Her family tree, indeed, blooms with familiar names, attracting her attention and access to the right parties ever since she was young. Her father was Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., an heir to the Standard Oil fortune and a descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. Her mother was Babe Paley, a famous social icon in the 1950s and 1960s; she’s cousins with Topper Mortimer. Ms. Burden’s first husband was the late Carter Burden, himself a descendent of the Vanderbilt family and ultimately a progressive City Councilman, and her second was the late Steven Ross, who led Warner Communications.
“When they talk about society in New York,” said David Patrick Columbia, founder of the New York Social Diary, “Amanda is the real thing.”
“Her mother, Babe Paley, and her stepfather were kind of the toast of the town,” he said. After Ms. Burden was first married, “they immediately started living a highly publicized, wealthy person’s life.”
All made for an unexpected candidate for government work in urban planning, a field that, at least in New York, has rarely held a glitzy place in the public imagination.
After earning a planning degree from Columbia, Ms. Burden took her first took as a disciple of the acclaimed planner Holly Whyte, gradually climbing a sort of urban-planning ladder. She led design and planning at Battery Park City in the 1980s, and later landed on the City Planning Commission. Then, in a move unexpected by many in the planning world, a newly inaugurated Michael Bloomberg picked her to lead the department and commission starting in 2002.
Within the administration, she has occupied something of a different realm than other commissioners. She was neither career bureaucrat nor corporate executive-turned-government reformer, and is personal friends with the mayor, living doors down from him on East 79th Street. She has a trim figure, wears graceful suits and fine jewelry, and emanates an air of elegance as she chairs planning meetings.
She still goes to parties, sometimes with her on- and off-companion Charlie Rose, though far less than in her younger days and they are often for planning-related functions, such as High Line dinners and the American Institute of Architects’ banquet.
She bristles at the word “socialite.”
“I like to say that the S-word stands for smart, and serious,” Ms. Burden said in her office.
From the start of the administration, she has doubtlessly been a devoted, exhaustive worker, walking the turf for each of the city’s rezonings (she said that she had just walked the north shore of Staten Island for a transit study). From her unassuming map-littered office at 22 Reade Street, she has overseen over 100 publicly-led rezonings that cover one-fifth of the city, often allowing more and taller office and apartment towers in certain places—near transit—while capping growth in residential side-streets. This aptly offers a carrot to both sides of the most basic pro- and anti-development debate that is forever playing out in the city, perhaps a source of her power and credibility with both the real estate industry and in neighborhoods.
“If you had to look historically, you would say she’s certainly one of the most influential, if not the most influential commissioners of city planning in New York history,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, an urban historian at Columbia University renowned for his research on New York.
MANY OF THESE REZONINGS were pushed by Mr. Doctoroff, who especially urged changing the West Side’s manufacturing zones and the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront to allow for residential and office towers.
