Oral History of Peter W. Herman

Peter Herman: I am among the oldest and longest continuously involved people. And so when I talk about the Second Regional Plan, there are very few of us who were around when that went on. I’m gonna talk about my bio, the humorous parts of getting involved with RPA, and then I’ll briefly touch upon a handful of things in the more modern era. You may know that I was Chairman for 13 years, starting in ​‘97 and going to 2010. And so I lived through all the 9/11 issues. Anyway, let me start and you can interrupt me at any point if you want.

Sarah Coffman: Okay. I’ll let you go through your points. And then if I feel like I have questions at the end, I will gladly just ask those. Thanks so much for coming prepared though.

Peter Herman: This is gonna take about 10 minutes, I think. I graduated from Columbia law school in 1970 in June, and went to work at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, & McCloy, a very big New York law firm. In the spring of that year, the New York state legislature enacted a new statute called the not-for-profit corporation law, which governed all non-profit organizations and cultural institutions. And they abolished the old law, they repealed the so-called membership corporation law. What happened as a result of that is that all nonprofits in the state had to redo their bylaws and their governing documents to conform to the new statute. And Milbank Tweed had a very large practice involving cultural institutions and nonprofits, and some major ones like Rockefeller university and Museum of Natural History and Lincoln Center. But they also had a number of small organizations like RPA. All of the young associates were given a tutorial in the new statute and then assigned to one or two nonprofit clients to rewrite their bylaws. The short straw that I got was RPA, and it confirms something I thought of all my life, and that is I’d rather be lucky than smart. That was very lucky for me. I had some familiarity with RPA from Columbia Law School. I had taken a course in local government law, which involved land use planning and zoning. The big issue then, in 1968, was the formation of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the revolutionary idea at that time that bridge tolls should support mass transit – very controversial back then. In any event, the old RPA bylaws had to be rewritten completely.

Peter Herman: I went up to RPA and met with the president, John Keith, and Kim Norton, retired president. I went through the whole thing line by line and to my surprise, I had a lot of pushback from Kim Norton about changes. And then I realized, of course, he had written the original bylaws in 1929. He was president of the Regional Plan, but we did do new bylaws. As I was writing the new bylaws, a matter came along at RPA that needed legal work and John Keith asked my boss, the managing partner, Frank Musselman, if he would assign that nice young lawyer, Peter, to the account. That was the start. The next thing I knew, I was at a Board meeting in November of 1970, where they were gonna adopt the new bylaws. Kim Norton had invited me. I don’t know if you know much about Kim Norton, you certainly will find out if you pursue this. Kim was president for many, many years and sometime in the ​’60s, the executive vice president, John Keith, was promoted to president and Kim retired, but because Kim had been involved since almost the creation, he stayed on and they gave him an honorary title, which was counsel, but he really didn’t like that because even though he was a lawyer, he was not really in practice. And as he once privately confessed to me, his law degree had become a little rusty. He then realized we have this captive young lawyer. If I bring him to Board meetings, nobody’s gonna ask me questions. They’re gonna ask him. And so my 52-year career of going to RPA Board meetings started in 1970.

Peter Herman: I actually joined the Board as a director in 1987, which itself was 35 years ago, and I think I hold the record now as the longest continuously serving Board member. I’m very proud of that. The biggest issue at RPA in the early 1970s was suburban sprawl, the arch enemy of all urban planners then, and I might say now, too. As an observer of RPA at the time, I learned a lot about sprawl. The 1968 Second Regional Plan railed against suburban sprawl, but some of its antecedents, actually sprawl’s antecedents, can be found in the original 1929 plan. Although in fairness to the authors of that plan, this involved ways that could have not reasonably been foreseen in 1929, particularly the advent of World War II. The 1929 plan called for limited access highways, and I might say my specialty, if I have one, has been transportation all these years and the ​‘29 plan called for limited access highways. Examples of this existing today on Long Island are the Grand Central Parkway, the Northern and Southern State Parkways, all built by the great Robert Moses in the day; in Westchester, the Sawmill River, Bronx River, and Hutchinson River Parkways are also limited access highways.

Peter Herman: But the plan also called for, the ​‘29 plan, arterial highways. Much of this began with the passage of the Federal Highway Act in 1916. That was the precursor many years later of the Interstate Highway Act. But the federal highways started being built. And one of the first ones was US Highway 1, which went from the south in Miami all the way north to Maine. I think Eastport, Maine is the Northern terminal. One of the things that came along was how does this new highway cross the Hudson River? The only crossing was the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan. Limited access highways, by the way, were built more for leisure than for commuting or for commerce. They all had low bridges so no trucks and buses could really navigate. Arterial highways, on the other hand, were for commuting and commerce and trucks.

Peter Herman: So the first issue dealt with in transportation in the plan was, what about US 1 crossing the Hudson River? Where does that happen? The Port Authority that had only recently been formed at that plan suggested building the bridge, the Crossman into Manhattan at 57th Street, but the RPA committee drafting the plan said no, no, no, if you wanna have arterial connections, you have to do it at a narrow part of Manhattan. And they picked 179th Street so that the bridge across the Hudson River could then connect with 181st street, an existing bridge across the Harlem river, and onto what is now known as the Boston Post Road in the Bronx. That was a genius idea.

