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.
Allen Lew, head of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, is guiding the renovation of RFK Stadium and creation of a ballpark.
(Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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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."
