Amanda Burden

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Amanda M. Burden

Amanda Jay Mortimer Burden (born 1944) is the director of the New York City Department of City Planning and chair of the City Planning Commission.

She is a proponent of revitalizing Lower Manhattan, improving public access to the Brooklyn waterfronts, improving commuter rail into the city, and reconsidering rezoning plans, and she has a reputation of holding developers to stricter design standards than previous planning directors. As stated in a 2007 profile of Burden in The New York Times: Whether walking up and down 368 blocks in Jamaica, Queens, to see which streets can accommodate 12-story buildings, or grabbing a tape measure from her desk to set the dimensions of seating in public plazas across the city, Ms. Burden is leaving an indelible legacy of how all five boroughs will look and feel for decades to come.

Burden previously worked for the New York State Urban Development Corporation. She worked on Battery Park City from 1983 to 1990.

Early life

Born Amanda Jay Mortimer, she is the daughter of socialite Babe Paley (1915-1978) and her first husband, Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr. (1913-1999), an heir to the Standard Oil fortune. She is a descendant of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, and a granddaughter of Dr. Harvey Cushing, the "Father of American Neurosurgery" and Pulitzer Prize winning author. She has a brother, Stanley Grafton Mortimer 3rd; five half-siblings, William Cushing Paley, Kate Cushing Paley, Averell Mortimer, Jay Mortimer, and David Mortimer; and two stepsiblings, Hilary Paley Califano and Jeffrey Paley. In 1947, her mother married William S. Paley, the son of a successful Russian Jewish immigrant entrepreneur who built a family acquisition into CBS. Her stepmother, Kathleen Mortimer (born 1917), was a daughter of railroad heir and United States ambassador Averell Harriman.

Burden briefly attended Wellesley College until her marriage in 1964. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1976, with a concentration on Environmental Science. She later earned a Master of Urban Planning from Columbia University, writing an award-winning thesis about solid-waste management .

Career

She worked with the architecture firm Gruzen & Partners and one of her mentors was William H. Whyte, the urbanologist, with whom she worked on his Project for Public Spaces.

From 1983 until 1990 Ms. Burden was Vice President for Planning and Design of the Battery Park City Authority. She was responsible for the development and implementation of design guidelines for the Vorlage:Convert site as well as for overseeing the design of all open spaces and parkland, including the waterfront esplanade. In an interview for New York Magazine, she cited her stepfather's influence on her design sensibilities, noting the Canadian black granite she choose for the esplanade was the same stone he selected in 1964 for "Black Rock," the CBS headquarters [1]. Among her other projects are the Midtown Community Court and the Red Hook Community Justice Center, which provide integrated legal, economic and social services .

Burden also worked as a public school teaching aide in Harlem in the 1960s.

As New York City's Planning Director, she has spearheaded Mayor Bloomberg's economic development agenda with comprehensive urban design master plans and new initiatives to reclaim the waterfront. She emphasizes open space, continuous shop fronts, and the inclusion of trees and other elements that foster lively street life, according to The New York Times. Burden's meticulous approach has been criticized, however, by some real estate developers, who have stated that she is imperious and arbitrary, using her seat in government to dictate the angles at which their buildings sit in the skyline or to mandate the use of overpriced architects.

Honors

Burden, then 22, was named to the Best Dressed List of the New York Couture Group in 1966, replacing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had graduated to the Best Dressed List's Hall of Fame.

In 2005, Pratt Institute awarded Ms. Burden an Honorary Doctorate in Public Administration and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects presented her with its 2005 Center for Architecture Award. Ms. Burden's dedication to design excellence was recognized by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum which presented her with its 2004 Design Patron Award .In 2008, Ms. Burden was inducted into the membership of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) College of Fellows, and was named the 5th most powerful person in New York real estate by the New York Observer .

Personal history

Burden has been married twice. Her first husband was Shirley Carter Burden Jr. (1941-1996), a multimillionaire descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt and a great-nephew of the actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr.. At the time of their marriage on 13 June 1964, Carter Burden was a student at Columbia Law School. An owner of the Village Voice and New York Magazine and later a New York City councilman, he worked as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, sparking his wife's interest in social justice and inspiring her to pursue a teaching career. They had two children, Flobelle Fairbanks Burden and S. Carter Burden 3rd, before divorcing in 1972.

Her second husband was Steven J. Ross (1927-1992), the head of Warner Communications; they married in 1979 and divorced in 1981.

Burden has had a continuing relationship with television personality Charlie Rose since the early 1990s.

Further reading

• "Amanda Burden — Engine Driving Mayor’s Redevelopment Frenzy," by Max Driscoll, e-OCULUS, 04.15.08
• "Social Planner," by Ralph Gardner Jr., New York Magazine, May 13, 2002
• "Greetings from the Chair," NYC.gov