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Downtown’s Douglass leads the way

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“Wall Street has been pronounced dead about six times,” Douglass said. “Each time it turns out it isn’t dead.
“I don’t think it will be quite as swashbuckling as it was in the last few years. And for some time to come you won’t see those gigantic salaries and bonuses,” he said.
“I think banking in general will become a less exciting and a more utility-like business,” he said. “But we still need it.”
There are plenty of people to blame and a number of reasons for the financial crisis, but he cited the “failure on the part of the investment bankers primarily.”
Aside from his chairmanship of the Alliance for Downtown, Douglass can look at the crisis from a number of different perspectives. Until recently he was chairman of the board of Clearstream International, the Luxembourg-based securities clearing and settlement organization. He’s a lawyer at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, an international firm he first joined as a partner in 1972. He also served in state government for many years before that. And he’s the son of a man who worked on Wall Street in the 1920s.
His father helped him understand that Wall Street reinvented the same problem every seven years or so. “It just has different clothing on it,” he said.
Of course, there’s much more to Downtown that high finance, and for his many admirers, Douglass himself is one important reason why.
Irish-American lawyer John Connorton said: “Bob Douglass has been a superb leader and spokesman for Lower Manhattan for decades, but especially after 9/11.” A fellow board member at the Alliance for Downtown, Connorton said that the chairman helped make it New York’s most successful and influential Business Improvement District.
One remarkable transformation since Douglass took over as chairman in 1992 has been the growth in the residential population below Chambers Street. Then it was under 10,000; now it’s nearing 60,000.
Douglass was born and raised in Binghamton, N.Y., 200 miles to the north. His maternal grandfather was the mayor, as well as a manufacturer and an inventor who had all the early patents on washing machines.
“He was the Irish side of the family. His name was Behan,” he said. “My grandmother’s name was Bowe.”
The other side was Scottish. “I’m the fourth or fifth Robert Royal Douglass, whatever that means,” he said, laughing. But he gave the official explanation. “We lost out to the Stuarts.”
Douglass graduated from Dartmouth College in 1953 and spent two years in the military. Then after graduating from Cornell Law School in 1959, he joined a legal firm in his hometown.
Through his contacts there, he became associated with the Rockefeller family and the liberal Republican cause.
“I went around the country with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller,” he said, recalling the GOP presidential primaries of 1964. He wrote speeches for the governor, carried his bag and generally kept him out of trouble.
Conservative Senator Barry Goldwater won the nomination, however, and Rockefeller went back to Albany. He appointed Douglass counsel and then secretary (as the chief of staff is formally known).
“It was an exciting time, and very enjoyable,” he said of those years through 1972.
Douglass joked that at that point he decided he needed to work for a living.
He and his wife Linda, to whom he’s been married 47 years, had a young family. (“I’ve two sons living New York,” he said. “And a daughter, commuting between London and Buenos Aires, with four children.”)
In late 1973, the governor also quit Albany and the following year was tapped to be Gerald Ford’s vice-president.
Douglass joined his younger brother David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Corporation, from which he ultimately retired as vice-chairman in 1993. That year he rejoined Milbank.
It was during the early period at Chase that he began his involvement with the cause of Downtown Manhattan. When finally he became chairman, he felt as if he’d been tasked with guiding a “burning munitions ship” safely out of the harbor.
What he called the “central core” of the district was full of buildings with asbestos, old wiring and other problems. “We put together quite an attractive tax incentive package to convert these buildings to residential,” he said. “And it worked.”
“Bob has discerning judgment,” Connorton said. “He’s extremely capable.
“He knows how to build consensus between different interests and knows how to get talent,” he added.
Connorton said that like most people he’s been involved with organizations where he wasn’t entirely happy with the leadership, but that’s not the case with the Alliance for Downtown.
“Everyone is proud of Bob Douglass,” he said.
Douglass, for his part, usually speaks in the first person plural.
“We have actually the lowest vacancy rate [8.5 percent] of any major central business district in the country,” he said. “Less that Midtown, less than Chicago, less than Los Angeles, you name it.
“Downtown is unique. It doesn’t look like any other part of the city. You’ve got the history. You’ve got the water on three sides,” he said.
As for the World Trade Center site, he said: “It’s a bit of a nightmare, but it can be done.”
The unresolved issues between the Port Authority and Silverstein Properties has helped make it a giant rubric cube.
“It’s a highly integrated, complicated construction project,” he said.
Progress, though, is obvious on a number of fronts. “Now you’ve got the feeling that something’s happening there,” he said.
Looking beyond Lower Manhattan, Douglass is happy with those who been charged with getting the economy on its feet again.
“[Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner is a very bright young man,” said Douglass, adding that he knows his father. “[Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben] Bernanke is also an extremely bright guy
“Together they’re trying things that neither the Treasury or the Fed had every dreamed of trying. And I think they’re doing the right thing,” he said.
Douglass is worried, nonetheless, that the new administration may be trying to solve too many problems.
But generally he believes that things are moving in the right direction.
“Basically, I’m an optimistic guy,” he said.

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