Just south of Brooklyn Bridge Park, six cranes dot the waterfront. Just one of them is in service, bringing in around 90,000 containers per year that come to Red Hook’s port — mostly food from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Of the five other cranes at Brooklyn Marine Terminal, two sit on condemned, crumbling piers. Hurricane Sandy left another crane in ruins, and the last hasn’t worked in years.
But the area is slated to be transformed, with crucial upgrades to the port and working waterfront that would allow an expansion of consumer goods transported there, taking vehicles off the road.
Thousands of new apartments could also be built on the site — and it’s this new housing that’s become a flashpoint in the approval process to create what would be a completely new neighborhood.
Less than four months ago, the city Economic Development Corporation amassed a task force of over two dozen elected officials and other civic leaders to vote on a vision for the future of the area by March.
The EDC is adamant that it can harmoniously redevelop the industrial area with seemingly conflicting uses: newly constructed housing with industry, public waterfront access with a functional port and resiliency in a flood zone.
“It’s not the 1950s anymore,” said Andrew Kimball, EDC’s president. “We can have housing right up against modernized all-electric industrial maritime uses. You’ve got to plan it smartly, particularly as it relates to transportation and traffic.”
But one of the biggest emerging tensions is over the prospect of shrinking and repurposing some of the last remaining working waterfront — the only port serving New York City east of the Hudson River. Many observers and those on the task force remembered how other working waterfronts around the city disappeared to make room for housing.
“Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. You’re not going to pull out housing or commercial development to create industrial land,” said Cortney Koenig Worrall, president of the New York City-based Waterfront Alliance. “God forbid something horrible happened to the George Washington…. It is the worst land-based freight choke point, and the quantity of food and goods and supplies that come over the George Washington Bridge is what keeps New York functioning.”
Land Swap
Under a deal brokered last year, the Port Authority agreed to trade the Brooklyn Marine Terminal for the city’s Howland Hook Marine Terminal in Staten Island. The EDC intends to usher in a new development plan for the 122-acre Brooklyn waterfront property — which spans about a mile from Pier 7 just south of Brooklyn Bridge Park to Pier 12, home of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook — using not the city’s public review process (known as ULURP) but a state-sanctioned, streamlined project plan that bypasses local laws.
Recent presentations by EDC show the possibility of up to 9,000 new apartments, roads through the site and green space. The working waterfront acreage would be more than halved to accommodate these other uses, with the remainder retained for the port, distribution and industry.
The redeveloped Marine Terminal would become a central piece of a plan to create Blue Highways throughout the city, moving freight by barges on the water instead of by truck, reducing street congestion and slashing air pollution. Plantains, for example, could arrive by ship in Brooklyn, then get transferred to a barge and sent upriver to Hunts Point Produce Market in The Bronx — no on-road vehicles required.
Currently, the shipping center receives avocados, bananas, peppers, seafood and more from overseas. Some of those goods are distributed throughout the boroughs, but each year about 30,000 containers go to New Jersey so they can be refrigerated. Eventually, they will get trucked back into the city for consumption.
Mountainous piles of rock and sandstone sit nearby, and royal blue garbage trucks park there, too. The city located a concrete recycling plant there, while another part of the terminal hosts a beverage distributor, whose trucks with beer logos transport soft drinks and beer across the state.
Michael Stamatis, president of Red Hook Container Terminal, which operates the port under a lease agreement, calls the terminal the “utility closet” of the city. He said he welcomed the EDC’s promises of a modernized port. To his eyes, the terminal, which handles less than 2% of the Port Authority’s total container volume in the New York Harbor, has for years been punching above its weight, hamstrung by short-term leases of only five years and chronic disinvestment under the Port Authority.
“It’s not yet maximized its full potential,” Stamatis said. “Let’s just make sure we’re making this plan in a way that allows us to grow in the future.”
Research commissioned by EDC suggests a revitalized Brooklyn Marine Terminal has the potential to move 135,000 containers each year, a 50% increase from current levels. The Brooklyn port can only accommodate small ships — a factor that restricts what the port can receive but also presents an opportunity to take on a greater number of smaller vessels. The port is further limited by its lack of direct connections to rails and major highways.
The city and state committed to invest $95 million on a new electric crane, to fix the dilapidated piers and build cold storage. An additional $164 million federal grant will cover further revitalization. But EDC officials say more revenue is needed to pay for redeveloping and sustaining the site, even beyond what its operations will generate. Housing, and possibly hotels or retail, would help fill the gap.
