BUILT TO LAST IN B’KLYN
She’s a success from the ground up
Her hardhat reflects her rugged road from childhood poverty in Far Rockaway, Queens, to president and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies, one of the city’s top builders.
Mary Anne Gilmartin, 50, a trailblazing woman of the construction trade and all the Barclays Center-related residential and commercial construction to come, will break ground on Monday morning on 535 Carlton.
Located at Carlton Ave. and Dean St. in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, all of the 298 units are destined for low, moderate and middle-income families as part of the original Atlantic Yards deal that included Barclays Center. The name of the overall project was changed over the summer to Pacific Park, maybe because with the overwhelming success of Barclays and the fading lawsuits against the plan, the mood has become less stormy.
Gilmartin will be joined at Monday’s groundbreaking by her chairman, Bruce Ratner.
So who is this powerful Brooklyn mother of three kids ages 8 to 15, married to a retired NYPD detective, responsible for developing the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn, the 76-story New York by Gehry residential tower near City Hall and the New York Times building in Midtown?
“I grew up in Far Rockaway, but my dad split when my sisters and I were young,” she says, construction helmet firmly in place. “My mom was a 1960s hippie, so she moved us up to Woodstock, where she married a riverboat pilot. I went to Catholic high school in Kingston. My mom divorced again. But she instilled in all of us that we were in charge of our own destinies.”
So Gilmar- tin enrolled in Fordham University.
“I couldn’t afford it,” she says. “So I did d work-study, took loans, and waitressed my way through college, majoring in politics and Spanish.”
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1986 won a New York City Urban Fellowship to work in former Mayor Ed Koch’s administration.
“It was the height of the crack epidemic and I planned on going to law school and saving disadvantaged young people lost in the criminal justice system,” she said.
Instead she wound up in the city’s Public Development Corp., learning the high-powered machinations of constructing buildings that were beneficial to the economy and the general public.
“Like affordable housing,” she says. “I sat in meetings with the biggest builders in New York. Too young and naïve to realize I shouldn’t be telling these experienced guys how to do their jobs. But they listened to me and I learned from them.”
She spent seven years in city government, using both her street smarts and formal education to master the construction industry. “I met Bruce Ratner, who b became t the Cons sumer A Affairs c commiss sioner,” s she says. “I a also met m my husband (James) at a Fordham five-year reunion. He’d studied law and became a detective in the 30th Precinct.”
After Ratner left public service, he offered Gilmartin a job in 1994.
“I was one of the very few women in the construction business not from a builder’s family,” she says. “Still am. Maybe it was the way I grew up, but I was never intimidated by the boys’ club. Bruce Ratner trusted me to use my government experience to help expe- dite deals in the private sector.”
When he asked her to help him with the political hurricane of the Atlantic Yards project, she moved her family to Park Slope and rolled up her sleeves. Last year, Ratner stepped down as Forest City Ratner’s CEO and president, transferring those titles to Gilmartin.
“My kids absolutely love Brooklyn,” she says. “My husband is retired from the NYPD now and takes care of the kids while I’m working. He’s totally comfortable in his own skin being married to a career woman. He’s a regular guy. I might be in charge at work, but at home I can never get my hands on the TV clicker.”
Okay, so what about Pacific Park’s partially-built B2-BKLYN, the all-modular 32-story, 363-unit 50% affordable-rent apartment building at 361 Dean St., stalled in a dispute with the Skanska modular company?
“To resolve the dispute, we just bought the Skanksa factory,” she says. “We’re hiring back most of the furloughed union workers (to work) at the FCRC factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We’ll start spitting out mods and building that one again in 2015. And starting Monday, 535 Carlton will rise from the ground up.”
Like Mary Anne Gilmartin.