Turf Wars How A Group Of Activists DEFEATED Donald TRUMP And The City Of NEW YORK! An Interview with Steven Robinson

Buy The Book:
https://www.amazon.com/Turf-War-Activists-Donald-Masterpiece/dp/1665763523

In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his "masterpiece," a half-mile of gargantuan buildings overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan's West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, they defeated his proposal. The victorious civic groups had a radically different vision for the site - one that was suited to the community, environmentally sound, and financially feasible. Seeking a way forward, Trump quickly endorsed their concept. The civic groups then worked with him to finalize the design. The resulting Riverside South Master Plan achieved substantial public benefits on privately owned land. Within eighteen months of the city's approval, Trump sold the property. As told by one of the key participants in this conflict, Turf War goes beyond the national headlines to reveal the personalities, politics, and economics that altered the development of this major waterfront property. These Manhattan activists were attached to their turf and were willing to fight for it. Cities and towns across America are facing similar assaults by developers who have little regard for the impact of their ambitions on the character of communities. There are lessons to be learned here.

Author: Steven Robinson

Date, Time & Location
Nov 01, 2024, 6:00 PM MDT

Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA

About the Event
Steven Robinson will be in conversation with renowned local writer and conservationist William deBuys.


This will be an in-store event and live streamed to Zoom, please register for Zoom here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_B675OUvRRzSc78_tl0XqZQ#/registration

Call the store to order (505) 988-4226. Signed copies will be available after the event.



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Transcript

[Music] you know here's a successful example of beating the biggest developer in the biggest city and so um that's my hope my

hope is that this book will uh give people uh the sense that you can make a

difference you can have a positive impact on your own built environment on

your own community on your own neighborhood on your own City and there are lessons to be learned

from you know a positive experience like this Our Guest is Steven Robinson who is

an architect a land use planner Community activist and writer in 1985 he

was a founder of West Pride the nonprofit that initiated the defeat of Donald Trump's overwhelming project for

Manhattan's west side and was a designer on the ensuing Civic oriented master plan for the site Stephen is the

founding president of the nonprofit which redeveloped the downtown Santa Fe rail yard in New Mexico and he has been

a featured speak speaker at the National Trust for historic preservation and taught at the Harvard University

graduate school of design welcome to the show thank you so you have a new book that just came out um the short entitle

turf wars why don't you tell us a little bit about turf wars and uh and it's impact on you and your life and all the

fun stuff to go along with it the uh subtitle I think really uh tells uh the

story of the book that I have wanted to tell the subtitle is how a band of

activists saved New York from Donald Trump's Masterpiece an insiders

account and the intent of the book is exactly

that there was a real estate proposal made and it would have been a disastrous

impact both environmentally and socially in our community and the upper west side of New York Manhattan and I helped to

form a local opposition group because we thought we could change

the system not because we were trying to fight Trump he happened to be the

developer but the way the real estate approvals were handled in those

days this is going back to the mid to late 80s early 90 s was that it was

often very politically driven it was financially driven and

um there were projects that had been approved that were very uh detrimental

to the communities in which they got built and we were determined uh not to let this happen on

our turf so the story is what was The

Proposal the specifics of The Proposal that was being made for a half a mile of

Hudson River Waterfront and how could we organize how

could we do the community organizing to oppose this

proposal and um we spent five years raising money and hiring independent

Consultants who made uh critiques of the environmental and economic and social

impact that particular project would have on our community and the way things worked then

was that I say our community but the community had no voice in whether or not

a project like this got approved it was between the developer and the city uh elected

officials so what we realized was that we had to intervene in the

process and um so we raised money and we hired experts and we had critiques done

of the potential impacts of this and we did that for 5 years

and during that time the city of New York

approved amendments to its own zoning res

resolution which made it easier for the city to approve this project it

diminished the Environmental standards to which this project would be held so it could have a much smoother approval

process so what we did was we sued the city of New York we

didn't sue the developer big distinction we sued the city of New York and we won in uh in New

York state supreme court and that meant that the city could no longer continue

to review the proposal that was in front of them because it had assumed all of

these reduced environmental standards and so uh the project The

Proposal was dead in the water and during that time a number of our uh

Civic organizations had gotten together and um designed an alternative plan for

that 62 acres of riverfront property on

the west side of Manhattan and our plan had a 21 acre

Park public park on the river and it reduced the density of any kind of

residential development and it eliminated what had been proposed as the

biggest shopping mall east of the Mississippi River and a 9,000 car parking structure

so our proposal was much more Civic oriented um than the uh proposal by the

developer after we won the law suit the developer came to us and asked to see

our proposal because he knew he couldn't build what he had wanted he couldn't build his

