BY ALBERT AMATEAU | The City Club of New York went to court last week to sink Pier55, the $130 million project funded by Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg and approved earlier this year by the Hudson River Park Trust, the city/state authority that controls the 4.5-mile-long riverfront park.
Filed June 11, the suit by the venerable civic group asks Manhattan State Supreme Court to stop the Trust from proceeding with the project until the authority conducts a new and complete environmental review. The suit charges that the mostly privately funded project — the city is also chipping in $17 million to help build the new pier’s infrastructure — “alienates” public parkland and therefore must receive approval from the state Legislature.
The lawsuit contends that the landscaped, square-shaped Pier55 — more an island than a pier — proposed for the Hudson just north of W. 13th St. was “the result of a secretive process designed to reach a predetermined outcome that lacked the transparency required by law and was not designed to solicit meaningful public scrutiny.”
An individual plaintiff on the lawsuit is Tom Fox, a club member and Hudson River Park activist who 30 years ago was president of the Trust’s predecessor organization, the Hudson River Park Conservancy.
“We want to stop the project right now,” Fox told The Villager. “The public is being hoodwinked. It’s part of the privatization of the waterfront.”
Fox said that the $113 million pledged for Pier55 by the Diller – von Furstenberg Family Foundation, “was not a donation, it was an investment.” The project, Fox added, needs a full environmental-impact study — including, he stressed, an analysis at the project’s traffic impact.
Last year, the Trust filed an environmental assessment form, or E.A.F., for the “Replacement for Pier 54,” the official designation of the Pier55 project. Major projects require an E.A.F. to determine if there is a “significant environmental impact.” If a significant impact is indicated, a full-scale environmental impact statement, or E.I.S., which could take a year, would follow. But the Trust’s E.A.F. said the project would have “no significant impact,” so no further study was required.
However, the lawsuit questions that finding: “HRPT reached the incredible conclusion that erecting a 2.4-acre island in the Hudson River — and driving 547 concrete pilings deep into the sediment-covered bedrock of an estuarine sanctuary protected for habitat, water access…and home to threatened and endangered species and their critical habitat — was free of potential environmental impacts,” the court filing says.
The suit charges that the assessment relied on an environmental review conducted 17 years ago and was not about Pier 55 at all but focused on the historic Pier 54, owned by the White Star Line, where the Carpathian landed with the survivors of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.
The Pier55 project began in 2013 with private meetings between the Trust and Diller focused on options to replace the deteriorated Pier 54, the suit says. The Trust and Diller came up with a new plan for an unconventional pier adjacent to Pier 54 that became Pier55.
Also in 2013, the Trust sponsored successful state legislation to allow the replacement to be built wider than the existing Pier 54. That same bill also allowed the park to sell its unused development rights. Assemblymember Deborah Glick, who is not a party to the City Club action, said last week that at the time she voted in favor of the legislation, the Trust had made no mention of the Diller plan. She said legislators were told the change to Pier 54 would be minimal. But after she discovered the deception, Glick said she called on the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Environmental Conservation — each of which must still review the project — not to approve Pier55.
She added that the project should have a full environmental impact study.
“There are significant visual issues and traffic impacts with the neighboring Pier 57 redevelopment and the new Whitney Museum,” Glick said. “The project could set dangerous precedents.”
In reply to the City Club suit, the Trust last week issued a statement.
“We are confident we have followed the law, including conducting an environmental review in accordance with state law, and going beyond what was required by inviting public comment on that review,” the Trust said.
Community Board 2 heard the Pier55 proposal at two meetings, and the Hudson River Park Advisory Council, which includes representatives from the community and local politicians, also received a presentation. The environmental assessment is available on the Trust Web site. The Trust insists that the assessment considered the new Pier55 location and did not rely on old information.
The project’s supporters remain steadfast despite the City Club challenge.
Margaret Newman, executive director of the Municipal Art Society, affirmed that the society stands behind Pier55.
“M.A.S. was proud to testify in support of Pier55 during its extensive public hearing and environmental review process this winter and we remain strong supporters of the project,” Newman said in a statement. “From Brooklyn Bridge Park to the High Line, public/private partnerships have been an indispensable tool for transforming New York’s untapped public spaces.
“The fact is that Pier 54 is crumbling and neither the city nor the state has the resources or the will to safely repair it,” Newman said. “To oppose this project is to favor inertia over action, caution tape over ribbon cuttings. Pier55 was conceived with the spirit of cooperation and it deserves the same treatment, even from its detractors.”
While Newman and others argue that private money is essential for parks nowadays, Fox disputed the Trust’s claim that the riverfront park is required by law to be self-supporting.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said last week. He cited the 1998 Hudson River Park Act, which empowers the Trust to design, develop, operate and maintain the park. The legislation says that, to the extent feasible, the park’s operation and maintenance should be paid by revenues generated within the park, and that those revenues be used only for park purposes.
“The language was included to ensure that park revenues be dedicated to the park and not to the city or state’s general fund — not to require that the park be self-sufficient,” Fox explained.
Fox said Pier55 would “alienate” park property because 49 percent of the events on the pier would be ticketed.
“They can charge up to $1,000 for these events,” he said. “To our mind, it’s taking away what was public.”
The Trust and Diller’s Pier55 Inc. group, which would run the pier’s entertainment, assure many of the tickets would be affordable.
Again, in environmental terms, Fox said the project’s environmental review was hasty and simply incomplete.
“This is not a rebuild or a reconstruction — it’s a new pier,” he stressed.
Another individual plaintiff in the action is Tom Buchanan, a club member who teaches journalism and environmental studies at The New School and is active in the human-powered boating community.
The suit also complains that Pier55’s new location is an area where kayakers practice their skills and that the project would thus violate the park’s mandate to encourage boating in the river.
Michael Gruen, president of the City Club, said the good-government group, founded in 1892, was revived in 2013 after being dormant for a few years.
“The lawsuit fits in with the ‘City for Sale’ problem that we have been addressing,” he said. “We took on the Midtown East zoning issue — essentially opposing the sale of zoning rights — and were able to make some changes. We also opposed a proposed shopping mall in Flushing Meadows Park.”
Marcy Benstock, executive director of the New York Clean Air Campaign, told The Villager that she thought the project, which she dubbed “Dillerville,” was a disaster.
“Federal law says you can’t build on the water when you have a viable alternative on land,” she said.
“Think of the project with three locations [the pier would have three distinct performance venues] that could attract a total of 5,000 people, and imagine a hurricane like the one we had three years ago, coming again out of nowhere and putting those 5,000 people at risk — and putting at risk the firemen and other emergency workers sent to rescue those people,” she warned.
Benstock was instrumental in the 1980s in the successful fight against the Westway landfill project along the Hudson.
