Program host Richard Kahan, former head of the State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), is President of the Urban Assembly, an international not-for-profit organization dedicated to making cities more livable by fostering growth that is socially responsible, ecologically sustainable, politically participatory, and economically productive. He is a winner of the Thomas Jefferson Award from the American Institute of Architects.

No person has ever or will ever affect my career or my values or what I've done in this world more than Ed Logue did. And the reason for that is that he taught all of those of us who were privileged to work with him that urban development was about lots more than bricks and mortar. It's about values. There is nothing neutral about urban development, about zoning, about designing projects. Everything is weighted with values, and Ed had a very strong, distinct set of values which he conveyed with tremendous power and enthusiasm. One of them, for example, is affirmative action. If he saw me introducing an all-white male panel, there would be hell to pay. But that's nobody's fault.

Roosevelt Island played a very important role in that set of values. Ed thought it mattered tremendously what the project was designed like, what the open spaces were like, what the public environment was like. He brought a new standard and a new way of thinking about large-scale development. If you think back to those days, the paradigm then was Coop City, Lefrak City, Trump Village... Nobody had thought to infuse public development with that kind of quality and architectural distinction.

There were other values. The affirmative action - I made light of it, but there was no question that Ed brought the issue of affirmative action to the forefront in a way nobody ever else had in government, that I knew of, and set a standard for a long period of time. Economic equity, economic integration, racial integration - no UDC project moved to the drawing board without that being the program. The architectural program came second.

Now, Roosevelt Island is particularly important in this context because it was one of the, if not the, centerpiece of his work, and it was a huge social and economic experiment. It's fair to say that as an economic experiment it failed. It failed because, for a variety of reasons, it was unable to pay its own way to carry the debt service on its infrastructure, and in that sense it wasn't replicable. Was it worth trying? Absolutely. Was it successful socially? In my opinion, absolutely. This was a time when the middle class was leaving New York in droves. Ed believed that, if you provide a safe environment with high-quality design, wonderful open spaces and good, small schools, people of all income groups would, in fact, stay in New York City. Now, if today, we were to say, "Let's provide safe neighborhoods, good small schools, and wonderfully designed neighborhoods," I think we would all agree that people will stay in those kinds of neighborhoods.

I went to Roosevelt Island a few springs ago - I haven't been there very much in the last 15 years - and people were just beginning to plant their gardens. And... everybody has little plots and they lean over the fences and talk to each other, and I saw black people, and white people, and Caribbean people, leaning over and arguing about whose tulip bulbs were going to be better this year. Then I walked across the street and I saw a soccer game with probably ten different ethnic origins on the field, and I thought to myself, "How many places in New York, which is a phenomenally racially-segregated city, can one see those kinds of everyday experiences working?" And that's the wonder of Roosevelt Island.

I guess that's what this discussion will be about, that that spirit and that philosophy carry on in whatever is done in the future on Roosevelt Island. There are certainly those who are arguing that that's not about to be the case, and those who argue that it is, but I will tell you that Ed's power reaches beyond the grave, what he was, at least what his attitude was not so long ago when he wrote a letter to Brendan Sexton, who was then President of the Municipal Art Society:

Dear Brendan,
      Once the Municipal Art Society was in love with Roosevelt Island. I hope you or some committee can reactivate your interest. Roosevelt Island is under some real threat.
      My very best wishes.
Ed Logue

Moderator Thomas Mellins is an architectural historian, co-author of three books on New York City, including New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars; New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial; and New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism.  In addition to being widely published, he has worked on numerous architectural exhibitions and has lectured in this country and abroad on art and architecture.

The Island, which in the 1970's was known as "the new town in town" was without question the UDC's most-publicized project, and it encapsulated a broad swath of the organization's lofty ambitions. First and foremost, the UDC plans for the Island sought to marry together first-rate architecture and urban planning with high social ideals, particularly the realization of a paradigmatic, mixed-income community.

