The Board
Project Team
Marie Salerno
President and Co-founder
Marie Salerno is the President and Co-Founder with the late Marian Heiskell of the Conservancy. For 40 years, she has produced campaigns for New York’s cultural, literary and educational institutions, including The New York Public Library, Thirteen/WNET, New York Magazine and NYC 100: Greater New York Centennial Celebration.
Shirley McKinney
Superintendent, Manhattan Sites, NPS
Ms. McKinney is a 37-year National Park Service veteran who joined the system in 1980 as a clerk-stenographer at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. She received several promotions before moving to Mount Rushmore National Memorial in 1986 as the administrative officer, a post she held until she transferred to Gateway in 1988 as a program analyst.
Tania Perez
Development/Executive Assistant
As the Development Assistant, Tania Perez supports Federal Hall in an administrative capacity, and also interfaces with partners and stakeholders. She also aids the President to execute strategies across all campaigns.
Lynn Goldner
ARTISTIC CONSULTANT, THE DEMOCRACY PROJECT
Lynn Goldner has produced programming for HBO Films, Sundance Channel, A & E Networks, and ABC News. Her feature films include Marvelous, The Painted Heart, and consulting on the Academy Award-winning documentary One Day in September.
Laura Herrera
Partnerships and Event Director
Laura Herrera is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Full House Events. She is the partnerships and event director for Federal Hall. Her experience includes travel and tourism, government, and event production. She has worked with the Conservancy for 15 years on projects including the annual fundraiser and the facilities leasing program at Federal Hall.
Sam Roberts
Advisor
Sam Roberts is a pro-bono history advisor/writer for Federal Hall. He has been a reporter, columnist, and editor for The New York Times and New York Daily News during a journalism career that spans more than 50 years. He is the author of 10 books and the host of The New York Times Close Up on CUNY-TV.
Lynch Pinnacle Group
Fundraising Consultant
A nationally recognized advisory services firm, Lynch Pinnacle Group specializes in developing leadership strategies to build intelligence, credibility, and success for high-profile, iconic capital campaigns, national initiatives, and special projects in both the public and private sectors.
Eugene McCabe
Curatorial Intern
Eugene McCabe attends the Museum Studies Graduate program at CUNY, School of Professional Studies. He graduated with a B.A. from Lehman College. At Federal Hall, he is creating new Mobile Tours, researching and deploying archival materials and methodologies to produce imaginative new experiences.
Tonio Burgos
Chairman
Founder, TBA Inc.
Mr. Burgos is the founder of Tonio Burgos & Associates Inc., a consulting firm which serves a wide range of clients in both the public and private sector across the tristate area.
Mr. Burgos began his career in New York State government working for the State Senate. He then worked for Governor Mario Cuomo during his tenures as Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor and then Governor.
In 2002, Mr. Burgos was appointed Vice Chairman of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and a member of the School Construction Corporation. Mr. Burgos served as a member of the Advisory Committee of Lower Manhattan Economic Development Corporation on Transportation issues. He has also served as a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and as a Director of the PATH Commuter Rail System.
Mr. Burgos is a member of the Advisory Board of the NYC Partnership, the Steering Committee of the Association for Better New York (ABNY), the New York Building Congress Foundation and the Governors Island Advisory Committee.
Mr. Burgos is a member of the NYC Latin Media Entertainment Commission. He also serves on the board of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute and is a member of the Democratic National Committee for New Jersey.
Marie Salerno
President/CEO & Producer New Day at Federal Hall
Co-Founder, The Harbor Conservancy
Ms. Salerno leads the Conservancy’s charge to reinvent and revitalize Federal Hall National Memorial through the arts, humanities, and community engagement launching in 2026. She has held leadership roles at New York City’s cultural, literary, and educational institutions for over five decades. She has created strategic development, marketing and fundraising campaigns and produced major celebrations.
