House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler won’t likely bring down President Trump, despite his threats and blustering. But beware the collateral damage Nadler might inflict if Trump prevails.
There’s no telling what Nadler might do out of sheer malice — at the expense of the nation or the balance of powers between the federal government’s three branches — if the president survives Nadler’s push for impeachment, as he almost surely will.
But hold your breath if Nadler’s past history of petty vindictiveness is any guide.
Nearly a quarter-century ago, Nadler screwed New York City out of a precious federal windfall that would have wonderfully transformed the Hudson River waterfront from West 59th to West 72nd Street. He sponsored a 1995 bill that barred use of funds from the 1996 federal budget to pay to demolish and move the elevated West Side Highway, steps that were necessary to create a magnificent new public park.
Nadler’s spiteful stroke killed any hope of replacing the elevated eyesore with a new, grade-level and underground roadway to the east. It ruined dreams of a new, 22-acre public park that would have been created between Trump’s buildings and the river and left the unsightly trestle to stand possibly forever.
The plan was endorsed by many prominent civic groups and community members. But Nadler was motivated by a single emotion: hatred of Donald Trump. Having merely damaged, but not killed, Trump’s vision for Riverside South, he took his bile out on everyone else.
Trump won his decades-long campaign to build the complex, albeit in a smaller and more compromised form than he first envisioned, after years of brutal battles with civic groups, community boards, lenders and elected officials — especially Nadler.
Trump pompously claimed he’d whipped Nadler although it was a pyrrhic victory at best. As a state assemblyman and then a congressman, Nadler delayed the project long enough for Trump to nearly run out of dough and to force him to drastically scale it down.
It wasn’t enough for Nadler. What made his revenge all the more inexplicable was that it wouldn’t really hurt Trump — he just didn’t like the idea that the project would include a pretty new park even though Trump would have paid for it.
Moving the highway wasn’t even Trump’s idea. As Richard A. Kahan, head of the public Riverside South Planning Corporation, told The New York Times in 1995, it was civic groups that wanted better public access to the waterfront.
“Donald Trump could care less whether the highway is moved,” Kahan told the Times. “The idea that this is Trump’s highway is the big lie that Jerry Nadler has been selling.”
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Moreover, Nadler knew that Trump wasn’t going to be able to complete Riverside South. The developer was facing financial ruin from the recession, bad debt and disastrous business decisions in Atlantic City.
But Nadler ruined things for all the real estate bigwigs who came after Trump at Riverside South — and all of the complex’s 10,000 residents.
To see what could have been, check out the downtown platform of the Fifth Avenue and East 53rd Street subway station.
A poster mounted decades ago by the Municipal Art Society, and still in place, shows how expansive and gracious the park would look if the trestle were demolished — and how shrunken and cut off from the river it would look if it remained.
Thanks to Nadler, the unsightly highway was left to stand on stilts forever — “sacrificing public amenities, sunlight and open space,” the early ’ 90s MAS poster reads.
Recalling his struggle to build Riverside South, Trump joked to me days before the New Hampshire primary that after fighting “community board on top of community board, I can handle Russia.”
He did handle the boards, with which he forged hard-fought compromises. He even got a rezoning deal out of development-averse former Mayor David Dinkins.
Only Nadler was deaf to compromise or reason. If the Mueller hearings don’t give him what he hopes for — a dethroned president — it’s terrifying to think what vengeance he’ll take and on whom.
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