Dan Biederman President of Bryant Park Corporation | CEO's You Should Know

Dan Biederman President of Bryant Park Corporation | CEO's You Should Know

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today on CEOs.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
You should know we're joined here by a man who
helped turn Midtew, Manhattan's Brian Park from this no go
zone into one of the world's busiest and most beloved
green spaces in town. Here with Dan Bierman, president of
Bryant Park Corporation, president of thirty fourth Street Partnership, and
founder of Beieterman Redevelopment Ventures, the firm that's brought revitalization

(00:23):
playbook to cities across the globe. Dan, it is so
great to have you here today.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Thank you very much for the chance to be on
your show.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, thanks for joining us. So I want to jump
right in and talk a little bit about Brian Park.
You know, most New Yorkers think about Brian Park and
they see movie nights, they see the red chairs, they
see people out there playing chess. The ice rink that
opens up Light FM in New York does our Broadway
and Brian Park there every year. Forty plus years ago,

(00:49):
it wasn't that. That was really wasn't the case, right.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
That's right, very troubled. There are crimes classified by the
FBI as Sirius crime. Seven of them. We had five
one hundred murder, rape, assault, grand theft and Maareim was
to bring that to zero, and we achieved it within
about a decade. So it was a turnaround that was
slow but then fast, and crime was only one piece

(01:14):
of it. The place was in terrible shape, so we
had to recondition it without much money. We didn't start
with much because the real estate community adjacent liked the
idea but didn't really believe would be successful, so it
took a while. Reopened in ninety two to one to
our management. We took the park away from the city, took.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
The park away from How was it that you got
involved in it?

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Interesting? I was the treasurer of an entity called the
forty second Street Development Corporation, which did Theodore in New York,
and the head of that recommended me to the Rockefellers,
who had decided that they would be the starter of
the Bryant Park turnaround effort because of the very interest
in the New York Public Library. So I was one

(01:55):
of seven candidates. I remember the interview well. My parents
were kind of shocked that I was taking a job
involving parks. That was off what I had been doing.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
But what were you doing before that?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
I was a systems consultant for a firm that I
joined out of business school two and a half years.
I was the only one in the firm who didn't
know a thing about computers, so I was the translator
of what they did to the New York City officials
whose books we were organizing for the first time.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Wonderful. I read recently that you once called Brian Park
the most densely used park in the world. So I mean,
talk about a transformation. Did you Did you imagine that
forty years ago that you were going to be at
this stage.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
There are so many points at which I got discouraged.
The politics were very dense, and I never first I
never pictured having any staff. It was just me for
a few years. And we have these dozens of talented
young people who do most of the work now. And
I walked down the hall see them talking to each
other about detailed things, and I said, God, what I

(02:59):
would have given nineteen eighty four for this kind of support.
And then I doubted myself at many times. Once played
hooky in an afternoon because I'd gotten some bad news
about the park approvals, and I went to a Kurosawa movie.
Only time I've played hooky in my entire life because

(03:19):
I knew it was depressing, and I said, it'll be
so depressing that I'll think my life is great. So
on the way back I met a lawyer, famous land
news lawyer, and he said, you don't look so good.
What's the matter. I said, this Briant Park thing's never
going to happen. I was a terrible mistake. I've wasted
six years of my career. And he said, no, no, no, no,
that's nonsense. And he showed me a chart he made

(03:41):
of good ideas, bad ideas, powerful people, powerless people, so
four boxes, and he said, your project is a great idea.
Fixing this park is fantastic, and you've got all these
The Rocketfellers are your backers. That's powerful people. So this
is in one hundred percent will happen back, whereas I
have a lot of other people are in the twenty

(04:02):
five percent or zero box. So he's put me back
on a day when I was early discouraged, and there
were many of those days.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
It took forever, Oh, I could imagine. So that's after
six years. So then when did you finally say to yourself,
like you go to Brian Park and you smile and
you could be proud of all that you did, Like
how much more well time did it take?

