UpClose With Julie Menin of Wall Street Rising

This week, to mark the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, GlobeSt.com opted to take our UpClose to the streets of Lower Manhattan. This special interview will be augmented on Wednesday with two special editorial features, including a timeline of news events that chronicles the year that changed our lives–from the moment the planes hit the World Trade Center until today.

Life for Julie Menin was in a state of flux prior to September 11, 2001. A lawyer by training, she left her position as senior regulatory attorney at Colgate Palmolive to open a Lower Manhattan restaurant–Vine–in 1999. That move put Menin squarely in the face of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center–and primed her not only to witness the destruction but also to become part of the solution. As she tells GlobeSt.com, she passed the management of Vine over to one of her managers and launched Wall Street Rising, a non-profit group dedicated to “restoring vibrancy and vitality to lower Manhattan and making it a 24/7 community.” She’s not alone in the task, of course, and the board and advisors of Wall Street Rising include some heavy-hitting players, including directors Mark Weiss of Goldman Sachs, Frank Vella of JP Morgan Chase and Jonathan Mechanic of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Menin also counts Charles Gargano of the Empire State Development Corp. and Carl Weisbrod of the Alliance for Downtown New York among the group’s advisors. Neither is the fledgling group pushing its mission in a vacuum, and Menin sits on both the Development and Small Business and Restaurant Advisory committees of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. With the determination made that redevelopment plans should now go to a global competition, we thought this week an appropriate time to gauge the analysis of someone intimately involved in the future of Lower Manhattan.

GlobeSt.com: It seems that after a magnificent buildup, the unveiling of the LMDC’s six proposal only brought us back to square one. How do you see their efforts shaping up?