Throughout her career, Ms. Salerno has forged alliances in the public and private sectors to unleash the educational power of history. Prior to incubating and founding the Conservancy, she was the campaign finance director for the successful 2001 campaign of Betsy Gotbaum for New York City Public Advocate.
Ms. Salerno is the former president of NYC 100, the public-private centenary celebration of the City of New York commemorating the consolidation of New York’s five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. She led a consortium of over 200 entities, producing and specially arranging hundreds of programs and events that illuminated the city’s rich heritage.
Ms. Salerno was vice president of public affairs at the New York Public Library charged with creating its centennial celebration, the platform for launching a $500 million capital drive. Prior to NYPL, she was managing director of Thirteen/WNET.
Ms. Salerno was a member of the board of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, appointed in 2013 by the Secretary of Interior. She serves as on an advisory committee to America250.
Michael Greenspon
Treasurer
Global Head of NYT Licensing & Print Innovation for The New York Times.
As the Global Head of NYT Licensing (formerly called the News Services Division), he is responsible for The Times’ global licensing strategy and businesses. He leads a division with a large portfolio of revenue-generating products and services, as well as the editorial and business staff that support those businesses. Within the portfolio overseen by Mr. Greenspon are the editing and sales operations of The New York Times News Service and Syndicate; publications, including the International Weekly and Times Digest; content licensing, including international versions of T Magazine; and book development. He has run the division since 2009.
As Global Head of Print Innovation, Mr. Greenspon is the business lead for the ongoing evolution of The New York Times print newspaper, with the goal of enhancing reader engagement, increasing subscriber retention and continuing to provide meaningful advertising revenue. Before stepping into his role in Print Innovation, Mr. Greenspon helped lead The Times’ global expansion as the New York lead for international strategy. He also oversaw the company’s foreign-language operations, including its Chinese site, cn.nytimes.com, which he launched in 2012.
Mr. Greenspon joined The New York Times Company in 2002 in advertising sales at The Boston Globe. In 2004, he became a director in the Globe’s circulation department, overseeing youth readership programs and leading day-to-day operations of the newspaper’s wholesale distributor. He moved to New York in 2007 to join the strategic planning unit of The Times.
Before his time at the Globe, Mr. Greenspon held several positions at The Washington Post, including general assignment business reporter, assistant plant manager and financial planner. Prior to his newspaper career, he worked on national security policy at the Department of Defense.
Mr. Greenspon sits on the board of the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy, whose mission is to preserve the environment of New York Harbor, to promote economic development along the harbor, and to create on the waterfront the finest urban recreation and educational national park system in the world. He is on the executive committee of the board of SIP-IAPA, a press association serving the Americas, and sits on the boards of the New York News Publishers Association and the International Center for Journalists.
Mr. Greenspon holds a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Kenyon College. He is married with two children.
David J. Callard
Secretary
Mr. Callard is an active investor of his own assets and Chairs a very large investor’s investment committee. He co-founded Pelican Investment Management in 2002 which was acquired by the Eaton Vance Corporation in 2011.
Mr. Callard started his business career at J.P. Morgan where he worked primarily in its Trust & Investment Division as an investment officer, ultimately becoming a vice president. He then became a general partner of Alex.Brown & Sons in Baltimore, Maryland and a member of the firm’s executive committee. He also chaired Alex. Brown’s strategic planning committee and was a director of the firm. While at Alex.Brown he founded and headed the real estate and the mergers and acquisitions departments and headed the firm’s investment banking business.
Since 1992, he has been president of Wand Partners, a private equity firm that has raised and invested $350 million in a variety of companies.
During his career, Mr. Callard has chaired Hotel Investors’ Trust, a NYSE-listed REIT, and has been director of six other public companies. He advises the Investment Committee of Union Theological Seminary where he was a Trustee for 20 years.
John Calvelli
Mr. Calvelli is Executive Vice President for Public Affairs at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). He joined WCS after working for more than 15 years in public service. Mr. Calvelli served as Administrative Assistant/Counsel to Congressman Eliot Engel, having oversight responsibility for Congressional, administrative office functions and overseeing, directing, and supervising all legislative initiatives during his tenure on the House Commerce, Foreign Affairs, Science and the Education and Labor Committees.