In light of dramatic shifts in the nation's political and economic climate, I am asking the panelists tonight to address how relevant and how sustainable is Ed Logue's vision today, and [ask], "Where do we go from here?" [and] "Is Ed Logue's vision sustainable - how relevant is it?" I would ask you, "What's your wish list for the Island - what would you say are the priorities there?"

Alexander Garvin is currently a commissioner on the New York City Planning Commission, and is also the Director of Planning for NYC2012, New York City's bid for the 2012 Olympics. Mr. Garvin is the author of the award-winning The American City: What Works, and a principal author of Urban Parks and Open Space. In October 1995, he coordinated Roosevelt Island in Future Focus, a day-long workshop on the future of Roosevelt Island.

I always had strong feelings about Ed Logue. He's that kind of person. He's the kind of person who made things happen. There are very few people in government whose whole psyche is about getting things to happen. But if you're trying to get things to happen, you have successes and failures, and my view is that Ed Logue always had successes and failures.

There are clearly things that Ed Logue tried to do at Roosevelt Island that were successful: Income mix, access for the disabled, a remarkable accessibility... Trouble was, the subway opened 13 years late, so there had to be a Tram, and I still remember working at the Planning Commission and saying, "A Tram? We should invest $2.4 million to build a Tram so that they can market apartments?"

It is a largely automobile-free Island. But not 100% automobile-free. It never could be. Nevertheless, as an experiment in a less automobile-intensive environment, it was a success.

I would say its major success was in demonstrating that you could provide public services outside the City of New York and its bureaucracy very successfully. Of course, it took more than a million dollars annually from the State of New York in subsidies because the Island was never finished, and that's very significant. Had the Island been finished, I believe you could have covered the cost of a lot of these services. Maybe not the debt service on the infrastructure... but I think it would have been possible. The trouble was that housing was not marketable without subsidies later on.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the failures, of which I think there are many. The first is, they didn't implement the original plan. Philip Johnson planned a town center on top of the subway.

The original plan that Johnson prepared, which had the town center... [at the subway station]. Nobody imagined the Tram at that point, and what he had [at the subway station] was in fact an air-conditioned shopping mall... You came out in the middle of an air-conditioned shopping mall. I don't really care whether you took the architectural form that he proposed or not, but I do believe that if you're going to have viable retail it's... going to be based at the subway. That's one of the reasons I think one should be thinking in terms of the next stage, using the fact that there's a Tram and it was never thought it was going to be there forever.

The Island developed and you can't start from scratch anymore.

Without 5,000 units of housing there you do not have enough to support anything. But more than that, there's no other reason to be on the Island except to live there. This is a residential enclave. It is not part of New York. And to that degree I think it is a problem, because it cannot be replicated and it had no spillover into the rest of the communities of New York.

In order to be successful you need a critical mass. When it opened in 1975-76 they had 2,100 units; they now have 3,200 units. That's not enough to support active retail. It never was, never could be. And 5,000 would work, if there were not two towns, a Southtown and a Northtown. Once you've got a Southtown and a Northtown you do not have enough customers in any one of the two of them to support the kind of life it would have been over the subway, and it would have made sense, had the original plan been implemented.

I believe that creating a plan - and Johnson is as responsible for this as the later planners were - with five parks misses the point. You want all of the density in one critical mass that could support a pedestrian environment. You can't do that; it's too spread out, there's too much open space in the way of parks in between.

The minischools did not work. We now have a single school there. I don't know, if Ed Logue had been around to continue the experiment, whether they would have or would not have worked.

But my main problem with Roosevelt Island is that it's not part of New York. It is an Island that the people who live there know very well but the rest of New York goes to very rarely. Had there been a source of employment there, a... some other reason to be there besides living there, I think you might have had a very different kind of environment. Had the plan actually been executed with a high-density core at the subway, I think things would have been very different.

I wish to get on with the job of finishing it. But I would say it's very important to understand this is 2001 and not 1968. The United States is a different place. The needs of the people who are there are different from [the original plan].

You need a governance there in which the people who live there have something to say about its future.