Peter Herman: The ​‘29 plan also endorsed subway expansion. And that continued pretty well until 1940. The Sixth Avenue line was the last major construction before the war. There was a novel, very novel commuter rail idea in the 1929 plan. At that time, there were multiple commuter lines coming into Manhattan. The New York Central and the New Haven Railroad came into Grand Central from the north, the Pennsylvania Railroad from the west into Penn Station, and the Long Island Railroad from the east. The 1929 plan had a great idea, that transportation plan as to this day, wish had actually happened. And it’s the famous upside down Y. What I mean by that is this, if you looked at the map of the lower half of Manhattan and put the stem of an upside down Y at Grand Central Terminal and drew the Y down all the way to Hanover Square in lower Manhattan. And then, the west branch of the Y would connect with the Jersey Central Railroad Terminal in Jersey City, now part of Liberty State Park and the east branch would connect to the Long Island Railroad at Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn. This would’ve unified commuter rail throughout the region. And it would’ve, in my opinion, and I think many planners would say if it had been built, it would’ve had a vastly positive effect on the economics and patterns of settlement here in the region. But because of the multiple different railroad lines involved, nobody could agree on who should build it. And so it was never built. And by the time World War II ended, virtually all of those commuter rail systems were on the verge of bankruptcy, or indeed did go bankrupt. They all did ultimately. So there was as a result of World War II, no highway, subway, or railroad construction. Diversion of funds went to the war effort from every source. There was poor maintenance and infrastructure deterioration everywhere. That could not have been foreseen in 1929, I think, and had the economy not been interrupted by the war, I think much more of what they proposed would’ve happened, but the war changed everything. And this is another antecedent of the Second Regional Plan.

Peter Herman: At the end of the war, there were returning soldiers and sailors and they all wanted to get a new life back to normal. And so the Veterans Administration supported low-interest, easy mortgages for home purchases. There is a novel concept, I think Ford Motor Companies started this, but the idea of an auto loan, you could borrow the money to buy a car. And then there were homebuilding innovations all over the place and all of this led to suburbanization in the ​’40s and ​’50s. David Halberstam’s book, The Fifties, has a chapter on the Levitt brothers which I think is very instructive and entertaining. I don’t know if you know about the Levitt brothers, but Bill Levitt was drafted into the Navy in World War II and he was assigned to the construction battalion in the Pacific known as the Fighting Seebees. I was a Navy guy too. The war in the Pacific, which every officer’s candidate studies these days, including when I was in ROTC, the war in the Pacific was an island hopper campaign, and the Seabees would land right after the Marines took control of an island, and there were eight or 10 of these islands over three years. I think Guadalcanal was the first one. And the Seabees would come in and build an airstrip, aircraft hangers, mess hall facilities, birthing facilities, and whatever else was needed to make a base almost overnight. And they became very adept at rapid construction very quickly. And so when the war ended, Bill Levitt formed a real estate company in Nassau County and he brought the Seabee plans and techniques to Nassau County and he bought something like 60 or 70 acres of potato fields at the time and began mass production, of large scale of a suburban town.

Peter Herman: One of the secrets was all plans for all the houses were identical and all parts were interchangeable. So that building’s foundationers, framers, plumbers, electricians, and all the rest were done in sequence. One day, they were in one house, the next day, the next house. And they could build a lot of houses very quickly and sell them cheaply. So low-cost housing, favorable cars, financing, and all that made for rapid suburbanization.

Peter Herman: The Second Regional Plan was written in multiple parts, an initial book followed by a separate supplement, several ones. The ones I remember best in the supplements were something called Spread City. It called for concentrated development of suburban centers, among many other things. And we had at that time, and for many years, a Board member named Bob Rich. Bob Rich was a real estate developer who bought a lot of land in downtown Stamford, Connecticut, and became the model of the Regional Plan notion of concentrated downtown development in suburban center cities. He stood as a monument to the planning recommendations that worked. Another innovative thing from the Second Regional Plan was a booklet called Urban Space for Pedestrians. It was the first planning paper that I know of that attacked cars. Cars are the root of all evil. And they called for parks, for more sidewalks, and for blocking cars from various places - topics, by the way, that are still on the table, to planners, very much, we learned during the pandemic. And I’ll digress and say, I grew up in Upper Manhattan and my street was not a very big thoroughfare, but in the ​’50s, the city cut the sidewalks back so to make another lane for cars on this tiny little street, and that went on all over the place. And I think RPA was the first organization to say, its people that count, not cars. The booklet, Urban Space for Pedestrians.

Peter Herman: Another one, there were four that I remember, the third one was one called River City. River City railed against water pollution. Remember back then there was no sewage treatment in New York city or anywhere else? Sewage went right into the river. There were also abandoned peers, railroad yards, warehouses, all falling apart and abandoned all along the waterfronts in all of the region. And RPA said, we need to reclaim the waterfront for recreational and other uses for building - let’s build apartment houses on the waterfront. People can get views. Now it was again, the first thing of that type.

Peter Herman: And then finally, a booklet called Race for Open Space. The Gateway National Recreation Area was formed in the early ​’70s. This is a personal story. I love it. Sandy Hook and Riis Park and Breezy Point and the Rockaways were part of this, taken over by the federal government, and also parts of Sandy Hook in New Jersey. And it became a national park in effect. There was one apartment building near Riis Park and the Rockaways that had been partially constructed. The developer wanted to build it and get it done before the recreation area came along. But the National Park Service got an injunction and there was a big litigation. Finally, at the time of the formation, they got permission to demolish the building, and it was one of those first controlled explosion demolitions and RPA chartered a bus to take some of the Board members and staff out to Breezy Point to watch this. And I wanted to go, but my boss for whatever reason kept me in the law firm and I couldn’t go. But since I was in a high rise building in lower Manhattan, I got a pair of binoculars and watched the demolition 20 miles away. It was fun. Regional Plan was integral to the formation of Gateway and many other open space projects. Sterling Forest, in later years in New York, in the Ramapo mountains.