Mr. Calvelli was bestowed the honorific title of Knighthood in the Order of Merit by The Republic of Italy for his work promoting stronger US-Italy relations. He is a founder and current chair of the International Conservation Partnership, and he also chairs the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’, Government Affairs Committee. He serves on the board of the Public Affairs Council of NYC & Company, the National Italian American Foundation, St. Joseph’s Medical Center, the Steering Committee of the Association for a Better New York and is the immediate past chair of the New York City Cultural Institutions Group.
Mr. Calvelli graduated from Fordham University and earned a law degree from Fordham Law School.
Jonathan Capehart
Award-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is anchor of The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC and also an opinion writer and member of the editorial board of The Washington Post, where he hosts the podcast, Cape Up.
In 1999, he was on the editorial board at the New York Daily News that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s series of editorials that helped save Harlem’s Apollo Theater. He was also named an Esteem Honoree in 2011. In 2014, The Advocate magazine ranked him nineth out of fifty of the most influential LGBT people in media. In December 2014, Mediaite named him one of the “Top Nine Rising Stars of Cable News.” Equality Forum made him a 2018 LGBT History Month Icon in October. In May 2018, the publisher of the Washington Post awarded him an “Outstanding Contribution Award” for his opinion writing and “Cape Up” podcast interviews.
Mr. Capehart first worked as assistant to the president of the WNYC Foundation. He then became a researcher for NBC’s The Today Show. From 1993 to 2000, he served as a member of the New York Daily News’ editorial board. Mr. Capehart then went on to work as a national affairs columnist for Bloomberg News from 2000 to 2001, and later served as a policy advisor for Michael Bloomberg in his successful 2001 campaign for Mayor of New York City. In 2002, he returned to the New York Daily News, where he worked as deputy editorial page editor until 2004, when he was hired as senior vice president and senior counselor of public affairs for Hill & Knowlton.
In 2007, Mr. Capehart joined the staff of the Washington Post as a journalist and editorial board member. There, he wrote for the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog and served as a contributor for MSNBC. He also served as a substitute anchor on many MSNBC programs, including AM Joy, The Cycle, Martin Bashir, and Way Too Early, and appeared regularly on Hardball and other programs. Capehart has also been a member of the Reporters Roundtable on ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos, as well as the host of America on the Line, a news and national call-in show about the 2018 midterm elections on WNYC New York Public Radio.
Mr. Capehart served as a moderator at the Aspen Ideas Festival and for the Aspen Institute, the Center for American Progress and at the Brussels Forum of the German Marshall Fund. He has also moderated sessions at the Atlantic’s Washington Ideas Forum and for the Connecticut Forum, and he was a fellow at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service in 2019.
Mr. Capehart was born on July 2, 1967 in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Saint Benedict’s Preparatory School and received his B.A. degree in political science from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1989.
Ed Cox
Ed Cox is a lawyer with a distinguished record of service to his Party and in the domestic and international policy arenas. He has served three U.S. Presidents, four Governors and the Republican Party at the state and national levels. He served as Chairman of the Republican Party of New York State from 2009 to 2019, one of the longest serving tenures. In July of 2019 Mr. Cox was tapped to join the Trump Pence Victory finance team.
For more than forty years he has supported and campaigned for candidates across the country beginning in 1968 as a part of the Nixon presidential campaign. In 1972, he travelled extensively as a family surrogate for President Nixon and in 1980 was active in the Reagan campaign. In 1984, he conceived and organized the statewide volunteer effort which helped carry New York State for the Reagan-Bush team. In 1988 and 1992, Cox organized the New York speakers’ bureau for George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaigns.
