To understand why Kathryn S. Wylde has earned a reputation as perhaps New York City’s most in-demand civic fixer, just look at the last few months.
She quietly counseled City Hall through the first federal indictment of a sitting mayor. She oversaw a campaign, with just days’ notice, to push through a pair of polarizing legal changes affecting prosecutors and mentally ill people.
And though she refuses to talk about it — “then it wouldn’t be very private, would it?” — Ms. Wylde has been pulling the strings on a quiet effort by top business leaders to persuade President Trump to leave New York’s nascent congestion pricing program intact.
On Thursday, Ms. Wylde will make news of her own, announcing that she plans to step down next year from her role as the chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of 350 corporate giants, law firms and banks that she transformed into a pillar of New York’s permanent government.
The decision is almost certain to make waves at a time when many of New York’s most robust institutions, from City Hall to universities, have been badly battered. Mr. Trump, too, is making direct threats to the city’s federal funding and the partnership’s members.
But in an interview in her spartan corner office overlooking New York Harbor this week, Ms. Wylde said it was “time for younger leadership.” She will be 79 next month and plans to help the organization, which also runs a civic-minded investment fund and research arm, find a successor.
“So long as New York City attracts the world’s best, most productive talent, we will be fine,” she said, batting away questions about the state of the city.
It can be hard to capture the scope of Ms. Wylde’s influence. Unlike the camera-hungry politicians and the ostentatiously rich people she works with, she has never held public office and still lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where she began as a community organizer in the 1960s.
But her imprint, particularly in an era when private business came to play a greater role in the city’s affairs, can be found almost everywhere: on mayoral cabinets, state tax policy, new citywide zoning regulations, the passion projects of billionaires and the careers of the leaders of both House and Senate Democrats. With 6,501 contacts in her iPhone, she has earned a reputation as one of the city’s savviest gossips and one of the few who can force warring politicians and business leaders into one room.
Martin Lipton, the storied Wall Street lawyer who helped New York City avert bankruptcy in the 1970s, recalled walking through City Hall once with Ms. Wylde and realizing she personally knew almost every official they passed.
“She has been the vital connective tissue among a huge swath of people in New York,” said Louise Mirrer, the president and chief executive of the New York Historical and Ms. Wylde’s longtime tennis partner. (In a concession to age, they now play Ping-Pong.)
Ms. Wylde has persistent critics, too, who have accused her of helping the superrich burnish their reputations while the city becomes more and more unequal.
The partnership has at times opposed raising the city’s minimum wage, raising taxes on the rich to pay for free prekindergarten and providing paid sick-leave protections for all city workers. Its work and advocacy around alleviating the housing affordability crisis, one of the city’s biggest challenges in recent years, has been comparatively limited.
Ms. Wylde retorts that the city needs to stay attractive to businesses, whose taxes underwrite its services and solve problems government cannot alone. “We need as many billionaires in New York City as we can attract,” she said.
That view has earned her their loyalty.
“Without Kathy, I have no idea what some of our tax and regulatory outcomes would have been,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, the billionaire leader of the Blackstone Group.
Ms. Wylde has had other significant accomplishments that were more public-facing. In the 1980s, she led a groundbreaking partnership project to privately finance the construction of 40,000 new housing units on city-owned land in burned-out and blighted neighborhoods. In the 1990s, Henry R. Kravis put her in charge of a $130 million fund that seeded New York’s tech industry.
After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Bush administration called the blueprint Ms. Wylde commissioned for stabilizing Lower Manhattan “the Bible” for its early response. And few figures have been more closely associated with the decades-long fight by business leaders and Democrats to implement congestion pricing.
“When you walk through Midtown, and it’s less congested and easier to get to your destination, the person you have to thank for that is Kathy Wylde,” said Rob Speyer, a real estate developer and current co-chair of the partnership’s board.
It is a long way from where she began as a Wisconsin transplant organizing her working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Ms. Wylde’s life changed in 1981, when David Rockefeller, the head of Chase Bank of Manhattan, asked her to design and run a housing program for the partnership, a nascent group of business leaders trying to exert greater influence over the city. It was a runaway success, revitalizing both the city’s neighborhoods and its tax base.
After being elevated to chief executive in 2000, Ms. Wylde became a go-to sounding board for politicians seeking the support of the city’s business class, as well as executives looking to put their imprint on New York.
One of them, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said Ms. Wylde was “a tireless champion of the city’s business community and highly effective at making sure the business community can be heard in City Hall and Albany, no matter who holds office.”
Ms. Wylde quipped that the pair had a good relationship “when I kept my mouth shut,” but added, “I don’t think we’ve ever had a better, stronger mayor than Mike Bloomberg.”
Other relationships were rockier. Ms. Wylde called Bill de Blasio, who tried to curb the influence of business after Mr. Bloomberg, “a disaster.” After being an early supporter of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, she became a sometime critic but said he could be a good mayor if he followed Mr. Bloomberg’s example.
“She can push sometimes, and maybe some people figure she’s pushing too hard,” said Mr. Kravis, a private equity billionaire. “But honestly, that’s what you need.”
Ms. Wylde said she hopes to soon spend more time in Puerto Rico, where her husband lives with seven rescue dogs and 19 cats.
She declined to offer advice to her successor, but argued that the nature of her work was often misunderstood.
“The most important thing for anybody in my job is to understand that this is a bottom-up, not a top-down city,” she said. “My fear is that finding somebody who shares that perspective is hard.”
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
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