Leading the post-pandemic transformation of a historic New York City neighborhood

Like many neighborhoods, Union Square was hit hard during the pandemic. Today, Union Square is bustling with foot traffic of 109% at the end of 2023, 43 new businesses having opened this past year and 24 more businesses on the way. Union Square Partnership, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing the neighborhood’s quality of life, has made strides in ensuring that Union Square is not only liveable but thriving. It is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, having recently announced USQNext, its blueprint for the future of the district, where it hopes to make the area more accessible.

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Julie Stein, the executive director of Union Square Partnership, about the organization’s mission, accessibility in the district, and what the Partnership plans to achieve in the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your ties to Union Square?

I always say that everyone has a Union Square story. My parents’ third date was in Union Square, and it's like a classic story in my family about them going to Paragon Sports. Beyond that, I'm a lifelong New Yorker, and so I've spent a lot of time in Union Square.

Tell me about USP and the initiatives you have been working on this past year.

Union Square Partnership’s mission is to make Union Square the leading live, work, play, and learn neighborhood in New York City. But BIDs are really about community care. It's about neighbors getting together to invest in our common spaces to achieve the best outcomes for our residents. I feel very lucky to be in this role. My transition to running a business improvement district has really been quite a natural one. I have a background in urban planning and place management and economic development, with a lot of experience in public-private partnerships and community engagement. And I spent a lot of time doing real estate transactions, running and operating business and then I was the architect of the New York City's business district recovery plan coming out of the pandemic. So all of that has been very fertile training ground for leading the BID here in Union Square. 

We have an incredibly talented and dedicated staff who are truly masters of their field. So I see my role as being here to set them up to succeed in the work that they do, and to figure out how to make our team as effective as possible. 

This past year, we also brought back our full roster of in-person events, from our annual meetings to Summer in the Square to our first Harvest fundraiser, the first one since before the pandemic. Also across the board, we've refined our programming strategy to make sure that our roster of annual events resonates with our key audiences, that they drive engagement, that they foster community, and that they support our fundraising goals. We've also spent the last year advocating for key policy changes like the City of Yes for Economic Development so that the city's commercial landscape is modernized, has more activated storefronts, and greater ground floor diversity, to recover that foot traffic loss that many business districts across the city saw during the pandemic, and also to bring back tourism and enliven the public realm. We've really been honing our message to make sure we're better communicating our work and our aspirations to our board, to our membership, and to the general public, while at the same time, we've been continuing to invest in relationships with our local stakeholders and partners to strengthen and expand our networks and the work that we do. It's been a very fruitful year. 

What’s a typical day at work look like for you?

Our first pillar in our framework is really about enhancing livability. That's about making the neighborhood cleaner, safer, and more beautiful. I will spend time with our operations director, walking the district, talking to our clean and safe team, and seeing what the conditions are in the street. What our quality of life challenges are and how we can better support the livability in the district. Our second pillar is about what we're what we call “Make Union Square the place to be,” and this is really about elevating the reputation and the perception of the neighborhood. We do this in a couple of ways between our marketing vertical and our planning vertical. This is about the brand of the neighborhood. Whether it's our public art program or our place-making program to make sure that Union Square is the place where people want to be. The neighborhood is known for authentic, immersive, and unique experiences. And so we try to both lift up the ones that are happening and also create our own. Our third pillar is really around fostering a thriving economy in Union Square, and this is about catalyzing that virtuous cycle of economic growth. So we also spend time during the day speaking with our partners in the real estate community, with the brokers, with the property owners, and with prospective tenants, to make sure that we're helping them articulate Union Square as a competitive edge. And we do this through a lot of data gathering, market intelligence and a lot of data tools that we have. And then the fourth pillar is about what we call building community in Union Square. This is about strengthening relationships among our residents and our businesses. 

What do you like about being at USP so far?

There’s no better neighborhood than Union Square to do this work. We're such a dynamic live-work-play neighborhood, with dedicated staff and a dedicated set of stakeholders. It’s a great place to be.

What’s exciting about working at USP so far?