Cox has assisted candidates at all levels throughout New York in numerous election cycles. And in the critical election of 1994, Cox played a key role in helping to elect George Pataki Governor. He also participated in the Republican National Conventions and presidential campaigns of 1996, 2000, 2004. During the 2008 Presidential election, he served as State Chairman of John McCain’s campaign.
Under President Reagan, Cox served as General Counsel to the government corporation which financed major synthetic fuels projects. As a Trustee of the State University of New York (SUNY) he has developed cutting-edge policies and programs for community colleges, charter schools, teacher training, facilities construction and finance and administration. Cox has played a key role under four Governors in the selection of judges for New York’s highest court. In volunteer positions both in and out of government he has been a leader on energy and environmental policies.
His writings on public policy have appeared in The New Republic magazine, the Antitrust Law Journal and the New York Post, and he is co-author of a book on the Federal Trade Commission.
Cox was born in Suffolk County, Long Island and was raised in Yorkville, New York City, where he graduated from Trinity High School. He received his B.A. degree in 1968 from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He earned his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1972.
He is a proud veteran having joined the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) at Princeton in 1964. He later completed officer and airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia and served as a reserve officer with the 11th Special Forces Group.
Cox practices corporate and finance law and has served as a member of the Management Committee and the Chairman of the Corporate Department at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. He has represented companies in a wide variety of industries including software, finance, insurance and biotech and has been named to the list of Super Lawyers in the practice of Securities and Finance law.
Cox married Patricia Nixon in the Rose Garden of the White House in 1971. They have one child, Christopher, who is a graduate of Princeton and the New York University School of Law.
Steve Israel
Former Congressman
Mr. Israel left Capitol Hill – unindicted and undefeated – to pursue a career as a writer. In addition to writing two critically acclaimed satires of Washington, he currently heads the nonpartisan Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs in New York.
Mr. Israel was a Member of Congress for sixteen years. He left in 2017, having served as House Democrats chief political strategist between 2011-2015 as Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. President Bill Clinton called him “one of the most thoughtful Members of Congress.” Mr. Israel served on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment & Related Agencies, where he took a leading role in supporting historic preservation, land conservation, and cultural arts investments.
He was one of only nine members of the House Democratic leadership. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for four years, Israel was the chief architect of House campaign strategies. He was responsible for overall development of competitive House campaigns across America. He was lauded for recruiting and electing the most diverse and entrepreneurial freshman congressional class in history. He developed a vast network of local, state and federal officials throughout the nation and is considered a leading expert in congressional dynamics.
He served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee as well as the Armed Services Committee and Financial Services Committee. He also created the House Battlefield Preservation Caucus.
Mr. Israel’s most recent book, Big Guns, skewers the gun lobby. Branded Pictures has fasttracked it for film/television development. Mr. Israel’s first novel, The Global War on Morris came out in 2015. The book was optioned to Rob Reiner for television development.
As the Director of the new nonpartisan Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University, the only academically-based institute of politics in the New York City metropolitan area. Its mission is to curate programs that deepen discourse and raise understanding of political issues and geopolitics. He also served as a Tisch College Visiting Fellow at Tufts University, where he taught a course called “Topics in American Politics: Inside Congress and the 2018 Midterm Elections,” and as an Institute of Politics Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he taught a student-only and off-the-record seminar with former Congressman Tom Davis, who served on the other side of the aisle as the Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) from 1999 to 2003.
Mr. Israel serves on the boards of the Theodore Roosevelt Legacy Partnership; Alzheimers Foundation of America; and Haiti Air Ambulance. He and his wife live in Oyster Bay Cove, Long Island.
Mark Josephson
Leslie Mattingly
Ms. Mattingly is an attorney, mediator, advocate for environmental and historic preservation, and musician. Throughout her career, she has been active in a large variety of civic and charitable issues, including youth mediation, civil rights, and child abuse prevention. For over a decade, Ms. Mattingly served in private practice in Indiana while also serving the court system in Madison County, Indiana. She was a Master Commissioner, Assistant Judge and Judge Pro Tem. In 2001, Ms. Mattingly served as a member of President George W. Bush’s committee to interview and recommend nominees from the State of Georgia, for the positions of Federal Judge, U.S. Attorney, and Federal Marshall. Further, she was appointed by Governor Sonny Perdue to the Georgia Judicial Nominations Commission, vetting and recommending Judicial officers at every State level, serving 8 years in that capacity.
