People fighting for the character of Brooklyn's waterfront see a tragedy -- and suspect a crime -- in the spectacular fire that engulfed 15 abandoned industrial buildings on Greenpoint's waterfront May 2. "I'm in a state of mourning over the loss in Greenpoint," says industrial archeologist Mary Habstritt.
The buildings were likely to obtain landmark status, she says. The character and history of the industrial waterfront could have been maintained while transforming the site into a residential and business area befitting the burgeoning residential character of Greenpoint.
That isn't what the developer wanted. He planned to raze the old buildings to put up 2.6 million square feet of residential towers, townhouses and retail. The 10-alarm fire that ravaged the 21-acre site and took days to put out will probably make it more convenient, less complicated and less expensive for him to proceed as he had wished.
A day after the blaze, the Daily News reported that Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta immediately suspected arson. A tell-tale sign was that the fire began in the quiet pre-dawn. Another indication of suspicious origin was that many buildings quickly went up in fierce flames, even before the first fire trucks arrived.
Based on her knowledge of construction methods in the past, Mary Habstritt, who is president of the Roebling Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology, had additional reasons to see an arsonist's hand. She says that in the 1890s, when some of the buildings on the site went up, there weren't sophisticated methods, as there are today, for preventing and fighting fires. Giant timbers, heavy and dense enough to withstand all but the hottest fire, spanned the floors and were set into holes in the brick walls. If a fire did rage through, the timbers should have fallen out of the walls, leaving the outside structure intact. But in this fire, Habstritt says, walls collapsed.
These buildings had resisted flames for more than a hundred years, says Habstritt. "They were constructed to resist fire. You couldn't get those timbers burning without help."
She dismisses the idea reported in some media that rope left over from the old rope factory was in the buildings and contributed to the flames. She has been inside of one of the old rope factory buildings, and it was completely bare.
A former tenant of one of Guttman's Brooklyn loft buildings, Anne McDonald, also harbored suspicions as soon as she learned of the fire, she says. The Guttman building she had lived in at 247 Water Street in the DUMBO area of Brooklyn (whose troubled history has been recounted in the Village Voice)had burned in 2004. The fire was investigated but evidence as to arson was inconclusive. Four other Brooklyn buildings owned by Guttman have burned since 1991, according to the New York Times, all of them judged as arson.
Guttman, who owns properties all over Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens, has never faced arson charges. Gotham Gazette's calls for comment to Guttman's home in Lawrence on Long Island and to his Brooklyn real estate office were not returned. His attorneys have told the media that he had nothing to do with the fires. They speculated that squatters or vagrants started the fire. One of his attorneys noted that Guttman did not have property damage insurance on the buildings.
Some 20,000 people live in a state of legal limbo in lofts on the waterfront in Brooklyn, says McDonald. In SoHo in the 1980s, when artists moved into the lofts abandoned by light industry in the neighborhood, the legislature legalized residential use by artists. That led to the transformation of the neighborhood. No such legal dispensation aids Brooklyn loft tenants. Not everyone would want the law amended to include Brooklyn. That would lead to an even faster-paced change to the neighborhood with higher rents.
"Usually, the landlord and tenant are complicit" in the illegal residential use of loft spaces, says McDonald. "It's a little bit of a gray zone."
After leaving Guttman's building, McDonald found a new loft space in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park. The landlord there upgraded the property and recently received a certificate of occupancy, allowing residential living.
Residential living in industrial property is the kind of thing that should have happened to the Greenpoint Terminal Market, say preservationists. The Municipal Art Society, a preservation group, had applied for landmark status. At least some of the buildings would have been preserved. There would have been accomodation for new high rises as well.
