Opinion: She beat Donald Trump

New York has lost a civic giant. Olive Freud, who passed away this week at the age of 97, is someone whom 99% of New Yorkers have never heard of, but her courageous fights against Donald Trump, Lincoln Center and local developers have shaped the 21st century Upper West Side.

For those who knew her and her passion for both the environment and her beloved Upper West Side, her important work will echo for decades.

“You don’t want to be on the opposite side of the negotiating table with Olive Freud,” said City Council member Gale Brewer. “She takes on these big companies and she wins. She’s really made her mark on the West Side.”

Freud started a group in the 1980s called “The Committee for Environmentally Sound Development.” Who inspired this fledgling non-profit? None other than a rapacious developer named Donald Trump who had just bought a huge parcel of waterfront property stretching from 59th Street to 72nd Street along the Hudson River.

“Riverside Drive ended at 72nd Street and the park ended there… we could have extended the park to 59th Street but instead dear old Donald Trump bought that plot and of course he wanted to put in luxury housing,” Freud recalled in 2023, when she received the Clara Lemlich award in recognition of her environmental activist work. “And of course he talked elected officials into helping him do it.”

But when “dear old Donald” tried to pull a fast one, Freud and her environmental group stopped him in his tracks.

“It was part of the agreement when he bought that land that the traffic that originated from his complex would go up the new road – Riverside Boulevard – to Riverside Drive,” Freud said. “But it was very expensive to do, and he thought it would be better if the traffic came up to West End Avenue instead.”

Freud wasn’t going to let her new nemesis get away with this. So she filed a lawsuit – and won. “So now there is a connection from Riverside Drive to Riverside Boulevard and the Boulevard goes into the West Side Highway,” she said. “It’s much better (for the environment and traffic) that way.”

Freud came to the Upper West Side in the 1960s with her husband, Edgar. They raised two children, Conan and Salome. I went to Stuyvesant High School with them, and Conan was a long-time friend.

Conan worked in city government for many years — at OMB, TLC and other city agencies known by their acronyms. After 9/11, he was one of those selfless New Yorkers who went to Ground Zero and spent days helping at “the pile.” For his heroism, like many others, he contracted a fatal cancer and died in 2018. (I wrote a tribute to him after he passed away.)

Olive lamented how much all the luxury high rises changed her neighborhood in the last 60 years. “The West Side used to be full of social activists,” she said in 2023. “Now it’s full of people who only think of themselves and not their community.”

But she was the quintessential community activist. When she noticed one day that her neighbor, the cultural institution Lincoln Center, was chopping down trees in a local park to build a new concession area, she leapt into action and sued the iconic venue. “That was Damrosch Park,” she said. “And we won. They had to re-plant those trees and put back the flowers that had been cleared.”

At 95 years old, when most of her contemporaries had long relocated to Century Village in Florida or were spending their well-earned retirements playing canasta, Olive Freud was helping a man on West 45th Street fight a huge building going up in his neighborhood.

“I thought I was calming things down, and then he called me,” Freud said in 2023. “And within a week, I found him an attorney, a land use expert. I couldn’t help myself. It needed to be done.”