A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park Read online

  By the end of 1983, however, the Port Authority had finally given up on the possibility of continuing traditional maritime operations on the vast waterfront property immediately north of the Red Hook pier, stretching from Pier 6 near Atlantic Avenue at its southernmost point to Pier 1 just south of the Brooklyn Bridge to the north. The limited cargo operations being conducted on the piers were scheduled to end the following year, and the dual constraints imposed by the elevated lanes of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and the steep cliffs of Brooklyn Heights effectively blocked the piers from the substantial upland areas required for containerization and land transport.

  TOWARD THE END OF 1983, Anthony Manheim, the president of the Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA), received a telephone call from a representative of the Port Authority’s Commission on Ports and Terminals, informing him of the Port Authority’s plans to dispose of the piers. Consistent with its corporate mandate to protect the public interest, dispossession of public property by the Port Authority has traditionally been a lengthy and complicated process, requiring the agency in charge of the property to consult with local leaders to solicit the concerns and recommendations of the affected communities.

  “He called me in my capacity as president of the Brooklyn Heights Association,” Manheim recalls, “and explained that the decision had been made that the Port Authority was going to begin disposing of these piers. He explained that they were required to do so because the piers were no longer germane to any of the Port Authority charter-mandated activities.”10 The Port Authority representative quickly brought Manheim up to speed on the reasons for the impending disposal of the waterfront property (the recent shift from break-bulk shipping to containerization, restricted access to the upland area above the piers). The decision had also been made, he explained, to dispose of similar pier properties in Hoboken, New Jersey, and at Hunter’s Point in Queens. Near the end of the conversation, the representative asked Manheim the question that would haunt officials at the Port Authority, along with their counterparts in city government, for the next three decades and that would ultimately result in the complete transformation of the west Brooklyn waterfront.

  “What do you think we should do?” he asked, pausing briefly to repeat his question, as Manheim listened in disbelief. “What do you think we should do with the piers?”

  “They made what I’m sure many people would later consider to be a mistake,” remembers Manheim, chuckling at his own understatement. “It was an open invitation to have input into their disposition process, and I took this very seriously. Very seriously.”

  A former investment banker with a lifelong passion for community activism, Manheim had been living in a spacious apartment above the Brooklyn Heights Promenade since 1960, his rear windows affording a spectacular, panoramic view of the East River and the Manhattan skyline. As he gazed at the vast stretch of waterfront property beneath him, he quickly assessed both the serious threat and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity represented by the proposed dispossession of the piers. “I looked out my window,” he continues, “at the view that I had been seeing at that point for twenty-three years, and I could see it all spread out in front me, from Pier 1 just south of the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to Pier 6 just north of Atlantic Avenue. And I thought to myself, ‘What an unbelievable opportunity!’ ”11

  In spite of his initial visions for the property and his concerns about the impending dispossession of Piers 1–6, Manheim was not surprised to learn that his enthusiasm to become actively involved in the future of the Brooklyn waterfront was not immediately shared by his associates at the BHA.

  “The biggest issues confronting Brooklyn Heights at the time were development pressures,” he continues. “And the particular development pressure that tended to dominate the serious thinkers of the Brooklyn Heights Association was the inexorable-seeming expansion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had had their world headquarters at the bottom of the hill since 1909 and had recently been going through a worldwide expansion to the extent that they were buying up every multiple dwelling that came on the market.”12

  During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the not-for-profit legal entity through which the leaders of Jehovah’s Witnesses conducted their business, had purchased sixteen prime properties in and around Brooklyn Heights for office space, printing facilities, and housing for their rapidly increasing membership, including then-current plans to build a thirty-four-story residential tower at Columbia Heights and Furman Street, just outside the scenic-view protection zone of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District.13

  In addition to their controversial real-estate and high-rise construction ventures, Jehovah’s Witnesses were a conspicuous presence in Brooklyn Heights in the early 1980s, including their daily activities to, from, and along the Brooklyn waterfront. The Watchtower Society had recently purchased a large warehouse facility at 360 Furman Street, on the future park site, which was used for carpentry and maintenance operations, as well as storage and loading of the society’s semimonthly magazine, the Watchtower, and other religious materials that were shipped to members of Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world, and each day thousands of cars owned by Watchtower residents and employees streamed into and out of an enormous parking lot on the uplands at Pier 5. The familiar sight of Watchtower employees walking up and down Joralemon Street between the Court Street area and the piers below was a constant reminder to other Brooklyn Heights residents of the society’s growing presence and impact on the neighborhood.

  “It was not as easy in retrospect as you might suppose to get the interest of my fellow board members to focus on the incredible opportunity that, in effect, presented itself by this phone call from and later meeting with this relatively junior official of the Port Authority in charge of the Brooklyn piers,” says Manheim of the neighborhood association’s initial reluctance to become involved in the proposed dispossession of the waterfront.

  Following a lukewarm response from his colleagues on the board of governors of the Brooklyn Heights Association regarding plans for the piers, Manheim decided to reach out to two friends, Otis Pearsall and Scott Hand, in Brooklyn Heights with extensive experience in community activism and neighborhood preservation.

