Regina Myer:
When I took the Brooklyn job, I really knew that I could do something there because I loved Brooklyn. I moved to Brooklyn in 1991 and started to get sort of obsessed with the fact that there was so much potential here. We just knew that Brooklyn couldn't be the second city anymore.
Narrator:
Hey BK with Ofer Cohen
Ofer Cohen:
So, welcome to Hey BK, Regina Myer, one of the most important people in the Brooklyn transformation in the last 25 years. A couple of days ago I sent Regina an email or text and I forwarded her a picture on Instagram that had the opening of Brooklyn Bridge Park. What did you say? You said Best Day in Brooklyn, no, "best day for Brooklyn". Tell me about that moment a little bit.
Regina Myer:
Opening up Brooklyn Bridge Park was really, I think one of Brooklyn's best moments in the past 10 years. Um, it was really a transformational idea to build Brooklyn Bridge Park. And for 20 years the community fought to build the park on those piers. But nobody really got it. Nobody really believed it at first. And honestly, when it was first proposed, it was the wrong thing to do, there was so much more to do in Brooklyn in terms of rebuilding Prospect Park and rebuilding our neighborhoods. But when it got going and when Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki decided to hit the go button, I was in the right place at the right time. I got to the state offices and I was overwhelmed with how much had to get done and we worked so hard the first three years to prove to everybody that there could be a great park on the Brooklyn Waterfront. So that moment was really a coming out party.
Ofer Cohen:
Was it the biggest moment of your career?
Regina Myer:
Yeah, it was the biggest day in my career. I would say, honestly I just had this flashback that I think the approvals, the city council approvals for Greenpoint, Williamsburg were huge, huge day for me too. That was just such a Gargantuan effort. But yes, I mean building Brooklyn Bridge Park was clearly, I think once in a lifetime opportunity for anybody. And that moment really encapsulated it all.
Ofer Cohen:
As I was going through your biography and I saw that, you know, you worked as a city planner for many years and then you became the head of the Brooklyn office for city planning. And so the first thing that I was wondering about was who wakes up in the morning and decides that that's what they want to do.
Regina Myer:
I always loved New York City. I grew up on Long Island, um, but my parents owned a liquor store in midtown Manhattan. And I fell in love with coming into the city with my parents really, really early on. So coming to the city planning department, I felt really privileged, that this was that I had the opportunity to work in, in a place that was dedicated to the future of New York City was a pretty special gig for me.
Ofer Cohen:
So that's basically what you want it to do. I mean, you kinda took that path strategically?
Regina Myer:
Not really. I was in college. I went to the University of Michigan. I really, I got off, I got out of the East Coast and I was messing around playing in the music business. I was the music director of a college radio station, WCBN, which was an incredible time for me. Had nothing to do with loving New York City.
Ofer Cohen:
What kind of music did you guys play?
Regina Myer:
It was, it was the, you know, the hay day of punk and new wave era. But we really got into a lot of music. I mean, we were in Detroit, so, you know, I had a lot of special times playing music and then it sort of ended for me. I realized that I didn't really want to do that. And um, then I realized I had to find something to do and I remember I had a temp job in the Upper East Side and one day I just said, you know, I love the city, let me just check this out. And I started taking planning classes at Michigan and decided to stay on and was really lucky enough to come home. And, I had a neighbor who was one of the city planning commissioners, Marty Galland and he got me my first job.
Ofer Cohen:
That's amazing. So when you took the head of the city planning in Brooklyn job, did you know what you got yourself into?
Regina Myer:
When I took the Brooklyn job, I really knew that I could do something there because I loved Brooklyn. I moved to Brooklyn in 1991 and started to really get sort of obsessed with the fact that there was so much potential here and I had a lot of colleagues who felt the same way and that was an amazing time. I was promoted to director during Mayor Giuliani's And we just knew that Brooklyn couldn't be the second city anymore, that there was a place here that was as special Manhattan and I had worked in the Manhattan office. So I had become obsessed with turning the Brooklyn Office into a place that was as dynamic as the Manhattan office.
Ofer Cohen:
Fast Forward to that period 2004 or five when all the big rezoning processes took place. Walk us through this year.
Regina Myer:
What was incredible was when Mayor Bloomberg came into office, he hired an incredible team, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, he chair of the city planning commission was Amanda Burton and when we started talking to them about what the future could be in Brooklyn, all they said to us was go, no one said that was a bad idea or think about it a different way. They were like, that's a great idea. Let's do it. So the three things that we pitched to Amanda and Dan, right off the bat, were rezoning for Downtown Brooklyn, rezoning Park Slope, and rezoning Greenpoint and Williamsburg.
Ofer Cohen:
These are the three districts with the most amount of density in Brooklyn.
