Matthew Haag

That is at the heart of a plan for a landmark overhaul of New York City’s corrections system, which will culminate with the closing of Rikers Island, the jail complex with nearly 10,000 beds that has become notorious for chronic abuse, neglect and mismanagement.

The City Council approved the proposal Thursday, a decision that seemed nearly impossible just a few years ago and that supporters say immediately places New York City at the forefront of a national movement to reverse decades of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected black and Hispanic people.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, embraced the jails plan, throwing their political weight behind the momentous reforms despite steady opposition from neighborhoods whose residents worry that the towering jails will harm their quality of life.

“What we are doing today will reshape the city for generations to come and impact the lives of every New Yorker,” Johnson said Thursday. “For decades, our city was unfair to those who became involved in the justice system, and the overwhelmingly majority who were caught up were black and brown men.”

But now, the hard part begins. To meet its deadline of 2026, the city will have to build four new jails scattered in neighborhoods across the city, shut down a 400-acre jail network on an island in the East River, and relocate thousands of prisoners and corrections officers.

The transition and new construction also carries a hefty price tag: more than $8 billion.

The city may also find itself having to fend off the legal challenges that are often mounted when neighborhoods oppose major developments.

In a sign perhaps of the challenges and opposition ahead, Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents parts of Brooklyn, said the legislation did not go far enough to address the reasons people end up in jail.

“This vote only enriches developers in the short term, while leaving the fate of Rikers in the hands of a future mayor and a future Council,” said Menchaca, who voted against the proposal. “I do not trust this mayor, do you?”

To make the plan a reality, city officials must place their trust in future elected leaders to share the same vision and see it through on the same aggressive timeline. It also depends on further declines in the city’s crime rate, which by some measures is already the lowest since the 1950s.

Today, the city’s jails hold about 7,000 people every day — about a third of the population when it reached its peak during the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s. The new jails, however, would not have room even for the number of prisoners today.

The city announced this week that the new facilities will be smaller than first anticipated with a combined daily capacity of about 3,300 prisoners. The jails will be about the same size — each with 886 beds — and will require reducing the jail population by more than half by 2026.

The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, which represents more than 10,000 correction officers in the city, has criticized the projected number of prisoners as unrealistically optimistic.

The City Council’s minority leader, Steven Matteo, said Thursday he had concerns over what it would take for the city to reach the goal of 3,300 prisoners.

“It will require putting more potentially dangerous offenders back on the street, jeopardizing public safety,” said Matteo, a Republican from Staten Island who voted “no.”

When the new jails open, officials said, they will be safer, smaller and more humane and will make New York’s corrections system a model for the rest of the country. Prisoners will be provided job training, mental health counseling and education services.

“I have been to Rikers. I have been to the Kew Gardens jail,” said Karen Koslowitz, a councilwoman who represents the area of Queens that would get a new jail. “They weren’t cells. They were cages.”

Before the vote Thursday, Johnson said that years of declining crime rates show that the prisoner population would continue to drop and that the new jails would meet future needs.

“We feel confident this is the right size,” he said.

Smaller jails are possible, city leaders say, because of changes by New York state and the city to reduce the number of people sent to jail.

In recent years, New York state repealed the Rockefeller Laws, the 1970s antidrug legislation that established mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. New laws go into effect in January that will outlaw cash bail for most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, and will require prosecutors to give evidence to the defense far earlier.

New York City has banned solitary confinement for people under 22 years old, expanded diversion programs that keep people out of jail and did away with arrests for most people found with small amounts of marijuana.

As part of the jail plan, the city also announced $265 million in new spending on efforts intended to keep people out of jail and to support those who have been released.

It would include an expansion of the supervised release program, which allows defendants to wait for trial outside jail; conflict-resolution lessons in schools; and transitional employment opportunities for inmates upon release.

This article originally appeared in

NYC Votes to Close Rikers. Now Comes the Hard Part.

NEW YORK — One 886-bed jail will tower over shops and restaurants in downtown Brooklyn. Another will be next to a subway yard in Queens. In the Bronx, a jail will replace a Police Department tow pound. And another jail will rise in the shadow of City Hall in Manhattan.

Mayfield, then 46, had been arrested often enough to have seen the inside of many jails, including those at Rikers Island, the sprawling complex near La Guardia Airport.

