Paul Goldstein Leaves CB1 Post After 23 Years

By Carl Glassman
POSTED OCT. 2, 2006

There was no P.S. 234, no Downtown Little League, and no library on Murray Street when Paul Goldstein became district manager of Community Board 1 in 1983. And Lower Manhattan was hardly seen as a desirable place to live. But quietly and behind the scenes, without the ponderous speechifying of a politician or shrill voice of an activist, he helped bring those improvements and an impressive array of others to Downtown

“He’s always in the shadow but he really is the hero of the board,” said former CB1 Chairwoman Anne Compoccia, who served with Goldstein for 12 years, the longest tenure of the seven board chairs that he worked under. “He saw a problem and he saw it to the end.”

Last month, Goldstein, 51, announced that he is leaving the district manager post that, to those familiar with Community Board 1, is synonymous with him. On Oct. 9 he goes to work as the director of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s district office in Manhattan.

Goldstein is vacating a job that requires not only running the board’s office, but also navigating vast bureaucracies to help resolve local problems, and negotiating with powerful city players.

In an interview, Goldstein recalled his first negotiated trade-off for the community: support for the towering Shearson (now Citigroup) building on a city-owned site at Greenwich and North Moore Streets, in exchange for construction of a new school—P.S. 234—on a nearby city property.

“It was predominantly a business board then and very out of character for it to be getting into these kinds of negotiations to hold up a project,” Goldstein recalled. In the years that followed, he continued to help negotiate with developers and the city for common neighborhood amenities—more schools, a library, ballfields, parks and more.

“We had to fight to get things that most communities just took for granted,” Goldstein said.

Julie Menin, the board’s current chairwoman, said she was forming a committee of several CB1 members to help select the next district manager.