She founded the restoration of the historic Paramount Theater in Anderson, IN, and has served several history related boards and organizations. From 2003-2012, she served on the Coastal Marshlands and Shore Protection Committees of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources. From 2013-2021 he served two terms on the board of the Georgia Conservancy, including as Board Chair. She has served as a member of the Advisory Council of the St. Simons Island Land Trust since 2004. Since 2013, she has served on the Advisory Council of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico (Para La Naturaleza). She was the founding president of the Coastal Symphony of Georgia Society and served as a member and officer of its board. Ms. Mattingly has been a member of Rotary International since 1991 and has twice served as a club president. She currently serves in multiple positions in her local club and District. Beginning in 2018, she spearheaded a large, multi-year Rotary Global Grant focused on re-establishing sustainable agriculture in Puerto Rico.
Licensed to practice in both Georgia and Indiana, she is also certified in domestic and civil mediation, and arbitration in Georgia. Ms. Mattingly holds both a B.S. degree, in Business Administration and a J.D. degree, in Law, from Drake University.
Elsie McCabe Thompson
Elsie McCabe Thompson is president of the New York City Mission Society, an organization dedicated to ending multigenerational poverty through compelling educational programs. She is a former president of the Museum for African Art. During her tenure there, Ms. McCabe Thompson oversaw the expansion and reinvigoration of its Board of Trustees, increased earned income by roughly 200 percent, and—most significantly— initiated and led the most important development in the institution’s history to date: the planning for and construction of a new building, to be located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 110th Street.
Prior to joining the museum, Ms. McCabe Thompson served as New York City Mayor David Dinkins’ chief-of-staff, overseeing the city’s nine Constituency Affairs offices; its city, state, and federal Legislative Affairs offices; the Human Rights Commission; the U.N. Commission; and the Community Development Agency, among other areas. Previously, in the private sector, Ms. McCabe Thompson was a senior litigator with Shearman & Sterling, where she specialized in commercial and banking litigation. During her tenure there, she founded and ran a training and mentoring program for minority students.
Ms. McCabe Thompson has served on the boards of numerous nonprofit and for-profit corporations. She currently serves on the boards of the National Recreation Foundation, the Trinity School, and the Learning Care Group, Inc. Ms. McCabe Thompson is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), the Greater New York Hospital Association’s Diversity Committee, and the Association of Art Museum Directors. She is a graduate of Barnard College and Harvard Law School.
Michael Mulgrew
Mr. Mulgrew became the fifth president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in August 2009 and was elected to a full term by the UFT membership in April 2010. A staunch advocate for equality in education and fairness for all working families, Mr. Mulgrew has led advocacy campaigns for educational equity, for transparency and oversight in school governance as well as for jobs and city services. He was instrumental in organizing the Keep the Promises, One New York: Fighting for Fairness and A Strong Economy for All coalitions between 2008 and 2011 that led to the restoration of hundreds of millions of classroom dollars and city services.
Mr. Mulgrew is vice president of the American Federation of Teachers and an executive board member of the New York State United Teachers. Mr. Mulgrew also sits on the boards of the Council for Unity, CUNY’s Joseph S. Murphy Center for Labor, Community, & Policy Studies, and New Visions for Public Schools. He has received numerous labor, education and public service honors, including the 2011 NAACP Benjamin L. Hooks Keeper of the Flame award.
Prior to being the UFT president, Mr. Mulgrew served as vice president for Career & Technical Education high schools and later chief operating officer of the union, which represents 200,000 teachers, guidance counselors, paraprofessionals and other personnel in New York City’s public schools, along with nurses and home day care providers. A Staten Island native, Mr. Mulgrew attended CUNY’s College of Staten Island and has degrees in English literature and special education.
