Big Ideas: The Trust for Governors Island’s Clare Newman on Urban Solutions, Models for Cities, and Mentorship
By Julia Gamolina
Clare Newman serves as the President and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island (TGI), charged with delivering on its mission to serve as a resource for New Yorkers. Previously, Clare was the Chief of Staff and EVP of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation where she implemented projects to create high-quality jobs and foster development. Clare was also a senior leader at Bloomberg Philanthropies and a Vice President at NYCEDC.
Clare received a Masters of Urban Planning from GSAPP at Columbia University and a B.A. in Political Economy from Williams College. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Clare talks about the various forces in real estate development and cities within cities, advising those just starting their careers to dream big.
JG: You studied political economy and then you went on to urban planning. I’d love to know the reasons for both and how you decided to go from one to the other.
CN: I was born and raised in New York City and that gave me an early appreciation for urban environments. I was pretty obsessed with physical space and its impact on our lives. I wanted to go away from the city for college though, to experience something different. I knew I wanted to do something related to the urban environment, but the study of political science and economics and all these forces that influence how cities grow was my interest at the time. I should also mention that I did take a lot of architecture classes, at least those that my small liberal arts school offered.
After I graduated, I did Teach for America in rural Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. This was the literal opposite of New York City — everything was built along highways, and my students hung out in a Walmart parking lot. Then, I moved back to New York and actually worked for an architecture firm as a project manager – I was very interested in the design elements of the work, but I realized that I wanted to do something at a different scale. That’s how I got to graduate school in urban planning at Columbia.
On the top of Outlook Hill on Governors Island with Borough President Mark Levine. 2022. Photography by Sarah Krautheim.
Your first job out of Columbia was at the EDC – tell me about your five years there.
I tell anyone coming up in the field that NYCEDC is a great first job. You’re given the opportunity to put your personal imprint on a lot of projects at a fairly junior age. Obviously for people that want to bring together an interest in the built environment with mission, it’s one of the most interesting places you can work.
I immediately joined the real estate group, where I was focused on projects in Queens. I got to work on a lot of fun projects in Jamaica, the Rockaways, all over. I was learning a ton about how to make projects happen in New York City, and learned a lot about economic development and how to create high quality jobs. Eventually, my department restructured, and I worked on projects all over the city, including the restoration of Loew’s King’s Theatre in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Theatre creation does a lot for neighboring restaurants and retail experiences, as well as creating street life. I also worked on the Applied Sciences RFP which was a city initiative coming out of the Great Recession of 2008 and focused on creating high-quality tech jobs in New York City, to diversify New York’s economy. Now, when I look at Roosevelt Island and see Cornell Tech there, I really feel like, “Wow, I helped make that happen!”
“I love the idea that I can be a part of getting projects off the ground that make New Yorkers’ lives better, but that can also be used by other cities.”
How did you then get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard? What were you looking to do and what did your role entail?
I ended up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard because of David Ehrenberg, who was one of my bosses at the EDC and is himself a phenomenal urbanist. Places like the Navy Yard, the Trust for Governors Island bring together so much of the subject matter that I was interested in, which was thinking about how we can look at a smaller section of New York and use that as a model to create a virtuous ecosystem that helps create accessible, high-quality jobs, that brings together mission-driven real estate development, and that focuses on place-making and urban design.
You essentially have a little city within a city – at the Navy Yard, we had three hundred acres that were focused on being the hub for urban manufacturing. Working with David and the whole team there was an extraordinary experience because we were in one of our biggest growth cycles in the history of the organization. While I was there, we added something like two million square feet of job-generating space, and brought together design, economic development, real estate development, and so many operational aspects as you’re managing this asset into one system. There’s a lot you can achieve within these urban microcosms.
Clare and her (championship!) Pride Basketball League NYC team in Spring 2023. Courtesy of Clare Newman.
Tell me now about Governors Island.
One of the really interesting things about Governors Island is — with respect to local control and it being a publicly accessible site — it’s still very “young.” It was closed to the public until 2005, and despite growing up in New York, I didn’t know about Governors Island – hardly anyone did! And then, all of a sudden, it was this place with extraordinary potential, and everyone started to think about what we could all do to make it a public resource for the city.