City Councilmember David Yassky supported landmarking of the buildings, which were in his district. He's not a knee-jerk preservationist. He favored substantial changes to the Austin-Nichols warehouse last year, even though the Landmarks Commission recommended landmarking the building. He persuaded the City Council to support the changes. The mayor supported landmarking, but the council overrode his veto. (Read my article on this, Old Industrial Buildings on the East River)
Habstritt and other preservationists see the loss of irreplaceable landmarks that convey the vital hurly burly of New York's industrial past. The value of the Greenpoint Terminal Market was in unique features, such as the dramatic bridges from building to building over West Street. There was the historical value, too. The buildings once held the largest rope and twine factory in the world. The waterfront location was practical. Materials to make rope came from imported materials unloaded from ships right by the factory. The place showed how it was the working waterways that made it possible for New York to become the great city it is. "We were really convinced that we were on the way to saving it," says Habstritt.
Â
Jane Jacobs left New York City in 1968 and went into self-imposed exile in Canada. Yet when she died April 25 at the age of 89 in Toronto, she was remembered as one of the greatest advocates of New York City’s urbanism. While the rest of the country thought of New York as too densely developed, overcrowded, and dangerous, Jane Jacobs wrote passionately about how its density and diversity made the city livable and exciting.
In a nation that was mostly rural in 1898 when the City of New York was created, the American Dream was small town America and the big city was its nightmare. Jane Jacobs helped retire the myths of the big city.
Jacobs didn’t just wake up one morning in 1961 and write her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – today, required reading for architects, urban planners and everyone who study cities. Her ideas arose from her lived experience on Hudson Street, in Manhattan’s West Village, and from her years of active struggle to protect her neighborhood from the city’s grandiose urban renewal plans. A nemesis of Robert Moses, the city’s development czar, she saw the city’s planners call lively human-scale neighborhoods “slums” and “blighted,” then bulldoze them. They were replaced by dull high rises set in wide-open wastelands without a street life – the modernist model of the “tower in the park.” She fought and helped kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway and an urban renewal plan for her own neighborhood. Her book, released in 1961, resonated with the thousands of activists who were fighting battles against urban renewal, highways that cut through the hearts of cities, and grandiose megaprojects. Thus, her brilliant insights are best understood in their historical context, as contributions to the struggles to save neighborhoods from orthodox urban planning.
Jacobs saw incredible richness and diversity in neighborhoods that development-hungry planners disqualified as chaotic and dysfunctional. Of course, she had no financial stake in seeing her neighborhood leveled, and perhaps because of that there was a fundamental difference in the way she perceived the city. Cities aren’t just physical forms but rich landscapes for social and economic relations among people. How do people use the streets and sidewalks? How do the people who work in industries, retail customers, tenants and homeowners interact and coexist with one another? By asking these questions she came upon principles of physical planning that were embedded in the built environment. These relations, which at one point she likened to a “symphony,” and not the abstract visions of planners and developers, were for her the starting point for planning.
Jane Jacobs’ remarkable catalog of urban treasures has inspired generations of urban professionals searching for alternatives to the modernistic bombast and monumentalism that created sterile downtowns, isolated public housing, and sprawled suburban enclaves. Her work contributed to the flourishing of the neighborhood preservation movements, and influenced many other progressive New York urbanists including City Planning commissioners from Beverly Moss Spatt in the 1960s to Ron Shiffman in the 1990s, both advocates of decentralized planning involving neighborhoods. Author Roberta Gratz (The Livable City) and William Whyte, founder of Project for Public Spaces, carried forward many of her ideas. Indeed, there aren’t too many professional planners of all stripes who don’t acknowledge in some way her important contributions.
The city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and the federal government’s withdrawal of funds for large urban renewal and public works projects created fertile ground for Jacobs’ alternative way of seeing the city. After Robert Moses retired, government austerity left no money for ambitious public projects or for aggressive urban planners that would reincarnate the master builder. With widespread neighborhood abandonment, professionals had to search for ways to improve communities using the resources that were already there. Organizers and activists in community-based organizations, consciously or not, followed Jacobs’ approach of strengthening the human bonds in neighborhoods and building on existing assets. The city’s housing agency created neighborhood preservation programs. The city created a Landmarks Commission in 1965 that would help protect historic buildings and districts. And the City Planning Department later initiated contextual zoning to encourage new development in context with the existing built form. While all of these initiatives have their limitations, and some of them are used mostly to protect exclusive enclaves, they are part of a toolkit of measures that can be used to protect everything valuable in neighborhoods.
