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February 2004 Strategy:
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by Anne Field
When the restored great hall of Ellis Island opened to the public in 1990, most people didn't realize how much of the historic site had been left untouched: more than 22 acres with 30 decrepit and crumbling buildings, including a massive hospital complex, ferry building, and laundry. It wasn't until eight years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those other acres belonged to New Jersey, not New York, that then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman convened an 18-person commission to decide what to do with the rest of the island. The coordination and running of that effort fell largely in the hands of Lisa Nitze, MBA '87, an experienced director of private-public sector projects.
It was a gargantuan task, one that might have overwhelmed most people. Previous renovation proposals already had met with ferocious public opposition. And coming up with a plan that wouldn't meet the same fate meant getting the blessing of a dizzying number of interest groups, from Congress and the National Park Service, which owned and operated the island, to the mayor of Jersey City, historic preservation groups, and historical societies.
But Nitze, who was tapped for the job by commission chair and former Beneficial Corp. chairman Finn Caspersen, was in her element. "She's probably one of the best strategic thinkers I've ever been around," says Liz Jeffery, a commission member who now directs program development and administration for the fundraising organization Save Ellis Island! (www.saveellisisland.org). And in just one year, the New Jersey Governor's Advisory Committee on the Preservation and Use of Ellis Island not only came out with a series of five proposals that were all warmly received by the public but also helped raise more than $10 million to stabilize and begin rebuilding the tottering buildings.
Even the most ambitious effort has to begin somewhere. Nitze's first major step was, along with the rest of the commission, to tour the site, a massive array of interconnected buildings including sections for immigrants with specific contagious diseases, a maternity ward, operating rooms, and a morgue. What they found was startling. The General Services Administration had awarded the National Park Service ownership of the island in the 1960s—after its former owner, the Coast Guard, gave it up—but without any budget for maintenance. As a result, "The buildings were one to five years away from collapse," says Nitze. Trees had sprouted in the middle of hallways and had burst through walls; windows were shattered; doors were hanging off their hinges; owls had taken up residence in various locations. "We reported back to Gov. Whitman that any rescue plan was academic unless we could immediately stabilize the buildings," she says.
Whitman allocated a third of the money needed and asked Congress and the National Park Service to contribute the rest, for a total of more than $6 million. Nitze won two government grants to restore the ferry building, a metal-domed edifice housing the ferry that immigrants took to New York City, and the laundry. Including matching funds from the state of New Jersey, those grants came to about $3.9 million. The ferry building is due to open this spring.
At the same time, however, Nitze and the commission couldn't get any of that money for at least four months. With the buildings on the verge of collapse, Nitze enlisted the aid of the Department of Corrections, which donated inmate volunteers to help with the initial cleanup.
That step was easy compared to the next: developing a rescue plan that would win public approval. Between 1892 and 1954, about 12 million immigrants came to the United States through Ellis Island. About 40 percent of Americans have a direct link to at least one of those people, so feelings about the site run high. Over a 12-year period, a previous developer had come up with three recommendations. But thanks to a mix of public opposition and confusion about who had sovereignty over the land, the plans were all scrapped. The upshot: For the new plan to work, it had to win the widespread support of skeptical stakeholders, including congressional leaders, state politicians, ethnic groups, and preservation societies.
Nitze had a carefully honed strategy: Pinpoint all important potential players and meet with each one. "There's a trick to a successful private-public sector process," she says. "You study the mistakes of the past, identify the key stakeholders, the areas of agreement and the common goals you can adhere to, and cast a wide net for gathering input." First stop was with representatives of the New York Landmark Conservancy, National Trust for Historic Preservation, and World Monuments Foundation. They were national leaders in the effort to save the abandoned buildings and, she figured, particularly influential players. Total number of meetings: more than 50 in 10 months.
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Nitze carefully assigned commission members to participate in specific meetings. The idea was to match appropriate committee representatives with stakeholders from the same community of interests. So, Clement Price, professor of history at Rutgers, met with historians. Assemblyman John Kelly arranged for fellow committee members to make a presentation to the New Jersey state assembly.
Private meetings had to be only part of the picture, however. There also had to be a larger public forum in which participants could voice their opinions—and committee members could visibly demonstrate their willingness to be flexible and open. Plus, they could take the opportunity to explain their guiding principles—that the plan would be in keeping with the historical significance of the island, economically self-sustaining, and open to the public. So, early on, Nitze arranged for a hearing to be held in Trenton. "Stakeholders could see we were in line with the things they felt were important," she says. "That got everyone working with us instead of looking at us with suspicion. We weren't going to open a McDonald's on Ellis Island."
A year after they started, the committee submitted its report to Whitman, whose administration submitted it to the National Park Service as part of the environmental impact statement process related to developing a final reuse plan for the unused buildings. That plan is due to be issued in early 2004. If the plan follows the committee's suggestions, it will include building a national learning and conference center focusing on issues related to immigration, racial diversity, and public health—what Nitze calls "a national Versailles."
Above all, say committee members, it was Nitze's resourcefulness, persistence, and patience that saw them through the effort. And those qualities didn't just help them through the complex process of public persuasion. They also came in handy during internal meetings. Professor Price recalled a commission meeting early on in which one member suggested they build a center for conservationists. "Lisa gently challenged that idea, explaining that the island needed to be able to draw the broad public to it," he says. "We couldn't include things that wouldn't serve the greater public." The committee member withdrew the suggestion without his feelings being ruffled, and the meeting moved on to other subjects.
Masterminding such public-private sector projects is something Nitze has done before, but it wasn't until well after graduating from Stanford when she got a job developing a state biotechnology plan for Maryland, that she really began honing those skills. After that, she worked as executive director of Maryland's World Trade Center Institute where she coordinated a public-private partnership for international trade and, later, as executive director of a statewide partnership for economic development in New Jersey.
Still, even Nitze admits Ellis Island was "vastly more complex than I'd thought." She recalls moments of frustration at the glacierlike pace. "When you're dealing with all these large bureaucracies, it's a slow process," she says. "That was the most difficult thing to grapple with on certain days."
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Nitze's next step may be the most ambitious. In 2000, she helped set up a nonprofit called Save Ellis Island! to be a fundraising partner with the National Park Service. The mission: to raise $300 million needed to renovate the other buildings and the grounds and put the rescue plan into action. The group plans to launch the campaign as soon as the park service releases its final proposal. A large part of the effort will focus on finding corporate sponsors and business leaders willing to help. She is now cochair of the reuse committee, which is in charge of implementing the renovation plan.
"For nearly half of all Americans, Ellis Island is a personal touchstone, so it's very important to find a way to restore and open these buildings up to the public," she says. "The time to start doing that is now."
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Strategy:
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Collaboration:
An Entrepreneurial Journey into the Desert
Anne Field is a New York-based freelance writer.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EVAN KAFKA
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