New York City’s economic boom is keeping a little-known commission very busy, as well as making it unusually powerful.

The Art Commission of the City of New York is the city’s design review board, charged with reviewing all building projects on city property — from water treatment plants to streetlights to the long-promised public toilets — as well as overseeing the city’s public art collection. Established in 1898, the commission has a history of distinguished members: artists like John LaFarge, Alexander Calder, and Robert Ryman; architects such as Charles McKim and James Freed; and civic leaders such as J.P. Morgan and Robert de Forest, a longtime chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The commission’s power has waxed and waned under different administrations. Today, with significant support from Mayor Bloomberg and a lively group of members, including the architect James Polshek, who joined last October, the commission may be at its most influential since the early 20th century.

The commission has always included an architect, a landscape architect, a painter, a sculptor, a representative of the mayor, and representatives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Public Library (the three major cultural institutions at the time of the commission’s founding). Right now, the three lay members include an engineer and a graphic designer.
Projects that require Art Commission approval are referred by the relevant agencies. Many come from the departments of Design & Construction and Parks & Recreation. The new bus shelters appearing around the city, which are part of a $1 billion street furniture contract awarded by the Department of Transportation to the Spanish firm Cemusa, Inc., were approved by the commission. The contract also includes newsstands and public toilets, the first prototype of which will be installed in Madison Square Park this summer.

Mr. Polshek, whose firm has designed many projects in the city, including the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History and the renovation of the Brooklyn Museum, said that the city’s wealth and the Mayor’s support combine to make the commission particularly strong.

“We’re in the middle of an absolutely unprecedented economic boom, [which] means more projects are coming in,” he said. “We are getting projects, some that will be controversial, for private institutions — cultural, health care, educational — that have very grand plans.”
Because the commission has a very small staff — much smaller than that of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, for instance — it can’t enforce its authority without mayoral support. Under some administrations, the heads of city agencies regularly bypassed the commission. During the Giuliani administration, for example, the Parks Commissioner, Henry Stern, installed yardarms (cross-bars) on 750 flagpoles in city parks without the Art Commission’s approval. In the ensuing controversy, the president of the commission resigned and sued the city for violating its charter, and a group of City Council members introduced a bill calling for the commission to be abolished as “unduly burdensome.”

Today, it seems to be back in everyone’s good graces. Mr. Polshek said it is “a very high priority” of Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Patti Harris. Ms. Harris, who was the executive director of the commission (a non-voting staff position) under Mayor Koch, told The New York Sun that mayors can support the commission in two ways: first, by impressing on the heads of city agencies that they must bring their projects before the commission, and second, by appointing strong, active members. Mr. Koch “really reinvigorated the office,” Ms. Harris said. “He sent a memo to all agency heads telling them they had to cooperate with the commission,” she continued. “Mayor Bloomberg has done the same thing.”

Still, when it comes to major projects, the commission’s power is limited; by tradition, it can’t reject a plan outright or bring work to a halt. “With large projects such as the new Yankee Stadium, it’s a matter of tweaking details,” a member of the Art Commission between 1998 and 2003 and the author of “The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission,” Michele Bogart, said. Instead, it’s on small projects, like trash receptacles, telephone kiosks, sidewalks, and light fixtures, where the commission has the greatest effect, she said. “It’s the small projects over the long haul that compose the built environment of the city,” she added.

Mr. Polshek, who as an architect has himself come before the commission many times, takes the commission’s mandate very seriously. “No architect is perfect,” he said. “Unlike artists, we don’t have the license to be arbitrary — and, unlike much art, which is in museums, what we do in the city is highly visible and is there for a long time. Even with these [prominent] architects, I see as our responsibility to make what they present even better.”

Mr. Polshek said the first project he saw — an Anheuser-Busch storage and distribution center in Hunts Point — was a great success and a model of collaboration between the commissioners and the applicant. The project came before the commission because the waterfront site includes a public-access bicycle path on city property.

The design, as presented, was a “great big windowless box and a goofy little office piece,” Mr. Polshek said. “I saw that there was a solution,” he said, and “I just got up with a big fat black magic marker, and I drew in the drawing.” Other commissioners had ideas, too. The graphic designer Paula Scher, who is a partner at Pentagram, proposed putting a huge Budweiser label on the plant — an idea the company liked, though it ended up being unfeasible. The commission’s intervention “totally rearranged the way the offices work and what the public would see,” Mr. Polshek said. “They came back in, and they had absorbed everything we had said and they were grateful.” The project is currently under construction.

Ms. Harris, too, said that collaboration is key to the commission’s work. “A strong commission really works with the City agencies and their designers,” she said. “It’s not just yes or no.”

With increased use of the city’s rivers for transportation, the commission is now looking at several river-edge projects, including the reconstruction of a ferry terminal on East 34th Street and the East River, and the development of an esplanade along the Stapleton waterfront on Staten Island.

The commission also oversees the conservation of the city’s murals and monuments, like the Washington Square arch, which was restored in the 1990s after a lengthy review process.