Gretchen Dykstra (born NY August 22, 1948) was the founding President and CEO of the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum Foundation, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs under Mayor Bloomberg, and the founding president of the

Times Square Times Square is a major commercial intersection, tourist destination, entertainment hub, and Neighborhoods in New York City, neighborhood in the Midtown Manhattan section of New York City. It is formed by the junction of Broadway (Manhattan), ...

Business Improvement District A business improvement district (BID) is a defined area within whichever businesses elect to pay an additional fee (or assessment) in order to fund projects within the district's boundaries. A BID is not a tax, as taxes fund the government. BID f ...

(now the Alliance) throughout the 90s. Trained as a teacher, Dykstra worked at the

Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The foundation was created by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller (" ...

, the NYC Charter Revision Commission, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. She taught English in

Wuhan, China Wuhan; is the capital of Hubei, China. With a population of over eleven million, it is the most populous city in Hubei and the eighth-most-populous city in China. It is also one of the nine national central cities and the second most livabl ...

from 1979-1981. Dykstra currently writes full-time. Her first book, ''Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era'', (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) was a team effort with James P. Leary, pre-eminent folklorist, to re-issue the classic ''Songs and Ballads of the Shanty Boy'' (Harvard, 1926), written by her grandfather, Franz Rickaby.online review, saying much about Gretchen Dykstra
/ref> It includes new material, an introduction by Leary, and a biography written by Dykstra. Her book ''Civic Pioneers: Local Stories of a Changing America, 1895-1915'', was released in the spring of 2019.

References

Living people 1948 births American women chief executives 21st-century American women {{US-CEO-stub