By Chris Lombardi

Anna Hayes Levin’s list of board memberships is impressive: Community Board 4, Hudson Yards Community Advisory Council, Housing Conservation Coordinators, the Friends of Moynihan Station. They also constitute her full time job, one in which Levin has become the “go-to” person for advocates, elected officials—not to mention journalists—trying to get a handle on the rapid changes on the Far West Side. We caught up with her last Friday at her Columbus Circle apartment to talk about it all in the near-shadow of the Time Warner Center.

You grew up on the West Coast. You even moved back there after law school, then came back for love?

I grew up out in Portland, Ore., and came East for college [Yale], majored in literature. I came to New York, got a job as a paralegal because that’s where the jobs were for liberal arts graduates. I had no clue about what it meant to be a lawyer, but then I then went to NYU for law school and found out.

Afterward, I did go back to the West Coast and went to work for a company that did venture capital work. But meanwhile Peter [Levin], who I’d met in college, who I’d left behind, was working in New York. I realized how stupid I’d been to leave him behind.

You know so much about real estate, about the laws on land use. But that wasn’t your specialty.

Absolutely not. I was a corporate lawyer for about 20 years, most recently as U.S. general counsel for Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. I was busy doing that work, and raising my kids, until the end of 1999. By then I had been at LVMH for about seven years, and I wanted to do something different. Selling champagne and cognac and cosmetic is not going to change the world after all. Well, maybe champagne, but cosmetics?

For a long time, I was completely disdainful of real estate lawyers. I thought they didn’t do real law. Now here I am, and it’s all I do.

You’ve been living in this apartment for 25 years. Your sons, Will and Ned, were born after you bought it. And in some ways it was this behemoth next door, the Time Warner Center, that brought you to the community board.

When we first moved here, the Coliseum was still active. During their car shows they’d close the street, and all the cars in the shows would be there waiting to be loaded

We’d stay up all night, looking at the fancy cars.

Then there was a long period of time when the Coliseum was closed, and another when it was being demolished. And then came the Time Warner Center. The first time around, in 1985, it didn’t have a public process at all. But the Municipal Arts Society filed a lawsuit, and they organized what had to be one of the most wonderful pieces of public protest in the United States. The earlier building would have been much more massive: They knew it would cast a shadow, so they got people out on a sunny Sunday afternoon [on Oct. 19, 1987] with black umbrellas, all the way to Fifth Avenue.

The second time there was some public process, but the construction, starting in the summer of 2000, was horrible. The MTA is not subject to city rules like noise codes! So at 4:30 in the morning, the jackhammers would start, and would continue till 9:30 at night. One of my colleagues on the board of this co-op is [former C.B. 4 chair] Simone Sindon. She hauled us all off to the community board to complain.

That was my first glimpse of what community boards did. I’d never heard of the CB before. Then Simone recruited me to CB 4. A minute and a half later she was elected chair, and I—without planning or preparation—was chair of the Hell’s Kitchen Land Use Committee.

Hell’s Kitchen is so huge: from 30th to 55th Street. How can it be a neighborhood?

Geographically it’s pretty big, but socioeconomically it’s a coherent whole. The ethnic mix has changed from the historic Hell’s Kitchen community, which grew up when the piers were still active. But there’s tenaciousness and a pride that I think is still there.

When the Hudson Yards rezoning began, we knew we were mostly going to lose. So we decided to concentrate on the one thing we could protect: Ninth Avenue as the main street of a special Clinton sub-district.

You’ve talked about that main street before. Can you describe it, and what you achieved by protecting it from potential danger from Moynihan Station?

If you start walking south from 55th Street, you see classic Hell’s Kitchen walkup buildings and small retail ground floor such as restaurants, hardware stores. Above that: modest housing, apartments whose rents are similarly modest. We got that with limits on building heights and with others that make it almost impossible to demolish existing residential buildings.

And now, as you walk down Ninth Avenue, that character has mostly been retained

Even in South Hell’s Kitchen, around 30 to 34th Streets, it’s more compromised but you can see it.

You’ve been going full steam on Hudson Yards, from the new development allowed by the 2005 rezoning to the rail yards. And now Moynihan Station?

All these massive development projects. You can’t do them all; we don’t have the resources. So the logical place to start is Penn Station. Build the transportation hub to fuel the economy to the east, and think intelligently about what you do on the west,including the rail yards.

Thus, the Hudson Yards rezoning also upzoned Farley and MSG. It’s always seemed logical to us that if you add density, that’s where you go: west of a transit hub. But you have to be smart about how you do it.

Last week’s Hudson Yards forum on the rail yards had a pretty clear consensus about one thing: the need for affordable housing, especially for the middle class.

It’s little hard for our neighborhood, and little different than the citywide conversation about affordable housing: You have people who’ve lived here for generations, and their kids can’t afford to live here. I know that in the Bronx, when you talk about subsidizing people who make 120 percent of the area median income, people look at you like, What?

But I think that’s where the gap is. The incentives in the state 80/20 program [which gives tax breaks to developers who designate 20 percent of units as low-income] are pretty good, and developers are generally taking advantage of it. The challenge is to make those units permanent, and create financing that makes more varied forms of it possible. That’s why I was one of the people talking last week about a new Mitchell-Lama.

How is it working with city and state officials on all these issues?

The stadium fight in 2005 helped us grow really productive relationships with all of our elected officials. We’ve also learned how to talk to the MTA, NJ Transit, the Port Authority—more than they talk to each other! We know about it all because it’s all happening in our neighborhood.

As far as city officials, most of my work has been around the Department of City Planning. Under [Commissioner] Amanda Burden’s leadership, the agency has rezoned more of the city than any DCP since…whenever. It’s quite remarkable.
And I really think that there has been a level of planning and attention to all sectors of the city, not only to developers. But they are so strapped for resources—developers pushing for variances or individual rezonings—that it makes them vulnerable to pressure.

Your own thoughts on Deputy Mayor Doctoroff’s departure?

First of all, it remains unclear whether he’s really leaving us: he’s said he might stay at the Hudson Yards and Moynihan Station projects. But overall? Polarizing person, difficult to work with. Like Bloomberg, he came in with this private-sector approach, which I mostly like. But at the beginning, he was really politically tone deaf.

And I do think that it’s largely due to his own arrogance that we’re not building a stadium

A non-political person who thought he had this thing wired. He thought that because legally he had had no need for public review, he didn’t have to bother with it. But if he had taken it to the City Council, even though we would have had this big food fight—loud, ugly, raucous—my bet is that the council would have approved it. Then when he went to Albany, he would have been in a much stronger position.

So much of your work is building on previous fights, previous compromises, zoning changes from years ago. How is that for you?

Look. Cities are fundamentally these relationships among people. The people on the CB change, but the ideas get transmitted. I know for some things I have to call Simone, or Ross Graham, who led the board thru the 1997 Chelsea zonings.

We’re all living our history. We live in a common-law world, where we live with what came before. That’s what I like about it.