Dan Biederman

Daniel A. (Dan) Biederman is a prominent New York City downtown manager and pioneer in the field of privately funded urban and public space management. He is the co-founder of Grand Central Partnership, 34th Street Partnership, and Bryant Park Corporation, three Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) operating in midtown Manhattan. He currently serves as the president of the latter two of these organizations and advises downtown redevelopment efforts in several other cities.

Bryant Park Corporation was co-founded in 1980 by Biederman and Andrew Heiskell, Chairman of Time Inc. and the New York Public Library. Initially supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, BPC is now funded by assessments on property and businesses adjacent to the park, and by revenue generated from events held at the park. BPC is the largest U.S. effort to provide private management, with private funding, to a public park.

By the 1970s Bryant Park had become a dangerous haven for drug dealers and was widely seen as a symbol of New York City’s decline. Upon assuming management of the park, Biederman and Heiskell created a master plan for turning around the park’s fortunes. In the words of an Urban Land Institute case study, "Biederman began experimenting with a series of efforts to bring people back to the park, while also exploring how to generate revenue."

BPC immediately brought significant changes that made the park once again a place that citizens wanted to visit. Biederman, a proponent of the "Broken Windows Theory" expounded by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in a seminal 1982 article in Atlantic Monthly, instituted a rigorous program to clean the park, remove graffiti and repair the broken physical plant. BPC also created a private security staff to confront unlawful behavior immediately.

In 1988 BPC closed the park in order to undertake a four-year project to build new park entrances for increased visibility from the street, to enhance the formal French garden design (with a lush redesign by Lynden Miller), and to improve and repair paths and lighting. BPC’s plan also included restoring of the park’s monuments, and renovating its long-closed restrooms, and building two restaurant pavilions and four concession kiosks.

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