A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park
Page 13
According to other Coalition members from the period, Manheim was not the only one willing to challenge the authorities. Watts describes one particular meeting in the mid-1990s with the Port Authority and the UDC (at UDC headquarters on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan) in which Coalition Working Group member Robert Rubin, a partner with Lehman Brothers who had overseen the financing of numerous Manhattan construction projects, stood up to UDC executive director Vincent Tese. “Tese was constantly giving us deadlines,” Watts remembers. “He would say, ‘I’ll give you till the end of year and if you don’t have it all figured out, I’m going to fast track the property back on the market.’ It was clear he didn’t think any of us had any idea what we were doing. And in one of the meetings, he looked at us and said, ‘How many of you people here have ever built a building?’ And Robert said, ‘I have.’ And Tese responded, ‘Oh, yeah? What have you built?’ And Robert replied, ‘This building we’re in right now.’ And that was the end of the conversation.”6
THE CONFRONTATIONAL APPROACH displayed by Manheim and other Coalition members gained the attention of elected officials at both the local and state levels. One of the first to respond in a positive way was Assemblywoman Eileen Dugan (figure 17). In 1993, Dugan, who had been supportive of the park plan since the Community Board 2 (CB2) Piers Subcommittee hearings in 1998, secured the first major financial assistance for the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition, a $250,000 contract awarded by the New York State Department of Economic Development.7 For the Coalition, which had been dependent primarily on direct-mail campaigns and other local fund-raising efforts to fund its studies and cover its expenses, the state contract was both a vital source of funding and an enormous encouragement that the Brooklyn community’s seemingly quixotic ambitions for a park on the piers might actually be achievable.
ON JANUARY 5, 1994, Governor Mario Cuomo finally announced during his annual State of the State message that an agreement had been reached among all the parties in the west Brooklyn piers negotiations: “The UDC will take the lead in implementing a plan developed by the city and Borough President Golden’s office and long supported by Assemblywoman Eileen Dugan to create a mixed-use development on the Brooklyn waterfront, at Piers 1 through 5.”8
FIGURE 17
Assemblywoman Eileen Dugan on Pier 6, ca. 1990.
COURTESY OF THE DUGAN FAMILY
While Manheim noted—and representatives of the Cuomo administration acknowledged—that the agreement was limited to the guidelines and did not include a specific development plan, he was gratified that the community’s demands for the creation of an independent public authority for the piers had begun to progress—even though the public authorities cautioned that the actual development of the piers would still be years away. “The engine has been running, but the brakes have been on,” Manheim said of the long-delayed but now completed negotiations. “Now, the brakes are being released and the project is being allowed to move forward. We just hope that the focus will be more on parkland.”9
THE COALITION WASTED LITTLE TIME celebrating the governor’s statement of support for “a mixed-use development” of the west Brooklyn waterfront, with Manheim writing to Cuomo a few weeks after the State of the State message to remind him of the community’s ultimate objective for the piers. “The goal of the universally endorsed program is public use and access,” Manheim reminded the governor. “Mixed use is the means to that end: a technique for creating a major regional public amenity in a financially responsible way... Controlled, limited and relevant ‘concessions,’ subordinate to the park’s central purpose, are welcome—but only so much as needed to support and sustain a soft and green park, and subject to a comprehensive plan, developed with meaningful community input and controlled by the ‘13 Guiding Principles.’
“Appreciative as we are of your past actions in vetoing Port Authority disposition of these public assets and arresting inappropriate development schemes,” Manheim explained, tempering his gratitude with a note of frustration, “we trust you will understand our impatience to move ahead now to begin recycling this underused land for new, higher and better public purposes—and at minimum public cost.”10 As important as the governor’s past interventions with the Port Authority had been, a stronger and more focused commitment of state government would be necessary before the Brooklyn community’s goal of “public use and access” of the piers could be achieved.
