Development Horizon Stretches Far Beyond Midtown

NEW YORK CITY-It’s a measure of how the city has evolved in recent years that, as a RealShare New York panelist pointed out, three of the four experts at Tuesday afternoon’s “Development Focus” discussion talked about developing below Midtown. A decade ago, the panelist observed, the conversation would have been very different.

Phillippe Visser, the RealShare panelist who made that observation, emphasized the World Trade redevelopment, which he oversees for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Alicia Hurley, VP for university relations and public affairs at New York University, focused on the school’s large-scale expansion within its Greenwich Village neighborhood and elsewhere. Industry icon Edward J. Minskoff, who spearheaded the World Financial Center project Downtown in the 1980s, is now targeting Union Square with a speculative office project at 51 Astor Place. The panel’s fourth member, Seth Pinsky, takes a citywide approach as president of the New York City Economic Development Corp.