The following article appeared in today’s NY Times: Appropriately enough, percussion from construction hammers provides the audio backdrop at the Midtown office of Avi Schick, the sumo-size former deputy in Eliot Spitzer’s hyperactive attorney general’s office. Now, at the request of Governor Spitzer, he wears a double hard hat as president of the Empire State Development Corporation and, starting last week, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Only 40, and already an important public policy player.

Make that two hard hats plus a threadbare yarmulke, an old favorite: An Orthodox Jew, he spares time for synagogue every morning, tries to study the Talmud nightly and posits that his religion — he graduated from Mirrer Yeshiva Central Institute in Brooklyn before receiving a law degree from Columbia University — provides a reality check.

“Maybe it’s a religious lesson, or maybe it’s a moral lesson, but it grounds me and reminds me, I guess, of the transience of life and the small role any one person plays, which is a pretty good thing to be reminded of when you work in government,” he says, dropping into a leather armchair in an office dominated by family photographs — he has five children, ages 4 to 15, at home in Midwood, so the photos stretch far — and a blueprint of ground zero. He has a more impressive map, one that takes up an entire wall, but thought it would be “too ostentatious to use the bigger one.”

He seems blissfully immune to the renovation racket at Empire State’s headquarters on Third Avenue. Perhaps he is learning to treat hammering, sawing, blasting and digging as music to his ears.

Construction, and scads of it, is the focus of Mr. Schick’s new portfolio. “There’s nobody I trust more to get things done,” Mr. Spitzer says of him. To the extent that Mr. Spitzer, whom Mr. Schick calls an intelligent, solicitous, appreciative boss (“You can’t say this stuff about him without coming off like you’re drinking the Kool-Aid; hey, don’t put that in!”), has issued marching orders, construction at ground zero tops the list.

“The governor has a strong vision, and it’s my job to play traffic cop and honest broker and facilitate it,” Mr. Schick says, sipping from a can of caffeinated Diet Coke and jiggling his legs from his knees to the toes of his black wingtips. (He may resemble a big, bearded teddy bear, but repose is not his thing. He’s antsy and agile at evading questions such as “How are you going to step in at ground zero without stepping on the toes of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg?”)

Those wingtips are the same ones that stepped all over Richard A. Grasso, the former New York Stock Exchange chairman who was ordered to repay $100 million of a compensation package that Mr. Spitzer contended was in violation of state laws regarding nonprofit institutions. And they are the same ones Mr. Schick wore when he represented the state in the $200 billion tobacco Master Settlement Agreement during his eight years in the attorney general’s office.

In lieu of a direct answer, he switches to détente-speak: “The public face of New York City was scarred by 9/11, and we’ve got to repair that scar. It is really important that we bring the World Trade Center back bigger and stronger and better than before. Yes, that’s the message we have to send.”

It is Mr. Schick’s charge to resuscitate what had seemed a rudderless Lower Manhattan development agency. Enough already, he says, as Mr. Spitzer’s proxy, with the ego jousting that characterized the first five years of the reconstruction effort. “I understand the challenges of trying to bring together a variety of factions, but if one steps back and takes the ego out of it, it shouldn’t be that hard.”

TAKE the Freedom Tower: Mr. Spitzer is still not enamored of it, but wants it built. Take the Memorial Foundation, where Mr. Bloomberg’s influence has been pivotal: “He stepped in when things were less than perfect, brought some discipline, raised some money and showed real leadership,” says Mr. Schick.

As for a performing arts center, there is room, and reason, for tweaking: “The cultural component at the trade center site is not fully formed, but we intend to produce a world-class facility, world-class in the way the arts are represented and the institutions that deliver it. I see what we want to do as addition rather than subtraction or substitution.”

Mr. Schick grew up in an intellectually lively household in Borough Park, Brooklyn. His father, apart from a stint as an aide to former Mayor John V. Lindsay, was a political science professor, and his mother teaches 12th-grade literature. “In our house, conversation could sometimes be a contact sport; it was not a relaxed, laid-back Charlie Rose type of conversation,” he recalls. The day he (too) proudly waved his law school acceptance letter in front of his grandmother, the widowed owner of a kosher bakery, she taught him a life lesson.

“She showed me a piece of paper, an eviction notice she got just after her husband died during the Depression,” he says, “and she told me, ‘Just remember, this was also done by a lawyer.’ ” It blew him away.

For the past eight years, since his grandmother’s death, he and his wife, Michal, have run Bobbie’s Place, a store named in her honor that gives clothing to needy children; it began as a basement enterprise with castoffs from their own offspring. Last year they distributed 60,000 clothing items at the store’s Brooklyn and Rockland County locations.

“At some level, I hope my government service is informed by what I learned through this charity,” he says. “I got exposed, frankly, to a New York not always readily visible to people in my kind of job.” Or jobs.