While Manheim expressed concern about the possible construction of high-rise buildings on the “triangles of opportunity” at the northern and southern boundaries of the site, immediately outside the protected scenic-view zones, both he and the other committee members remained guardedly optimistic with the explanations and assurances they received from LaRocco and the representatives of the Halcyon consulting team. As Manheim reported in the BHA newsletter shortly after the meeting, “We have no reason to believe that there is currently any contemplation of not respecting this constraint [the scenic-view zone].”25 For the time being at least, most of the BHA’s members were willing to give the Port Authority and the city the benefit of the doubt.
At the time, it seemed to many residents of the Brooklyn Heights community as if there were little else that they could do. With the combined financial resources and public influence of the PDC, the Port Authority’s Department of World Trade and Economic Development, and the Department of City Planning, along with the enthusiastic endorsement of the mayor’s office, the private development of Piers 1–6 had all the marks of a fait accompli. The Waterfront Committee’s best hope of preserving the neighborhood’s scenic views and tranquil streets and sidewalks was to continue working with the Port Authority behind the scenes, building trust, and, hopefully, gaining leverage by reassuring community residents of the good will and trustworthiness of those in authority.
WHATEVER GOOD WILL AND TRUST had been established during the continuing meetings and negotiations between the Port Authority and the Waterfront Committee during the spring and summer of 1985 was seriously undermined the following October when the Port Authority and its partners in city government launched a media campaign, releasing the tentative findings from the forthcoming Halcyon Report and publicly announcing its plans for the private development of Piers 1–6.
In a 1,700-word special report, “In Brooklyn Heights, a Spotlight on 87 Neglected Acres,” New York Times journalist Richard D. Lyons made a strong case for the disposal of Piers 1–6 (which he described as having been reduced to “a parking lot for a few bulk cargo ships of the sort that have used the area since the turn of the century”) while praising the potential benefits of developing the property for commercial use. The article, which read more like a public-relations announcement than an investigative report, revealed that the proposed development of the piers property would include a mix of “public housing, parkland, a resort hotel, condominiums, athletic fields, exhibition halls, marinas and manufacturing plants.”26 The unfolding development process, as described by Lyons, was complete with heroes and villains and suggested, for the discerning reader, the blame-the-critic strategy that the Port Authority and the city would use to discredit its opponents and achieve its objectives in developing the piers.
The heroes, as Lyons presented them, were the Port Authority and its partners in the Department of City Planning and the PDC, along with the commercial investors who would soon be revitalizing the abandoned piers on behalf of the borough and the city at large. An opening statement by Theodore Kleiner, the director of the Port Authority’s Task Force for the Brooklyn Piers, immediately established the optimistic, civic-minded, pro-development tone of the article. “This is the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved with,” Kleiner gushed, citing the proposed development’s potential benefits for the city and region.
Wilbur Woods, the director of the Brooklyn office of the Department of City Planning, reiterated Kleiner’s enthusiasm for the potential public benefits of development, explaining that, along with his partners in the Port Authority, he viewed the site as a “regional resource, not merely a local asset” whose future should not be determined exclusively by the desires of Brooklyn Heights or Wall Street (where many of the neighborhood’s residents were employed).
The article’s villains, as Woods’s comments suggested, were the wealthy, well-connected residents of Brooklyn Heights who would resist the broader public benefit simply to protect their own privileged views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline. “My guess is that the real-estate developers will do anything to raise the height restrictions for the property,” complained longtime Brooklyn Heights resident and celebrated author Norman Mailer. “Disposal of the site could be a political scam that would generate an enormous sense of outrage. But if they try to do something against the interest of the area, the opposition here will make the fight over Westway look like All Souls’ Night.”27
With his high profile, combative style of public debate, and flair for colorful hyperbole, Mailer was the perfect foil for the Port Authority’s strategy to discredit public resistance to its plans for the commercial development of the west Brooklyn waterfront. Many New York Times readers would have still remembered Mailer’s controversial positions in his unsuccessful New York City mayoral campaign in 1969, particularly his outspoken commitment to the right of each of the city’s neighborhoods to make its own decisions and determine its own destiny, independent of centralized municipal rules and regulations.
At the time, Mailer’s stubborn defense of neighborhood autonomy and self-determination had resonated powerfully among a wide variety of citizens dissatisfied with both the intrusions and the neglect of city government, including African American separatists in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. To many other voters, however, Mailer’s comments reflected his singular commitment to the concerns of his own privileged neighborhood, where scenic views and tranquil streets were more highly valued than the interests of the city at large.
“I don’t care too much about those people whose views might be obstructed because I see the issue as being much bigger than that,” explained Martin Gallent, vice chairman of the City Planning Commission, openly mocking what he claimed to be the inflexible position of some residents of Brooklyn Heights that the neighborhood’s historic views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline were an “untouchable” right that trumped other potential civic benefits, such as job creation and economic revitalization.