  Whatever Piers 1–6 might become over time, Manheim reasoned, the most immediate concern was the protection of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood and the views it provided, for both its residents and the thousands of visitors who enjoyed the Promenade each year, of the East River and the Manhattan skyline. An attorney for the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed, Otis Pearsall was, in the estimation of both his supporters in the neighborhood and his adversaries in city government and real-estate development, the neighborhood’s, if not the city’s, leading figure in neighborhood preservation and view protection.

  In 1965, Pearsall had led the campaign for the enactment of the New York Landmarks Preservation Law and the subsequent designation of Brooklyn Heights as the city’s first Historic District. Two years later, he led the effort to protect Brooklyn’s view of the East River and the Manhattan skyline through the enactment of LH-1, limiting all construction along and above the waterfront to fifty feet.

  “Otis was the progenitor of the whole historical preservation movement, both in Brooklyn and citywide,” Manheim explains. “As a governor and then president of the Brooklyn Heights Association board, he was the first person I consulted on any preservation issue, and the protection of the waterfront and the preservation of the magnificent views were certainly major concerns at the time.”14

  The second person that Manheim contacted, former BHA president and Inco executive Scott Hand, also had an impressive record in civic activism and neighborhood preservation. In the late 1970s, Hand had successfully advocated with the state for the purchase and preservation of the Empire Stores and Tobacco Warehouse property along the waterfront between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

  IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, Manheim continued in his
capacity as president of the BHA, devoting as much time as possible to the newly formed ad hoc Waterfront Committee, which included both Pearsall and Hand, along with several other members he had managed to recruit from the BHA membership. He continued to speak regularly by phone with representatives of the Port Authority, and in April 1984, he and his fellow Waterfront Committee members Earl Weiner, Joyce Curll, and Pat Coady attended their first formal meeting with officials of the Port Authority’s Commission on Ports and Terminals at the organization’s headquarters on the sixty-seventh floor of 1 World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.15 “They could literally look out their conference room windows and see the piers below,” Manheim remembers. “That may have something to do with why they took the site, which was such a tiny part of the overall properties they were responsible for, so seriously.”16

  Brooklyn Heights residents had been invited across the river to share their community’s opinions about the proposed dispossession of Piers 1–6 and were assured that their concerns and recommendations would be included in a forthcoming feasibility study on the potential uses of the Brooklyn waterfront. With the view of the piers and the west Brooklyn skyline clearly on display below, the committee members identified the three concerns that they would continue to emphasize in their future negotiations with the Port Authority: protection of the scenic-view plane of the river and the Manhattan skyline, the exclusion of any new pedestrian or vehicular corridor directly linking the neighborhood promenade to the shoreline, and the dedication of meaningful space for public access and use of the waterfront property.

  Consistent with Manheim’s earlier informal conversations with the Port Authority, the committee members’ first formal meeting with the Port Authority focused primarily on the Brooklyn community’s concerns about what the development should not involve. A general consensus had emerged among community representatives that, whatever changes were made to the waterfront and the piers, the existing environment and day-to-day experiences of the residents of Brooklyn Heights and the adjoining neighborhoods should be left undisturbed, from the spectacular scenic views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline to the tranquil, cul-de-sac layout of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood.

  “The main concerns during those early meetings were the protection of the view and the possibility of a corridor linking the promenade with the piers,” remembers Fred Bland, a Beyer Blinder Belle partner, Brooklyn architect, and future BHA president, who, along with Manheim, Pearsall, and Hand, attended an early meeting with Port Authority public-relations director and Brooklyn Heights resident Rita Schwartz, shortly after the meeting at 1 World Trade Center. “We hoped the scenic-view restrictions would protect us, but it was an important concern for everyone.

  “There was some talk here and there about including public space as a part of whatever was developed on the waterfront,” Bland continues, “but at the time, nobody was saying ‘park.’ ”17

  Manheim agrees that the focus on building a park evolved over time, though he insists that it was always assumed that whatever use was made of the property, at least some of the space would be preserved for park and recreational use. “I’m not exactly sure when the park idea came up in our discussions,” he says. “I think we always considered ‘park’ as a part of it, but not necessarily ‘pure park.’ A park with things in it.

  “The goal,” Manheim continues, “was to take this publicly owned asset, about eighty-five acres, about one-third water, about one-third piers, supported largely by deteriorating wooden pilings, and about one-third upland, and decide what to do with it.”