Speaker 1 (04:23):
In nineteen ninety two, it was safe and clean, but
that was about it. It wasn't jammed with people as
you referred to. We thought we had more to do,
but at that point we were somewhat proud, and we
had started up the Grand Central Business Improvement District and
thirty fourth Street at the same time. Quite a busy year,
and I said, we're getting there. Now. We need to

(04:46):
find the key to make this space truly lively. And
that key became what we call programming. So if you
walk into Brian Park, you're seeing ping pong on one side,
a reading room and the other petank next to you
juggling clas is a carousel various food and beverage locations.
That's what you have to do to make public space

(05:07):
in midtown safe and pleasant. And that accelerated through the
late nineties and o's and that's what we're still working
on today. The work is never finished.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
I can't imagine the red tape too. You have to navigate,
you know, between you know, agencies, property owners, community boards. Right,
I'm sure there's a lot of yes, a lot of
red tape. You got to try to get yourself through.
What was your secret weapon there? Like, how did you
navigate all that?

Speaker 1 (05:31):
That's a good question. I think you can't get discouraged.
I try not to roll my eyes when one of
my staff members comes up and says, you know, Community
Board five doesn't want us to do that. I used
to be chairman of Community Board five forty five years ago,
so because if I roll my eyes, then they're going
to roll their eyes, and I don't want them to
be negative. So the secret is not to get too

(05:55):
depressed about the thickness of the bureaucracy. And New York
City is on the average, believe it or not, in
the bureaucracy field. Although my chairman, who was the chairman
of Time Inc. When I started Andrew High School, somebody
asked him in an interview, what's taking so long in
the need to turn Brian Park around? And he said, well,

(06:17):
young man, everybody in the Western Hemisphere and his brother
has to review this project twice. And the guy laughed
And it was really almost that bad. There were many
many layers of approval.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
So let's talk a little bit about scale. I mean,
you started New York City. You've done things all over
the country globally. What you know when you take the
Brian Park playbook into one of those new cities, what
are you taken from that? I'm sure there's a ton
of learnings that you've had.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yes, Brian Park's the laboratory for the work we're doing
in San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, El Paso, West Palm Beach,
Saint Petersburg. A lot of our works in San Francisco, Texas,
and Florida. So we've tried out these techniques and most
of them work in different cities. There are slight differences

(07:12):
between cities. But if you ask about people in San Francisco,
do they want to do free exercise like yoga outside,
the answer is yes. Do they want to listen to music, yes?
Do they want to eat and drink in a nice
environment with gorgeous flowers and trees around, Yes. So those
are the old mainstays, and then we customize by city.

(07:35):
San Francisco I always tell people is a very high
IQ public space group. I was shocked when we opened
a space their Salesforce Park on top of the Transit Center.
How intelligent. On opening day, the comments were that people
were making. There was behind me. I was incognito, except
I wear a business suit, so they thought it was

(07:55):
some kind of weird outsider. And the guy behind me
had his ten year old son, and he's lecturing his
son on what my theory was in doing the park.
He didn't know me. He just figured it out. And
I told my staff, you know, if that's what San
Francisco is like, this is incredible. This guy must be
a tech guy and he's telling his ten year old
son very intelligently what our theory in running the park is.

(08:18):
So this is going to be a pleasure to work here.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
How much local input must go into that, because you know,
you're obviously connected to New York City. You have that
feel that the deep, the deep roots around New York
City when you go to a San Francisco. Are you
asking people? Are you talking to the community.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
That's a very good question. I have two answers to it.
One is positive and one is slightly negative. Okay, it's good.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
What are we doing first? Positive?

Speaker 1 (08:44):
Positive? First? It is a good idea to ask local
people what would appeal to them to do in the space.
I'll give you an example. We worked for the Green
Bay Packers on what's called Title Town, which if you
watch NFL games, sometimes pops up when the when the
Packers are home, and it's right near lambeau Field. And
because we did what's called outreach, which is the point

(09:06):
of your question, we met various people we call programming
partners who said they will come in and run these
programs for us. One guy was interested in curling, and
he said, I'm going to do this for free. I
just I'm so devoted to curling spreading throughout northern Wisconsin.
I'm going to run this for you. So we never
would have met the guy if we hadn't done what
we call outreach. The bad side of outreach is it

(09:27):
becomes a little slavish. In a recent project in Virginia
was so time consuming and there were so many outreach sessions,
and I said to my staff, you know, at the
end of the time, we got to realize that we
know a lot about this, so we'll do We'll pick
up some ideas from this, but we're not going to
tell people that we got the answer from our outreach sessions.