I also would like to have not just citizen involvement, but I really believe that you've got to bring [in] people who know about planned communities... We have been building them. There are hundreds of them in construction all over the country, some of them good, some of them bad, some of them very famous, some of them not; there's a body of experience out there and I think that bringing together some of these people, and some interesting architects, with the residents, would help us to proceed in the spirit of Ed Logue. [But] I don't think that we should slavishly follow the plan that's there now.

Public partnerships, public agencies, only work when the people running them have whatever it [takes] to make things happen. Ed Logue had that. What we are missing at the moment is the leadership in public agencies as a whole that will break through the logjam. I believe that, if enough pressure comes to bear, that will happen on Roosevelt Island, but you need an individual, whether that's someone from the community, someone who is elected, someone who is appointed by the Governor to run RIOC, it really doesn't matter. But you need that individual or else it will continue to spin.

Perhaps if we could subsidize the creation of the FDR Memorial... The completion of the Island, I think, has to be an ongoing thing, and in the year 2050 there should be another meeting like this that questions what was done during the last 50 years to make the place better, because I don't think we should stop just because 5,000 units happened or we got the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele on top of the subway. I think there are a lot of things that could be. Some of them we haven't thought of yet, and I hope the Island grows and changes many times more...

I think that the Main Street looks like deteriorated East Berlin. I think the concrete columns are totally out of place, don't belong there, the plastic windbreaks, the generic store signs, all of these things represent design failures. And I believe that they were inherent from the very beginning. That's one of the reasons that I said I think we have to engage the community that knows about all of this already, from the very beginning in the replanning of it.

Paul Byard is a principal in the New York-based architecture firm of Platt Byard Dovell and the Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  As the Associate Counsel to the New York State Urban Development Corporation from 1969 to 1974, he was a key participant in the development of Roosevelt Island with Ed Logue.

What struck me, as a question to ask, is whether this is all history in which, therefore, there are some lessons we could draw from it, or whether it was still a set of live possibilities; and whether we could talk about it as a sense of what we ought to be doing, or whether we ought to think of it as an interesting time when people actually tried to do something. But of course we all learned after that you couldn't do anything, so forget it, and go on living the way we do now.

I think the failures of Roosevelt Island are definitely national failures, not failures of the scheme. And I note in Alex's comment on things like density, if you look at the map that was part of the lease, of course the density was right where Alex said it was. So the point is not what was going to be built but what actually got built.

There were no inherent failures. [The failures] had to do with things like energy policies. We were paid, I think it was, $2000 a unit [to] put in electric heat. That was because Ravenswood had nothing to do in the winter. It would provide lots of nice electric heat and we could save a bundle of money off the actual mortgage costs, which were the problem.

I'm very glad Alex says that if you had the full 5,000 units it would have worked. It certainly looked as if it was going to work, and that would have included the debt service on the infrastructure. There were a lot of things you had to do. Yes, you had to keep on having the subsidies, but at that time we expected to have subsidies. It never occurred to us that the United States would entirely give up trying to do anything for the poor. That was something that I dearly, dearly remember Ed saying from his service in Calcutta. Of course we all laughed together in 1969 and 1970 at the idea of people sleeping in the street. That happened in Calcutta. It would never happen in New York. Well, of course, it did happen with a bang in New York when we decided - when the nation decided - that we really wouldn't take care of the poor and the indigent and the people who couldn't take care of themselves.

So the 5,000 units would have come with the proper subsidy that we all expected. [But] when Nixon ended the subsidy program, of course, we all went out of business, and that was the beginning of the end for Roosevelt Island and for everybody else.

I think it's important to remember that Roosevelt Island was the product not just of a single interest in doing good, doing the public good on a very complicated and high level of the notion of the public good. We thought we were going to deliver something and we certainly did try.

Whatever happens surely has to reflect the needs of the larger politic of the time. Daily life is different now and it's important to remember what it is. Architecture's got to be important...