In addition to more aggressive support from state government, the success of the Brooklyn waterfront movement would require increased support from local residents and elected officials. In March 1994, the Coalition hosted an outdoor rally in blizzard conditions beneath the Manhattan Bridge on Fulton Ferry Landing to raise public support for the formation of an independent public entity to take control of the west Brooklyn waterfront. In spite of the heavy snowfall, a representative for Borough President Golden was in attendance, along with Karen Johnson, an aide to Congressman Edolphus Towns, who recently had secured a $500,000 federal grant for a study conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that would contribute to the development of an erosion-control plan to stabilize and repair Piers 1–5.11
In spite of the generally positive tone of the ceremony and the gratitude expressed to Towns and other elected officials for their past support of the waterfront project, Manheim cautioned that past contributions would not be sufficient to achieve the community’s goals for the piers property. “We will not allow this election year to pass with just words,” he informed the crowd, clearly signaling that the Coalition would not hesitate to withdraw its support from elected officials who failed to follow through on their commitment to community ownership and development of the piers. “We will not let this opportunity go by without significant irreversible progress.”12
WITH THE INTERCESSIONS AND VOCAL SUPPORT of Governor Cuomo, the formal endorsement of the “13 Guiding Principles” by the UDC, an expanding Coalition membership (that now included almost sixty borough, city, and state organizations), and the increased financial resources resulting from the grant secured from the Department of Economic Development by Assemblywoman Dugan, the Coalition’s vision of a park along the west Brooklyn waterfront actually seemed within reach. The crucial remaining step was the formation of an independent public entity to manage the disposition of the piers and the construction and maintenance of a public park on the property. After more than a decade of leadership in the park movement, Manheim and the other Coalition members understandably believed that the organization would ultimately play a crucial role in the creation and leadership of the new public entity, along with the design, construction, and maintenance of the park over time.
Beginning in 1994, a series of personal, political, and economic events seriously threatened not only the Coalition’s power and credibility in the Brooklyn piers movement but also the continued existence of the organization itself. The first major blow to the Coalition was the defeat of Mario Cuomo, the Democratic incumbent, to Republican challenger George Pataki in the gubernatorial election held on November 8, 1994. Not only had Cuomo championed the Brooklyn Bridge Park concept in his State of the State message at the beginning of the year, but he had included support of the Brooklyn waterfront park and other public spaces as a feature in his campaign, and the election of Pataki signaled a potential defeat for the park movement in Brooklyn.
According to Coalition board member John Watts, “Cuomo was always reassuring Tony. He’d say, ‘Don’t worry, Tony. You’ll get your park.’ And then when Cuomo wasn’t reelected—and he didn’t do anything to get it done in the interim between the election and the end of his administration—I think Tony took that really hard.”13
Fortunately, Pataki, a longtime admirer of President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to protect the natural environment and open public space, would soon warm to the concept of a public park along the west Brooklyn waterfront, listing Piers 1–5 among a roster of ninety tracts of “open space” that the state government intended to purchase or protect
from development, with the state to provide a $250,000 grant for a preparatory study for the optimal development of the site.14
THE SECOND MAJOR BLOW to the Coalition and the Brooklyn Bridge Park movement—and to the Brooklyn community as a whole—was the death of Eileen Dugan on November 8, 1996, after a long battle with cancer. As a local member of the New York State Assembly and the chairwoman of the Committee on Economic Development, Job Creation and Industry, Dugan had been among the earliest and most committed supporters of the concept of a park on the piers, lending her name and support to the CB2 Piers Subcommittee’s endorsement of the Harbor Park plan, publicly criticizing each of the Port Authority’s repeated attempts to lease the property for private development, urging UDC director Vincent Tese to endorse the “13 Guiding Principles,” and securing a $250,000 contract for the Coalition from the New York State Department of Economic Development in 1993.