Masterpiece but he was under the obligation to pay uh the mortgage on the

land and um and all the ancillary carrying costs so he was under a lot of

financial pressure he had to seek an alternative approvable use for that

site and then we worked with him for a year and we designed what became known

as Riverside South not television City not Trump City

but Riverside South and that's what got approved by the city and has been built

over the last um 15 years and

um uh it has become a pretty decent New York City neighborhood that's the line

of the story and um it was a very exciting

project to be involved in to stop a bad development and get a good

one and it sounds like it's a human story right like this is more about the

activists that were involved in creating a place within the city that they loved that they could appreciate and I think

um one of the things I see about Trump's architecture uh his buildings and stuff

and something that we see in America in general which sometimes is actually criticized is that things aren't built

to be beautiful anymore things are built to be useful and Trump tends to BU build

big huge towers and buildings and he

tends to make very blocky buildings to for lack of a better word um and just

recently even we've uh we've heard certain people criticize America's like

buildings and its architecture and have compared it to other countries and said that we like really lack any of that

kind of of architecture any kind of like Spirit or creativeness I would say Trump's buildings lack

imagination would you agree with that yes um I I think that

um America in general um has not

been supporting really fine architecture around the country there are some

wonderful examples of fine architecture but it tends to be the exception

rather than the pattern of being proud of the built

environment um and so yes yes I I I

agree yeah and do you think that uh that's why activism is so important right is that we seem to be in this

place where people with money with wealth with power with connections as you were saying about New York and

they're creating these new laws all of a sudden that are helping to push through the this uh this project being built it

seems like what's missing from this equation is the people human beings the

people that live there the people that care about it and here in America I think we last time they did a study we

ranked somewhere like 25th in the world for happiness and I think that that's impacted right right like it's just

crazy to live in America and and we have this insane statistic where we're the number one economy in the world and

we're the 25th as far as happiness and I believe that a lot that comes from the fact that our cities don't bring joy

they're they're mostly built for industrial reasons they're built to be efficient they're built to to get us to

work and to get us home but they don't seem to have that that spirit that soul

that that the older countries have and do you think that you guys did you bring

that to that project or do you feel good with the way that that project finished

out well let me start with an earlier point you made mhm because uh I believe

that it's been widly written about now and discussed is that the built

environment has visceral impacts on

everybody and it's can be as simple as walking down a city street on the Shady

Side of the Street on a cold day and then deciding to cross the street and go to the sunny side of the street and it

can be uh in certain cities and certain places you feel like you're in dark cold

Canyons where everything is masonry and um there is very little

inviting architecture at the street level where people experience the built

environment so yes I I think that we uh As Americans are victims of the built

environment which is as you said um driven by Financial interests and driven

by often corporate interests and rarely driven by the

needs the visceral needs the social needs the communal needs of a society

and you know that's why you often see places where there is a lack of public open space where every site has to

become a building site so I I I think

that that is a really important part of what's been very

difficult in American culture yeah to ask me specifically am I pleased with the way our plan came

out it's it's a little bit mixed because there the wests side highway which runs

over the property um our plan was to take that elevated

Highway and lower it and to lower it at

grade to grade so that it could be covered by the park there are plenty of

highways in the country that go underground and especially ones which

are on um large public spaces like waterfronts or Parks so that was a very

important part of our uh intention was to get rid of the overhead Highway and we failed to do

that we had the political will to do it we had the governmental will to do it

but unfortunately it became the victim of some personal political battles that

were going on in New York at the time and the highway never got relocated so

the highway um takes up a lot of park space and it continues to spew of air

pollution and noise uh on the public open space which faces uh the river now

there is also a just a beautiful Riverfront Park part of the park that is

west of the of the highway with a pier that goes 715 ft out in the Hudson River

with boardwalks that walk walk you across the tidal Wetlands with Lawns and

recreational opportunities right on the Hudson River so that part is a wonderful

success the buildings themselves we tried to convince the developer and

other developers to hire architects who could work within our guidelines and

within our design controls and make them really inviting contemporary buildings

with a traditional base and a traditional flavor to them and um that didn't

succeed so well so the buildings are kind of ordinary but that's you know

part of the fight you fight in New York all the time trying to fight for better

architecture overall there are market rate

Apartments there are a substantial amount of affordable H housing units

within the within each building there are gar a garage under each building for

parking for the residents so there's no big parking structure there is street level retail at the ground floor to