  The overriding objective was to find the most beneficial use of the property for the community residents and the rest of the city: “We looked at it very simply the same way that you would look at a private development project intending to maximize profit, although ‘profit’ was not for me measured in dollar return; it was measured in public benefit.”18

  The Port Authority officials with whom Manheim, Bland, and the other committee members met during 1984 and most of 1985 were generally sympathetic to the concerns expressed by the community leaders. Whatever plans the Port Authority officials may privately have been entertaining for the piers, Bland recalls, “they really didn’t put up a fight” in response to the concerns expressed by the committee.19

  At least one office at the Port Authority was taking the local community’s concerns and recommendations very seriously at the time. Between July 1984 and April 1985, Robert Parsekian was a member of the Commission on Ports and Terminals’ Task Force for the Brooklyn Piers, a three-person design team preparing multiple schemes for the use of the west Brooklyn waterfront. “Several of the schemes we designed did have a lot of parkland,” remembers Parsekian. “We had created a model in the office of Piers 1 to 6. It was full scale in white foam core. It was meant to study how massing of structures and parkland could be funded at the site. We figured out the economics of the amount of upland versus parkland use.

  “We had a model scope,” he continues, “a device that had a fine stainless-steel tube that you could place in the model and look down on through optics as though you were a person in the model walking through the space. There was some housing, but we weren’t trying to fill the space with housing. I remember that there was a tremendous concern for not interrupting the view plane.”20

  THE ABILITY OF THE PORT AUTHORITY to honor its early, informal commitments to the Waterfront Committee would soon be seriously compromised by both the internal restructuring of the organization itself and the realignment of its relationship with city government. Even before the organization’s first formal meeting with the Waterfront Committee in April 1984, negotiations were under way at 1 World Trade Center that would completely alter the governance of the region’s piers and the Port Authority’s goals and priorities for dispossession and development.

  In March 1984, the Port Authority and New York City signed a Letter of Agreement to jointly study the potential development of the piers, including the formulation of general guidelines for the dispossession of Piers 1–6 in Brooklyn. The Port Authority’s partners in this new arrangement included the New York City Department of Ports and Terminals, which temporarily maintained nominal authority for the maintenance and control of the piers; Department of City Planning; and Public Development Corporation (PDC).21 The inclusion of the PDC, a powerful, well-funded enterprise with 140 full-time workers (compared with just 14 employees in Ports and Terminals), signaled that Mayor Koch was finally on the verge of achieving his objective of converting the abandoned piers to real estate.

  In little more than a year, the PDC would be formally designated as the lead agent for waterfront development, with the executive director, James Stuckey, publicly chanting the mayor’s mantra that abandoned waterfronts, converted into real estate, were the future of profitable urban development. “Nowhere is this more true than in New York City,” Stuckey explained in the ambitious report New York City’s Waterfront: A Plan for Development, “where the fast pace of development in Manhattan has left little undeveloped land save the waterfront, and has increased the desirability of waterfront areas facing Manhattan.”22

  In addition to the joint planning initiative with the city, critical changes were simultaneously taking place in the Port Authority. By the end of 1984, the Port Authority’s Commission on Ports and Terminals would effectively relinquish control of the piers and the dispossession and development process to the agency’s Department of World Trade and Economic Development, with its mandated focus on economic growth and job creation.

  As Manheim and his colleagues would soon learn, the new arrangement between the Port Authority and the city represented a determined and inflexible commitment to private development as the sole destiny of Piers 1–6. In January 1985, the Port Authority and the city jointly retained the consulting firm Halcyon Ltd., of Hartford, Connecticut, to study the alternatives for development. In place of the proposed feasibility study to which the Waterfront Committee members had been told
they were contributing, Halcyon had instead been commissioned to produce a marketing study. The task at hand was to sell the Port Authority and the city’s decision in favor of the private development of Piers 1–6 to potential investors and the general public—either with the support or over the objections of the communities that would be directly affected by private development.

  Later that month, Philip LaRocco, the Port Authority’s Director of World Trade and Economic Development and the agency’s newly designated liaison with the waterfront communities, convened a meeting with Manheim, newly elected BHA president Earl Weiner, and several other members of the Waterfront Committee. The purposes of the meeting were to inform the committee that the Port Authority and its partners “had decided to go the route of private development,” to introduce the committee members to the Halcyon consulting team, and to reassure the Brooklyn Heights residents that, in spite of the sudden unilateral shift in direction, the community’s concerns would continue to be respected in the ongoing plans for development.23

  “Suddenly, the attitude of the Port Authority changed,” Manheim recalls. “I remember being specifically told by Philip LaRocco, who was one of six department directors of the Port Authority, who reported directly to the executive director, and his department was called Economic Development. And the disposition of the piers property, both our piers and Hoboken and Queens West, had been turned over to that department, taken out of another co-equal department that operated piers and shipping facilities.

  “They had spent, I believe he said, a million bucks on a planning study for Hoboken and found it to be unproductive,” continues Manheim. “And they weren’t going to repeat that mistake in Brooklyn. They didn’t want to hire a planning firm just to interview people to tell them about the piers’ potential—or lack of potential—for break-bulk shipping. They’d just be interviewing their own employees to tell them what they already knew. And they didn’t need a consultant to tell them that luxury-housing condos would sell there. Why did you need to spend a million to have somebody tell you what everybody already knew from the get-go? Instead, they had decided to conduct a marketing study for Piers 1–6. I remember that he used those words: ‘marketing study.’ ”24