Peter Herman: I witnessed a lot of things over the years. The television series CHOICES for ​’76. I did the legal work for RPA, working with ABC on the production contract for that. But throughout all of those years, the early years I have to say, I was an adviser, I was on the sidelines, but I was not in the midst of leadership.

Peter Herman: And that all changed in 1996. The Third Regional Plan had been published in 1996. The chairman of RPA at the time was involved in a personal controversy that led to his abrupt resignation in early 1997. And I was counsel, I’d taken that position when Kim Norton actually fully retired. And I was asked to be chairman for a temporary period of time that was estimated to be six months to a year. My tenure lasted 13 years. I’m gonna tell you three highlights from my time that I remember the best, although there were many, many other things, and there were other people, Claude Shostal being a name of someone you definitely need to interview, retired President.

Peter Herman: The first of these things was a press conference in 1999 in the Grand Hyatt ballroom with Lou Rudin. Lou Rudin was a very prominent real estate developer, head of the one of the civic organizations, For Better New York. And he was advocating with our help for the construction, ultimately, of the Second Avenue Subway, the full length from 125th street to Hanover Square. And he pointed out that his father, Sam Rudin, had been on the original citizens’ committee for the Second Avenue Subway in 1929. But I think this press conference was a catalyst, it got a lot of attention. And I thought it was the thing that began to bring that subway plan back to life. Claude Shostal, Bob Yaro also will tell you a lot about that.

Peter Herman: The second thing is September 11th, 2001. That changed everything on the RPA agenda. And the very first issue was what should replace the World Trade Center? The design of the original Trade Center, to planners, was viewed as a disaster, but there were many people who said, build it back just like it was. And we did not think so. And I’ll tell you at that time, Battery Park City immediately to the west of the Trade Center had been constructed using the spoils from the original Trade Center excavation as landfill. And a fellow named Alex Cooper, a famous architect, someone I had worked with at Rockefeller Center, designed the plan for Battery Park City. And what he did was put in the Lower Manhattan street grid into Battery Park City. So it looked like the rest of Lower Manhattan. In contrast, the original World Trade Center was a huge monolith that had almost no outdoor activity. It was a windswept plane in the winter, hot as can be in the summer, and it was inaccessible to automobiles, and many planners thought it was a huge mistake.

Peter Herman: There was in November of 2001, a Board of Directors dinner at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, hosted by Charlie Maikish, a board member from Chase. And we had dinner overlooking the pile as it was still burning. And I’ll never forget the idea of the sun setting over the Hudson River and the smoke coming out still six weeks later. But that meeting was very, very informative for this reason: on the back of a napkin, Bob Yaro and Charlie Maikish extended the street design from Battery Park City back across what had been the World Trade Center. And for the most part, that plan was what was ultimately adopted. We had to lobby and press and act for four or five years before the master plan was actually in place.

Peter Herman: We had two large-scale public events called ​“Listening to the City.” Again, Bob Yaro can tell you more about that. One thing I remember: the first design, which was a tentative design for the new World Trade Center, was presented in a slideshow at Listening to the City at the Javits Center. And this is the summer a year later, 2002, and people were asked to comment, and their comments were flashed up on a screen. I’ll never forget the one that brought down the house. It said, ​“This is awful. It looks like the Albany mall.” If you know what the Albany mall is, it’s a nondescript concrete monstrosity.

Peter Herman: The third of these events that I remember from my tenure was the Jets football stadium. This is 2005 and 2006. Deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff wanted the 2012 Olympics in New York and they wanted to build a huge new football stadium on the west side, just next to the Lincoln Tunnel, a largely derelict area at that time. And once the Olympics were over, the Jets would play their games there. We had a Board-level working committee to examine that proposal. And I remember being asked to go to the Board-level working committee meeting. And what they said was, as a matter of urban planning, putting a football stadium there is the worst possible land use decision you can make. We must oppose it. We should root for office retail, residential, mixed use, the higher and best use. We brought in a consultant who had been president of Rock Center Development Corporation who showed us that, as an economic matter, the mixed use big deal development would work. And I remember sitting there saying to Dick Ravitch who was on that committee, ​“You mean to tell me that this small nonprofit organization should take the lead in opposing the pet project of Mayor Bloomberg?”

Peter Herman: And the answer was yes, and it took many years. We had a lot of trouble, the legislative people favoring it worked over our Board members and we had three or four resignations of prominent Board members instigated by Bloomberg. But at the end of the day, the state legislative leaders, three years later, rejected the plan. And that was it. And in the aftermath of that, something called Hudson Yards came along just exactly as we had proposed. So that’s the end of my prepared texts. Please ask me anything you want. I have institutional memory, but at my age, I’m losing it.

Sarah Coffman: Well, thank you so much for bringing all of that. I could ask you so many things, but I have my set of questions that I want to see and make sure that kind of covers everything. What would you say was RPA’s greatest accomplishment during your tenure?

Peter Herman: You know, that’s a hard one because there are so many good things, and not all of them were very big. I will tell you things that are pending on the agenda today that started way back when that are not yet fulfilled that would be very big deals. And let me start by saying Gateway project, the Hudson river tunnels, the railroad tunnels being built with the reconstruction of Penn Station. If those things come to fruition in the next five or eight years, that would be a great accomplishment. And it started back when. I remember going to a meeting with a government committee called the Access to the Region’s Core project, and that was in the late 1990s, maybe even the mid-1990s, that gave rise ultimately to the Gateway Project. Another thing, I think, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center - we were instrumental in the design that was ultimately picked. And I suppose if you look at the great things that were done in recent years, the Trade Center with our heavy influence, Penn Station, still in the planning stage. And of course, I hope one day my grandchildren will see the whole Second Avenue Subway built. But it’ll take that long. When you look back at history again, the 1929 plan was a great blueprint. Many of the things they proposed happened and benefited the region, particularly in the area of transportation. But you know, it’s always a fight. Nothing comes easy in this city and this region. And one of the aims of the 1996 Third Regional Plan was to reform government in a way that it worked better for the people and worked better for the building of infrastructure. And I think even though that was an objective of the plan, we and the region get the grade of F - government is not responsive.