animate The Pedestrian experience and uh there are schools

there are supermarkets there and so it has become a a really vibrant in uh

environment its own little neighborhood so at that level I think it's been very successful awesome and you know uh you

bring up uh the uh the highway being uh taken underground I have a friend who

was just in Seattle and she was talking about one that used to be above ground

and they brought it underground they rebuilt the whole thing and she said it was beautiful she said

the impact on what it used to be to what it is today also a lot of Waterfront uh

property in Seattle so kind of the same idea she said just it just felt so much

better to beat there so much prettier to beat there um do you think there's a do you think there's a country this is kind

of an off topic question do you think there's a country that we could emulate

uh as far as like building structures to to kind of change the environment for

American citizens so that way we we do like have a little bit of a a a more

symbiotic relationship with our cities I I I can't really think of specific

examples of um you know a couple of years ago I was in

Copenhagen and what I noticed very clearly was that a lot of the new

architecture was beautifully scaled to the environment it was in to the context

to the neighborhood it often was built either adjacent or around its own green

open space and there were tremendous emphasis put on uh bicycle

circulation and put on public transportation none of which we've

managed to do very well but Copenhagen is the first city that comes to mind that I think has been doing it really

well it feels once again like the missing element of this equation is

humans human interaction and the people when I say humans I mean not the politicians not

the the the Donald Trump's the world the the the people with the wealth the status to to make things happen but the

people and what they care about do you think that more activism from American

citizens would have a positive impact on

that type of thing within the city creating places that people feel better about and living in them yes I do and I

I'll give you an example there were other developers working on the west side of Manhattan around the same

time and several of them came to what is called the community board which is

basically you know a residential quasi governmental organization and brought their plans and

had public discussions about what the people who live there felt good about and what the

people who lived there were deeply concerned about and several of these

developers actually modified their plans substantially so that they could feel

that they were engaging the community that when they went for their approval

process they would not be uh vigorously opposed and that when their buildings

were built they could feel proud that they had contributed to the built

environment in a positive way rather than having um had a negative impact on

it so yes I think that there is always the

opportunity because there are thoughtful real estate developers and there are thoughtless real estate developers like

there are thoughtful Architects and not and and lawyers and so on and so forth

but when you can get engaged with a thoughtful real estate developer in your community who thought you know that oh

that building site looked okay because it was open space but it turns out to be a

wetland and a valuable piece of landscape for migrating birds and for

the environment and you sit down and talk with that developer and get them to you know build someplace else or on the

edge or someplace that won't be as intrusive I think I mean I'm very

optimistic but I believe that these interventions can have posiible positive

comes because of the experience not only that we had in New York but that I see

happening in various other parts of the country I think that uh people are waking up more towards their environment

right like they're recognizing more and more nowadays that they are impacted by what's around them and you know I think

it was in Oakland when the A's the A's recently have decided to move uh to Las

Vegas the baseball team and they had this beautiful stadium that they had

created a rendering of in Oakland called Howard's terminal and the best part

about that Park was that it was open that that the the sides kind of opened

up and it opened on the water and there was grass All Along The Outfield where

people could sit and then they had an idea for the Coliseum where they were going to impact the Coliseum and and

then they were going to create all of these Community Driven baseball Parks

diamonds you know uh athletic uh places like pickle ball Courts for people to be

outside to be in their environment to feel good and I can tell you the difference between the Oakland Coliseum

and the renderings from Howard terminal just looking at them by themselves made me feel good uhhuh yeah yeah so do you

think so so when you say that people should become more active and involved

in these uh these talks how do people go about meeting politicians that will

listen to them go about meeting lawyers that could potentially be people that will be helpful and not people that are

attempting to take advantage of how do people get started with that kind of thing well the first

opportunity is normally that a building that is being

planned will have to go to some public body maybe

it's a Planning Commission maybe it's a the mayor's office I mean you know it

depends on the community but for people to pay attention to the calendars to the

schedules of what's happening in the government of their

Community that's when you'll first see what is being proposed and and you you

know it takes a little bit of diligence you know to look at the calendar of your Planning Commission or your mayor's

office but once people you know if they feel the desire to be involved that's

the place to start sometimes actually you know in in a lot of uh cities and small towns you

know developers will actually have public presentations so you know watch

in the newspaper and see you know what may be happening to a certain piece of open space and if it's something that

you're concerned about the community organizing can begin and you can start talking to your neighbors and saying hey

