Silver: Downtown Should Be Higher Priority Than West Side

The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, used his pulpit as the first elected official to speak before the executive board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to demand that the mayor and the governor ensure Lower Manhattan's prosperity before taking up other plans.

"Surely you can understand the resentment of this brutally mauled community when - after all of the heroic pledges and vows - we now hear the mayor and the governor championing the commercial development of the far West Side in competition with the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan," Mr. Silver said to the board.

The mayor has been championing the redevelopment project at the Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan as a way to invigorate the area and attract the 2012 Olympics. Many downtown residents fear the project will siphon funds and energy away from the World Trade Center rebuilding program.

Mayor Bloomberg responded that the vast projects are not mutually exclusive.

"We have to develop downtown. But we have to develop Midtown. We have to develop uptown. We have to develop the left side and the right side. We have to develop all five boroughs, all kinds of neighborhoods. We have lots of projects going on, and it isn't an either/or," the mayor said after announcing a new playground initiative at the Lower East Side.

The speaker also called on the mayor and Governor Pataki to add to the two local residents sitting on the board and to create a Chinatown Empire Zone to support the sagging economy in that neighborhood.