Julie Menin Has Wall Street Rising

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Julie Menin is the owner of Vine Restaurant and founder and executive director of Wall Street Rising, a 30,000-member community coalition dedicated to reinvigorating the Financial District for businesses and residents. Ms. Menin spoke with The New York Sun’s Eric Wolff at the opening of “Art Downtown,” an exhibit at 11 Wall St. curated in part by Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Q: You walked away from the law and your restaurant?

A: I was very, very proud of opening Vine in 2000, but after September 11, I re-evaluated my life and decided I wanted to be involved in the area’s revitalization and I felt as a small-business owner and as a lawyer, I had one advantage, which was in dealing for example with all the myriad issued that come up in owning a small business and dealing with a tragedy like September 11. I felt that I was able certainly to deal with some of the legal issues, and if I could offer help – I don’t mean legal help – but if I could offer marketing assistance … that was something I was extremely focused on. At the same time, I was also a downtown resident and I also wanted to focus on programs that would help make the quality of life for downtown residents as well. That’s how I founded Wall Street Rising, and I founded it approximately three weeks after September 11, 2001.

Did you ever think you’d be working with Mikhail Baryshnikov?

I had a real moment when I was looking around at the installation. When I think about Wall Street Rising and where it is today, to see how far we’ve been able to come, I’m very, very proud of that.

Our members are everyone from businesses to residents to museums. We have an extremely wide-ranging membership, and I’m just extremely proud of the way the organization has grown in the last three years. It started with just myself working late at night trying to come up with ideas to revitalize Lower Manhattan.

Downtown was notorious for being dead at night. How do you see Wall Street Rising helping to create a mixed-use neighborhood?

Every single one of our programs has one goal, which is to make Lower Manhattan an attractive place to live, work, and visit. So, for example, a program like Art Downtown is open late at night during the week and it’s open on weekends with the main mission of trying to get people to not just be here from 9 to 5.

Are there any challenges with getting the restaurants to stay open later?

We’re the third-largest commercial business district in the country, yet unfortunately we’ve found that many of the workers tend to leave the area as soon as business is over. And it is something we’ve been working on. We launched a project in 2002 called “Do It Downtown,” which is a discount card that features discounts at over 250 businesses. The hope is that by doing something like that the restaurants, as well as some of the stores, would consider more weekend hours and later hours in the evening.

How do the ground zero plans play into your plans for downtown?

I think that the plans for the World Trade Center site are really very exciting. The challenge is that it’s gong to be a number of years before that happens. Specifically what I’m talking about is we face a 10- to 15-year construction plan, in different parts of Lower Manhattan.

We face a challenge: there are going to be over 5 million visitors annually to the memorial. How do get them to explore other areas of Lower Manhattan? I mean, Lower Manhattan is a treasure trove of things to do. We want to make sure people don’t just go to the World Trade Center site and leave. We want them to explore all areas of Manhattan, and one of the ways to do that is to help create retail corridors on north-south access points, so that people are not just going east-west. If we could reinvigorate, for example, lower Broadway and Nassau Street, those will certainly accomplish it.

How do you contend with the sheer noise and volume of construction going on down here?

As an attorney and as a member of the community board down here, one of the items I’ve been extremely focused on for the last year have been the environmental impact statements for every single major construction project going on down here, going through thousands of pages of documents to assess what is the noise impact, and what is the quality of life impact on downtown residents and businesses. One of the things we’ve done at Wall Street Rising is to file comments focused on noise mitigations measures, traffic mitigations measures, and other ways to mitigate the impact of the construction projected.

How contentious has it been dealing with the city on the construction projects?

I think the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has made a commitment to have a construction tsar, and I think that’s the right way to go. We do need one central person that people can go to so we’re not dealing with a whole panoply of different agencies and people. So I think it is so important to have a 24-hour hotline for residents to call; I cannot tell you how many times construction that is supposed to end at a certain hour, and unfortunately due to circumstances. it doesn’t. It can happen in the middle of the night, it can happen on the weekends, and in fact the schedule for many of these construction projects contemplate weekend work. That’s why we’re very focused on trying to make sure there is a 24-hour hotline.

You must cringe every time there’s a terror alert or a scare of some kind. Does that keep people away?

Shortly after the recent terror alert focused on the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions, the building right across the street, 24 Broad, has some astronomical number of units pre-sold. The people are clamoring to move into that building.

Do you see yourself getting more involved in community affairs or politics?

Now that I am involved in community and civic affairs, I could not get involved in the private sector again. To me, it’s a labor of love to work on all these community issues. I do foresee myself in the next 10 to 15 years staying in a civic capacity.

Have you considered elected office?

Certainly something that I have considered, we’ll see what the future holds.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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