By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH  

Officially, lower Manhattan's much ballyhooed Business Improvement District will not be up and running until Jan. 1. But someone forgot to tell that to Carl Weisbrod, the group's new head.

Ensconced in temporary offices across from Battery Park, Mr. Weisbrod, fresh from the leadership of the city's Economic Development Corporation, is already chipping away at downtown's travails.

He has exacted a promise from Peter E. Stangl, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to consider extending commuter railroads to lower Manhattan. He is readying plans for a downtown software-industry center. He is setting up programs to beef up sanitation and security throughout downtown, even though he concedes that those are secondary issues in the area.

"It's like the Giuliani administration tackling quality of life," Mr. Weisbrod said. "It makes a visible, concrete point."

Few downtown afficionados argue with Mr. Weisbrod's goals. But the question remains: Is he the one to achieve them?

His fans -- and there are many -- point to his successes in keeping companies like Morgan Stanley from leaving New York, his experience with revitalizing Times Square, his ability to manage people and his intimate knowledge of the political process.

"In his public-sector life he was always part of the solution, not part of the problem," said David W. Singleton, senior vice president of J.P. Morgan & Company and chairman of the Downtown/Lower Manhattan Association committee that hired Mr. Weisbrod for his new post.

"He has demonstrated a terrific ability to mediate between the private and public sector," added Richard L. Schaffer, the Commissioner of City Planning under Mayor David N. Dinkins and now a professor.

Skeptics, however, suggest that on Mr. Weisbrod's watch New York overpaid to keep companies that would never have left anyway; that Times Square's improvement has been agonizingly slow; that he ignored community sentiments when he arranged for more than 30 acres of city land to be used for a new tennis center. And they worry that his lack of private-sector experience means he may be destined to make bad mistakes.

" Carl has never had to deliver services in a real-time way," said one city official. Others have been critical of the benefits Morgan Stanley was able to win from the city as part of its decision to remain.

Such criticism irritates not only Mr. Weisbrod, who notes that his deals never involved cash handouts, but simply put a brake on tax growth for companies that stayed; it also irritates his former bosses.

" Carl doesn't have business experience, business sense?" asked an incredulous Edward I. Koch, who was Mayor through much of Mr. Weisbrod's public career. "My administration was very business-oriented, to the annoyance of the radical left. And whatever task Carl was assigned, he completed."

David Dinkins, whose subsequent administration had a quite different political thrust, is equally effusive.

"What he did for me was amazing," Mr. Dinkins said. "He got the United States Tennis Authority to spend millions to build a center that the city will own and can use 11 months of the year. Would people rather they did that in New Jersey or Atlanta?"

Many business leaders accept Mr. Weisbrod as of their ilk.

"I negotiate with tenants to stay in my buildings, he negotiates with companies to stay in the city," said William Rudin, the prominent New York developer. "We both must understand the corporate mentality."

Those are pretty strong endorsements for someone who, in his youth, might have taken intimations of business savvy as an insult.

A native New Yorker, Mr. Weisbrod went through public schools in Queens and spent the 60's attending Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and New York University Law School.

"I really got caught up in the politics and social change of the decade," said Mr. Weisbrod, who turned 50 last month.

He went to work for Mobilization for Youth, a forerunner of the National Legal Services Corporation, representing squatters, welfare recipients and other indigents. He successfully sued the city so many times that, in classic make-the-troublemaker-monitor fashion, he was recruited into the Department of Relocation under Mayor John V. Lindsay.

Since then, Mr. Weisbrod has brushed up against many private-sector issues and people, picking up their attitudes and techniques. What he doesn't know, he asks about.

"Too often, city officials with no business expertise turn for advice to those with even less expertise," said Raymond T. O'Keefe, an executive director of the Edward S. Gordon real estate brokerage. " Carl always reached out for thoughts from industry."

And he acted on those thoughts. He transformed the Mayor's Office of Midtown Enforcement from an agency whose sole purpose was rooting out Times Square pornographers into one that would deliver services throughout midtown. He consolidated the Public Development Corporation, the Department of Ports and Trade and the Financial Services Corporation into what is now the Economic Development Corporation. He pared the new agency's staff by 25 percent, yet continued to recruit professionals from business schools and to dismiss people who were not performing up to snuff.

"I turned E.D.C. into a true meritocracy," Mr. Weisbrod said. "I tolerate human error, but not repeated human error."

To be sure, the E.D.C was never bound to hire and fire by civil service seniority rules. And it did not need myriad signoffs to buy equipment, something that Mr. Weisbrod concedes made it easier to implement E-mail and otherwise computerize the agency.

"I've never had to run organizations where I was stuck with rigid, bureaucratic rules," Mr. Weisbrod said. "I'm not sure I could stand it."

Perhaps because of his distaste for bureaucracy and petty politics, Mr. Weisbrod has wafted comfortably between administrations, businesses and other oft-warring constituencies. A lifelong Democrat, he not only moved easily from the feisty Koch administration into the more-laid-back Dinkins administration, but he also seems to be segueing smoothly into dealing with the current Republican administration.

"They are receptive to ideas for the best of reasons," Mr. Weisbrod said. "They recognize that lower Manhattan contributes a half billion dollars in real estate taxes each year and is vital to Manhattan's health."

Mr. Weisbrod's ability to stay out of the political fray does not surprise his friends and former colleagues.

" CARL has always known how to bridge worlds," said Rosina K. Abramson, president of the Queens West Development Corporation. Added Jane Henig Orlin, a project manager at Cushman & Wakefield and a former project manager for the city: " Carl had political savvy, but he was never a political hack."

That difference should serve him in good stead, other former colleagues note.

" Carl is a big-picture person, someone who can understand the strengths and weaknesses of the lower Manhattan area, not just of a building or a block," said Barry F. Sullivan, the former deputy mayor. "And he is an excellent negotiator -- he really hears what his opponents are saying."

Mr. Sullivan points to Mr. Weisbrod's success in keeping Unicef in New York as an example of that listening skill.

" Carl realized that they kept harping on the fact that New Rochelle would give them their building," Mr. Sullivan recalled. So Mr. Weisbrod negotiated a deal in which Unicef takes title to its United Nations-area building at the end of a 30-year lease.

Such successes are sources of considerable pride to Mr. Weisbrod. And in a sense, they are also the reason he decided to leave government service.

"I accomplished what I'd set out to do," he said. And, of course, there was a quintessentially private-sector motive as well. "I wanted more money."

No quibble on that last statement. Mr. Weisbrod won't talk salary, but he is making considerably more than he made with the city. But in fact, he did not accomplish everything he set out to do.

Mr. Weisbrod, his wife, Jody Adams, and their 11-year-old son, Billy, live in a three-bedroom co-op on Roosevelt Island and he has been trying to get the city to extend ferry service there for more than a decade.

"Now he's even trying to get the Queens West ferry to stop at Roosevelt Island," chuckles Ms. Abramson, who once headed the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation.

Ms. Abramson sounds unpersuaded. Some things, it seems, even savvy negotiators cannot accomplish.

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company