One area in which Jacobs’ admonitions have been mostly ignored is in planning for streets and sidewalks. She showed how mixing pedestrians, cars and bicycles and encouraging an active street life was important to livable neighborhoods. The city’s Department of Transportation, however, is mostly dedicated to moving as many vehicles as quickly as possible through streets. For the most part, the same logic applies to sidewalks. Jacobs felt that having many “eyes on the street” contributed to a lively and safe environment. That means encouraging people to move slowly, stop, talk, and “hang out,” and slowing vehicular traffic.
As happens with many great thinkers, Jane Jacobs is cited by real estate developers and planners who interpret her work in ways she might well question. For example, Alexander Garvin, influential urban planner in New York City, was quoted in the April 27 New York Times as saying The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “changed my life.” Yet Garvin’s reputation is as a pragmatic planner who tries to find better ways to accommodate new development, not community preservation. For example, he was the author of the city’s ambitious Olympics 2012 plan that created sports venues sharply disconnected from neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs on many occasions spoke up against such megaprojects in Toronto.
The New Urbanism is a recent trend in urban planning and architecture that proposes re-creating traditional, walkable communities following the model of 19th Century small-town America. But contrary to many of her critics, Jacobs wasn’t a nostalgic looking to idealize the old. The sterile New Urbanist experiments like Seaside and Celebration in Florida are a far cry from the bustling diversity that Jacobs saw in her West Village.
Jane Jacobs was hardly a traditionalist. She was truly a rebel. She dared to look lovingly and with care at her neighborhood. She stood up to the powerful Robert Moses. She criticized racial discrimination in housing and employment (for example, in her book The Economy of Cities, she cites W.E.B. DuBois and goes on to criticize the inadequacy of programs to aid minority contractors). Her family’s opposition to the war in Vietnam drove her to self-exile in Canada. And ever since then she supported progressive planning, and good hearty urban protest, throughout North America. She most recently sent a message of solidarity to community groups in Greenpoint/Williamsburg (Brooklyn) fighting the city’s massive waterfront rezoning project. Jane Jacobs was a true New Yorker.
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.Â
When the Queen Mary 2, the largest cruise ship in the world, docked in Brooklyn for a day earlier this month, it marked the official opening of the newest cruise ship facility in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The terminal will create hundreds of new jobs and attract millions of passengers –- and they owe it all to dredging.
The city had spent millions of dollars to dig a deeper channel. They felt they had no choice. As the size of ships have grown, so too has the demand to accommodate them. Indeed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is the government agency that does the dredging, is in the midst of the largest New York Harbor dredging project since World War II.
But there is another demand growing as well –- that the environment be protected in the process. The latest step in a lawsuit that has been dragging through the courts could lead eventually to an agreement that will prevent further contamination of already-polluted waters. Environmental groups want the Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a meaningful plan to clean up as well as dredge. The corps responds that they are doing just that.
Dredging to make way for seafaring trade has been ongoing for much of the history of the New York Harbor, but in recent years, the pace and depth has picked up, with the dredgers not just scooping out silt and sand but blasting away bedrock as well.
In the 1980s, ships carrying a thousand boxes full of cargo, each of which would fit on the back of a truck, could fit down channels that had been dug to 35 feet deep in New York Harbor. But then the container ships quadrupled in size. The steroidal growth didn't stop with "Panamax" vessels, so called because they were the largest ships that could fit through the Panama Canal.
Shippers started bringing the clothes and cars and computers from around the world through the deeper Suez Canal with even bigger "Post-Panamax" ships. The U.S. Army Corps on Engineers recently finished dredging channels as deep as 45 feet to accommodate them.
As soon as that was done, the corps began planning 50 foot channels that will cost $1.6 billion to make way for gargantuan "Post-Panamax Plus" ships that bring as many as 7,000 to 8,000 containers to the New York and New Jersey terminals.