But he had never laid eyes on the Vernon C. Bain Center, a hulking, 625-foot long royal blue barge in the East River topped with a nearly windowless five-story jail resembling Lego pieces stacked together.

“The heat was unbearable, and it was dark and cramped and sweaty,” Mayfield said of his experience at the jail. “We were in a cargo hold of a slave ship — a modern day slave ship owned by the City of New York.”

More than 10 years later — and 27 years after it first docked along the shores of Hunts Point — the Bain Center, a largely unknown and overlooked workhorse of the New York City jail system, houses up to 800 inmates every day.

It opened in 1992 as a supposedly temporary and emergency fix for a soaring inmate population fueled by the crack epidemic.

But the number of inmates has plummeted at Bain, thought to be the country’s only floating jail.

Now, the facility has been pushed out of the shadows as New York City pursues an ambitious plan to shut down Rikers and build a new criminal justice system with more humane jails and fewer inmates.

The city has pledged to close the Bain Center as part of the plan, which has won the support of criminal justice advocates, as well as Mayor Bill de Blasio and many members of the City Council.

The council must vote on the plan and, if approved, Rikers and Bain would close by 2026.

But the soft timeline for closing the barge has sparked outrage among elected officials and criminal justice advocates, who have demanded to know why the floating jail is even still around.

They have made the future of the facility central to the broader jail debate, insisting that it should be vacated and removed immediately before any other part of the plan moves forward.

“Sink the boat, get rid of it and sit with the community about how we can best utilize that open space there,” said Rafael Salamanca Jr., a councilman from the Bronx whose district includes the jail.

So far, city officials have not revealed the order in which the jails would be shut down or whether the closing of the Bain Center could be expedited. The barge, which has 317 workers, costs nearly $24 million a year to operate.

“We also want to see the barge closed,” Dana Kaplan, a deputy director at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, told council members at a recent hearing. “We do not want a continued vestige of what was not supposed to be a permanent solution and what is not representative of what we think is the right justice system.”

On Jan. 22, 1992, the Vernon C. Bain barge, named for a Rikers Island warden who died in a car accident, sailed into New York Harbor joining a fleet of four other floating jails. In the late 1980s, Mayor Edward I. Koch had envisioned these jails as the future of the city’s corrections system.

The city ordered the Bain from a shipbuilder in Louisiana at a time when the inmate population at Rikers was near capacity — 22,000 inmates every day — and was expected to grow. The shortage of facilities was so dire that the Department of Correction warned that temporary jail dormitories might have to be built.

Koch said the floating jails were needed if the city was to get serious about cracking down on crime.

“We have to have jails in which to put them, and we dock a jail barge alongside a neighborhood, there are opponents,” Koch said in a speech in 1989. “I say to these groups, ‘Would you rather have these people walking around in your neighborhood, or be in jail on a barge in your neighborhood?’ ”

The Bain Center was pulled by tugboats — it does not have motors — to Hunts Point, after the city had considered but dismissed other locations, including the Brooklyn Army Terminal and near Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but area residents rose up in protest.

But by the time the Bain Center arrived, the city’s jail population was declining and the city soon announced it would remove and likely sell two of the floating jails, one off Greenwich Village and the other near the Lower East Side, to a company that said it was going to turn them into scrap.

In the years since it opened, the Bain Center has stayed relatively the same. Inside, the walls and ceilings are still colored an off-white gray. The barge sways with the waves. Inmates can exercise on the top floor inside a caged-enclosed recreational area that has views of Rikers Island. From their cells, inmates can look out through tiny portholes.

“Rikers, in all its gory details, still had benefits over the barge,” said Mayfield, who spent 10 months between 2008 and 2009, at the Bain Center because he could not afford bail regarding his drug-possession charge. “One of those benefits was mobility and being able to move around and being able to go outside.”

Mayfield, who at age 57 is taking undergraduate classes at Columbia University on a scholarship, said he would never forget sweltering summer days inside the barge jail, breathing in steamy, acrid air.

“Closing Rikers is one thing. Closing the boat should have happened decades ago,” he said.

Critics say the Rikers Island complex, a collection of nine jails, has become emblematic of the country’s embrace of mass incarceration and of a criminal justice system that is biased against African Americans and Hispanics. It has also been the site of brutal attacks by officers on inmates and unsafe, squalid conditions that officers themselves have long complained has exposed them to attacks.