Although it had apparently not been the intention of the Port Authority in its initial overtures to Manheim and the Waterfront Committee, the concerns that the representatives of the Brooklyn Heights community had expressed about preserving the integrity of their neighborhood and protecting their view of the skyline—along with the community’s past successes in neighborhood preservation and view protection—were now being turned against them. Far from ignoring the suggestions of the Waterfront Committee and other local representatives, the Port Authority’s current leadership had clearly taken them to heart—not as legitimate concerns about the future development of the waterfront but as talking points for caricaturing and vilifying local resistance to commercial development. The strategy of the public authorities was to neutralize preemptively public objections to the commercial development of the piers by portraying local activists as self-interested elites, eager to sacrifice the greater public interest for their own privileged views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline.
In spite of their own private frustrations with the direction the Port Authority and the city had announced for Piers 1–6, Pearsall and Manheim were not as quick as Mailer had been to take the public authority’s bait in a citywide forum. Pearsall acknowledged to the Times reporter that “some people are voicing disillusionment with city officials because of the Morgan Stanley building [which had recently, with the aggressive support of the PDC and the approval of the City Planning Commission, erected a seventeen-story computer-operations facility on the corner of Pierrepont and Court Streets].” He was far more restrained and diplomatic in expressing his own views, however. “I can’t bring myself to believe that anything underhanded is going on,” he said, affirming his continuing commitment to work cooperatively with the Port Authority.
Manheim was even more conciliatory in his comments, essentially endorsing the Port Authority’s plans to use the waterfront for the commercial development of the property, as long as “some fraction” of the property was devoted to pub
lic use. “A mix of uses is what is needed,” he told the Times reporter. “It would be unrealistic to put eighty-seven acres out as public parkland.”
Even before the New York Times article was published, rumors regarding the findings and recommendations from the forthcoming Halcyon Report had reached the local Brooklyn media. In contrast to the enthusiasm of the Times piece and the guarded optimism voiced by Manheim and Pearsall, Brooklyn Heights journalists were highly critical of the Port Authority’s plans for a “mammoth” recreational, residential, and commercial center on the site currently occupied by Piers 1–6.
A special edition of the Brooklyn Heights Paper, issued a week before the Times article, expressed alarm about a proposed pedestrian walkway connecting the piers to the tip of Montague Street or to Squibb Park, below Columbia Heights.28
A week later, the Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News published multiple responses to the proposed development. A featured editorial warned local readers that the proposed construction of a luxury hotel on the waterfront would inevitably result in traffic congestion on Joralemon and Furman Streets, the only accessible routes to and along the piers.29 A separate report in the same edition by journalist George Winslow cautioned that the Height’s spectacular view of the skyline may be blocked by the impending development. “The development of the piers may offer some surprises,” cautioned Winslow, citing past betrayals of the neighborhood by Robert Moses in the 1940s and the Port Authority’s failed attempt to erect high-rise buildings on the piers in the mid-1950s. “Heights residents could wake up one morning and find a thirty-one-story Watchtower building blocking their views north of the Promenade and a thirty-story hotel blocking the view of the harbor at the south end.” To support his concerns, Winslow cited a letter from Herbert Sturz, chairman of the City Planning Commission, explaining that the Department of City Planning could provide developers with a “zoning variance” reducing current view protections and properties that fall outside the designated scenic-view zones would not be protected from high-rise development.30
While Manheim and Pearsall were wisely reluctant to share their frustrations through the media, they and their colleagues on the Waterfront Committee were privately angered and discouraged by the preliminary information from the Halcyon Report. “It became clear,” recall Hand and Pearsall, “that for all the pains of the Waterfront Committee members in urging their points, they might just as well have saved their breath. Pure and simple, what the agencies wanted was development with a capital ‘D.’ ”31
It had also become clear that the Port Authority and the city were prepared to play hardball to get their way in privately developing Piers 1–6, publicly depicting opponents of development as privileged, self-serving elites with little concern for the public good. If Manheim, Pearsall, Hand, and the other members of the Waterfront Committee were to have any chance of success in protecting the interests of their community, they would have to adopt a much bolder and well-organized approach in their future interactions with the public authorities, the local community, and the media.
IN LIGHT OF THESE REVELATIONS, Manheim, Pearsall, Hand, and the other members of the Waterfront Committee immediately realized that they could no longer simply trust the Port Authority to incorporate their community’s priorities and concerns into its development scheme for the piers. A far more aggressive, well-funded, and broad-based approach would be required for the committee to succeed in gaining leverage with the authorities and protecting the Brooklyn Heights community and the surrounding neighborhoods from the negative impact of the private development of the piers.