The school was made a nuisance for really good reason. It was supposed to be a horrible thing to administer, and the point was that, if you had a thing that was difficult enough and you built it difficult, you would make people have to run the school differently.

[The relationship between the City and State under which the State is developing Roosevelt Island is] basically a leasehold, and if you do something wrong you've violated the lease. Then the question is, what happens? The other side's got to enforce it. It's an ordinary private set of relationships between two governmental agencies, with a subsidiary to help out with it. You don't go straight to jail. Somebody has to want to have it come out one way or the other. Well, what the General Development Plan was supposed to do, and the choice of the word ["general"] was very careful, was not... there was a thing that was regarded as the master plan, but this thing was called the General Development Plan, as a way to give a kind of very general set of directions that would endure, and it's interesting to see that they seem to have, somewhat. The object of the exercise was to get an envelope and a shape and commitments to parks and commitments to open space. But the remedies are remedies of a private transaction between two governments.

The envelope I've seen at least of what's been proposed seems quotidian for architecture today. I hope we can do a little better, because we certainly wanted to, and I think we did produce some interesting stuff along the way.

[We] bought [the Tramway] on a letter to von Roll. It's the world's most inefficient Tramway because it lifts you up at both ends. It was not very expensive, and it was not necessarily supposed to last, because after all the subway was supposed to come. But it came in a box, essentially, from Switzerland.

Matthew Katz is President of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA).  Prior to being elected to this position in December 2000, he served as a member of the RIRA Common Council beginning in 1997, and has served on several of the Association's committees, including Housing and Government Relations, and as Treasurer of the Legal Action Fund. He has been a Roosevelt Island resident since 1989.

In the [exhibit] brochure which some of you may have seen, there's a quote that says, "Logue's solutions were often the best in terms of architecture and planning and people's real lives," and that struck a note with me. I think that's true. I think Mr. Logue and his group at UDC built a construct, a Roosevelt Island.

But I would also point out that he did not build a community and, were he here today, I think he would agree with that. The idea that this would be a community was a risk, and 25 years ago people took that risk and they built the community. They built playing fields, and they built an Historical Society to take note of the 250 years of history out on that Island. They built Garden Clubs, moving tons of topsoil themselves... They built a library from scratch, now part of the New York City Public Library. They built a Theatre and Dance Alliance...

This was done by people who moved out there, who took chances, and made this what it is today. From the sociological point of view, you must say that it's a success.

I think if there's anything that brought people out there, that made it worthwhile to take these chances, it was the physical conditions that they found there. It was the parkland and open space that makes Roosevelt Island a unique community in the middle of New York. If you were dropped down there blindfolded you would say you were in some small town in upstate New York or in some village in the middle of the country, not in the middle of the Big Apple. It is a unique environment.

I grew up in Brooklyn, I've lived in Queens, I lived for 14 years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. If I knew my neighbors, it was to inquire about the weather in the elevator. It's impossible to walk down Main Street, our one street on Roosevelt Island, without getting into a half-a-dozen arguments and discussions with people about the issues of the day. This is not the kind of interaction in a community you expect to find in the middle of New York City. This is another thing that makes the Island unique. But what brought so many of us out there are the parks and the tennis courts and the swimming pools and the playing fields, fields that were built by the sweat equity of the people who live there, and this, I think, is very important.

Ideas come to the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, they are considered, perhaps for years at a time; they are either implemented or they are dropped. Case in point: the minischools. People have been looking for a use for [the minischools] ever since they were abandoned. For the past two years, RIOC has been considering the plan of one developer. For two years now, this plan has been in front of RIOC. For two years the Island has said that they oppose the idea virtually unanimously. A blue-ribbon commission of Island residents [the Capital Planning and Development Committee] was put together to advise RIOC on this particular plan. They voted unanimously against it... and yet the RIOC Board voted for it unanimously.

Now, just recently, within the last month, after two years of looking into this, this idea has been dropped, and now the process must start again from scratch with a new RFP. There's no opportunity to look at the Island as a whole, and I think this is a terrible detriment to the inspiration of Ed Logue.