Travis Noyes
Travis Noyes is the owner of Attraction Services Company which helps start-up and grow businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector. Mr. Noyes previously served in the capacities of chief operating officer and senior vice president, for New York Water Taxi, Circle Line Downtown, and Water Taxi Beach.
He has served as the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Marketing Association and the Destination St. George Alliance. Mr. Noyes also serves on the boards of Snug Harbor Botanical Garden and Cultural Center, NYC & Company, and The Coalition for Hospitality and Tourism Recovery.
Patricia Duff
Patricia Duff has worked for over two decades in civic life and politics, for a Congressional investigative Committee, as a consultant in Washington D.C. for two of the top political strategy firms, and she has been at the forefront of many issues and campaigns, advocating for women, children, human rights, freedom of expression and government reform.
She founded The Common Good, a 501c3 nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that brings together distinguished national leaders and opinion makers on critical issues of the day with forums, screenings, town halls and informational travel to create civil dialogue, help break the gridlock of hyper-partisanship, and to encourage active participation in the political process. Events have included top government officials such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, Antony Blinken, and many other major elected officials, opinion leaders, experts, and media figures. Ms Duff founded and chaired TCGs’ predecessor, Show Coalition, an entertainment industry organization which helped fuse Washington politics and the Hollywood community by informing and involving its members in critically important public policy issues.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of Advisors of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and has also served on the Library of Congress Board of Trustees, NPR Radio, and other eminent organizations. She was honored by Esquire magazine as “Women We Love” for her activism.
Charles John O'Byrne
Charles John O’Byrne Charles John O’Byrne is Executive Vice President for Policy at Related Companies where he serves in a leadership role on a wide range of assignments involving government affairs on the federal, state and local levels; labor issues, litigation matters, and questions of strategy on multiple projects within the Related portfolio. He also serves as General Counsel for Fanvision Entertainment, a holding of Related’s Chairman and Founder, Stephen M. Ross.
In 2016, he was named one of the 50 most powerful and influential New Yorkers in politics and business over the age of 50 by “City and State”.
Charles is a native New Yorker and currently resides in Manhattan. Trained as an attorney, his career prior to joining Related involved varied experiences in government, religion, academia and business. A former Jesuit, he worked at Columbia and Harvard universities as a chaplain and teaching fellow. He also served as Associate General Counsel for the Archdiocese of New York.
Charles has decades of experience in politics and government as a speech writer, communications director and chief of staff. His work included stints on several presidential campaigns including that of Governor Howard Dean.
He spent more than five years in state service acting as Chief of Staff to the Senate Minority Leader, Chief of Staff to the Lieutenant Governor and Secretary to former Governor David A. Paterson. The constitutional office of Secretary to the Governor is the highest appointed office in the state’s executive branch.
Charles has served as a trustee and personal adviser to members of the Kennedy Family for more than 25 years.
Long active in charitable and philanthropic works, he is a past president of the Columbia College Alumni Association, a co-founder of the Thomas Merton Lecture at Columbia, a former trustee of the Kennedy Smith Foundation and former Vice Chair of VSA Arts, an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts providing artistic opportunities for people with disabilities. He is former Co-Chair and current member of the executive committee of the board of the Hetrick Martin Institute in New York, a member of the Board of Directors of NYC Outward Bound, a member of the Steering Committee for an Association for a Better New York and a Trustee of the Citizens Budget Commission. He also serves on the executive board of the Greater Area Board of Directors for the Boy Scouts of America.
Charles holds his BA summa cum laude from Columbia College, where he majored in history and studied Chinese philosophy. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the Columbia University School of Law where he was named to the International Fellows Program. He holds a Masters in Divinity with Distinction and an S.T.L., in Theology from the Weston Jesuit School.
