NEW YORK CITY-Lower Manhattan has lost its greatest advocate.
Elizabeth H. Berger, president of the Downtown Alliance since 2007, died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The passionate civic leader—who turned the city's lower reaches around after 9/11 and made the once dormant-after-5 p.m. area the place to be in recent years—turned 53 years old this past Saturday.
Under Berger's leadership, the Downtown Alliance created a $1.5 million grant program for Lower Manhattan's small businesses affected by Hurricane Sandy, opened mobile tourism information kiosks across the district, expanded and enhanced its signature bus service, the Downtown Connection, and convened a diverse stakeholder committee to advance Lower Manhattan as a location of choice for technology and innovative firms.
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Rayna Katz
Rayna Katz is a seasoned business journalist whose extensive experience includes coverage of the lodging sector, travel and the culinary space. She was most recently content director for a business-to-business publisher, overseeing four publications. While at Meeting News, a travel trade publication, she received a Best Reporting award for a story on meeting cancellations in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