A lot of the early years were focused on figuring out how to get people to come out here. The early leadership of the island built an amazing park, which feels like something totally different than anything else in the city. Thinking back to what it was like in the early aughts – there were all these derelict buildings that covered the entire island, there wasn’t a lot of green space, there was no running water, no electricity, your cellphone didn’t work. You had to really squint your eyes to see the future. But now that we have all these exotic amenities like potable water [laughs], and a place to plug in your electronics, it’s an incredible destination that opens up a huge wealth of possibilities for its future.
In that regard, one of the things we asked ourselves was, “Can Governors Island be for climate in New York like the Navy Yard is for manufacturing?” We’re extraordinarily excited to have announced our partnership with the NY Climate Exchange, which will make that vision for a climate center come to life. They’re creating an educational and research hub focused on public engagement right here in the heart of New York Harbor. The campus will itself be an example of resilient and sustainable development, and the Exchange will create a next generation of urban solutions that can launch here in NYC and spread to other places around the globe.
“In such a male-dominated industry, it’s important to find women who will mentor and support you, who will put you in touch with the right people, and who actually care about your career growth.”
I wanted to come back to something you said earlier, which is that the EDC is wonderful for someone to work for as they’re starting their career because they see how projects get through in New York. Our readers are primarily architects, and in studio in school, we talk a ton about site selection. However, when you’re an architect and out in the working world, you rarely get the opportunity to choose a site and program. Can you share a little bit about the whole timeline of a project, the impetus for building something new in the city, and how professionals decide what is the thing that’s going to be built on a certain site.
I do believe that ideas can come from anywhere. There are a lot of examples where a community group is advocating for a certain outcome, and it’s on us to figure out how to accommodate that. There are also examples of elected officials initiating a project – the Loew’s King Theatre is a Marty Markowitz love story. This is public information so I can share this: he had his first kiss on the balcony of the theatre. He always said, “We just have to bring this place back to life,” and got the right people and advocates to make it happen.
Then there are examples of citywide initiatives that are looking for homes, like Cornell Tech. When the idea came out of City Hall and the EDC to get a tech hub to New York, a team of people were scouring the five boroughs for good sites that could accommodate that use. Same thing with housing – when an administration decides they want to focus on affordable housing production, then it can be about asking, “Where in the city do we need it in an economic sense? Where is the zoning appropriate?” I do think there are a lot of pathways to site selection but what links them together is finding this intersection of the Venn diagram between a city goal or need and a site and context where it’s appropriate.
Clare at the Friends of Governors Island Gala with EB Kelly, Patti Davis, Shantell Martin, and Marquise Stillwell. Photography by Radhika Chalasani.
What have been some of the biggest challenges for you? How have you handled setbacks?
One of the things I’ve learned and that I advise young people on is that early in my career, I don’t think I appreciated the practice of going out and talking to people that you think are inspiring. The reality is that most people do want to be helpful to younger folks in the field, and fostering those relationships is really important.
Given your audience, I think it’s important to point out that real estate is a very male-dominated field, and I’ve had a lot of experiences in my career going into a meeting with a man and assumed to be the more junior person, or an assistant – same thing on email chains. People don’t realize that you’re the Chief of Staff and the number two in an organization [laughs]. There are a lot of incredible and inspiring women who have helped me and who I’ve been able to look up to, and two of them are my bosses right now – my board chair Alicia Glen and First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer. In such a male-dominated industry, it’s important to find women who will mentor and support you, who will put you in touch with the right people, and who actually care about your career growth.
What would you say your mission is?
I love the idea that I can be a part of getting projects off the ground that make New Yorkers’ lives better, but that can also be used by other cities. That’s one of the things we’re excited for with the climate center on Governors Island, is that we can be on the vanguard of urban solutions that can then spread to cities around the globe.
Finally, what would be your advice to those just starting their careers in our field?
Don’t be afraid of big ideas. It’s natural to think about things that can work and projects that can feel practical and implementable, but the projects I’ve been most proud of are the projects where we’ve gone, “You know what we need? We need a whole new, different, big idea.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.