There are too many people to thank for this incredible victory. Special recognition must go out, however, to Professor Ed Lloyd and the staff at the Columbia Environmental Law Clinic, William Plache with the New York City Corporation Counsel, local attorney Adam Perlmutter, the Pace Energy Project and its lead counsel Victor Tafur (now with Riverkeeper), and Assemblyman Joseph Lentol. Many community organizations and individuals were also critical to the victory — far too many to list here (this did go on for 9 years after all). Suffice it to say, we are especially grateful to Christine Holowacz and Peter Gillespie who provided great leadership throughout this long fight.

The decision appears below.

2010 N.Y. Slip Op. 60611
Unpublished Disposition
NOTE: THIS OPINION WILL NOT APPEAR IN A PRINTED VOLUME. THE DISPOSITION WILL APPEAR IN A REPORTER TABLE.

Court of Appeals of New York.

In the Matter of TRANSGAS ENERGY SYSTEMS, LLC, Appellant, v. NEW YORK STATE BOARD ON ELECTRIC GENERATION SITING AND ENVIRONMENT, et al., Respondents.

No. 2009-1190. Jan. 12, 2010.

Motion for leave to appeal denied with one hundred dollars costs and necessary reproduction disbursements.

Judge Read took no part.

HIP HIP HOORAY!

THE SOCCER FIELD AT BUSHWICK INLET PARK IS OPEN AS OF TODAY!

IT’S A LITTLE TASTE OF THE GREEN WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR ON OUR WATERFRONT.

STARTING TODAY, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13TH THE GATES WILL BE OPEN EVERY DAY.

EXACT OPEN AND CLOSE HOURS ARE STILL BEING WORKED OUT BUT CHANCES ARE IF IT’S DAYLIGHT, YOU’RE GOOD TO GO.

NO SCHEDULED GAMES ON THE FIELD AS OF YET.

THE PARKS DEPARTMENT IS CURRENTLY ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR PERMITS TO PLAY ON THE FIELD.

GO TO WWW.NYCGOVPARKS.ORG FOR MORE INFORMATION.

NOTE THE VERY COOL MISTING STATIONS.  THERE’S ONE ON EACH END OF THE FIELD.

ALSO NOTE THE VERY POWERFUL MOUNTED LIGHTS ALLOWING FOR NIGHTIME PLAY.

CONSTRUCTION ON PHASE TWO OF THIS PARCEL BEGINS IN THE SPRING.

SO UNFORTUNATELY THAT UGLY CORRUGATED FENCE BLOCKING OUR VIEW OF THE WATER WILL REMAIN UNTIL CONSTRUCTION WRAPS UP IN 2011.

WALK, SKIP, RUN.  GO CHECK IT OUT!

BETWEEN NORTH 9TH AND NORTH 10TH ON KENT.

YEAH!

Yassky’s Bargain: A Departing Councilman in Search of a Quo for His Quid by Katharine Jose for the New York Observer November 23, 2009

Though he has only a few weeks left in office, City Councilman David Yassky has lost none of his enthusiasm. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, he parked a blue minivan on Kent Street in Williamsburg and bounded out, wearing a black suit and a black tie with green flowers, and no coat, although it was cold and damp and the suit jacket flapped in the unyielding wind.

Yassky, joined by his community liaison Rami Metal, was facing several rows of dusty trucks, a wide expanse of Astroturf and the East River. We were there to look, four years after the fact, at what had become of the parks the city promised Yassky in exchange for a sweeping 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront.

“This happens every year at the end of the term,” said Yassky, 45, a boyish, emotionally transparent policy wonk who has represented his Brooklyn district since 2001. “There are things they really want to get done.”

“They” in this context is the city government: the mayor’s office, the planning department, the parks department.  That rezoning bore dozens of condominium projects in a feverish real estate market, but they have not, so far, produced any of the three parks that were part of the agreement.

The almost-park, called Bushwick Inlet Park, is far from completed, but it is happening. Asked how hard it was to get it to this state of readiness, Yassky said, “It was murder. It was a nightmare.”

The Astroturf was very green and slippery, like a field made out of plastic leis. It didn’t seem ideal for any use, though Yassky told me the city parks department has been using it for years, because real grass is hard to maintain and gets muddy.

“The original plan for Bushwick Inlet Park was starting at North 9th, going through to the inlet,” Yassky said. “If you go back to 2005 when Amanda Burden and Dan Doctoroff would come present the vision for the Brooklyn waterfront.”

As sometimes happens, “the vision” has materialized more for the private sector than the public.

It’s true that the neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint are being transformed by condominium buildings. But what’s less obvious is that the people who tend to mind the most–the ones who scrawl “condoburg” on the stairs leading up from the Bedford Avenue subway stop–are statistically likely to move away within a few years. The longtime residents of the neighborhood, the ones who have spent a lifetime cut off from the tantalizingly proximate water, are more likely to be interested in the prospect of thirty acres of waterfront park than they are in whether or not a building turns up nearby.

