She looked nicer than Moses, and she had a new way of doing things — using facts and numbers the way he had used will and force.
[…]
The commissioner has Anna Wintour hair, a tight face, and a tan, thin body that does not look fifty but mid-thirties, sexy. She wears wraps over sleeveless dresses and when they fall away during rousing handshakes there is a toned yoga shoulder exposed, brownish and unabashed.
[…]
The new plaza has been up only a few days and already it’s peopled with iPad readers and texters and nearby business employees having their before-work coffee.
[…]
The dissenter does not speak again. In a city of people who matter and people who don’t, the woman at the table does not have the position or the information to pause the forward movement of the new commissioner, and so the dissenter disappears into a statistic [ptb: not clear in what sense this woman doesn’t disappear into nothing as opposed to pseudo-disappearing into a statistic]. And Sadik-Khan moves toward the green ribbon.
[…]
Back in her West Village bedroom, the commissioner dreams in futuristic pastoral, the Cross Bronx Expressway melting down into benches, joggers in ponytails loping across lime-green plazas, and bicycles, many thousands of them, as far as the eye can see.
Pete Beatty 