[The exhibit brochure says] "Because of Logue's work, New York and other cities could continue to regard themselves as engines of democracy." If there's anything that Roosevelt Island is failing in right now, it is democracy. It may have been that at the beginning of the community and, certainly when RIOC was developed in 1984, the idea of a community that was controlled by some entity seemed to make sense, since this was a brand-new community. RIOC, after all, is a public-benefit corporation, and should be working in the public's benefit.

This community, though, has been on Roosevelt Island for 25 years now. We have no local government. It is a level of government that has simply been denied us. We have Federal government, we have State government... end of story. The State determines who sits on the RIOC Board, who is the President of RIOC. The Island community has no impact on the operation of the Island or the development of the Island. When do we get enfranchised? ... These are basic, fundamental questions of American democracy that need to be resolved on Roosevelt Island.

There is a group on Roosevelt Island [the Maple Tree Group] that has been working for three years now to revise the 1984 legislation to provide for an elected Board which would then be empowered to hire a trained, professional, experienced community manager to run Roosevelt Island. We think this is an idea whose time has come. We think the current RIOC is not doing an adequate job for Roosevelt Island.

Just one last thing. The brochure says, "One of the keys to Ed Logue's success is that he had great patrons, Nelson Rockefeller chief amongst them, who stuck with him. With the right Governor, the right Mayor, and a few others, it could happen again." God willing.

In 1996, George Pataki became the Governor of the State of New York. One of the first things he did was eliminate both the operating and capital subsidies to Roosevelt Island. We were told, "You are self-sufficient. Go forth and multiply." For the past five years, Roosevelt Island has been barely making do on its operating costs by cutting back on a great deal of maintenance and repair work on the Island. As for any kind of capital improvements, there is no money. There is no capital fund. You might see, should you look at the financial statements of the Island, as we have very carefully, an item of $3.4 million in the capital fund. That entire fund will be going to pay for the infrastructure of Mr. Wine's Southtown project, because in the crackerjack negotiations for this project, RIOC has agreed to pay half the infrastructure costs of the project. So there is no money for anything else. We have a seawall. We don't know where the money to repair that or extend it will ever come from.

The General Development Plan is a 30-year-old document, but I think its fundamental proviso for affordable housing for families in a small-town context in the middle of New York City is as valid today as it was 30 years ago. My own wish list would be for sufficient population on Roosevelt Island to sustain our merchants, to make our Tram a viable operation. Our Tram, some of you may know, is the only commuter aerial Tramway in the United States. It is not subsidized by any government, as most public transportation is in the United States, and it is the only public transportation in the New York region that's not on the MetroCard - another one of the ways that Roosevelt Island has fallen through the cracks.

My wish list would include maintaining the open spaces and parklands that were provided for within the General Development Plan. The General Development was written by architects, not lawyers. You can read it. It gives guidelines about how to develop the Island, it is part of the Master Lease that exists between the City and the State of New York, it has the force of law. What the mechanism is for amending this document now needs to be tested. Perhaps in some of its details it could be spruced up a little bit, but this is the only thing that exists between Roosevelt Islanders and inappropriate development that is not in keeping with the quality of life of Roosevelt Island or with the proportionality of Roosevelt Island. It's the only thing approaching zoning that we have, and when this goes, so goes Roosevelt Island as a planned community.

It's a strange mindset on Roosevelt Island. Yes, of course we're part of New York City. Most of the population goes to work there, goes to school there, shops there, entertains itself there. But Roosevelt Island is something unique, something other than New York City. On a summer's day, when you've worked a day in New York and you get off the Tram on Roosevelt Island, immediately you realize that it's ten degrees cooler than anything you've experienced during the day, and the air doesn't smell of car exhaust, it smells of honeysuckle. You immediately know you're someplace other than New York City.

So we're both. We're part of New York, and yet we're also Roosevelt Island.