The Bain Center, which is much smaller than the Rikers complex, had the third-lowest rate for use-of-force by corrections officers in the city’s jails, according to the latest report by a federal monitor overseeing changes at New York jails. Yet, the rate has ticked upward, prompting the monitor to caution that the conditions at the barge “create reason to be watchful.”

In the early 1990s, the Hunts Point neighborhood around the barge was overrun by rampant prostitution, other crime, homelessness and junkyards. At night, the main attraction was strip clubs. Children in the area had some of the country’s highest asthma rates. The closest bus stop in Hunts Point, a roughly 900-acre peninsula in the South Bronx, was a 20-minute walk from the jail.

“Hunts Point was a place to put things that no one else wanted,” said John Robert, a former president of the local community board.

A little more than three years after it opened, the Department of Correction shut down the Bain Center, saying that the city’s lower jail population, about 17,900 at that time, did not warrant the cost. The city, after moving inmates and officers to the jails at Rikers, expected to save $2 million a month by closing the Bain Center.

But the closing was relatively short-lived. Mayor Rudy Giuliani reopened the Bain Center in the late 1990s as a juvenile detention facility and then as a jail for adult inmates.

The city’s inmate populations has dropped even more since it reopened, down now to just more than 7,000 inmates every day.

“That’s the nature of a lot of temporary things that become permanent in the city,” said Paul Lipson, a former chief of staff for Rep. José E. Serrano, a Democrat who represents the area. “Once a city agency grabs a parcel of land, it’s very hard for them to relinquish it.”

Now, the barge is part of a changing Hunts Point.

The strip clubs have been shut down; violent crime, including homicides and rapes, has plunged by 280% from 1990 to 2018, according to the Police Department.

Down the street from the jail, Amazon opened a warehouse over the summer, where trucks line up throughout the day to pick up packages to be delivered.

The city’s Economic Development Corp., which owns much of the prime waterfront real estate in Hunts Point, has big plans for the area. It recently asked companies to submit ideas for a redesigned Hunts Point Produce Market, one of the neighborhood’s economic engines.

Roughly 16,000 trucks travel through the area, shuttling goods like produce, meats and beer from warehouses to restaurants and shops throughout New York City. The city, hoping to significantly reduce congestion, has announced plans to develop a marine terminal at Hunts Point.

City officials envision that the marine terminal could anchor a major shift in how goods like produce and lumber enter the New York market, moving them off roads and onto waterways.

Whatever the future holds for Hunts Point, it does not include a city jail taking up precious and valuable waterfront property, Salamanca said.

“We should give this land back and create jobs,” he said. “Some could be green space for the community so we can enjoy the view of the East River.”

A Floating Jail Was Supposed to Be Temporary. That Was 27 Years Ago

NEW YORK — On a mid-September day in 2008, Marvin Mayfield, a lifelong resident of the Bronx, discovered a part of the borough he had never seen. The revelation came while he was being taken off a Department of Correction bus, placed in a single-file line with 10 other men and led over a gangplank.

When officers arrived, they found a woman lying on the street — critically injured but still alive — outside a two-story colonial-style home. Police entered the house and discovered a male victim.

The man, David Kimowitz, 40, who managed comedians and owned a popular comedy club in New York City, was pronounced dead in his home, authorities said Sunday. The woman, Karen L. Bermudez-Rodriguez, 26, an au pair for Kimowitz’s two young children, later died at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Police announced Sunday that they had arrested Bermudez-Rodriguez’s boyfriend, Joseph D. Porter, 27, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in connection with the deaths. He was charged with two counts of murder, possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and criminal restraint. He is being held at the Essex County Correctional Facility.

Kimowitz’s two young daughters and his wife, Laura, were not home at the time of the attack, authorities said.

The killings stunned residents of the leafy suburban town about 20 miles west of New York City. Until Saturday, there had been only 15 homicides in Maplewood, a town of about 25,000 people, over the past three decades, according to state and federal authorities.

Neighbors said Sunday that they could hear Bermudez-Rodriguez screaming from inside their homes before she collapsed on the street.

“It’s a shocking feeling,” Kathy Cantwell, who lives next door to the Kimowitz family, said. “You wish you could have interceded or you could have saved David.”