(09:49):
So it's good and bad. Everybody's doing it. We're asked
to do it. Sometimes other times there's a local player
who does so. Outreach can have two sides to it.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Without a doubt. It's like anything. The data that you collect,
you look at it, you dissect it, and you figure
out the direction that you're going to go, the direction
you're going to take it. So you know you must
be crazy busy. You lead multiple organizations Brian Park Corporation,
thirty fourth Street Partnership br V. How do you maintain
this constant vision while adapting to all these different challenges

(10:22):
that must hate you day in and day out.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
The three have to be seamless. Yeah, so I will
pick up ideas out of town and bring them back
and then vice versa, Brian Park ideas to those other places.
One way, it's very time consuming. I don't travel as
well as I did when I was thirty. I find
the flights to the West Coast very tiring. But and
it's against the wind, so you're talking six hours. But

(10:49):
the stimulation of working all across the country keeps me going.
I really enjoy knowing a lot of cities. I tell
people I've only I've been in every major American city
except Columbus and Tulsa. I've been in forty nine states,
and that's really fun. I just I've always wanted to

(11:09):
know all these places no one else knows. And I
find interestingly a lot of CEOs in Manhattan who I
deal with, have not been all around the country. They've
been to glamorous places like London, which I love, but
they have not been to some of these other towns, Albuquerque,
San Antonio. So that's a lot of the fun of

(11:33):
it being able to see these other places. And these
cities differ from each other enormously as to the conditions
on the ground, the attitudes politically especially fascinating.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
You mentioned programming before, you know, the programming has to
be very different for every place you go.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Mostly there's some we call them automatic winners, food and
fitness and music, almost the work and whatever city you're in.
But there's other stuff that's more particular to the city
you're in. We have more literary stuff in Brian Park
because of the library being being next door, and it's

(12:11):
also a city of readers, as San Francisco is where
we have two big projects, so there's a little bit
of local adaptation. But almost everybody likes those three or
four key winners, as we call it.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Of course I see that, like what else in San Francisco.
What's a little different there than might be.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
One of the fascinating things is the weather. The first
thing I ask when I arrive and I've got a
group of let's say, twenty five people, we just did
this in Petersburg ten days ago, how many days would
you and your family say that it's nice weather here?
So I don't want them telling me it's fifty five
eighty two. Just how many nice days? Is today a
nice day? And they said absolutely, it's a little humid,

(12:53):
but this is about as good as you get in
October in Saint Petersburg, Florida. So the more the cities
that have limited number of nice days, you've got to
do something to fill in those nice days. For example, Dallas,
you can't program really from July one to Labor Day
because it's one hundred and seven degrees. It's brutal used

(13:14):
to same thing, and it's humid more humid there. So
that is a big difference the northern cities. We've worked
in Buffalo, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Detroit, and there you'll
lose the good weather about October fifth New York is
October fifteenth. So then you've got to figure out a

(13:34):
winter activity, and that's what the Brian Park Winter Village
is all about. We used to have great We have
one hundred ten days of pretty nice weather in New York.
So now we have an effect two hundred and twenty
because we've added the winter days forty degrees. People are
wearing winter gear and they're happy to sit out and
next to our skating rink and forty degree weather at

(13:55):
thirty seven degree weather. So weather is a key thing
in San Francis is the weather is bizarre though Easterners
who don't know about it. The famous Mark Twain quote
is I've never been so called as in the summer
in San Francisco. And they, unlike the Seattle people who
are happy to be in the rain without an umbrella,

(14:18):
San Francisco it rains a lot, even though it says
it's fifteen inches of rainy year. I don't believe it,
but they say that's all they get. But it's it's
drizzly and the like, and they if it's drizzly, they
won't come out. So we lose our crowd at Union
Square in San Francisco. A lot we missed a lot
of programming this year because of bad weather.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Because of bad weather, the amount of projects that are
coming at you, I'm sure day in and day out,
how do you decide what's going to be next, what
project you're gonna Well, it's.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
Very mercenary at this point because I only can take
on a certain amount of stuff. It's this tiny company,
the consulting firm. It's only twelve or thirteen people. So
it's now come down to a negotiation over fees. There's
some I'd love to do, but it's just not enough
money for us to pay attention to it. So some

(15:10):
of them have seen Brian Park, have been there constantly
say can you do Brian Park for us? In this
public space that's now god forsaken? And if there's an
enlightened self interest behind some of the owners there where
they say we will pay for this and fix it
with you, then we take them on. So that's how
the San Francisco projects started. Dallas Cap Park in Dallas,

(15:34):
we did Clyde Warren Park, which is pretty famous now
in downtown Dallas, downtown and uptown Dallas. And those are
pay projects where you know there's enough money to make
it worthwhile for US as a consulting firm.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
I'd be curious to know. Is there you know you're
a New Yorker. Is there a landmark in New York
City that you know if there were no politics, no
budget limits, you know, what would you do differently? What
landmark would you want to change up?