In this sense, for Mr. Yassky–who compiled a progressive record as an aide to Charles Schumer and then as a council member; who won the wholehearted endorsement of The New York Times before losing, possibly in elective-political-career-ending fashion, to John Liu in his bid for comptroller–his public legacy hangs on what happens to these spaces.

The rezoning has very conspicuously changed the neighborhood, and since the real estate market is not what it was, the condo buildings have come to represent something other than progress. Greenpoint and Williamsburg have, according to the Daily News, 80 stalled construction sites. Some streets are, for blocks, lined with plywood fences hiding empty lots.

Just north of the Astroturf field is a large grey and blue warehouse owned by a company called City Storage, which houses documents for law firms and the courts and the city and other organizations. That warehouse has been there awhile. The warehouse just north of it, similar but much larger, was built within the last three or four years, after the plan for the park was public.

“[The owner's] story would be, you know, ‘I have a booming business and I can fill this up,’” Yassky said with a small sigh. “A skeptical person would say—well, and part of that would be–if the city was going to take this by eminent domain, which is what the original plan called for, then having the two buildings on it would let him argue that it was much more valuable and they had to pay him a lot more for it.”To make Bushwick Inlet Park the park it was meant to be, the city also needs to acquire the property to the north, owned by a heating-oil delivery company called Bayside Fuel. The city condemned the site in 2006, but a company named TGE already had the “option to buy” the site for the purpose of building a power plant. TGE argued that the site could not be condemned until the state denied the power-plant permit, which it eventually did, but not until last year. In the meantime it became clear that, as a place that once produced manufactured coal, the property would require extensive environmental remediation. That means, according to Metal, three to four years to study the problem, and maybe five to clean it up.

Before that happens, Bushwick Inlet Park will not actually reach Bushwick Inlet.

The second park that Yassky was promised, and the smallest, is where Greenpoint Avenue dead-ends at the East River. This is the WNYC Transmitter Park, a cramped piece of land about half the size of one one of the neighborhood’s blocks. The ground is covered in wood chips. There is a wooden walkway that leads to a platform with a wooden railing. It seems designed for wheelchairs. There is a fence along the far side that keeps visitors away from the water.

“It’s a work in progress,” Yassky said. “When I was elected there was a big transmitter tower somewhere around there. It was a big…like the Eiffel Tower. You know, 50 feet tall, it was a tall thing. And that’s what this was.”

It’s a third site that makes the councilman really mad. 65 Commercial Street is, as it was in 2005, a parking area for Access-a-Ride vehicles, a lot for emergency response vehicles and, at that moment, where Martin Scorsese’s new HBO series, “Boardwalk Empire,” was shooting. The city budget lists the development as a soccer field, but the site is still owned by the M.T.A.

I asked Yassky why the city thought this particular site would work.

“There are two possibilities,” he said. “They really didn’t intend to, they don’t really care, they just said it to shut me up. Like ‘OK yeah we’ll do this,’ and then–but it’s in writing, you know. They gave me a whole letter saying these are the three things we’re going to do.

“And the other possibility would be that, you know, they kind of meant it, but it’s hard. It is hard. It’s not undoably hard, it just takes some work.”

We stood looking at the chain link and the barbed wire and the gates and the pavement and Yassky said, “This one you should really write about. I mean this thing that they haven’t done–four years later–they said they would move this off and make this a park and it’s still here.”

There wasn’t much else to see and as we got back into the minivan, I asked Yassky about making deals with the city.

“Certainly one lesson,” he said. “One lesson of that is: whatever neighborhood improvements are supposed to go with a big development plan should be done up front–should be done before it’s passed. The commitment should be made enforceable in some way. And if not, then don’t bank on it.”

As we headed south on Franklin, Yassky told me there isn’t much he can do about the project now. “I mean, as of November 10, I’m passing the baton.”

I asked if his replacement, newly elected Steve Levin, would continue to push the city for the parks. “Absolutely,” Yassky said.

After a few seconds of silence, Yassky said, “In fact, we should get an actual baton.”

He turned to Rami. “Do we have one?”

They didn’t, Rami said.

A minute after we exchanged goodbyes on Wythe Avenue near N. 9th Street, Rami sprinted back and handed me a few sheets of paper–copies of letters from the 2005 rezoning. On April 28, 2005, in a letter about the Commercial Street site, the M.T.A. wrote to then-deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff to “confirm that the Metropolitan Transit Authority-New York City Transit would be willing to transfer the site to the City of New York for use as a publicly accessible open space within the context of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning.”