Several neighbors said that in the days before the attack, they noticed a man they did not recognize sitting in a dark-colored sedan near the family’s house. While they had alerted one another about the man, they did not call police. Authorities have not said whether that man was Porter.

On Sunday, a large portion of Walton Road, a tree-lined street with rows of clapboard homes, remained an active crime scene. Yellow police tape surrounded the Kimowitzes’ home, and officers were seen looking through shrubs outside nearby homes.

Neighbors of the Kimowitz family, who had bought the house on a corner lot in 2017, said that the family’s daughters were often seen playing outside with Bermudez-Rodriguez.

On Sunday, friends placed flowers outside the house, at the intersection of Walton Road and Jefferson Avenue.

Andrew De la Torre, who lived near the Kimowitzes, said that the family had employed several au pairs, who rotated every few months, since they moved into the house.

“They have a little balcony that they would be playing out there with their kids,” De la Torre said Sunday. “They’d have family friends over. Really nice people.”

Kimowitz was well-known in the New York comedy scene, as both a manager of comedians and one of four founders of the Stand Restaurant and Comedy Club, a comedy venue near Gramercy Park in Manhattan.

While the biggest club in town, the Comedy Cellar, attracted comedy elite like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle, the Stand maintained a steady rotation of high-profile performers including Tracy Morgan, Janeane Garofalo and Dave Attell. “There’s a stigma about comedy clubs,” Kimowitz told The New York Times in an interview in 2012. “They’re tourist traps, watered-down drinks. We’re trying to evolve the comedy club.”

The Stand closed its Gramercy Park location last year and reopened a few weeks ago in a fancier and larger space near Union Square. The founders added an upscale restaurant in an attempt to differentiate itself from other clubs. The club also has a green room — a rarity in most clubs — and two rooms with low ceilings for intimate performances.

The Stand also hosts a popular weekly comedy podcast, “The Legion of Skanks,” which features comedians managed by Kimowitz.

In 2012, Kimowitz and the same group that had opened the Stand started the Standing Room comedy club in Long Island City, Queens. While they had hoped to attract top comedians to perform there, the Standing Room could not replicate the success of the Manhattan venue and closed last summer.

Comedians who knew Kimowitz said that they were stunned by the news of his death.

“A great guy and friend has passed this weekend,” Rich Vos, a comedian, said on Twitter. “He seemed so happy, a wife, 2 kids, his new club opened.”

A LinkedIn page for Kimowitz said that he had received a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University in New York in 2002 and had joined several comedy ventures, including a company called Cringe Humor, which had started the Stand. He was also a partner of CH Entertainment, a talent agency with clients that included Vos. The group previously represented comedian Pete Davidson.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/nyregion/maplewood-murder-david-laura-kimowitz.html" id="9b636a41-0967-3688-a3d4-798dc2f4d7f9">The New York Times</a>.

Owner of Comedy Club and Nanny Are Killed at Maplewood, NJ, Home

The 911 call came just after sunrise Saturday: A woman was being attacked outside a house in Maplewood, New Jersey.

The au pair’s boyfriend was arrested Sunday and charged with two counts of murder.

Police in Maplewood, New Jersey, responded to a 911 call around sunrise Saturday about a woman being assaulted. After arriving at the scene, officers found the woman, Karen L. Bermudez-Rodriguez, 26, lying in the street critically injured.

They later found the homeowner, David Kimowitz, 40, dead inside the house, the Essex County prosecutor’s office said.

Bermudez-Rodriguez, an au pair for the Kimowitz family’s children, was pronounced dead at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. The family’s two young daughters and Kimowitz’s wife, Laura, were not at home at the time of the attack, authorities said.

On Sunday, Joseph D. Porter, 27, Bermudez-Rodriguez’s boyfriend, was charged in connection with the deaths and was booked into the Essex County Correctional Facility.

The killings were a stunning event in a suburb known as a safe place to raise children. Over the last three decades, there had been only 15 homicides in Maplewood, a town of about 25,000 people approximately 20 miles west of New York City, before Saturday, according to state and federal authorities.

Neighbors of the Kimowitz family, who had bought the two-story colonial-style house on a corner lot in 2017, said that their family’s daughters were often seen playing outside with Bermudez-Rodriguez.