It's a very interesting time to be doing this work as we sort of turn the chapter coming out of the pandemic. What's been exciting is to go from that 30,000-foot policy level to now be on the ground in a business improvement district with the ability to implement some of the recommendations that came out of the business district recovery task force action plan. We’re focused on public space transformation, public realm improvements that will generate economic growth, as well as some of the public space activation recommendations. We're able to actually implement them on the ground, and then see change.

How has USP handled accessibility in the district?

When people think of their favorite spaces in New York City or across the country, their favorite public spaces, they think that they are sort of static in the way they always remember them. But the truth of the matter is that Union Square's public space, like most public spaces, has evolved in sort of every pivotal moment in the neighborhood's history, and we think now is the time for that next major evolution. We have an extremely transit-accessible, live, work, play, and learning district that has great fundamentals, but there are challenges in accessibility in terms of ADA accessibility, and also our public spaces are underperforming. So in 2018, the Partnership kicked off a visioning and a planning process for Union Square's next chapter. This was before my time. They engaged over 1,000 community members, as well as all four local committee boards in a participatory process. And then in 2021 the Partnership published the USQNext Vision Plan, and it has three key features. The first one is a modernized Union Square Park that preserves all of the cherished historical elements in the park, like the monuments as well as the trees and the legacy of civic gatherings, but also better reflects the way that people use and enjoy public space. The second element is 14th Street Boulevard which is transformed with a robust and green streetscape that delivers a best-in-class pedestrian experience with a high-quality retail environment along the city's first dedicated crosstown transitway. And then the third element is the updated infrastructure, enhanced accessibility, and improved amenities in Union Square Park and along 14th Street to ensure that this world-class public realm that we envision will last for generations. And so if you think about the elements, it's a modernized park, a completed 14th Street, and then all of those accessibility and infrastructure improvements that are needed to make sure that this will last for generations. 

How is USP improving the art & culture scene in Union Square?

We've started to focus on even more this year is our public art program. We have a very robust public art program, which we use as a platform for emerging and established artists. We seek out work that celebrates expression and social discourse consistent with the way people have to use the neighborhood, but we also think about how we can surprise and delight visitors. Right now, we have three public artworks that are on display. We have our Busway mural by Talisa Almonte. This is our fourth annual Busway mural. It's a community project. Every year, we put on a base coat and then have a competitive process to get an artist to come, and then we have over 50 community participants who help us paint this. We also have two other pieces of art that are out there right now. One is called NYC Legend by Alexander Klingspor. He's a Swedish artist and sculptor. He felt really compelled to put a sculpture here in Union Square. It builds on the legend of there being alligators in the sewer in New York City. It's really spectacular. And then we've also had a sculpture called “Love- ego,” or "Love without ego," by Pasha Radetzki. And it's this brightly colored sculpture in the middle of our center lawn that spells out the letters “LOV” and then invites users to create the E with their body or to imagine an E another way. And there's been some performance art around it. We love public art for art's sake, but we also love it because it contributes to the experience of people using the park, using plazas, and it's something that we continue to seek out. 

Tell me about your vision for USP moving forward.

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of our organization's establishment as New York City's first business improvement district, which happened in 1984. This 40th anniversary moment resonates profoundly with us and with the district. As we celebrate these 40 years, we also are doing critical work to best position our organization and the district for the next 40 years. We're laser-focused on advancing the Union Square vision plan so that we can transform the public realm in our district, and we're looking forward to working with our public partners and other private partners to make progress on some critical district projects. In the short term, we're looking towards our signature fall celebration. 

If you could wave a magic wand over Union Square, what would you want for the district? Think big and no limitations here!

Union Square has tremendous fundamentals. It's location, it's transit accessibility, it has that tremendous, live, work, play, learn. It's a mixed-use district that has a lot going for it. But when we think about what's missing, what's driving some of the challenges that we see in retail occupancy. If I could wave the magic wand it would be modernization. It would be modernization of our public realm, preserving all the things that we love, about the park, and that we love about the neighborhood, but making it feel like a modern, 21st-century public space that would be super transformational in terms of people's experience. It would be super transformational in terms of the cycle of economic development, attracting higher quality retail tenants and getting to full occupancy. We are laser-focused on making that a reality. If I had a magic wand, I would certainly fast-forward the process. But I think the core of what we are doing is thinking about how we can improve our public spaces to the service of everything else we care about in the district.