Regina Myer:
We just really knew that they were great places for the borough to grow that could really be a spin off what was already happening in Brooklyn. I mean we knew that people were investing in our brownstone neighborhoods. I lived in North Park Slope and really love that neighborhood. But we also just knew that more people, more things could happen and that there was room for growth in the right ways. And we also loved these neighborhoods. These neighborhoods really deserved recognition and we spend a lot of time in the years before studying them and getting ready. But when Dan and Amanda said, go, we were ready and we had really basic concepts, planning concepts, it made perfect sense for Park Slope. It was preserved that old, the wonderful mid-blocks. But, let growth happen on Fourth Avenue, which sits right above the subways and was really sort of an obvious place to connect Gowanus to Park Slope. But Downtown Brooklyn, it was a zone really spinning off the success of Metrotech along Flatbush and Willoughby. And that's where the idea started was that Metrotech had stabilized Downtown Brooklyn. Now, what's the next phase? And I really pushed during that era to really look at both sides of Flatbush Avenue. And, that's what really spawned, I think, the growth into a great vibrant mixed-use downtown and for Greenpoint and Williamsburg there were a few different things happening that were really, really an incredible story for New York City. And the neighborhoods were really, although they'd been disinvested in, they started to be rediscovered by not just the artist community, but young people taking the L train to NYU and the community really started to fight against the manufacturing land on the East River waterfront and we started to really think hard that residential and park uses with the right thing to do when we did a lot of analysis, a bit how much illegal use within, in the neighborhood already, which was basically loft conversion and really started to understand how important the L train was. That Bedford Avenue was going to be the place
Ofer Cohen:
You guys probably had no idea the residential development is gonna take off. Nobody had an idea that rents are going to go up and support The residential development that eventually happened in such a massive scale.
Regina Myer:
No one in the early two thousands understood how strong the residential market would be in any place in Brooklyn. When did you move to Brooklyn?
Ofer Cohen:
I moved to Brooklyn and 2004.
Regina Myer:
So when you got here, what was it like?
Ofer Cohen:
It was a bargain, Brooklyn in 2004 and when I started the company subsequently in 2008, I thought it's going to take 20 years for, for this to be a sort of like in Manhattan market and it took five years.
Regina Myer:
Since then, you've made Brooklyn your career?
Ofer Cohen:
Yes!
Regina Myer:
So we can really relate to each other. We talked earlier in this conversation about opening Brooklyn Bridge Park as one of the most exciting parts of my career. I'd say the other one now that I'm thinking about it is the day that David Walentas came into my office and said we want to rezone Dumbo, and that was the first time in the Brooklyn Office that somebody was ready to make a commitment on the private side of that scale in Brooklyn and I remember sitting in my office and saying, this is going to change Brooklyn, that we have to do this.
Ofer Cohen:
That must have been sort of a great opportunity for city planning.
Regina Myer:
It was an incredible opportunity because David Walentas thought big, still thinks big and had a vision to take these loft buildings that he assembled almost a decade and a half earlier into a great neighborhood. And what we realized on the government side was, is that it was that kind of investment that could really change the borough. And everybody was exactly right because before there was Dumbo, there wasn't this idea that Brooklyn was really moving ahead and by all of the sudden releasing all of this great energy in an area that had been mostly disinvested in. Really had this moment to lead the borough at a time when really nothing else was happening in Dumbo. And all of a sudden Dumbo was a place and that showed that the energy in the neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, would move to other places than that more people were interested in the borough. And this is also at a time when government, for the past previous say 20 or 30 years had been spending all their energy in Brooklyn, literally stabilizing the borough, making sure it was safe. Making sure that schools functioned and making sure that they were using public sector money for housing appropriately. So you know, it's a really interesting mash-up of public sector and private sector involvement.
Ofer Cohen:
You know, one of the things that I've noticed and I enjoy working with you, is that you make people that you work with, on different sides of the table, like their partners like we all working towards some kind of a common goal, but how did you harness those skills during those battles?
Regina Myer:
I love to listen to people and I love to hear what people have to say. I think all of these efforts are, as you mentioned, big efforts and not one person can make all the decisions. I think one person needs to be really, really decisive and wake up every morning and say we have to schedule another 90 meetings to get this done and we have to put together another schedule and I'm going to. By the way, I'm going to keep you to it, but I really think that it's a lot of listening and then it's a lot of process in a good way.
Ofer Cohen:
Just walking on Schermerhorn, or walking on Livingston or walking on Flatbush Avenue. When you go to work in the morning and seeing this radical transformation from when you started working on these rezonings 2004, 2005, what does it make you feel?