Sarah Coffman: Yeah, it sounds like a consistent challenge to work with that as, not necessarily like a pair, but you have to work in tandem with them. And in line with that, what would you say, would you say that that has been RPA’s greatest challenge, and it will continue to be the greatest challenge?

Peter Herman: I would say, absolutely, it is that the government is not responsive to the issues raised by RPA and making anything happen successfully is worse than pulling teeth. And it’s not necessarily the people in government are bad. It’s the way government is structured. And I’ll give you just one example. This came up maybe five or six years ago. The idea of extending the Second Avenue Subway from 96th Street up through east Harlem to 120th Street, you know, a distance of maybe two and half miles. And we wanted legislative financial support from the state legislature to get that project going. And it was not forthcoming. And many of the state assembly people from upstate New York said, ​“Why should we support the subways of New York? What good does that do my district in the Adirondacks?” And was quoted in the New York Times by saying, ​“People who say that are either evil or ignorant because they don’t see the benefit of a prosperous city to the state and they’re too locally focused.” I mean, there was a publication by RPA in the ​’60s called 1200 Governments and they identified all the instruments of government in the region, in the 21-county RPA region. And there were more than 1200. Now there are more than 2000 and this includes not only municipalities and villages and towns and counties, but also sewage districts, water districts, things like that. But the system of government here is incoherent

Sarah Coffman: And for it to continue to be an issue, I mean, obviously, I hope at some point things improve, but it seems unlikely. But to pivot to something more positive, what would you say your greatest accomplishment was and what are you most proud of?

Peter Herman: Well, in the connection with RPA, let me say, although I’ve had a long involvement with RPA, I was in the law firm for 45 years, starting as a brand new associate and ultimately retiring as the head of the real estate practice group at Milbank. And I had my fingerprints deeply on many large real estate projects around the country. Most particularly, I spent 28 years working on the development of Embarcadero center in downtown San Francisco, which is a big multi-use project, retail parking, hotel, office. But in RPA, I think the greatest accomplishment, looking back, was the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in a design that makes sense for the city and for lower Manhattan. I might say just to complete the RPA, isn’t the only civic organization that I’ve spent a lot of time with. There was one other, and that is the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association, started by David Rockefeller in 1958, and I was counsel for them. And in fact in many ways brought RPA and DLA together on many issues.

Sarah Coffman: Can you maybe talk a little bit about that overlap because Christina (Kata) did say that there was some kind, some overlap between Rockefeller and RPA at certain points.

Peter Herman: Oh, no doubt about it. I mean, let’s start with the fact that David Rockefeller himself had given a relatively modest contribution financially to RPA for many, many years. Four years ago or so five years ago, there is a fund at RPA, which the organization, I’m proud to say, established in my name, the Peter W. Herman Chair for Transportation, and David Rockefeller contributed $100,000 to that endowment. It absolutely knocked me over. But the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund and various other things under their control have funded projects for RPA over the years. I don’t know that it has been all that significant, but in terms of philosophy, the idea of developing our region in the way that RPA has proposed was warmly accepted by the Rockefeller family, various of them.

Peter Herman: I’ll give you a couple of examples. Lawrence Rockefeller was a very big supporter of open space all over the region. John D. Rockefeller, III was instrumental in forming Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. David himself was sort of a promoter of lower Manhattan in many ways. He built Chase Manhattan Plaza - at a time when all the financial institutions were migrating to Midtown in 1960, they opened Chase Manhattan Plaza as the first big new high rise, you know, in many, many years. And that was his sort of planting the flag that Lower Manhattan is not over. He also lobbied his brother, the governor, to build the World Trade Center in the 1960s. Nelson Rockefeller was governor when that started and David, supporting Lower Manhattan, wanted to put that in Lower Manhattan. In fact, there’s a funny story that I’ll tell you, especially since you’re at Rutgers – they wanted to put the World Trade Center on the East River where the heliport is now, on landfill, more or less, at Wall Street. And there was a lot of planning for that. And at that time, what is now known as the PATH Hudson tubes, they were called back then, the railroad was in bankruptcy and there was lobbying. I think Governor Meyner in New Jersey was governor. Then this is the late ​’50s, early ​’60s and Governor Meyner, wanted the Port Authority to take over the bankrupt railroad and rebuild it, rehab it.

And the Port Authority said, ​“we’ll do that, if the New Jersey Port Authority commissioners approve the World Trade Center,” and Governor Meyner said, ​“I’ll make that deal with you on one condition, you move the World Trade Center to the Hudson river so that my people can see it.” And that’s what happened. Way back then I was in high school or at least college. I believe the Regional Plan was a supporter of the World Trade Center the first time around and certainly supported the takeover of the PATH rail system, which was going to close. Would’ve been a disaster for New Jersey. So that’s the involvement, as far as I remember it and know of it, between the Rockefeller and Regional Plan and, and the ideas of Regional Plan.

Sarah Coffman: Thank you for that. That was something Christina (Kata) had mentioned that I was very interested in, the connection between the two. So obviously you have a long tenure, and a question that I have, another question I have is, were there, I’m sure there were many, but any unexpected events, you’ve talked about 9/11, obviously during your career that RPA had to respond to? And can you describe how they responded and if you felt like their approach was effective?