Armand Pohan
Armand Pohan has been the chairman of NY Waterway since 2002 and is actively involved in the management of the business, which operates over 30 ferry boats in New York Harbor.
Mr. Pohan is also the current chairman of Steamship Mutual Underwriting Association, a UK mutual insurance company which insures fleets of ships all over the world. He began his career as an Assistant Prosecutor in Hudson County, NJ, and at the Newark law firm of McCarter & English, where he became a partner. After eight years in the practice of law, Mr. Pohan joined A-P-A Transport Corp., serving as President for over 20 years.
Mr. Pohan served as an elected Councilman in the Borough of Fort Lee, NJ, from 2003 to 2018, and still serves as a member of the Borough’s Planning Board. His nonprofit leadership includes seven years as president of the Board of Dwight-Englewood School; 17 years as Treasurer of the Fontainebleau Associations, an organization that supports French music and architecture studies at the Chateau de Fontainebleau outside Paris; and 4 years as Treasurer of the Friends of Fort Lee Film, Inc. Mr. Pohan is a graduate of Harvard College magna cum laude, and of Harvard Law School.
Louis Jerome
Louis Jerome is a Principle of JEMB Realty, his family’s real estate company that he joined in 2008. Mr. Jerome oversees the primary assets of the family portfolio in Herald Square, which involves close to 700 residential rental apartments and several hundred thousand square feet of retail space. Additionally, he is heavily involved in the company’s casino and gaming divisions, its expansion of the company in the development field, while also overseeing the company’s historic hospitality investments.
Prior to joining JEMB, Mr. Jerome attended New York University, graduating in 2008 with a BA in History. He has worked and interned at various governmental and business offices such as Senator Charles E. Schumer, City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, Assemblyman Alec Brook Krasny, and City Councilman Domenic Rechia Jr. In 2013, Mr. Jerome launched the Small Business PAC to promote candidates for City Council that were pro- small business. He also volunteers in local community institutions such as Sephardic Bikur Holim, and is a trustee for the Citizens Budget Commission. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Ellyn Toscano
Shirley McKinney
Ex-Officio
Shirley McKinney is Superintendent for Manhattan Sites, which includes African Burial Ground National Monument, Federal Hall National Memorial, Castle Clinton National Monument, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site, General Grant National Memorial, Governors Island National Monument, Stonewall National Monument and Hamilton Grange National Memorial in the borough of Manhattan and Saint Paul’s Church National Historic Site, located in Mount Vernon, New York. Ms. McKinney is a 37-year National Park Service veteran who joined the system in 1980 as a clerk-stenographer at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. She received several promotions before moving to Mount Rushmore National Memorial in 1986 as the administrative officer, a post she held until she transferred to Gateway in 1988 as a program analyst. She went on to become Gateway’s Administrative Officer and then Superintendent of its Staten Island unit. Ms. McKinney moved on to work as the assistant to the Commissioner of the National Parks of New York Harbor, a collaboration of 10 national parks, including Manhattan Sites, in the New York City metropolitan area and was promoted to Deputy Superintendent at Manhattan Sites. From there she was promoted to her current position as Superintendent.
Marian S. Heiskell
Chair & Co-Founder, National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy
Mrs. Heiskell, among many accomplishments, was a former newspaper executive, lifelong conservationist, and a leader in numerous philanthropic activities. She was a citizen founder of Gateway National Recreation Area and a member of the board of The New York Times Company where she also served as its director of special activities from 1963 to 1977.
Mrs. Heiskell was a former trustee of Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. and a former director of Ford Motor Company and Merck & Co., Inc. In addition, she was honorary chairman of GrowNYC and of The New 42nd Street, Inc. She was a member of the board of Audubon New York and of the 42nd Street Development Corporation.
Mrs. Heiskell was a lifetime trustee of the New York Botanical Garden and formerly served on its Board of Managers and the Executive Committee. In recognition of her years of service to the city and her efforts to make its neighborhoods green, vital and more humane, the Marian S. Heiskell Garden was opened in September 1997.