Owner of Comedy Club and Nanny Are Killed at NJ Home

The owner of a high-profile comedy club in New York City and his family’s au pair were killed at his suburban New Jersey home Saturday, authorities said Sunday.

<h1>NEW YORK — The town house where financier Jeffrey Epstein is accused of engaging in sex acts with underage girls is one of the largest private homes in Manhattan, a short walk from Central Park.</h1>

The seven-story residence at 9 E. 71st St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, sprawls across 21,000 square feet and has five bathrooms, a two-story reception room and many bedrooms, including three three-room suites on the fourth floor.

It also has a heated sidewalk in front to melt the snow during the winter months. On the second floor is a mural Epstein had commissioned in recent years: A photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Epstein portrayed in the middle.

“He said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again,’” said R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist invited by Epstein to a meeting at his home and to view the mural three months ago.

A person who visited the town house last year remembered Epstein doing work at the mansion while seated at a large dining table that fit 20 people, with multiple computer monitors and a phone alongside.

Epstein answered calls while hosting visitors, according to that person and another visitor last year who saw similar behavior. Behind him was a table covered with framed photographs of celebrities and dignitaries, including a signed photograph of former President Bill Clinton.

The visitors each said they were greeted by a tall woman who spoke with an Eastern European accent, who led guests up a marble staircase to a study on another floor. At the base of the stairwell, one of the visitors said, Epstein had placed a chess board with custom figurines dressed in underwear — each piece, he noted, was modeled after one of his staffers.

He decorated the home with other oddities, like a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and had arranged a small dining room to resemble a beach scene.

A wall of the study was covered with photographs of famous people, including Woody Allen, and another that Epstein pointed out was of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Epstein, 66, is accused of engaging in sex acts with young girls from 2002 to 2005 during naked massage sessions and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash, according to an indictment unsealed Monday.

During the search of his town house Saturday, investigators seized photographs of nude underage girls, federal prosecutors said. “The alleged behavior shocks the conscience,” Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said Monday.

Prosecutors said they were moving to seize Epstein’s town house.

Epstein, however, was not even supposed to become the owner of the opulent stone house on the Upper East Side.

In 1989, Epstein’s mentor, Leslie H. Wexner, founder and chairman of L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret and Bath &amp; Body Works, bought the seven-story Beaux-Arts home for $13.2 million. At the time, it was the highest recorded sale price for a town house in Manhattan.

Wexner then spent at least that much on artwork — including multiple works by Picasso — art deco furnishings, Russian antiques, rosewood tables and doors and a gut renovation of the home. Security devices, including a network of cameras, were installed. A cellar was divided into separate spaces, one for red wines and another for white. The renovation was featured on the cover of the December 1995 issue of Architectural Digest.

The town house had been a longtime private school and Wexner spent years converting it into a lavish estate.

Wexner, however, never moved; he decided to stay in Columbus, Ohio, where L Brands has its headquarters.

But another person did move in: Epstein. “Les never spent more than two months there,” Epstein told The New York Times in 1996.

The home has a history of going unoccupied by its owner. Herbert N. Straus, an heir to the Macy’s fortune, commissioned the 40-room mansion in the early 1930s and hired prominent architect Horace Trumbauer to design it. But Straus died in 1933, leaving the property unfinished and unoccupied.

The Straus family gave the residence to a hospital in 1944. In 1962, the private school, Birch Wathen School, bought it and converted it into a schoolhouse. The school, which was started in 1921 with an emphasis on the arts, relocated after Wexner bought the house. (It later merged with another private school to start the Birch Wathen Lenox School.)

Epstein said in the 1996 interview that the mansion was now his, though the transaction has never appeared in New York City records online. In 2011, he transferred ownership of the property from a trust connected to Epstein and Wexner to Maple Inc., a U.S. Virgin Islands-based entity under Epstein’s control, according to records.

The transfer document, from Nine East 71st Street Corp. to Maple Inc, did not list a purchase price, indicating that it did not involve any exchange of money.

A spokeswoman for Wexner said he “severed ties” with Epstein about a decade ago. Erika Kellerhals, a lawyer in the Virgin Islands who handled the 2011 transfer for Epstein, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Prosecutors say the home is valued at $77 million, but the city’s Department of Finance estimated this year that the mansion was valued closer to $56 million. The 2019 property taxes for the home, which are based on a much lower assessed value, were an estimated $347,000. (The property’s tax bill in 2008 was the fourth highest-taxed single-family home in New York City.)