A few months earlier, on July 23, 1996, Dugan had announced that she and State Senator Martin Connor had secured a $500,000 grant through the state legislature to support the Coalition’s planning, education, and advocacy on behalf of the park. “The grant will cover a portion of the Coalition’s expenses in seeking public access redevelopment of the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront from Manhattan Bridge to Atlantic Avenue for both active and passive recreation,” wrote Dugan in a press release to announce the grant. “Fighting for this park has been a long and sometimes exhausting struggle. However, Senator Connor and I remain firmly committed to this project, and we along with the Coalition believe that one day the downtown Brooklyn waterfront will be enjoyed by everyone for recreational use.”15
IN JUNE 1997, the Coalition’s ambitions for the area of the park north of the Brooklyn Bridge received yet another major blow when David Walentas of Two Trees Management Company announced that he was seeking city and state approval to resume his decade-old plans to construct an investor’s paradise of restaurants, retail stores, and movie theaters on the nine-acre Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park and its seven dilapidated Civil War–era warehouses (the Empire Stores) between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges (figure 18). Walentas was reportedly the only developer to respond to a request, in February, from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation for proposals to refurbish the parkland and warehouses. Walentas had originally been chosen to develop the waterfront property in 1982, with plans for more than 2 million square feet of office space, a 100-boat marina, and a 330foot observation tower, but his plans were derailed in 1984, when Kenneth Lipper, the Deputy Mayor for Finance and Economic Development, ruled that he did not have sufficient financial backing to ensure the completion of the project. In the face of public resistance for his private development plans and growing support for a public park along the west Brooklyn waterfront, Walentas had shelved his proposals for a number of years, waiting for a resurgence of the local real-estate market. In 1996, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani designated Walentas as prime developer of the property between the two great bridges, and the real-estate developer decided that the time was right to resurrect his plans for the site.
FIGURE 18
Two Trees Management’s plan for waterfront development in Dumbo, 1980s.
COURTESY OF BEYER BLINDER BELLE, ARCHITECTS & PLANNERS, LLP
In a further setback, Borough President Howard Golden publicly endorsed Walentas’s project, contributing an op-ed piece to the New York Times contesting the assertion of Times reporter David Rohde that Walentas’s plan “could delay or alter a decade-old effort by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition to convert the abandoned piers into a public park.”16 “In fact,” insisted Golden, “the uses proposed by Mr. Walentas for the inter-bridge area—retail outlets, a restaurant and multiplex movie theater—are not in competition with the uses envisioned on Piers 1–5. The Brooklyn Bridge Park plan calls for the development of a conference center and hotel, a maritime support center and marina, and catering and restaurant facilities, all within a park setting.”17
IN DECEMBER 1996, the Coalition encountered yet another obstacle when the Strober Organization, a large building-supply company, opened a massive wholesale showroom, lumberyard, and offices for its corporate headquarters on Pier 3. The Strober Organization had recently shut down its main headquarters on Hamilton Avenue in Brooklyn, having been granted a ten-year lease by the Port Authority in June 1996 to reopen its facilities on the pier.
For the Coalition, the installation of a massive lumberyard on Pier 3, near the center of the Brooklyn Bridge Park site, would violate the integrity of the proposed site and inevitably discourage private developers from investing in the creation of the park and the supplemental commercial ventures required to support its construction and ongoing operation. “Ten years is a long time,” Manheim explained to a reporter about the inevitable impact of positioning a building-supply storage facility at the center of a public park. ‘“It’s a new and unnecessary hurdle for any kind of constructive development. Who wants a site with a lumberyard in the middle of it?”18
In January 1997, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition filed a suit in the United States District Court in Brooklyn against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Strober Organization of Brooklyn, challenging the Port Authority’s decision to lease Pier 3 to the supply company. In addition to the papers submitted by the Coalition’s pro bono attorneys, the prominent New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, State Senator Martin Connor; Assemblywoman Eileen Dugan; Representatives Edolphus Towns, Jerrold Nadler, and Nydia Velázquez; and City Council members Kenneth Fisher, Stephen DiBrienza, and Joan Griffin McCabe had filed a brief by amici curiae in opposition to dismissal of the case.