Regarding the question of architecture, in terms of the future we've seen some architect's drawings of some of the plans for the Island. We've seen what some of the proposals for our Octagon Park might be. We've seen some of the proposals for what Southpoint might be, and what we've seen are two 32-story towers comprising a Marriott Hotel, condo and conference center which is so out of proportion with life on Roosevelt Island as to boggle the mind. What we unfortunately have not seen is so much as an artist's rendering of what Southtown will look like. Over the past two years, we've seen a three-dimensional artist's model of the placement of the buildings but, where the buildings go, what we've seen are white styrofoam blocks. Blackwell Field is now completely blocked off prior to the excavation of foundations in the springtime, and yet at this point we have never seen so much as a drawing of what these buildings will look like, what the facades will look like, what the apartments will look like... Will there be balconies, will there be spacious rooms? We just don't know. We have met with the developers on many occasions at town meetings, through meetings of our Residents Association, but there are some fundamental questions which haven't been answered, and again I think it comes back to the question of, "Is RIOC doing their job as a public benefit corporation?" And I would bring to your attention that RIOC is not represented here although they were given that opportunity.

David Wine is Vice Chair of The Related Companies, L.P., one of the country's largest real-estate companies specializing in luxury rental apartments, government-assisted housing, retail, commercial and mixed-use properties. He serves as President of Related Residential Development and as Chair of Related Managed Company, L.P.  Prior to joining Related in 1978, he was a multi-housing representative to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

I started my career as a multi-family housing representative for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as an urban intern. 1976 was a time of great commitment by government - the beginning of the Section 8 program. A group of urban interns were brought to Roosevelt Island to [see] an example of the new-communities program which had been implemented by HUD.

My next introduction was in the late 80's, when an RFP was issued for a developer to build Southtown, the portion of Roosevelt Island meant to complete the 5,000 units originally envisioned under the General Development Plan. 1989 was a problematic time in real estate - not much interest was expressed by the development community in a one-phase, 2,000-unit project in which the developers would pay all the infrastructure cost. I don't think any developers responded to that RFP.

My next introduction was the next RFP in the mid-90's. As a company, we saw Roosevelt Island as part of the greater housing scheme in New York, as it always was. Roosevelt Island was seen as a housing opportunity for various income groups and we saw the housing prices escalating dramatically beginning in the early 1990's. We felt Roosevelt Island could serve a need.

We responded to that RFP, [actually a] request for qualifications to enable RIOC to select experienced developers who could work in a quasi-public-private partnership developing a financially feasible plan for construction of Southtown. We were [chosen] in a partnership with the Hudson Companies. Between the two, we have a lot of experience in building all sorts of housing in New York City at multiple price points: high-rise, low-rise, for-sale housing, rental housing...

We embarked upon a series of meetings to really educate ourselves about many of the issues which have been discussed. Many of the issues had to do with the viability of commercial spaces, the viability and usability of whatever open space was going to be displaced by the construction of Southtown, what would come, what quality would it be, how useful would it be, what kind of economic integration would continue... I think we were struck by Ed Logue's commitment to economic integration; the spirit of that economic integration runs very deep in Roosevelt Island today, and we must address that in our development of Southtown.

We anticipate starting construction [soon] on the first two buildings, which will be operated and owned by Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and the Cornell Medical Center as staff housing for both their employees and their families, who I think share a great commitment to what Roosevelt Island is and what Roosevelt Island remains to be for the future.

My hope for Southtown is that it can be a springboard from which a lot of the planning that people have been talking about - for Roosevelt Island as a whole - can take place. Because such a long period transpired during which no development on Roosevelt Island occurred, there's been a lot of disjointed effort, and I think trying to get to some of the economic stability or economic self-sustaining numbers has spurred a lot of investigation. I hope Southtown can put some of those issues to rest, and guarantee the population density needed to make the Tram even more self-sustaining, to enable additional services to be provided, so that the Island as a whole can enjoy some of the planning the Island needs. It needs to be looked at as a whole, and to be planned, not piecemeal, but with great vision, which is what Ed Logue brought to the table.