All this dredging is complicated by some terrible contamination of the waterways. A factory up river in New Jersey that manufactured Agent Orange to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War spilled toxic dioxins into two of the channels between Staten Island and New Jersey, the Kill van Kull and the Arthur Kill.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is testing levels of pollution and methods of cleanup in the channels. Environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council, NY/NJ Baykeeper and Green Faith charge that the latest dredging operation interferes with the EPA's ability to make accurate assessments and cleanup plans. The groups also doubt the Corps' commitment to cleanup. In fact, they brought a lawsuit in early 2005 to force the Corps to provide a more complete analysis and plan. They asked for an injunction to stall the dredging until the studies could be done.
That is not what they got. In a March 2006 decision, the court imposed no injunction, but the corps did receive a strongly worded directive. U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin found -- as she had in an earlier ruling--that the corps had failed to present plans for an accurate assessment. She sent them back once again to get more and better information.
"The Corps must consider the issues that were inadequately addressed in its final Environmental Assessment, including alternatives to the projects and mitigation measures. The Corps should also take affirmative steps to ensure that its review is objective and made in good faith," Judge Scheindlin wrote(in pdf format).
They have four months to create the new report.
"What we'd like to see happen is that the corps approach this not just as a navigation dredging project, but as an environmental cleanup," says Larry Levine, Natural Resources Defense Council staff attorney. The corps can "use the dredges that are out there to dig up the contaminated sediment in a safe way that achieves the cleanup of the channels rather than stirring stuff up and moving it around the harbor." What they are doing now just uncovers contaminated material and leaves it exposed, he says. "The environment isn't a side consideration that has to be dealt with as a nuisance."
Even though the judge didn't enter an injunction as requested, it feels like victory to Levine. "In a practical matter, they can't go forward with the next stage of the deepening until they get their house in order."
An official for the Army Corps of Engineers seems unfazed by the court, however. "Dredging was not halted," says William Slezak, Chief of Harbor Programs Branch. The corps will use existing information and newly available data from the Environmental Protection Agency to put together additional models for the court. They are not collecting new samples. The consultants who have been hired to do the report are engineers, chemists and biologists, he says.
Slezak feels confident that what the corps is doing is adequate and will actually benefit the environment. He explains that most of the dredged material in their massive operations is free of contamination. Dredged material, including rock from debris created from blasting bedrock, goes into the ocean, creating fishing reefs. He is reassuring about what happens to the polluted sand and silt. Some of the contaminated material can be combined with cement to create a material that is stable and will not leach contaminant. That is used in such projects as capping landfills. High temperatures or washing are ways to deal with the more contaminated materials. Clamshell dredges -— big scoopers that pull sediment from the bottom of the estuary -- usually have open tops, but when there are contaminants, the clamshell is covered so that it doesn't spill materials over the sides. Furthermore, the channels that are being dredged are not in the Superfund site. That's upstream, he says.
Environmental groups are not confident that the corps' plans are adequate or that they are actually committed to cleanup as well as channel digging. "The Army Corps is notoriously bad on environmental issues," says Levine. The environment takes a back seat when it comes to economic considerations. "They're told by Congress, 'Here's a couple billion dollars, go dig these channels."
While the corps' Slezak says that the environmental concerns are important, he acknowledges that Congress is most interested in the economic benefits of getting more business to the ports. When the container ships began to grow and need deeper channels, Halifax, with its naturally deep bay, tried to line up business. Baltimore was interested, too. The only way to maintain the largest port facility on the East Coast -- the third largest in the nation, which generates 230,000 jobs regionally -— was to deepen the channels.
It doesn't matter which party is in power, Republicans or Democrats, the New York/New Jersey ports get their funding. The expense of Hurricane Katrina affected Corps projects elsewhere in the nation, but not the New York Harbor, says Slezak. Even the environmentalist Larry Levine supports the deep channels for the harbor.
The only issue for everyone concerned with the dredging is whether the Army Corps of Engineers will make the effort to keep contaminants from swirling around and adding to the considerable pollution already there Even Slezak would not eat the fish from these waters. It is not just the dioxins that make the water hazardous. This is a long-term problem generated by years of industrial pollution. It remains to be seen whether the Army Corps of Engineers dredging operations will make it better or worse.
Â