Peter Herman: Well, obviously 9/11 was the worst, totally unexpected event that ever happened in the lifetime of certainly most New Yorkers and people in the region. Let me just say, wholly apart from the planning aspects, there are personal aspects, even to people who were observers. Let’s remember Chase Manhattan Plaza was exactly two blocks from the World Trade Center. And I was there and when the first building fell, we were all assembled in some conference rooms and the cafeteria in the law firm. I remember watching it and all of a sudden huge black dust came up from the ground and was as dark as midnight. You couldn’t see the building across the street, the lights were on, couldn’t see it. And I said, ​“This is like a Godzilla movie, except we’re all in it.” But at least we weren’t killed. I mean, we just witnessed it. And I’ll tell you one other story. We were kept, the police department kept people in office buildings and were not allowed on the street for an hour or so after the second tower fell, there was just too much debris in the air and it was unsafe. And finally they let us go out and we exited east toward Water Street and then north up through Chinatown and into the Lower East Side. And when we got to the corner of Liberty and Water Street, and I was with two colleagues, I looked to the south and it was like a million people on the street. I mean, it was like the Exodus, the biblical Exodus.

Peter Herman: And we walked all the way north to Houston Street. And by the time we got to Houston Street, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. And one of my colleagues said, you know, ​“I’m tired, I’m hungry. Is there any place around here we can get something to eat?” And a light bulb went off in my head. The most famous Jewish delicatessen in New York is two blocks from here. Katz, Katz on Essex. ​“You want a pastrami sandwich for lunch?” And the answer is yeah. And the one thing I remember is my old beat-up flip phone was not working. But one of my younger colleagues sitting there in Katz had a more modern up-to-date phone, and I was finally able to call my wife in Westchester and say, we’re all right. She was worried sick. And there was no way to communicate. And we had no idea that the Pentagon was under attack or anything like that. In any event, I was sitting there eating my pastrami sandwich, thinking, you know, is the world gonna come to an end today? Or what? It was really very, very traumatic. And of course, we thought that there were huge casualties, you know, more than the 3000 that ultimately turned out. I thought there’d be 10,000 people killed. Anyway, that’s a personal recollection of something totally unexpected.

Peter Herman: The only other unexpected thing that happened. And this is personal to me, when, Gary Wendt abruptly resigned as chairman in 1997. And it had nothing to do with RPA. He was in a minor scandal with his ex-wife, I might say. Elevating me to be chairman was totally unexpected and came out of nowhere and changed my life. I mean, for 13 years. But you know, one of the great things about planning is that RPA and the planners on the staff are trained to try to anticipate the unexpected and try and plan for it.

Peter Herman: I can’t at the moment think of anything anywhere close to the scale of the World Trade Center. Obviously, the football stadium, we never in a million years thought that the football stadium was a realistic idea. That it would ever happen. And I have to say, as a lawyer, a real estate lawyer, I read the environmental impact statement drafted by the state of New York for that project. And this is the age of computerized word processing before I think the desktops were as popular as they are now, but you could search a document online. And I searched the EIS, which was about 1200 pages long with the exhibits, for the words ​“Lincoln Tunnel.” And it appeared twice only in passing - the fact that this thing would be built adjacent to the Lincoln Tunnel and would have huge impacts on traffic patterns. I mean, where are the 60,000 people gonna park? I’ll tell you what the scheme was in a minute and where, where are they gonna have their picnic? You know, I mean, come on. And so I thought the people who would sue to block it would surely win. And so we were not that worried about it, except that directors from Con Edison, from Verizon, from Brooklyn Union Gas, all abruptly resigned from the Board in the wake of our opposing the stadium, only because their chain had been jerked by Bloomberg and Doctoroff. And so it was political warfare. And I have to say, I had not myself ever experienced, you know, that kind of political activity on that scale. But we knew in our heart of hearts that that stadium was a dumb idea that ultimately they would lose, even if it had taken five years of litigation. And I think it’s fair to say that our planning staff, people, and certain Board members, anticipated that this was not ever gonna happen.

Sarah Coffman: That’s really interesting to think about urban planners planning for the unexpected. What else would you say that you’ve learned about planning through your exposure to RPA coming from a law background?

Peter Herman: Well, from my law background and from things I’ve seen elsewhere and certainly from my exposure to people on the RPA staff, well-planned, well-designed things succeed more often than those that are not well-planned and well-designed. It’s worth it to have a very capable architect work with planners, as was done on Battery Park City, I might say, and I believe we were supportive of Alex Cooper and his design. Certainly, it has been a success in terms of the institutions that are down there and the people that live in the apartment buildings. It’s a very, very successful project. Well-designed, well-executed, well-planned. I think that’s true for virtually everything. And it’s interesting that universities are now attracting more and more students into planning programs. Columbia, where I went, had a School of Architecture, but it’s now called Architecture, Preservation, and Planning. My son, who’s 29 years old, was a geography major in college at Chicago, U Chicago. And he got, mostly because of RPA, went to a graduate program in planning at Penn. One of our board members, an architect named Marilyn Taylor, who used to be at Skidmore, was Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, now known as Penn design. And my son got a master’s degree in - brace yourself - something called urban spatial analytics. Don’t ask me what that is. Maybe you know, I don’t know, but he was an intern. I have to say, I got him the internship at RPA in geographic information systems for the summer. And that’s how he got into all this stuff. And so that’s another way that RPA has influenced my life. I would not have known about that program if I hadn’t met and known Marilyn Taylor.

