Weisbrod helping make this city a better place.

After a decade of success helming the Alliance for Downtown, as well as over 15 years of proud public service working for the city prior, Carl Weisbrod was tapped this year to head Trinity Real Estate, the real estate arm of downtown's Trinity Church and owner of roughly six million square feet of office space in the Hudson Square submarket.

While the position carries with it the prestige typical of the kinds of private sector jobs that draw successful government figures, don't expect it to be Weisbrod's march off into the sunset from public service.

Weisbrod indicated that his new job will be quite the opposite in fact, providing him with ample chance to engage again in what he has done for most of his career: help shape and improve districts in the city. And because the Hudson Square neighborhood borders the northern edge of Tribeca and the western flank of SoHo, it also puts him in direct proximity to the district for which he has perhaps shown the most passion for and the one that has been the focus of much of his professional life, Manhattan's downtown.

When asked how he will go about shaping Hudson Square, which has been a hotbed for the current condo boom, Weisbrod indicated that because he is so new to the position--he only began at Trinity in mid-May--he isn't sure. If his prior work in Times Square and downtown serves as a predictor, Hudson Square will undoubtedly end up far better off from his contribution.

"This is an opportunity for me to create another neighborhood," Weisbrod said. "Trinity is a civic-minded property owner that has influence over the direction of the Hudson Square neighborhood and also downtown in general. I was definitely drawn to this position because of Trinity, its fine track record and the stewardship it has shown to the neighborhoods of which it is a part."

As the president of the Alliance for Downtown for the ten years prior to his recent appointment, Weisbrod has seen Lower Manhattan through both the heady days of its near total occupancy in the late 1990s to its darkest hours on September 11, 2001, and back again to its recent and ongoing recovery and renovation. Selected in 1995 to head the Alliance, which manages Lower Manhattan's business improvement district (BID), Weisbrod immediately set out to differentiate the organization from other BIDs in terms of the breadth of services it would offer.

Mired in a recession with vacancy rates as high as 21% in the mid 90s, downtown needed all the help it could get and it was the types of comprehensive services, such as business incentives and subsidies, that Weisbrod helped lobby for through his work at the Alliance that assisted in ushering in the area's boom years just before the millennium.

"When we started, our objective was to secure and enhance the downtown area as a world class business district and that objective never changed," Weisbrod said. "But when we began, the vacancy was very high and there was concern that downtown was a one-dimensional community. What was needed was an organization that transcended what a typical BID does."

In one of its proudest achievements under Weisbrod's tenure, the Downtown Alliance spearheaded the transformation of Stone Street into a wide, cobblestone concourse bordered with an eye-catching assortment of retail tenants in renovated 19th century storehouses. The Alliance also helped lure the kind of high tech companies that populated downtown during the dot com boom with its Plug 'n' Go program, which matched tenants with office space accommodative of their telecommunications and technology needs. Building on this measure in 2004, the Alliance also launched a plan to lay extra conduits in the street bed as major rebuilding efforts planned for downtown begin, as well as install a Wireless Redundancy System. Both innovations will greatly improve telecom capabilities in the area.

Weisbrod also played an active role in calling for the recent round of subsidies and tax abatements that were passed into legislation for buildings constructed at Ground Zero.

Citing the vast strides that downtown has made since 2001, Weisbrod said that he believes the area is in far better infrastructural and economic shape than it was in the wake of the first terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in 1993, something that many probably would never have expected considering the extreme devastation 9/11 wrought. Weisbrod watched the Twin Towers collapse from a police substation just a few blocks away and witnessed an aftermath that stood in stark comparison to the optimistic and ambitious vision he had worked so hard to realize for the area in the years prior.

"You needed a passport to gain access to downtown," Weisbrod said. "There were armed military troops marching around, fires were burning at the WTC site, telecommunications were out, everything was shut down. And all the lives that were tragically lost. It was one of the most tragic days in this country's history."

"But if anyone on September 12 saw where we would be today, less than four years later, they would have been astounded."

Before coming to the Downtown Alliance, Weisbrod was no stranger to economic development. Working for the Koch administration as the Director of the Mayor's Office of Midtown Enforcement and the Executive Director of the City Planning Commission, he played a pivotal role in cleaning out the seedy and criminal elements in Times Square by utilizing the very effective tactic of building condemnation.

"42nd Street probably was the most dangerous block in the city at one point and the big driver of crime and urban decay in the area was that a lot of the businesses there attracted a seedy crowd," Weisbrod said. "Shutting them down by condemning the buildings did a lot to clean up the area and laid the groundwork for Time Square's major revitalization."

Weisbrod oversaw much of the big deals and public development on and near 42nd Street, including the creation of the Theater Corporation, the piquing of Disney's interest in the area, and arranging for the construction of the numerous high-end office towers that now make up one of Midtown's most successful office submarkets.

The success Weisbrod had with Times Square's redevelopment earned him an even loftier city post, as founding president of the city's Economic Development Corporation. Weisbrod held that position from 1990-1994.

"I've been fortunate in my career to do jobs that I have loved," Weisbrod said. "Trinity is a continuation of the things I've been doing my whole career."