The original vision of having a common around the subway is the focal point of what Southtown is. Part of it is the hope to realize the dream of open space and parkland by having a beautiful commons at the subway.

Think about [how] the economics have shifted. Think about the amount of money that was invested in building affordable housing on Roosevelt Island when it was originally constructed. What's happened now is that for something to be built, to achieve economic viability, somebody's got to pay the bill. If the economics don't work, someone's got to pay the bill. So what's happened right now is New York is a medical center, and the hospitals have selected Roosevelt Island as a community in which to house many of their employees and their families. They're planning day-care centers and playgrounds, and they are seeing this as a means of joining the existing community. We see that as a good way to bridge a pragmatic fiscal need.

Gifford Miller serves as Roosevelt Island's representative in the New York City Council.  He serves on Council committees including Land Use, State and Federal Legislation, Transportation, and the Subcommittee on Permits, Dispositions and Concessions.  In addition, he previously headed the Council's Task Force on Regional Planning. He chairs the Council Select Committee for Charter Reform.

I think there are two purposes to this evening - to look back, and to look forward. I feel very confident that Roosevelt Island is a success, an extraordinary place, a place that is like no other.

I would really just like to address this "not-part-of-the-City" [argument]. I don't think that is true. It think it's a unique part of the City. It's a small town right in the heart of the biggest city in the world, very much a part of New York to me. It's a place where people not only know me, their elected representative, but know my mother. That's a unique experience in the City of New York, but it is most definitely part of the City. I think there is a give and take between the Island and the rest of the City.

I was there just the other day for the [PTA International Dinner], and the different parents brought food, and there was Afghani food, Thai food, Indonesian food... It was amazing, and these were all from people who live on the Island and are a part of the Island's community.

And the disabled community is an extraordinary success, and also there's a very large elderly community, particularly a very large community of people over 80 - drastically higher than there is in other parts of the City and the United States.

So it's a unique place, I think, and it has been extraordinarily successful in bringing people together. And it's a small town. Everybody loves each other, and everybody hates each other, and they all know each other so well. It's a unique place in that experience, but ultimately, I think, it's a place where people pull together.

I think that clearly we need to consider how to go forward in order to continue that give and take. But in terms of the income mix, people of different races, ethnicities, [it has] unique status as an extraordinary place where many people from the United Nations live.

What's disappointing to me is that there has been an abandonment by the leadership of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation of not just the General Development Plan, but also of any attempt to do the [kind of] planning which the Island is such a wonderful example of.

Under this Governor, there has been a total walking away from the notion of the planned community. This is not the responsibility of Mr. Wine's company. But I'm critical of the whole process by which they selected a developer and then have been negotiating with a developer for six years about what should go on the Island. To me, the effort that was undertaken for the Roosevelt Island "Future in Focus" in late 1995 was exactly the right type of effort that needs to be undertaken again. In 1974, a group of outside people could consider what was the right thing to do on Roosevelt Island because there were no inside people. Now you can't plan for Roosevelt Island without involving the residents. But you bring the residents, you bring planners, you bring officials, you get them together, and you consider, what is the right thing to do.

Government has walked away from the commitment to housing that was there before, and you can't pretend that there are still the same kind of dollars that there were before, but we should consider what kind of housing do we want - do we want families or do we want medical school housing, or do we want a mix? We should decide what it is that we want, and put it out to request for proposal on who's going to build. And you should consider the rest of the open space and all the rest of it.

My frustration [is that it] has been so difficult to get RIOC to move forward with any plans. I've been wanting to negotiate with RIOC on the subject of the one-fare MetroCard system. I'm offering them a deal on which they'll make lots of money, and MetroCard will be effective on the Tram, and they haven't been able in nine months to get together a meaningful meeting to accept lots of money in order to have the MetroCard placed on the Tram. It's that kind of total lack of leadership which has overseen an Island, which is an extraordinary piece of real estate, during the strongest real estate market in the history of the world, and yet [there is] no final agreement on what to build in Southtown. I think that comes squarely back on RIOC's shoulders.