Sarah Coffman: I’m interested in the growth of urban planning as a field because I took a geography course this past semester at Rutgers and there were a lot of master’s of urban planning students there. So I would say I’m going to pay closer attention to that because I’m coming from a history background, and my work overlaps with urban planning a lot, and I think it would benefit a lot of different fields to take courses in urban planning.

Peter Herman: I think it’s something for the future, particularly as the world and planning and architecture have all been computerized to the level they have. We bought a new car last year for the first time in 11 years. And of course it has a screen with GIS directions. I sit here and I say, this lady on the screen just told me what the speed limit is. What is going on here? The amount of programmer time it must take to program the entire country like that or the world is unbelievable. So yeah, I would say geographic information systems is a field for the future.

Sarah Coffman: To pivot for a little bit, do you feel like RPA ever took the wrong stance or side concerning a particular issue?

Peter Herman: The answer to that is yes in some respects because they couldn’t get what they wanted. And I’ll give you one example again from the period of 2000 to 2010. Bob Yaro was president then. So often, Regional Plan Association comes up with innovative ideas that for one reason or another do not happen. I’ll tell you two of them, both, believe it or not, involved the borough of Queens. It was suggested at one point that the Javits Center had been put in the wrong place and that it should be torn down, and high-end office and/or residential should be there. And that the state of New York that owns the site would reap a huge benefit, and that the Javits Center could be built more economically in Queens, on a deck above the Sunnyside railroad yards. And that in fact, two subway lines could have stations virtually adjacent to the Javits Center. If it were built out there, it would be accessible. You could even put a siding if you wanted of the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station, and as a transportation matter and a land use matter. This is many, I would say a couple of hundred acres of open space that is dedicated to railroad yards that could be decked over very easily and given to alternative uses such as a convention center. And I really favored that. I thought that was a great idea, but there was a lot of pushback from a lot of sources. And so Javits, at least for now, has stayed where it is. And in fact, it’s been expanded. So the likelihood of it being torn down and moved elsewhere is small.

Peter Herman: But also involved in Queens is the question of rapid transit access to LaGuardia, an issue that’s been kicking around for most of all of our lifetimes. And there are a number of different ways to accomplish that. One of which is on the table right now, a spur from Citi Field along the parkway to the airport. But another one is to extend the R train from its termination at Astoria Boulevard and just put it on top of the Grand Central Parkway for about two miles and put a subway station or two in LaGuardia. For whatever reason, that very obvious idea has been rejected, and the neighborhood doesn’t want it. And so RPA said, ​“Okay, there is a major transportation hub in Queens right now called Woodside, and subway lines and the Long Island Railroad all have stations at Woodside. Why not put a super people mover from Woodside to LaGuardia, which is only about a mile and a quarter and just rename Woodside, LaGuardia Station?” And I thought that was a genius idea. It would have to involve a lot of eminent domain to get the right of way, but a lot of it was derelict, the old apartment buildings from the pre-war era that could easily have been condemned and not be a gigantic price. But again, there was a ton of pushback, and we gave up that project.

Peter Herman: So, yeah. Are there things that I regret didn’t happen? Yeah, but the biggest thing I regret that didn’t happen was the building of the full length Second Avenue Subway. It should have gone from 63rd Street down to Times Square, and quite frankly, it should have connected under the East River to the Atlantic Terminal of the Long Island Railroad. That would’ve been at least one part of the upside down ​“Y.”

Sarah Coffman: Hmm. I see. Also, yeah, with regard to the LaGuardia issue, there’s just no good way to get there. Especially if you’re traveling from Jersey, like I know most people would probably go out of Newark, but if you have to go to LaGuardia, there’s no good way to get there. So interesting to hear there are conversations about rapid transit access.

Peter Herman:I have to say the ​“Train to the Plane” that the Port Authority ultimately did put in at Kennedy was another notion of RPA, that Kennedy should be made accessible to the mass transit system. There are numerous different ways to do it. The subway has a station, an aqueduct, which is adjacent to the airport, and for a long time, there was a dedicated express subway on the Eighth Avenue line that had nonstop service from Manhattan to the airport station where you got a bus to go around the terminal. Ultimately the AirTrain was built, and part of it has two legs. One leg connects to the IND subway at Jamaica, and the other, of course, goes along the Van Wyck Expressway to Jamaica Station on the Long Island Railroad. It’s better than no access at all, and we certainly favored it. And I remember getting a sneak peek with the Board. The Port Authority invited the Board to have a look before it was open. And it was very, very exciting. But sure, would I rather have seen the Long Island Railroad extend itself to Kennedy? Sure. It would’ve been much more efficient, but you know, not in the cards for a lot of reasons. So politics, I mean, the enemy of planning is not only sprawl. It’s also politics.

Sarah Coffman: Two questions. So, what are some of the greatest issues that RPA is facing at the present moment? And then, what does the future of RPA look like to you?

Peter Herman: Well, number one, let me say that during the tenure of Tom Wright as president and the current chairman, they have made major accomplishments at many levels, not the least of which is financially being much more secure than we had been for a while. They have more contributors, more sources of revenue, and as far as I’m aware, are in a relatively stable financial environment. Also, the Board is 50% or more larger than when I was there, which brings in more people, more revenue, more interest, more everything.

