By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 10, 2005; Page B01

The night 14 steel roof trusses collapsed during construction of the Washington Convention Center, Allen Y. Lew raced from his home in Georgetown to the scene in the middle of a driving rain. What he saw shocked him.

"It looked like spaghetti," said Lew, who was managing director of the 2.3 million-square-foot project.

By the next morning, his steelworkers, architects and engineers were blaming one another, but Lew was calm: An insurance policy he had purchased for $400,000 would cover the roughly $8 million in damage.

This combination of thorough planning and emotional steadiness helped Lew open the Convention Center on time in 2003 and will come in handy as he faces his next major task: overseeing construction of a baseball stadium project along the Anacostia waterfront in Southeast Washington in just three years.

Hired in November as chief executive of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, Lew, 54, took over an operation still in its first phase. An architect has yet to be hired. Stadium designs have not been developed. And land has not been acquired from property owners. Even the project's ultimate cost -- estimated at $440 million by mayoral aides but raised to $530 million by the city's chief financial officer -- is difficult to determine at this stage, Lew acknowledged.

Still, he professed confidence: "I'm not nervous. We'll get it done."

Lew will be a key player in the city's most politically controversial development project in years. Not only will he serve as top manager of the new ballpark, he is also overseeing an $18.5 million renovation of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, designated as the temporary home for the Washington Nationals.

Although the project is considerably smaller and less expensive than the Convention Center, the ballpark's controversial beginnings have raised the political stakes. City leaders, civic activists and residents debated for months over Democratic Mayor Anthony A. Williams's plan to use public money for the project before a sharply divided D.C. Council approved an amended financing package in December. Significant delays beyond Major League Baseball's March 2008 deadline could cost the city millions of dollars in penalties and cost overruns.

Although he will work closely with a team of city planners, Lew, who is paid $225,000 per year, is responsible for completing the project on time and within budget. But, as he knows from experience, it won't be easy.

The Convention Center, estimated in September 1998 to cost $714 million, ended up costing $834 million, a 17 percent increase due in part to overtime for workers. At a public hearing on the baseball stadium in October, D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) railed against the Convention Center cost overruns and suggested that Lew would exceed his budget on the stadium.

"I like him as a person, but you don't have to be a bad guy to overshoot the budget," Catania said in an interview. "What I'm suggesting is that from the get-go, the administration has underestimated the costs because it is politically unacceptable to tell the true costs."

Shortly after his appointment, Lew raised the cost estimate of renovating RFK Stadium from the $13 million in the mayor's initial budget to $18.5 million because he expects having to pay overtime to have the place ready for the Nationals by April.

Lew would not discuss the budget for the new stadium, which was developed by mayoral aides before he arrived. But Mark H. Tuohey, chairman of the sports commission, said that Lew told him the budget and timetable for the stadium are satisfactory.

"We're under the gun to get it done, but Allen is comfortable and I'm comfortable," Tuohey said.

Lew, short and compact, with a wide face and thick graying hair, favors simple navy suits and patterned ties. Since arriving in Washington in 1996 from his native New York City, he has lived alone in Georgetown because his wife, Suling, and his son, Garrett, 17, remain in New York. They see each other most weekends.

Colleagues describe him as calm, amiable and confident. With a touch of a New York City accent, Lew name-drops hometown politicians and architects he has worked with like a baseball fan listing his favorite players.

He grew up in Manhattan and Queens, where his parents owned a dry-cleaning business, and attended architecture school at City College and graduate school at Columbia University. In the early 1980s, he was hired by a former professor, Thomas F. Galvin, who was building New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and brought him in as a top aide on the project. That building was delayed by two years and went $111 million over budget, according to news reports. Lew eventually rose to chief operating officer.

He left a few years later for the private sector, developing hospitals and office buildings in New York. In 1996, he was tapped by the Washington Convention Center Authority to oversee construction of its massive project.

It wasn't easy. A ship carting steel from South Korea dumped the cargo overboard after hitting bad weather. Trusses collapsed. Cleaning contaminated soil cost $11 million more than expected.

"I never saw him lose his cool, and I'll tell you, everybody else did," said Michael M. Dickens, a Convention Center board member. "Any number of things happened, end-of-the-world things where we'd be sitting in meetings and everyone would be trying to find their Valium. But Allen was just calmly taking notes."

Ted Mariani, a chief architect on the Convention Center project, said that Lew "hates to criticize people and finds it hard to really slam down on people. If I have one criticism of Allen, it's that he's sometimes too forgiving."

Lew laughs about such descriptions.

"They might have been playing off my Far Eastern heritage because they always talked about how I brought 'harmony,' " said Lew, whose father emigrated from China. "I see my job like a Roman galley ship. Some guys are rowing one direction, some another, and some are just dangling their oars in the water. It's my job to get them rowing in the same direction and help steer it."

As the Convention Center's completion deadline loomed, Lew recognized that the project was behind schedule and authorized double and triple daily work shifts at a cost of $20 million in overtime.

In a report to Congress, the General Accounting Office pegged the final cost at $834 million. Lew and others argued that infrastructure work, including improving a Metro station and city streets, was unfairly included because much of it was added after the project began and was paid for with federal funds.

Jeanette M. Franzel, who conducted the GAO study, said last week that her office (now the Government Accountability Office) found "no big weaknesses" in the performance of Lew and his team.

But as Lew turns to the baseball stadium, even his former colleagues said they are concerned about the tight deadline. Mariani said he agreed with D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp (D), who pushed for spending caps and persuaded Major League Baseball to limit some of the District's liability for cost overruns.

Outside Lew's sparsely decorated office at RFK Stadium, early signs of a facelift are apparent: The playing field has been dug up, and seats in left field have been put on rollers. But on a recent day, there was a reminder of the kind of unpredictable setbacks that come with his job: Contractors had gone home because it was raining.

"I believe in Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong," he said. He surveyed the dirt field. "It's doable, but it will be a challenge."