Epstein also owns a home in Palm Beach, Florida, a 7,500-acre ranch in New Mexico and an apartment in Paris. He also owns Little St. James Island, a private island in the Caribbean, and at least 15 cars.

A spokesman for Clinton, whose photograph was on display in Epstein’s mansion, said the former president “made one brief visit” around 2002 to the New York home with a staff member and security officials. Clinton has not talked to Epstein in more than a decade and has not visited his properties in the Caribbean, Florida or New Mexico, the statement said.

From the street, Epstein’s Manhattan mansion has features that make it a commanding presence on the block: a 15-foot-tall oak front door (which the police pried open with a crow bar Saturday during a search of the property), large arched windows on the ground floor and a balcony on the second floor. Epstein’s initials are on a brass plaque near the front door.

While Epstein has tried to maintain a private life, he did allow a reporter for Vanity Fair magazine to visit the mansion for a 2003 profile, “The Talented Mr. Epstein.”

The article describes a main hallway that was covered with rows of artificial eyeballs from England that had been made for wounded soldiers.

The room connected to the hallway was a marble foyer adorned with a painting that resembled works by French artist Jean Dubuffet. “The host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it,” the reporter, Vicky Ward, wrote.

The article was published around the same time he started to recruit underage girls to the mansion, according to the indictment unsealed Monday.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-nyc-mansion.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Inside Epstein's $56 Million Mansion on the Upper East Side

The seven-story residence at 9 E. 71st St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, sprawls across 21,000 square feet and has five bathrooms, a two-story reception room and many bedrooms, including three three-room suites on the fourth floor.

Inside Epstein's $56 million mansion on the upper East Side

<h1>NEW YORK — Edward Assile started working for his family’s textile supply company near Macy’s landmark Herald Square store in the 1980s, when the Manhattan neighborhood was part of the garment district. Fabric shops surrounded the store and the sight of workers hurriedly pushing racks of clothing up and down the streets was common.</h1>

Macy’s still stands, but the rest of the area has been transformed. What was once a manufacturing hub has given way to an overflowing corridor of tourists and commuters cramming onto sidewalks, roadways and subway stations.

“Have you tried walking from here to Penn Station?’’ said Assile, 70, referring to the commuter train station. “It’s horrendous.”

Herald Square’s central location at the intersection of regional rail service and numerous subway lines has long made it one of New York City’s busiest neighborhoods. But today it is more congested than ever with 92 million people a year passing through its three subway stations, nearly double the number in the 1970s.

Now Macy’s, the epicenter of Herald Square for more than a century, wants to test the area’s limits. It plans to build an 800-foot tall office tower atop the iconic store, part of what could be the beginning of a building spree in the district.

The city is experiencing one of the greatest growth periods in its history, with a booming economy, soaring tourism and a population near a record high.

But in an era of prosperity, cracks have emerged: The forces of development pushing across many neighborhoods, like Herald Square, is taxing New York’s transportation infrastructure, from its strangled streets to its strained public transit.

A forest of office and residential towers has risen in Lower Manhattan and around Central Park in recent years, while new neighborhoods of high-rises have sprouted in Downtown Brooklyn, the South Bronx and along the Queens waterfront.

The flurry of construction has added more than 40 million square feet of new office space in the city in the past two decades — roughly the equivalent of the total office space in downtown Houston.

But while the city has thrived, the transportation infrastructure that it depends on has struggled — clogged streets have pushed down average speeds in Manhattan’s business districts to under 5 mph while the subway is struggling to reverse a steep decline in reliability.

“If the infrastructure falls behind, you are going to solve your own problem because people will leave,” said Nick Sifuentes, the executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a transportation policy and advocacy group.

In Herald Square, swarms of people fill every available inch of sidewalk and rush-hour traffic on West 34th Street, a main thoroughfare, is often at a standstill.

More than 140,000 employees work in the area, and a Macy’s tower could add another 6,000. The neighborhood is already home to the city’s third busiest subway station, and Pennsylvania Station is the country’s busiest train station with more than 600,000 riders daily.

At least one developer, Vornado Realty Trust, has plans to put up a super-tall tower in Herald Square, further adding to the density of people and cars.