Peter Herman: Issues that face the region that we can continue to press on? Well, the Gateway Tunnels to me are the most important thing. If that doesn’t happen, we may very well lose connectivity by rail to New Jersey, or at least half of it. That would be a major crisis, economically and for the commuter population. We need those two extra tunnels, badly. Coincident with that, there needs to be a major rehab of Penn Station and an expansion of Penn Station over the one block to the south, which is where the Gateway Tunnels would come in. It would be really a crisis if that didn’t happen. And, you know, there’s one other thing, the bridge on the Jersey side, I forget the name of that bridge, but it’s a railroad bridge across the Hackensack River. That was built in 1902 and has been rehabbed a little bit since then, but that bridge could fall into the river and there goes the NJ Transit connection to Manhattan. It would be a major crisis. That is part of the Gateway, the rehabbing of that bridge. I used to know that bridge by heart. Other things, I do think that a connection of some kind to LaGuardia is a high priority. As you point out, it’s terrible, it’s an outrage. I think extending the Second Avenue Subway, at least up to 125th, is a high priority. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense to connect the New York City subway system to the wealthy Upper East Side and let the poor Upper East Side suffer. That’s stupid. You want to get the people up in Harlem on the subway to reach jobs in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. It’s an essential public service, as far as I’m concerned. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

Peter Herman: Another priority, and again, I focus on transportation because that’s my primary issue, the so-called Interborough or Triborough line. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that is something that’s very feasible. Governor Hochul has said she’s in favor of it, and the head of the MTA said he’s in favor of it, and it could have wonderful ramifications for the ability to move people to jobs and school because it would interconnect with something like nine - the New York City subway system is what is known as a spoke system. It emanates from Manhattan, you know, in three directions. But what this would do is connect all the spokes in the outer boroughs. It’s an abandoned rail line or mostly abandoned rail line for freight that could be repurposed as a subway line above ground. It’s in a ditch basically. And we could connect virtually all the lines in Brooklyn and Queens with it. And so I think RPA did a survey that somebody who lived in Forest Hills, let’s say, but wanted to go to college at Brooklyn College would have to go all the way into Manhattan and all the way back down to Flatbush. But with this, they could be there in 25 minutes.

Sarah Coffman: Any other kind of major suggestions for the future?

Peter Herman: Well, I go back to the major failing of the Second Regional Plan that was only lightly touched upon in the Fourth Regional Plan, for the reason that it was somewhat of an embarrassment and really beyond the capabilities of an organization like RPA to have much influence. But it’s the issue with, government is not responsive to the needs of the people. Structurally, for the reason, I gave the example of the guy from the Adirondacks who doesn’t care about the subway system, you know, why should I care about anything in the Adirondacks, if he doesn’t care about us? So how to reform government is probably the biggest job for a coalition of civic organizations of right-thinking people. RPA could certainly be part of it, but it would be a much bigger thing than just for us. And I don’t think there’s any dispute, by the way, if you were to poll the Board of Directors of RPA and the staff, I think you’d get almost unanimous consent too, that the government doesn’t help us.

Sarah Coffman: Grim.

Peter Herman: But it’s not as grim as a lot of other things.

Sarah Coffman: So, can you briefly talk about the organization of the Board?

Peter Herman: Yeah. The organization of the Board, particularly as it is today, consists largely of people who are employed in businesses throughout the region. One of the things we’ve always had trouble doing is getting people from outside of Manhattan to be on the Board, you know, proportionately to the population. And it’s still a problem. We have good representation now from Connecticut and New Jersey. We generally had better representation from New Jersey than any other non-Manhattan section. And it’s largely business people, but there are some academic people, some people sprinkling, I think, from other institutions, of cultural kind. And you know, we’ve had some success in attracting women and minority people. Not as much as we would’ve liked. And I think that’s improving.One area, I live in Westchester, but for many years, we had a small cabin in the woods in Putnam County. And it’s always been hard to get people from the Hudson Valley to come into RPA. I don’t know why that is. Just maybe don’t have that much of a connection with the region. They think they’re somewhere else, although they’re not. Dutchess and Putnam and Orange, we’re all still part of this region, but they’re pretty far-flung and have connectivity without having to go through New York City.

Sarah Coffman: So we have about two questions left. If you could talk about what does the Centennial founding anniversary of RPA mean to you, and what did it mean to you to work for RPA and also have your career or involvement extend into the present?

Peter Herman: Well, the Centennial is a major thing. I think only the Chicago Plan predates the 1929 Regional Plan. So we were the second region to have a comprehensive plan. And I have to say it was a milestone. It inspired three more regional plans. It really was a guiding light from 30 years or so. And I have to say, I think it’s a great thing that we’re celebrating a hundred years of knowing about what regional planning is. Prior to that time, most people would not have ever heard the word planning, certainly not regional scale planning. And so I’m very pleased and I think it’s a wonderful milestone. For me personally, this has been a major avocation. Obviously it wasn’t a paying position. And so I had to work full time at the law firm, but the law firm Milbank historically has had its partners be involved in civic affairs of one kind or another; it’s traditional. I must say some of the things I learned in real estate development have helped me understand planning and conversely, some of the things I learned at Regional Plan involving planning have also helped in my law practice, particularly on these large scale projects.

Peter Herman: The Embarcadero center in San Francisco was a major inspiration for the building of bay area rapid transit because market street ended at the Embarcadero. And the only way to get to Oakland is either drive your car or ride the ferry and for a major metropolitan area, that was ridiculous. And in the’70s, the building of BART was a major accomplishment. And one of the things that I lobbied our clients to do was to lobby BART to build a station at Embarcadero. So right under the office buildings is the Embarcadero station. Should have been named after me because I leaned on them forever to do it, but it really helped the value of the neighborhood and the property.

