately involved in the future of Lower Manhattan.

GlobeSt.com: It seems that after a magnificent buildup, the unveiling of the LMDC’s six proposal only brought us back to square one. How do you see their efforts shaping up?

Menin: It is important to get community input. The reaction to the six plans was incredible, and I can’t remember another clear demonstration of democracy in action. Many people down here doubted that their opinions would be heard. But their criticism led to the LMDC opening the process to a global design competition.

GlobeSt.com: At the same time, it seems unjust that a year after the attacks, we are left without even a viable sketch.

Menin: Those who say let’s move quicker don’t live and work in this community. We are the ones dealing with these issues on a day-to-day basis. The community and other stakeholders need time to evaluate any plan; we must be given a lot of opportunity. If that takes longer, that’s one of the prices we pay.

GlobeSt.com: In a previous UpClose interview with C&W’s Bruce Mosler–another advisory committee member–he indicated that one person in charge to take the heat and make the decisions would create a more efficient process. Don’t you feel that way?

Menin: No, I don’t feel that way. This community was deeply affected and, as I said, we’re the ones who have to live by the site and live as well with whatever is developed. In terms of redeveloping Lower Manhattan, the democratic model is the way to go. To put it a different way, rushing to rebuild is not the appropriate course of action. The appropriate course of action is to come up with the best plan. We have an incredible opportunity to fix many of the problems that existed in Lower Manhattan.

GlobeSt.com: GlobeSt.com: Such as?

Menin: Battery Park City and the financial district were always two distinct neighborhoods, divided by the West Side Highway. This is the chance to depress West Street and create a cohesive neighborhood and one unified lower Manhattan. It’s also the chance to restore the street grid, actually to rectify a problem that existed in the community as a result of the World Trade Center. This is our chance to do it right.

It’s also a chance to attract new retailers to the community. We did a survey of workers and residents that included questions concerning what type of retail they would support, and we came up with a couple of interesting things.

GlobeSt.com: GlobeSt.com: Give us some highlights.

Menin: First of all, we found that nine out of 10 workers are committed to staying in lower Manhattan. We found that nine out of 10 people frequently used the retail at the World Trade Center. This was a surprise. I always thought it was more tourists than residents who frequented those stores.

GlobeSt.com: Getting back to your point about the democratic process, isn’t that delaying the much-needed economic correction that the redevelopment would drive?

Menin: I’m not saying that we need to slow the process down, but these two things are not mutually exclusive. Redevelopment has to move forward at a prompt pace. But I would not agree to one person dictating decisions without soliciting public opinion from any stakeholder. We have to balance the need to rebuild with the adequate time to develop a truly stellar design.

GlobeSt.com: So what would you suggest if you were the one put in charge?

Menin: I’d like to see various retail corridors established to create reasons for people to walk all around the neighborhood. We’ve got to make sure plans for the site incorporate the redevelopment of all lower Manhattan. Otherwise we will have tourists coming to the site but without creating activity in the other areas. I strongly believe the site must be mixed-use, with office and retail components, but I’m concerned that retail not be all underground. Even though the WTC sales per square foot were around $900, as opposed to $341 for malls of that kind, that kind of retail is not necessarily the best for the community. I want to see ground-level retail that engages the street and people in a true 24/7 community. Currently, half of the 600,000 sf the LMDC plans is underground, and I hope there is reconsideration of that–that’s very important. It’s also important to have residential development on or near the site. If we want to fulfill the promise of a 24/7 community, we need more residents down here.

GlobeSt.com: How would you treat the questions of a memorial and replacement office towers?

Menin: Let me take the second question first. We have to ask if we build very high, will the upper floors be occupied. We already have an office vacancy rate that’s triple what it was two years ago. Do we really want to build these tall buildings that people might not occupy? Yet, we’ve heard from the town hall meetings that we should restore the skylines. I think the tall element could be accomplished by a memorial or some other tall structure that’s not occupied. And that gets to the memorial question. Obviously it needs to pay tribute not only to the lives lost but also to what the trade center embodied. It was a global center of commerce and one of the most significant landmarks in the country. We need to pay respect to that in the memorial.

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