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Locals fear end of Brooklyn waterfront
2007-06-18
As the self-designated captain of a 93-year-old barge that he refurbished as a combined maritime museum and residence, David Sharps exemplifies the quirky charm of Red Hook, a history-steeped neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront. So when the National Trust for Historic Preservation added the borough's industrial coastline to its list of the nation's most endangered historical places, Sharps was pleased. The Trust argues, as do many residents, that old buildings should be rehabilitated and turned to new uses instead of being demolished to make way for fancy new residential developments. "It's our challenge of the next generation -- what are we going to do, what is the waterfront going to look like?" Sharps asked. The neighborhood has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. Cruise ships shuttling tourists to distant destinations come and go. Luxury high-rises are sprouting up. An Ikea furniture outlet is being built -- and developers paved over a large Civil War-era drydock to make way for its parking lot. In its announcement last week, the National Trust said the area, which dates from the early days of Dutch settlers and was a shipbuilding and repair center for more than a century, was in danger of becoming a "victim of voracious developers anxious to cash in on the area's newly hip status." "These buildings represent Brooklyn's industrial heritage and they shouldn't be lost for that reason," said Richard Moe, president of the organization. Whether the group can exert anything beyond moral pressure to forestall the loss of significant sites is uncertain. Points of maritime history abound along the seven-mile Brooklyn shoreline from Sunset Park north to Greenpoint. They include vestiges of the iron works where the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor was built, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where hundreds of later warships were fitted for combat. There is also Red Hook's Erie Basin, where grain cargoes sent from the Midwest via the Erie Canal and the Hudson river were finally offloaded for shipment to Europe. The sailors and mob-controlled stevedores who spiced the waterfront's legendary past are also mostly gone. Charles Johnson, an artist and photographer, 58, said that to preserve shoreline spaces for public use, new residential developments should be "pushed back a block. They kill the waterfront." The neighborhood's fate also is a concern to Greg O'Connell, a 60-year-old retired detective who has made the regeneration of Red Hook's local economy a new career and personal crusade. He saves old brick warehouses and turns them into spaces for artists, craftspeople and small businesses. He said his own properties in Red Hook prove that old buildings, protected by zoning, can be turned to new uses -- in his case such enterprises as glassblowing, haberdashery, apple processing and a key lime pie maker. "Luxury housing doesn't have to be the answer," he said. Red Hook preservationists were caught by surprise when a longtime landmark, a conical silo once owned by the Revere Sugar Co., was recently demolished. O'Connell said that property had been bought a few years earlier for $13 million and sold for $40 million. "You could have done so many things with that," said O'Connell. "But it's all about the bottom line." Two years ago, many area residents worried that the creation of a new cruise ship terminal in Red Hook would create traffic congestion, while others said it would bring jobs and business to one of the waterfront's most-neglected areas. Neither occurred; the Cunard liner Queen Mary 2 and other Princess Line ships come and go almost without anyone noticing, and ship passengers see Red Hook's quaint brick streets only from the windows of buses and taxis. With housing costs rising, but still below nearby neighborhoods, Red Hook has yet to experience a real estate boom. Gentrification may be in its future, but for the moment it seems caught in transition, like the tavern with two signs -- one reading "LeNell's Wine and Spirits Bar," the other a hand-scrawled "wine and likker." ___ On the Net: http://www.nationaltrust.org
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