Although various procedural challenges were included in the suit, the foundation of the Coalition’s case was that in allowing the Strober Organization to use Pier 3 as an office and a warehouse—and not as a “marine terminal facility” for the offloading of goods delivered by ship to the site—the Port Authority “would be acting ultra vires [beyond] the powers conferred upon the agency by its compact in leasing the property to this codefendant.”19
On January 21, 1997, Judge Reena Raggi rejected the Coalition’s argument that the Port Authority’s charter of 1921 restricted the site to “marine-related uses” and would hence not radically alter the character of the property, which had originally been “designed” for the unloading of freight at the waterfront.20
Although the Coalition’s claim was denied, the lawsuit resulted in an unexpectedly positive outcome for the organization and the park movement. On August 1, 1997, Lillian C. Borrone, director of the Port Commerce Department, authorized the Port Authority to enter into a five-year, rent-free lease with the Coalition for a vacant building at 334 Furman Street in exchange for the discontinuation of a planned appeal of the Strober decision.21 The building, which today serves as the headquarters for both the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy and the public entity in charge of the construction of Brooklyn Bridge Park, was the park movement’s first footprint on the piers property.
IN DECEMBER 1997, Manheim and the Coalition received a final—and seemingly insurmountable—blow when Borough President Howard Golden, with the support of other local elected officials, finally proposed the formation of the Brooklyn Waterfront Local Development Corporation (LDC) to prepare studies to facilitate the development of Piers 1–5. During the 1997 session of the New York State Legislature, State Senator Martin Connor and Assemblywoman Joan Millman, who had replaced Eileen Dugan, secured a $1 million grant to support the formation and operation of the new entity.
According to Golden’s chief of staff, Greg Brooks, the timing and design of the LDC were motivated by the frustration of Golden and other political leaders over a conflict with the Coalition earlier in the year. “The catalyst for the LDC was at the opening of the Coffey Street Pier in Red Hook [on February 5, 1997],” recalls Greg Brooks. “There was a discussion among the elected officials in attendance—Howard Golden, Martin Connor, and Ed Towns were there; I ca
n’t remember who else—and they were all wringing their hands over some controversy [involving the Coalition] that had recently happened. I said, ‘What we really need is something to give this thing a push,’ and I recommended that we form a local development corporation that would involve every community and whose first goal would be to create a master plan for the park.”22
The decision by Golden and the other officials to form the LDC at the time was also motivated by pressure from community groups frustrated with the Coalition’s inability to move the park forward. “On behalf of the Cobble Hill Association,” recalls Franklin Stone, former president of the Cobble Hill Association, “I wrote a letter to Howie Golden, and I withdrew the Cobble Hill Association from the Coalition. Both in writing and person, we [at the Cobble Hill Association] and others went to Howie Golden and asked him to set up a new organization to move the park forward. At that time, there was no sign that the Coalition was making any progress on the park or that it would be making any progress in the future. We also did not feel that it was representative of all the communities that would be using the park and affected by the park as a new more-representative organization would be. I’ll say as a shorthand, it was too Brooklyn Heights–centric. And Golden did set up the LDC so that there was broader representation.”23
The LDC would be governed by a board of directors and the leaders of Community Boards 2 and 6, the Brooklyn Heights Association, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, and a number of other groups from the community. With the Coalition having worked tirelessly for the creation of a public entity in charge of the piers, the formation of the LDC should by all rights have been regarded as a major victory for Manheim and the other Coalition board members—if not for the fact that the Coalition was not included among the groups that would be involved in the governance of—or in the selection of directors for—the LDC. “It didn’t make sense to us to include the Coalition,” recalls Brooks, “which was composed of members of other communities that would already be included. Our hope was that people would understand that the ‘electeds’ were very serious about having something happen at Brooklyn Bridge Park, and that they would come into the fold because they didn’t want to be excluded from it. The communities that the Coalition represented would naturally be a part of that.”24