Regina Myer:
I still love Downtown Brooklyn. I know that there's been a lot of change, but when I started thinking about it, Livingston and Schermerhorn Street were all vacant lots from the 19 forties for when the city and the state started to assemble property for the IND at Hoyt-Schermerhorn and Flatbush avenue had three triple x bars. So to me, there was no question in my mind that Downtown Brooklyn should be a better place and now the downtown is an exciting place and in a different way.
Ofer Cohen:
And you must feel very, very proud being at the, in the middle of this entire transformation and then sort of coming back and taking the Downtown Brooklyn and or at least having the opportunity to take Downtown Brooklyn to the next level.
Regina Myer:
I'm proud and I'm also amazed and also still constantly surprised and delighted at how the private sector responds, right? We rezoned Downtown Brooklyn, but we didn't know a Brooklyn Fare would open up on, on Schermerhorn Street. Right, and that's to me what the magic is, is that we can work really hard on the government side, but we can't predict how the private sector is going to respond. And so to me, a restaurant like Brooklyn Fare all of a sudden put Downtown Brooklyn on a map that in a way that I could never have done. And the same thing in Williamsburg. We could work really hard to think about what the future would be, but a company like VICE grows from, from the ground up or in Dumbo. A company like Etsy or West Elm decides to make Dumbo it's brand really to this day. Even the West Elm is California owned company. Those are the things that government can't do it all. And that's the magic for me is that we work really hard to think about the future and then the private sector does the same thing.
Ofer Cohen:
Now as the head of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, how do you feel about the ability to continue to transform Brooklyn to continue to transform Downtown Brooklyn?
Regina Myer:
What's really exciting about what's going to happen next in Downtown Brooklyn is that major sites that really are in I think perhaps the best locations, can transform Downtown Brooklyn to be an office center. And let's be honest, we're competing on the world stage here. Ten years ago there was no flatiron district, so we have to continually be competitive and I think sites like the alloy site at 625 Fulton have the opportunity to be the places where there is the next big move for office growth and mixed-use growth in Downtown Brooklyn. And the great news is that locations are perfect also the idea of the Strand, I think it's really finally people listening to, again because I'm realizing that the rebuilding of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway can have a profound effect on Downtown Brooklyn,
Ofer Cohen:
Brooklyn in the next census is scheduled to surpass Chicago and to become the third largest city in America. And so, in a way, it sounds to me like the work that you're doing with the Downtown Brooklyn area has the responsibility in a way for the entire borough of Brooklyn in our city of Brooklyn to kinda position itself in the US, position itself in the world as competitive, right?
Regina Myer:
Totally. I think that Downtown Brooklyn is the image for the entire borough and the growth of Downtown Brooklyn really is what's leading the borough. Obviously, there's so many different neighborhoods where there's so much different investment in different strengths. But if it wasn't for this location in Downtown Brooklyn with every single subway line in New York City, except the seven line coming to Downtown Brooklyn Without Long Island Railroad, without Barclays Center without Fulton Street, which is a major shopping street to this day without the kind of new investment of City Point to those, each one of those projects is what makes Downtown Brooklyn Great. And that is what's leading Brooklyn right now.
Ofer Cohen:
When you close your eyes and you say, how will this place look in 15 years?
Regina Myer:
I think in 15 years, it will be more built out. I think that they'll be better connections to the waterfront. I think that the navy yard will feel like it's around the corner. And I think, the area from Downtown Brooklyn through to Dumbo heights to Dumbo was honestly be one continuum, right? It's all coming together and those are a lot of things that I think will take another decade to really feel all of the impact, especially if the Brooklyn Queens Expressway is going to be rebuilt for the next decade. But that will happen.
Ofer Cohen:
What about the BQX?
Regina Myer:
The BQX has this huge potential to connect all of our neighborhoods. I love the idea of adding another technology for transit in Brooklyn and I think Brooklyn is the place for the city to get that started and I'm really hopeful that Mayor de Blasio takes a lead on, on bringing new transportation to Downtown Brooklyn.
Ofer Cohen:
It feels like almost like Downtown Brooklyn is, the best-kept secret in America. So do you have any thoughts about how we can brand it?
Regina Myer:
I think we have to do a better job of making sure people understand how great it is living in Downtown Brooklyn is such a great experience. It has great views, great transportation, and great services and that's something that I think working altogether that of the nightlife culture and the housing is really the brand for Downtown Brooklyn. But the other thing is making new companies come in settle in Downtown Brooklyn and those are the things that I think are key to rebranding Downtown.
Ofer Cohen:
Thank you so much for Regina. I really appreciate you being here with me today.
Regina Myer:
Thank you Ofer, this has been great.
Ofer Cohen:
Thanks for listening to Hey BK the podcast dedicated to the people behind Brooklyn's transformation. You can find us at heybk.nyc or wherever you get your podcasts.