The first action in the committee’s more aggressive waterfront campaign was to convene a public meeting to inform neighborhood residents about the details of the Halcyon Report and its potential impact on the community. Although the Port Authority would not release the complete content of the report to the public for several months, Halcyon had submitted its final report, Development Concepts for the Brooklyn Piers, to the Port Authority and the city in December 1985, and preliminary drafts of the document had begun to circulate informally throughout the community, increasing the anger and frustration that had been generated by the media coverage in late October.
As Philip LaRocco, Director of World Trade and Economic Development at the Port Authority, had already confided to Manheim months earlier,32 Halcyon had indeed prepared and submitted a marketing study—recommending optimal scenarios for selling the concept of private development to potential developers—in place of the type of community-informed planning study to which the Waterfront Committee members had originally been led to believe they were contributing by voicing their concerns to Port Authority representatives.
As the Times article had suggested, recommendations for private development and use of the piers property dominated the report, with minimal references to public use and recreation. At the center of the Halcyon concept was the creation of “an ‘international city,’ which takes full advantage of the unique assembly of land and waterfront at a prime, visible location in a major metropolitan area.”33 The proposed “international city” would feature a research institute, a trade-oriented exhibition center, and a conference center, sponsoring programs on world trade. Additional private developments would include office buildings, corporate headquarters, residential buildings, retails centers, and a large boat marina and ferry terminal.
Faced with the barrage of negative local media coverage, the Port Authority and the city quickly distanced themselves from the Halcyon Report’s recommendations for an international trade center to be constructed along the Brooklyn waterfront. “Their [Halcyon’s recommendations] inclusion here should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any of their ideas by either the City or the Port Authority,” explained the Port Authority’s Philip LaRocco and Deputy Mayor Alair Townsend in a joint press release in early 1986.34 Whatever the Port Authority and the city actually thought of Halcyon’s specific recommendations, however, their commitment to private development was clear.
WITH THE PORT AUTHORITY DECLINING an invitation to defend its report at a public meeting, the Waterfront Committee decided instead to assemble a panel of distinguished experts in urban planning and development, who would be asked to assess the merits of the Halcyon Report and provide their own recommendations about what should and should not be done with the piers property. With the advice and assistance of local architect Ted Liebman (former chief architect for the New York State Urban Development Corporation), Manheim, Hand, and Pearsall quickly recruited “an all-star panel”35 that included
Architect David M. Childs, of the prominent architecture, urban-planning, and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Barbara J. Fife, former chair of the Waterfront Committee of the Parks Council and former Deputy Mayor for Planning and Development
Edward J. Logue, former president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation
Robert Campbell, architecture critic for the Boston Globe
Roger Starr, former New York City Housing and Development Administrator and member of the New York Times editorial board
Michael H. Zisser, president of the New York Metropolitan chapter of the American Planning Commission
The panel discussion, which was moderated by Municipal Art Society president Kent Barwick, was held at the Annual Meeting of the Brooklyn Heights Association on February 25, 1986, at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights, with “several hundred associates, members, residents and business owners” in attendance.36
Predictably, given their widely divergent backgrounds and experiences, the panelists differed in their views of the appropriate use of the waterfront property, with recommendations ranging from open parkland (Childs and Fife) to self-contained residential and commercial quarters (Campbell) to delaying development indefinitely in the hope that appropriate maritime uses could be identified that would restore the piers’ traditional importance along the shoreline (Starr).37
While the speakers diverg
ed in their recommendations for the appropriate use of the waterfront property, they were unanimous in their repudiation of the methodology, findings, and recommendations of the Halcyon Report, which was variously described as “incompetent,” “inappropriate,” “irresponsible,” “ridiculous,” “embarrassing,” and completely lacking in the type of “comprehensive planning” that would give legitimacy to the Port Authority’s proposal for the private development of the piers. At one point in the discussion, panelist Robert Campbell openly wondered “why the city agencies were not embarrassed to duplicate and distribute it.”38
In addition to their rejection of the report’s grand vision of an international trade center sprawling along the waterfront property, the panelists repeatedly criticized the fact that Halcyon had presented—and the Port Authority and the city had apparently commissioned—a marketing study before conducting sufficient research and planning to determine what precisely it was that they were trying to sell. The report, wrote local journalist Tracey Garrity in summarizing the panelists’ combined critiques, “offered no foresight in planning and was in fact a marketing study—and a bad marketing study.”39
IN ADDITION TO ITS SCATHING REBUKE of the Halcyon Report, the BHA panel discussion on February 25 also called attention to the lack of substantive research and planning for the development of the Brooklyn piers. Even as they publicly distanced themselves from Halcyon’s international-trade-center concept, the Port Authority and its partners in city government were moving full speed ahead with the development process, announcing in the spring of 1986 that they intended to issue Requests for Proposals to eighteen major real-estate developers by late summer,40 with tentative plans for infrastructure development in the fall of 1988 and site construction in the summer of 1989.41
A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park Page 5