WestView

Park Board Invites Pier 40 Solution

November 2009, by George Capsis

With little hope of getting developer money, Pier 40 board invites community 
to come up with uses to eventually pay for needed repairs.

Driving to work, David Blumenfeld, while still in his early twenties and scion of one of the dozen or so mega real estate families, became aware of a decaying factory in east Harlem. “Boy, wouldn’t that make a terrific shopping center? I gotta tell dad.” And now, in his forties-twenty years later-he just might cut the ribbon.

For developers, building in New York, the ultimate Monopoly game, has become a protracted sumo-like struggle with opaque city regulation, turf politics, exotic financing and community kvetching.

Once considered “prime water front property” the decaying four-block-long, 15 acre concrete Pier 40 at the foot of West Houston Street has experienced ten years of community tussling and two failed requests for proposals. Now, with a recession and the nasty aftertaste of spending millions for failed proposals, developer interest has all but evaporated.

But wait. The Hudson River Park needs the money since it is legislated to be self-sustaining. The monthly rent from leasing the piers has to cover the operating costs, including the salaries of the staff and directors. And, as more sections of the park are completed, the operating expenses go up. So, if it can’t get a developer for Pier 40, where to find the money-like real fast? 
Simple-up the parking fees.

Its 2,000 parked cars contribute $5.5 million, or 40 percent of the park’s operating budget, and every year staff head Connie Fishman asks the non-paid board members for yet another hike and, to justify it, presents a survey prepared by the parking operator as to what the other parking facilities are charging to demonstrate they are still below the garage down the block. Yes, well, but as taxpayers, Pier 40 is owned by you and me and if we have rent regulations for apartments, why not low cost parking to get as many cars off the street as possible and then increase the number of parking spaces to increase revenue and serve even more middle class West Villagers? (Thirty years ago, when the city owned the pier, you could park for $29.50 a month. In 1987 it was $100. Today, I pay $390.)

But increasing parking has become a Titanic deck chair exercise since the open seams of the concrete slabs that form the roof are leaking, leaving impossible-to- remove calcium deposits on the cars below. More and more cars are herded into smaller and smaller areas. The roof has been leaking for more than 20 years. The Port Authority, when they ran the pier, hired a contractor who botched the job. The PA sued, the contractor went bankrupt and the seams never got sealed.

A structural engineer offered that Pier 40, completed in 1962, is one of the few structures that will cease to be on the date projected as the end of its useful life.

Board member and West Village parent Paul Ullman (he discovered the pier five years ago when his boys began playing on the courtyard field) allows that a developer or some source of funding is still needed to spend perhaps $20 to $30 million to seal the leaking roof and $35 to $60 million (or many more millions) to repair the worst of the corroding steel piles. In September of 1987 the danger of collapse was so acute that the Port Authority closed the pier for a month. Some of the 3,500 steel piles go down 175 feet below the riverbed to hit bedrock. A Port Authority diver reported, “You could push your finger through the rust.”

Ullman and several other Hudson River Park Trust board members like Pam Forester (who teaches at Columbia University’s School of Journalism), concluding that another formal RFP with its nearly two year time-frame is not going to happen, have opened the door to any and all ideas.

Ullman, who heads his own Real Estate Investment Trust, clarifies the business proposition: “Suppose Pier 40 did not exist and you went to the park community and said I will build you one point three million square feet, any way you like it, but you have to pay us back.”

And to this he adds, “There are two basic approaches. First, low cost-work with what’s there, fix the parking so you increase revenue and keep the sports facilities so you have parking and sports-do the minimum amount to stabilize the situation. And we are working on this.”

Plan B is something else that everybody wants-to make it a world-class facility

“Any idea what this might be?” I asked.

“We have tons of ideas but no numbers. To work, it has to be economically viable.”

Pam Forrester added her wish for a walkway around the pier and cited the success of the High Line.

I asked Pam if Pier 40 might relocate some of the many independent shops and restaurants we have lost through high rents and she cited the plan to invite small shops as offered in the winning proposal for Pier 57 By The Durst Organization and C and K Properties (they were the former parking operator for Pier 40 and lost out on the first RFP some five years ago).

The $330 million plan, besides a Music Theater, calls for small shops, restaurants, cafes, food stalls and boutiques.

What is important about the Durst and C and K plan is that both the community and the HRPT board have bought it. It is a done deal. It is a model of what the community and the board might buy for Pier 40.

Indeed, Pier 40 may be the place to relocate all the small independent shops and restaurants that have been pushed out by high rents.

The original C and K proposal was killed because of three words, “big box store.” Pier 40 might be revived because of two words, “Trader Joe.” And why not a huge greenmarket?

We want to ask you: “What do you want on Pier 40?”

E-mail your ideas to georgeC101@aol.com and we will publish the best of them.

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