Speaker 1 (16:08):
I have this list on my desk that's very egotistical
spaces in the United States that only I can fix,
so I apologize for it. Some of them are Union
Square was on it now we're doing that. I want
in Detroit where the Joe Lewis statue is, it's Heart Plaza,
a few others. In New York. There's nothing in New

(16:31):
York on it, because you know, we've spun off some
efforts to do things and others have done it on
our own. I'm trying to think, well, obviously i'd run
the subways differently. We're thinking of adopting the Bryant Park
subway station because we got it renamed from forty second
Street to forty second Street Bryant Park. But it's now

(16:51):
giving Bryan Park a bad name. It's so terrible. It
smells of urine. There are drug guys hanging around. Room
is mediocre, which is not bad, but it's mediocre. We
run restrooms a lot better. So it's a hard question
you ask, but I guess i'd say the subway stations.

(17:11):
And if you look at I'm abroad quite a bit,
their stations are quite nice. Paris has done a very
nice job with their subway station metro stations. Yeah, so
that I guess that's the thing I would pick.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Okay, okay, that's a good one for any you know,
young urban planners or city leaders that are out there
and they're looking to kind of get their foot in
the door. And you know what advice would you give
about building partnerships and sustaining the momentum in this you know,
these complex long term projects.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Well, what what the young people want to get into
the field need to bring to it is a couple
of backgrounds, And I don't I think what they're doing wrong,
some of them who come to me and say we'd
like to work for you. The background isn't hard enough.
I think planning is an okay background. But when I started,

(18:01):
I realized that the four things, I quickly realized what
I'd need to know, and I said, I only have
two of those four real estate, government, business, and design.
And I really wasn't deep in real estate at the time,
even though I had an MBA and I was in design.
I had to go to many sessions and read many books.

(18:23):
So when I'm interviewing people, I look to see how
many of those four they at least have a smattering
of knowledge in. And that's the way to get into
the field, aside from traveling. A lot too many people
are young. They come to Manhattan and then they stay
within this tiny little islands not even part of the
United States mainland, and never get out enough because they

(18:44):
love New York so much. That's bad. They've got to
travel more for whatever purpose, seeing their relatives, going to
conferences and traveling in places that a lot of their
friends don't go to, mundane places.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Is there one thing you want people to take away
from your mission.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
Well, our basic theme is to do this outside of
government with our own money, because a lot of these
projects don't get started because the government money that's attached
to them has too many strings attached to it. So
a good idea is as soon as you take over
a public space is to say, how am I going
to finance this privately? And that's what we've done. Brian

(19:26):
Park has a thirty million dollar budget. It started at
one hundred and ten thousand and nineteen eighty So I
do it sounds arrogant to say I do what I want,
but I much more do what I want than if
I had government money for some of that thirty million.
We have not accepted a government check since nineteen ninety six.
So that's that having your own earned income stream is

(19:50):
a great approach.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
With that's impressive. If people wanted to support your mission,
support what you're doing, how can they go about doing
that well?

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Political support we still face a lot of criticism at times.
That would be one thing. And then if anybody listens
to this, who's a high net worth individual, there's usually
a place to fund something you care about next to
an asset you care about, whether your house or your
office or an office building you own. By leading the

(20:21):
private sector effort to turn the place around, I get
a lot of approaches like that. There's some people are
out there looking for ultra high net worth people like
Dan Gilbert did in Detroit. He turned around downtown Detroit
because he loved it from Rocket Mortgage. So there there's
a search for more Dan Gilbert's and if anybody's listening,

(20:42):
who happens to be in that category. I think his
net worth is eleven billion dollars. But anybody like that listening.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Call me, call me too, it'd be great. Well, Dan,
it was a pleasure to have you on the program today.
Thank you so much for coming by.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Good question. Obviously going to.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Be following along. We're in New York, so we're going
to be We're at Brian Park every year, of course,
but thank you again, thank you so much for that.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for the good questions.