Peter Herman: Another big project I worked on, although it was mostly underway before I came along, was something in the Southwest urban renewal area of Washington called L’Enfant Plaza. L’Enfant Plaza was a complex of four office buildings, a retail structure, and a hotel. And it was built sort of off the national mall in the direction of the Potomac River, an area that at the time had been a total slum and which had been ignored by the city fathers in DC forever. And L’Enfant was built and it didn’t really rent very well. The Lowes hotel didn’t really prosper very well. And then all of a sudden they started designing the Washington DC Metro, and I suggested very quietly, get a station at L’Enfant Plaza, and they did better than that. A major rail Metro junction underlies L’Enfant Plaza. And I gotta tell you, it turned that project around from bad to very prosperous. You gotta be on a rail line if we’re in the downtown area.

Peter Herman: The bottom line is I would not have thought of that in either place if I hadn’t known about RPA and been involved. Concentrate development near rail stations. That’s an element of an antidote for spread city. Put residential high rise buildings in Mineola or New Brunswick, I should say.

Sarah Coffman: It sounds like you carried a lot from your involvement with RPA to other projects.

Peter Herman: A lot of it is intangible in ways I can’t even articulate, but to learn to respect other people’s ideas. Don’t be bullheaded and try and understand what they’re talking about. And that’s great for business and negotiation too.

Sarah Coffman: Can you talk about the culture of RPA?

Peter Herman: Well, the culture, the culture is set, or has been set, largely by the president. I think with the participation of the chairman and a handful of key Board members in my time, and I think this is still the same. When we had a board of maybe 50 people, 20 of them were true believers and paid real close attention and were interested in what was going on and wanted to influence what was going on; the other 20 or 30 were interested to a level, but not that greater level. And I think the staff, especially those who went to Board meetings or committee meetings, were able to discern who was really interested and who wasn’t, and interacted with the interested part. Now the Board has doubled the size of what it was when I was chairman, and I am gonna guess that maybe that 20 has increased to 30 or 35. One of the problems I have these days is that so much of my participation for the last two and a half years has been this way on zoom. I have actually had medical trouble with my feet and I have to walk with a walker, not life threatening or anything, but my balance is a mess. And so moving around and coming into meetings would’ve been hard anyway, but with the pandemic, it was totally compelling that I operate by zoom. And so I don’t have the level of interaction with either the Board or staff in person that I would’ve liked to have had. I was part of a fundraising exercise this spring, along with Claude, in which we canvassed, maybe 50 Regional Plan staff and Board alumni asking for contributions in honor of the Centennial. There are other fundraising efforts also involved, but because we had to sign a zillion letters and write personal PS to make it more personal, I didn’t want to come into New York. So I invited Claude and three staff members, including Christina Kata, up to Scarsdale for lunch. And that was the first in-person interaction with any of those people I had had probably in two and a half years. And it was a lot of fun, enjoyable. And after we did our lunch and signed all the letters, they came back to my house and we talked for a while about what was going on. And I kind of said, you know, I miss the informal interaction. It’s gonna come back. I’m sure. Because the pandemic is,I hope, loosening its grip, although I’ve gotta say my 31 year old daughter in Miami caught it yesterday. So I’m still spooked. I somehow managed largely by being a total homebody tio have avoided it so far, but I worry that either my wife or both are gonna get it. But that’s taken its toll on everybody one way or another, the pandemic. And I think we’re gonna come out of it. I enjoyed the interaction with the three young ladies from the staff and reminded me of the good old days

Sarah Coffman: To wrap up the interview, would you mind telling me any story that has not come up yet, but really shaped your time at RPA? It could be as long or short as you like, just to talk about anything that hasn’t come up yet to you.

Peter Herman: Well, I should say the very first time I came up to go over the bylaw issues with John Keith and Kim Norton, after we had gone through the bylaw exercise, I said to them, well, now that I know all about how this place is organized, what is it you exactly do? That precipitated an hour and a half of war stories by these two very senior people at RPA for the benefit of a 26 year old, young lawyer. That was absolutely endearing in every way. And a lot of the stuff I just mentioned at the beginning about the first Regional Plan and the Second Regional Plan were things that I learned on my very first day with them. The two of them were like, you know, … it was like a movie almost, we did this, we did that. We did the other thing – fascinating to me. I mean, I was always interested in this kind of thing, geography, planning, and so it was totally unexpected. But as I said, when I started this interview I’d rather be lucky than smart. And I was so lucky that I had to deal with these two guys and they were so animated and for whatever reason became interested in having me be part of it. And that, you know, that was just a whim. It could have been nothing but an unexpected event. The whole involvement of my lifetime was an unexpected event. I never, in a million years, thought I would have any kind of role at RPA as I did. It was a life changing event. and it recurred. I mean, hardly any day went by that I didn’t have something to do with RPA. And certainly in the 13 years that I was chairman, I think I talked first to Claude and then to Bob Yaro when he took over, almost every day, certainly twice a week, at least.

Peter Herman: And that reminds me, I have to tell you a great story that I use whenever I’m at an event with Claude Shostall. Claude had been president since about, I’m gonna guess 1991 or so, maybe 1990. And I had known Claude for years because he was an officer of Rockefeller Center Development Corporation, which was one of the big clients of Milbank in real estate that I work with a lot. And when Gary Wendt, the chairman, abruptly resigned, Claude with the benefit of the nominating committee called me and said, ​“We need you to be chairman of RPA for an interim period.” And I said, ​“Well, I have to get Millbank’s permission.” That’s a major assignment, but I said, ​“Promise me three things, promise me I won’t have to spend substantially more with this organization, then I already do. Promise me that this organization is not in financial trouble of any kind. And thirdly, promise me, as long as I am chairman, you will stay on as president.” And then I say to the people, when I raise my glass in honor of Claude, until he came to me in 2001 and said,” I want to retire.” Until that time, I thought he had only lied to me about two of the three things. That always gets a laugh. So maybe I should end on that note.