I discovered, when I pushed open the shabby doors of the Pier 40 lobby, that the elevators were not working. A couple of maintenance guys were scooping up metal folding chair and lugging them up the “grand” two-flight staircase and delivering them to the dusty hot second floor conference room flooded by a setting sun that blinded the 40 odd attendees that have a stake in the survival of the Hudson River Park, from the kayak sailing club to the sports groups using the pier’s AstroTurf fields. The theme of the September 11 meeting was, as it nearly always is, how to find money to keep the park running.
The dead elevators, the broken air conditioner and now the inoperable windows sealed us in an airless sarcophagus that told us we were in a dying room, in a dying building and perhaps in a dying park. The building, on Pier 40, was eating repair money almost as fast as it produced parking fees and when the park uses up their last reserves in maybe 20 months, it is all over – no maintenance, no park.
We had been assembled by attorney Arthur Schwartz, who heads the advisory committee. That is, all the people and groups who have an interest in seeing that the park remains well maintained and survives. However, the three sports groups who use the huge AstroTurf field on Pier 40 had by far the greatest use and hence a more immediate anxiety that the pier would close and they would lose what is so rare in downtown Manhattan – playing fields.
The 50 year old pier has never been seriously maintained and is literally falling apart; it could be, as it was some 20 years ago, closed because of its being in danger of collapsing.
Some of the sports dads are Wall Street types or celebrities and they are used to making things happen, so they paid Tishman Construction $150,000 to come up with an optimum solution that provides the most revenue for the least amount of traffic. Such a solution was 600-800 apartments and a 150 room hotel scrunched up along the north side of the pier so no shadows would fall on the ball fields. State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick would not buy it and allowed Speaker Sheldon Silvers’ staff, seeking a compromise, know it and stopped the efforts of Assemblyman Dick Gottfried to change the use limitations. However, with the Glick objections, the changed “law” never made it to the Albany floor last month.
Oh wow, now what to do? If Gottfried had been able to open up the uses and move from a 30 year lease to 50 or even 100, there was at least “hope” of doing something and that hope could be used to bludgeon the city and/or state to come up with money to keep the pier from being condemned so the kids could continue to play and 1600 cars could still park relatively cheaply.
HRPT Vice President Noreen Doyle responded to the question, how long do we have before the pier collapses into the river, “Nobody knows.” Currently, there is no way in hell that a developer is going to spend $125 million to make the pier secure before he spends half a billion dollars to build a project that will satisfy the congenitally negative activists. Furthermore, as I said, the current charter would not let him build anything like the Steve Jobs Tech City or even perhaps the Bloomberg Memorial Hospital. Money, money, money is needed just to keep the pier up and running and pay the maintenance crew to empty the trash bins.
Glick is puffing with pride over stopping the “Trump Towers” and is milking it in e-mails and personal appearances, while the sports dads are in ignominious defeat with “well, we are open to other solutions.”
However, back to the meeting in the hot dying room on Pier 40. We listened to AJ Pietratone, head of the Friends of Hudson River Park, offering Doug Durst’s idea to create a Neighborhood Improvement District (NID); they have not filed the formal papers yet. It would aim to raise $10 million a year, of which 60% would go to HRPT for maintenance and $1-1.5 million would go to the West Side Highway for island planting and cross walk traffic markings. Of the remainder, $500-600,000 would go to community groups and block associations to do something to signal entry to the park area like planting a tree or having a large HRPT official planter (my idea) on the corner; the rest would go to improving crossing visibility and perhaps even contributing to the building of a pedestrian bridge or two.
Sure, a NID is a relatively easy way to generate money. The hundreds of real estate interests and businesses that line the five mile pier would be asked for modest fees to keep the park alive and going, since it improves their own property values (the High Line has boosted real estate values ten times). Yet again, time, time, time. It will take a year to start and they only expect to raise $7 million in the first year. They still have to persuade the community groups and a few business organizations to say “yes, sure, why not” and they go through the approval procedure and back to the City Council – time, time, time.
Chris McGuiness, President of the Village Little League, offered the birth of the “Pier 40 Champions” made up of the three sports organizations using Pier 40’s playing field. They meet “once a week to come up with ideas so we can educate our families.” They have set up a Facebook page working with the architectural firm XYZ studios to come up with renderings of all options. He said, “what we are saying to our community is that the pier is in jeopardy and we need you to understand the problem and then look at all of the option solutions – we don’t say that residential is the only option we are looking at.”
I can’t imagine what these defenders of the sports field can say to each other week after week because it is not what should go on Pier 40 that is important, but how it legally will happen and more importantly, the time it takes to do so.
Right now, if Deborah Glick aligns with Dick Gottfried and they agree as to what uses she will permit a developer to risk his money on, that change in the charter can only go before the State Assembly in March 2013. A firm has to be retained to write a Request For Proposal and then the proposals will have to be prepared, including having renderings and models made which will then be submitted and chewed over by the Community Boards of the several districts abutting the five mile long pier. The HRPT board has to select one (not so easy since they have failed to do so in the last two tries) and then it goes through the long, long city approval process ending up with the City Council – time, time, time, months, months, months, years, years, years.
All this time, the salt water of the Hudson River estuary will eat away at the 3600 steel pilings some 80 ft. long and the dead weight of the massive reinforced concrete pier will acquiesce to the will of gravity.