Before Macy’s revealed its tower plans, company executives met privately with community groups and city leaders to outline their vision and gain their support. Executives also pledged that Macy’s would invest in the area’s infrastructure, such as adding new entrances to the Herald Square subway station, according to three people familiar with the company’s preliminary plans.

A Macy’s spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the company’s plans, saying that there were “a number of hurdles we need to cross before we can share more concrete details.” Macy’s would need city approval to build the tower.

“We believe the best way to unlock the store’s underlying real estate value and promote economic activity in the area is to build a commercial office tower while continuing to operate this iconic store as our national flagship,” the spokeswoman, Blair Fasbender Rosenberg, said.

Some local leaders welcomed the news. “Anything that is good for Macy’s staying healthy and in business is good for New York,” said Dan Biederman, the president of the 34th Street Partnership, a business-improvement district in Herald Square.

Still, the tower proposal, though it could take years to be realized, has already sparked concern among elected officials over the potential strain on the neighborhood.

Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, said that a tower over Macy’s would “require major public improvements to the streets and sidewalks that surround the Herald Square neighborhood.”

Layla Law-Gisiko, a member of the local community board, had a pointed reaction to the idea of more people flooding into the area: “Disastrous, disastrous, disastrous.”

But Tom Wright, the president of Regional Plan Association, a transportation research and policy group, said that the sky-is-falling predictions for Herald Square were overly gloomy. He noted that several ambitious public transit projects are underway that would ease congestion both underground and aboveground.

Penn Station, which Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road share, is extending into the adjacent James A. Farley Post Office to serve passengers riding Amtrak. A rail project known as East Side Access, more than a decade under construction, will eventually move Long Island Rail Road passengers away from Penn Station to Grand Central Terminal.

“There is so much investment in the area that you don’t want to walk away from it,” Wright said. “Taking advantage of that sunken new investment to build new density is good public policy.”

New York is one of several cities across the country grappling with the consequences of dynamic growth. Los Angeles, Seattle and Honolulu, among others, are all spending billions of dollars to expand public transit as a way to unsnarl their roadways.

In New York, the subway system, the largest in the nation, has barely expanded in recent years, adding a new line with three stations on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a new station to extend a line to the Far West Side of Manhattan.

Next year, New York will become the first American city to impose congestion pricing, a fee to drive into the busiest parts of Manhattan. The plan is meant to ease traffic and raise more money to modernize and improve subway and bus service.

The city’s development wave has already lapped up against Herald Square. To the west stands Hudson Yards, a city within a city with acres of gleaming glass and steel office and residential buildings. To the east, skyscrapers are rising in a part of Midtown Manhattan that has been rezoned to allow for taller buildings.

Between them are Herald Square’s collection of mostly stubby buildings, except for the Empire State Building, that developers believe could be part of a giant business district stretching across the width of Manhattan.

The challenge the city’s robust development poses for the existing transportation infrastructure is being felt beyond Manhattan.

An influx of new people in northern Brooklyn has bogged down the L train, the only line serving some of the borough’s fastest-growing neighborhoods. More than 675,000 people now live more than a mile from a subway station on the far edges of Queens, according to the city, and many use buses that often run late and slow.

A commuter ferry service run by the city recently began docking in areas underserved by public transit along the waterfront in Brooklyn and the Bronx, though it is expensive to operate and its ridership is tiny compared with the number of subway or bus riders.

Even without a Macy’s tower, Herald Square is packed. It is one of the busiest pedestrian thoroughfares in New York, with more than 11,000 pedestrians at its peak, on late weekday afternoons, filling 34th Street in front of Macy’s, according to a traffic count by the city.

Each year, more than 20 million shoppers visit Macy’s Herald Square, the company says.

“Growing responsibly means that significant development must be accompanied by investments in mass transit, parks, schools, streetscapes, libraries and all the public goods that make our city livable,” said Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker whose district includes Herald Square. “We have to find a way to grow responsibly if we want communities around the city to accept the need for growth.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/nyregion/macys-tower-herald-square.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Should Macy's Build a Giant Tower in One of NYC's Most Congested Neighborhoods?

Macy’s still stands, but the rest of the area has been transformed. What was once a manufacturing hub has given way to an overflowing corridor of tourists and commuters cramming onto sidewalks, roadways and subway stations.

Should Macy's build a giant tower in one of NYC's most congested neighborhoods?