I haven't been able to get RIOC to agree to anything... anything, even reasonable things that you can't believe that they can't agree to, and the only reason I think there's hope is that I'm hoping that we're going to have a new Governor in a year and half, and at the rate at which they're going, there's still going to be plenty of things left on the table to be decided.

There is a raging debate on Roosevelt Island on what the right type of governance is because the governance, in my opinion, has been so poor. To me, the question is not that the governance there now is so unacceptable, and that it can't work, because it can work, but it's not going to work unless there's leadership from the top, and all the way down, that is committed to making the Island into a place consistent with the vision of Mr. Logue and the others who first framed this as a concept.

I think that the "where we go from here," is we should sit down as a community, as elected officials, and as a leadership of RIOC, consider what we want to go where, and not just turn it over to whoever is the highest bidder for any particular place, and then make it happen.

RIOC's abandonment of the whole concept of planning [is unfortunate]. There's one member of the Board, who is close to the Governor, who wants essentially to just put the Island up for sale to the highest bidder, and let them do whatever they want to do with whatever portions of the land it is. I think that's ridiculous... [APPLAUSE] These are failures not just of the Pataki administration. There were previous Governors who never did anything about Southpoint. There were many Democrats in a row [who] did nothing to develop the fabulous proposal for the FDR Memorial at the south end of the Island, which should be a jewel. It's right for an extraordinary space [APPLAUSE], and it's not been acted on.

So there needs to be more development, and it should be done in a planned way that involves the community in order to reach the best solution for everyone involved. And I hope we can still do that with the space and the time that we have left.

May I say about the Tram... It's become such an extraordinary part of the Island's identity, I don't think anyone can contemplate the Island without the Tram.

I think it's pretty well accepted that, if the Island reached its full development point, it could sustain itself in terms of its operating costs. In fact, there hasn't been a subsidy for four years...

It depends, I suppose, on how you gauge success. Richard [Kahan] said it's been a failure as an economic matter in the sense that it doesn't entirely support itself. But what community does entirely support itself? The Upper East Side does not support itself and no one thinks about it in those terms. You have taxes which go to pay for the local services and you have other taxes which go in a broad sense to pay for the capital of the structure, and I [don't think we can] expect a unique place like Roosevelt Island to be entirely responsible for its seawall. And why should we look at it in that fashion? It's a part of the City, it should be receiving the services which it needs and it should be supported to the extent that it has infrastructure needs. So I think that [self-sufficiency] as a gauge of success is false.

The General Development Plan is an excellent document. It's brief and it allows for innovation. I re-read it again this morning, and I don't think that there is a great need to amend it all that largely, but I would be open to amending it. The City... There is argument about how you go about amending it, and whether it has legal force, but to me, there isn't much question - either the Mayor or the Council has to approve amendments.

I don't think the Governor is committed to what everybody on this panel has pretty much expressed their commitment to, which is to consider a plan for the Island as a whole and to work to realize that plan. And that's reflected in those people who work for him [at] RIOC. The Governor's recent appointments to the Board have been floating ideas of selling off the Island or turning it back to the City. Nothing can happen on the Island without the Governor's say-so in some form, whether it's him personally or his appointees.

My concern is that I don't see the City, State, and Federal government making the type of commitment to affordable housing that you had before, and so it's how do you work within that context to still realize something that is appropriate for the vision that was originally there.

The problem is that everybody on this panel doesn't get to make that decision, and [it is] the people who are not on this panel who are making the decision, and who are not doing the plan.

I think the point here is that you have such a contrast between proposals for what to do with this extraordinary space and between planning processes. In the one, you had a master plan from someone who considered that part of the Island should be open space, and relate the name of the Island to the mission of the Island, and in the other, you had an RFP process which said, "How can you make money with this particular plot of land?" And so what you have is an extraordinary contrast between one vision and another, which comes directly out of the type of planning process which was undertaken for that space.