But some members of the task force said they have not been presented with alternative funding models to consider.
“What does it take for the site to be sustainable if it was only commercial activity happening there? I haven’t seen the calculations of something like that yet,” said Tiffany-Ann Taylor, vice president for transportation at the Regional Plan Association. “We’re at such a deficit of commercial spaces throughout the city. I think it’s important for us to actually understand what it means to preserve something in that way and what the tradeoffs of that would be.”
Walter Kemmsies, managing partner of port consultancy firm The Kemmsies Group, said financial sustainability for the small port area could be possible without residential uses. (Kemmsies has consulted for EDC in the past but is not involved in the Brooklyn Marine Terminal redevelopment process.)
“It’s not the best use of this property for the Brooklyn economy,” he said. “The bottom line is you can be generating revenue and jobs with industrial real estate, and that means warehouses, distribution centers, maybe light manufacturing.”
The terminal already handles freight beyond containers, and Red Hook is a hotbed of warehouses and e-commerce facilities. The construction supplies used for building the Oculus at the World Trade Center came through the port, and it has the potential to bring in and stage materials to rebuild Brooklyn-Queens Expressway’s deteriorating triple cantilever and for new development on Governors Island.
The terminal also deals with bulkbreak, goods that don’t typically fit into containers, and heavy-duty equipment, known as project freight.
“There are hardly any facilities left in the port with the expertise to handle such breakbulk and project freight. The central location of BMT is also an advantage,” John Nardi, president of the Shipping Association of New York and New Jersey, which represents maritime companies, said in an email. “I have seen the initial plans for BMT and in my view [EDC] needs to dedicate additional land to cargo operations to meet the needs of the city.”
D&M Lumber Products, a tenant of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, has seen the effects of consolidated port and industrial space on the site, as it had to squeeze its operations onto one pier as the Port Authority condemned two other piers for safety reasons and businesses got shuffled around.
Steven Packin, president of the lumber supply company, said each ship that brings lumber to Brooklyn takes 400 tractor trailer loads off roads, bridges and tunnels. But space constraints have limited what the company can bring into the city directly by water.
“We’re diverting ships to Baltimore, Maryland, and trucking it here because we don’t have enough room,” Packin said. “Our business is growing right now, so we need more space, not less.… If we had more space, we’d bring in more ships to Brooklyn. It’s as simple as that.”
Hopes for Housing
The prospect of redeveloping the Brooklyn Marine Terminal into a partly residential neighborhood — with resplendent views of the Statue of Liberty — comes amidst a citywide push to build more housing. Mayor Eric Adams directed agencies to consider all city-controlled land for housing in a bid to develop 500,000 apartments by 2032.
Some generally pro-development politicians who want to maintain full industrial use of Brooklyn Marine Terminal for economic reasons find themselves in delicate political territory.
Take Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, for instance, who formed a “housing league” of elected officials to push a pro-development agenda and testified in support of citywide zoning changes meant to spur new development. Yet as a task force member, he wants to maintain the industrial use of the entire Marine Terminal site in alignment with his comprehensive plan for the borough.
He pointed to past waterfront redevelopment efforts over the last two decades that took historically industrial waterfront areas permanently offline.
“We should be putting a lot of political capital in being able to build all over Brooklyn where we can, and this is one of the few spaces that we have that do this type of very unique thing,” Reynoso said. “We lost Brooklyn Bridge Park. We lost all of the Williamsburg waterfront.”
City Council member Alexa Avilés (D-Brooklyn), who represents the area and serves as vice chair of the task force, is on the same page.
“This is not about housing. This is about the proper use of land,” she said. “This is a port that is currently functioning as a port, and could and should be maximized for economic reasons for the city and also for regional importance.”
Her co-vice chair, Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn), said he isn’t opposed to other uses of the space, but maritime use comes first.
“I want to see this area transformed into a 21st century port that meets the needs that the city has identified, and that is through the Blue Highway plan, and anything else that happens after that is all secondary,” he said. “We’re still halfway through the process, so there’s still a lot of ground to cover.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn), who is chairing the task force, is determined that the group move the process forward swiftly, by the March deadline EDC set.
“My concern is that ultimately we’re going to have to make some sacrifices along the way,” Goldman said. “If we don’t reach a deal, it will be one of the biggest wastes of an opportunity in the city’s history, and it will go back to a barely functioning container terminal with a ton of land that is under-utilized and provides no benefits to the community.”