That is, “dependent upon the City therefore having identified, acquired and fitted out a suitable alternative site” and “the replacement or relocation all the unit’s facilities to the new locations.” This Emergency Response Unit, the letter warned, “is extremely location-sensitive” and “the City would also need to have provided a replacement site for the New York City Transit’s Department of Buses.” That site “must be of equivalent or greater value.”

CHECK OUT THE LATEST SIGNS OF LIFE AT THE NORTH 9TH-NORTH 10TH STREET PORTION OF BUSHWICK INLET PARK.

THIS PHOTO SNAPPED ON MONDAY SHOWS THAT THE TURF FOR THE ATHLETIC FIELD IS IN….  YEAH!!!

Despite the recent news that $57 million dollars will be cut from the Parks Department  North Brooklyn construction budget for the next 6 years, I couldn’t help but feel giddy when I rode by by the stretch of land on Kent Avenue between N.9th and N.10th Street today to see signs of construction activities and upturned soil.

Construction on Phase I

Yes, it appears, Phase I is underway!  I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the Parks Department has installed an informative sign, telling people about the Future Bushwick Inlet Park, unfortunately it does not mention that the park will be larger than the lot currently under development (Phase I &II) between N. 9 & N 10th St.  It does include  a new projected date for completion : Phase I( Soccer Fields) Winter 2010 and Phase II (Building & Shoreline) – Winter 2011.  I am in an optimistic mood, so here’s hoping this sign and upturned earth mean progress and we won’t see a new projected completion date next summer.

Thanks to everyone who turned out for Where’s My Park Day?!? yesterday.  We worked with the Open Space Committee of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG), GWAPP,  Barge Park Pals, The Friends of Transmitter Park, and Park Moms to let the City know that they can’t leave their promises to us unfulfilled, as the realities of the rezoning come to fruition and new towers arrive, bringing new neighbors,  but our new parks are still missing.

The ghostly parkless children arrived first, chanting about the missing Bushwick Inlet Park as the crowd gathered.   Traffic slowed to see what was happening and passerby joined the crowd.  We got moving as The Rude Mechanical Orchestra took the lead and the a chant of “Where’s My Park” echoed down Franklin Street toward Greenpoint Avenue.  We stopped at the next missing park- WNYC Transmitter Park before moving on to the missing park at 65 Commercial Street and ending at Newton Barge Park where we learned about its missing expansion.

The public attention drawn by our efforts got the City’s attention.  As a result the City has made several new commitments intended to speed up the promise of waterfront access as a result of the 2005 rezoning.  More details can be found on NAG’s blog.

photo credit:Rachelle Rae House

Where’s My Park Day?!?

May 16th: Where’s My Park?!? Day

Two Events:

Where’s My Park?!? Bike Tour
Sat, May 16, 9:30 am – 12:00pm

We will meet at the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge @ 9:30am.  (Near S. 5th Pl). Please RSVP to wheresmyparkride@gmail.com.

We will be visiting parks in Williamsburg and Greenpoint to learn more about some of the existing parks and find out what is happening with many of the waterfront parks that were promised to the community when the neighborhood was rezoned in 2005. Stops will include Cooper Park, McCarren Park, Greenpoint Nature Walk, undeveloped park sites near Barge Park, and the future Bushwick Inlet Park, amongst others.

This ride will be at a family pace, 10 miles/hr, with frequent stops.

Volunteers to marshall are needed, if you would like to volunteer please let us know when you RSVP.

Remember the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg Rezoning? In it, we were told that in exchange for enormous buildings along the water front we would receive a number of parks and open spaces to relax in, to get up by the water, to play soccer, to do whatever we please!

Where’s My Park?!?
Saturday, May 16 12:30 &2:00pm (see below)

Not one park has been completed, not one has been opened.

So while the rest of New York City is celebrating “It’s My Park Day!” on May 16th, NAG and GWAPP will be instead asking, “Where’s My Park?!?” in an act of community awareness and civic action.

Bring your kids and your grandmas to the NAG Office (N 8th and Kent) at 12:30 to make some pro-park crafts and picket signs, and then join us at 2:00 at Bushwick Inlet (N. 14th and Kent Ave) as we march down past several of the promised parks’ locked gates. The day will end with a block party full of music, games, refreshments, and community… in a parking lot.

Come help us make a scene! It’s the only way we’ll unplug the City’s deaf ears across the river.

Come learn about how to take our future 28 acre waterfront park from a fantasy to a reality.
-Learn more about Where’s My Park Day on May 16th
-Plan garbage clean ups and other community outreach activities along the future Bushwick Inlet Park
-Letter writing and other ideas for advocacy
-Volunteers needed to help with the website & other activities

Invite your Friends, Invite your neighbors!

We need you to Love Your Future Park (or there won’t be one!)

-The Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park