did you see what's planned for such and such a site and then if it grows the

concern grows you can as as um we did and as described in the book you sort of

look for natural allies in the community uh and environmental groups affordable

housing groups who will you know join in in the conversation and in the

discussion and once that happens you know then you know then you're then

you're in the public realm okay so it's getting the ball rolling obviously the biggest part participating being active

and being an activist those are all important things uh to to getting the ball rolling so in your time as I said

uh we don't I'm not here to make this about Donald Trump but Donald Trump a polarizing figure what were your

takeaways from being on the other side of a turf war with a person as wealthy

and as connected as Donald Trump what we realized in the

beginning was that we were not going to fight Trump we had no personal contact with

him we had no uh interactions with him at all for the first 5 years we realized

that what we were fighting was the system that might

enable him with his connections both financial and political to get something

approved that would be very detrimental to our community so once we started public Rel

we started with you know getting newspaper articles written about how

potentially damaging this proposal was and those newspaper articles generated

television interviews and they generated you know a lot of publicity and of

course having Trump be the developer he wanted as much publicity as he could get

whether it was good or bad I mean that's the nature of the Beast somebody who

craves attention wants publicity good or bad so he uh began to his own publicity

campaign for his project and then it became a city-wide issue it became a

national issue and we maintained our posture that this was not about Trump

this was about our community this was about the way in which Real Estate

development projects get reviewed and approved in New York and do you think that the the way that you fought that

did that have a lasting impact on uh how people after that also fought those same

fights it's a great question and somewhere near the end of the book you

know I posed the question did we change how land use decisions get made in New

York and my answer is this time we did but

every subsequent overscale development sort of found its way through the

process there was very I mean there have been gargantuan projects and and you may

be familiar with what's called Billionaire's row which is just south of Central Park those super tall buildings

MH there was no opposition to them and you know I think some of it depends on

the period of time in which you're acting my colleagues in this

war were people who had been experienced in the anti-vietnam war movement in the

women's Liberation movement in the Black Power movement these were people who

knew how to engage issues they were concerned about

and from what I'm understanding at least in New York these days that kind of

activism is hard to come by yeah purpose it all comes down to purpose and like you said it comes down to the time and

when you talk about things like the Civil Rights Movement when you talk about you know women's rights movements

it really is about like how necessary at the time it is for you to act and it

feels very much like people are becoming more like politically activated nowadays

maybe we a law of such but things like fighting against you know uh potential

of like corporations coming in and taking out mama pop small businesses or

big land owners using you know their land to to for more specifically industrial reasons rather than uh to to

make the population happy or to create things that make them happy it's a NeverEnding fight it's something that

you're never done with if you get them to change some rules so that way the

environment is better impacted they will one day find a loophole to to make that

not happen they will they will find a way to change it or they'll they'll try to push through legislation that that

will change it as well but it seems like overall uh what you did what you and

this group of people did really gave purpose for people and really started that ball rolling was there something

during that time that that you take away from it that was like your proudest moment or like your happiest moment yes

I I think the happiest moment was

when the Supreme Court Judge of the state of

New York ruled from the bench that the city had acted

illegally in facilitating the approval of this particular development

because for years we had thought that g Gathering all of the

environmental negative environmental impacts and presenting them to the city

and uh Gathering all of the negative Financial impacts on our community and

presenting them to the city government because it was city government that was going to approve or not the project um

um we thought for years that we were going to win on environmental grounds that the

environmental impacts of this project would have been so devastating that the city could not conceivably approve it we

really believed that but it turns

out that the only way we won was by filing a lawsuit against the city and so

that was certainly the most gratifying moment yeah it's once again it's the

people fighting against the power right once again we talk about civil rights same thing and sometimes you know it's

the power of um a developer and sometimes the developers

are most often in cahoots with compliant elected officials so there's this whole

system in the real estate world that has been you know

functioning at at at will and what I like to say is they they have

often have their way with different communities and the communities don't

have enough of a seat at the table to influence those those decisions and we

fought very hard and very long to work with the city government to have them

receive all of the technical critiques that we were that we were presenting to

them and discuss them and have open dialogue about this proposal so you know

the the the the necessity of not only engaging your neighbors and engaging you

know U natural allies and engaging lawyers and experts it's also important

to engage the uh government in any way you can and there was a great turn of events for us when

the local community board because it's a quasi governmental organization did have