The four companies all had close ties to George Norcross, a powerful Democratic leader in the southern part of the state.

A state official revealed that three of the companies had indicated that they were considering moving to Philadelphia in order to qualify for tax breaks to stay in New Jersey, but in fact did not have viable offers to go there.

The fourth business identified a potential relocation site in Philadelphia four days before the state approved its $40 million tax credit in 2014, the official said.

The revelations about those companies, which all sought to move to the city of Camden with sizable tax credits, under a 2013 law known as the Economic Opportunity Act, were made public during a daylong hearing by a panel of investigators appointed by Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat.

The task force is examining whether $11 billion in economic development programs have delivered significant economic benefits or have been a boon to politically connected firms and companies.

An investigation by The New York Times found that lawmakers allowed a real estate lawyer, Kevin D. Sheehan, whose influential law firm has close ties to Democratic politicians and state legislators, to edit drafts of the 2013 law that unlocked sizable tax breaks for his firm’s clients.

The testimony on Thursday by current and former officials at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which oversees the tax credit programs, raised serious concerns about the law, the lack of oversight in reviewing applications and the way some tax credits were awarded.

A former president of the authority, Tim Lizura, also acknowledged that many last-minute changes to the law were made by Sheehan. The Times found that those alterations were done without any public disclosure.

Companies had been awarded $4.9 billion under the 2013 legislation by moving to New Jersey or remaining in the state and creating and retaining jobs.

The hearing was the second held in recent months by the task force, which in April referred evidence to federal prosecutors for possible criminal charges. It is not immediately known whether the evidence might lead to charges or what might result from Thursday’s testimony.

But a member of the task force said companies could be held criminally liable.

“There is real criminal exposure for companies that lie to the EDA,” said Pablo Quiñones, a special counsel on the task force.

For several hours, another special counsel, Jim Walden, displayed some of the specific edits of the bill on a large screen. Some changes, he noted, were intended to allow specific companies, such as Subaru of America, to claim hundreds of millions of dollars in additional tax breaks.

Several companies had business ties with Sheehan’s firm, Parker McCay, Walden said.

Sheehan did not register with the state as a lobbyist for the Economic Opportunity Act, and his firm told The Times that its work on the legislation did not amount to lobbying.

“Parker McCay was asked by policymakers, including those in the Legislature, to review this legislation and offer input and suggestions on ways it could be strengthened to help Camden and other localities in South Jersey, which have historically lost out to North Jersey in receiving economic benefits from the state,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Beside his work on the bill, Sheehan also helped the four businesses who were considering a move to Philadelphia — Cooper Health System; Conner Strong &amp; Buckelew; the Michaels Organization; and NFI — assemble their tax credit applications, Walden said.

Cooper Health was awarded nearly $40 million in tax credits to relocate to Camden. It submitted an application on Nov. 7, 2014, and stated that none of its employees were at risk of losing their jobs and wrote “TBD” in response to a question about whether it was considering leaving the state, according to a copy of its application shown during the hearing.

The next month, a Cooper Health executive told the state that it had located a property in Philadelphia. Four days later, the Economic Development Authority approved its tax credit submission.

A Cooper Health spokesman said on Thursday that the company was truthful in its application and had hired more employees than it had proposed. A representative for Conner Strong &amp; Buckelew said that suggestions made during the hearing were inaccurate and that the company was seriously considering a move out of state to consolidate its offices.

The building that Cooper Health eventually moved into had been owned by the Economic Development Authority, according to records obtained by The Times. The agency sold the site in late December 2014 to a nonprofit organization, which sold it that same day to a real estate investment group, documents show.

Intersecting nearly every piece of the testimony on Thursday, even though their names were rarely mentioned, were the Norcross brothers.

Parker McCay’s chief executive is Philip Norcross, whose brother is George Norcross, an insurance executive at Conner Strong and the chairman of the board of trustees of Cooper Health System.

A third brother, Donald Norcross, is a former Democratic state senator who represented Camden and had been a sponsor of the 2013 law; he is now a United States representative.

NEWARK, N.J. — The backlash over New Jersey’s lucrative corporate tax incentives grew on Thursday when it was disclosed that four politically connected companies received nearly $300 million in tax breaks based on questionable claims that they would otherwise move out of state.

Matthew Haag

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