regular meetings with the city planning staff about this proposal and they vo

their concerns and objections and they realized they weren't getting uh

traction and they convinced the City Planning Commission to allow

us the opponents the vocal opponents to be at those

meetings and so for the final two or three years I mean I went to you know

meetings at the city planning office once a week because the community board

had encouraged the city to allow more citizen participation and citizen part

participation that was bringing with it expert advice so that was a major uh uh turning

point in being able to attend and those those meetings express our concerns show

our documents and have the city planning staff uh at least pay

attention yeah to be heard right to actually feel like you're being heard yeah I think that's something saying

earlier about Our intention to somehow get a seat at the table where these these uh arguments

these conversations these discussions about what the product was going to be were being held because I knew from

earlier experience that being outside the system and just throwing

rocks rarely penetrates a process as well oiled as the real estate approval

process is you got to be there you got to be at the table well oiled is a great

word for it um it greased also um I I think that that should

resonate a lot with people nowadays people have asked me because I do a

political show so they asked me well what's the difference why do I why do I

think so much more optimistically about our government today even recognizing the the sins of

the past and I say all the time that a lot of that the reason that I have optimism is the diversity of

representation that we have in our government now now we are a country of

many different cultures many different classes we we have you know uh people

that that span the Spectrum in this Melting Pot we call America and there's

anything in this country that gives me like severe optimism it's the diversity

in which we are being represented but that diversity doesn't happen unless people get up and go out and get

involved so you're very involved m in this project you know may seem like the

stone in the pond but it's the ripples that it has the butterfly effect that it has over time that that that's what

matters and that's why you see our diversity in our government now and and that is exactly the reason I wrote the

book I mean I wanted to tell the story we had been through but I also want to

convey to Residents in cities and towns around the country who are being

threatened with real estate development that could negatively impact their

community that there are ways to get engaged and you know here's a successful

example you know uh of beating the biggest developer in the biggest city

and so um that's my hope my hope is that this book will um uh give people uh uh

the sense that you can make a difference you can have a positive impact on your

own built environment on your own community on your own neighborhood on your own City and there are lessons to

be learned um from you know a positive experience like this and you also you

know mention you know diversity

the Upper West Side of Manhattan had been one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the entire city and

this proposal would have been an island of luxury and wealth and privilege um

completely isolated from the U community that was

so rich not only in its um ethnic

diversity but in its AR chitectural diversity in its cultural diversity with

all kinds of little theaters and restaurants and uh schools and this was

just this would have been this grotesque uh

carbunkle you know on the edge of the community privatizing a half a mile of

Hudson River Waterfront yeah it speaks a lot to uh everything that we imagine is is wrong

with our society and the solution to to correcting those those wrongs is for

people to get involved and to use their voices and I'm really glad that you

wrote this book because stories matter and stories are what change history they

they change the future uh that they're they're written in history and they change the future of our society and I

think that we are on the precipice of a a paradigm shift and one of the things I

talk about my viewers a lot is that we've told ourselves a lot of lies and

in our time to make ourselves feel better about what's going on one of them is that our vote doesn't matter one of

them is that all politicians are corrupt um and and many other things that are

along those same lines and one of the reasons I started this show was because

I wanted to speak to politicians and I've spoken to House Representatives I've spoken to

people that worked with Nixon people that have worked with Obama people that worked with the clintons people that

were in the senate for 40 years and the one thing that came across in all those

interviews were that these were people and they had stories and they just wanted to tell them to help people so I

I really uh look forward to enjoying your book um can you tell everybody

where to find uh your book and if you have any type of website or anything like that you'd like to plug go ahead

and do that as well yeah the um the book can be found any place books are

sold that's that's um uh the

Spectrum okay any place books are sold the book is now available and uh I do

want to say that um there is a wonderful uh independent bookstore here in Santa

Fe newx meico um called collected works and it is uh been just brilliantly

um owned and operated by darthy Massie for almost 50 years and um I've been

going to readings there by you know either friends of mine who wrote or

something I was interested in for almost 35 years and I am deeply honored to be

having a reading there on uh November 1st at 6: p.m. mountain

time and I will be joined in conversation by a dear friend named Bill

DUIs who is a um wonderful writer in his

uh in the work he has done um on so many various subjects uh mostly related to

environmental issues and critical Environmental issues he wrote a book you know called the great aridness um about

the future of the Southwest ecology U so and I'm I'm gonna be really happy to be

in conversation with Bill that evening and have some uh read some brief uh

excerpts from the book well I I really appreciate you coming on the show uh I'm

• super thankful for you coming on here and having this conversation with me and sharing your story with my