Con Ed’s River Street site, partially demolished
Photo: Sharese Ann Frederick on flickr
I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but Con Ed is doing some serious demolition at its River Street facilities. The two-block site used to house a series of storage tanks, but over the past few months, the tanks have been slowly coming down. (The speed of the demo is probably due to the fact that the tanks are constructed of concrete 20″ thick; there is no evidence of any environmental remediation at the site that I can find.)
So what’s in store for this site? Could it be the site of the recently-rumored Williamsburg Whole Foods (I’m betting not)? Some other development (I’ve heard rumors that CineMagic’s Riverfront Studios is expanding somewhere “within a few blocks” of their Kent Avenue/South 9th Street studios, though I doubt this is that site)? Or is Con Ed just going to mothball it like they have their other waterfront site, the former BRT Power Plant at Division and Kent?
The options are somewhat limited by zoning, which is heavy industrial (M3-1), which limits the as-of-right options to industrial uses and certain commercial uses. (The six-block area between North 3rd and Grand Street west of Kent Avenue is actually ripe for rezoning – the industrial zoning on five of the six blocks is completely anachronistic since the residential rezoning of the Domino properties to the south in 2010.)
Or perhaps Con Ed will do something truly useful for the community and turn the site over for a waterfront park and esplanade? It would make a fantastic extension of the esplanade at 184 Kent to the north, wouldn’t it?
Photo: Heather Roslund
According to Brownstoner, the broker handling the sale of St. Vincent De Paul Church on North 6th Street has announced the sale of the property for $13.7 million. MNS, the broker, says that the mystery owner plans to convert the church.
The church owns two parcels on North 6th Street. One of those parcels (lot 30) is the rectory, a four-and-a-half story building that was constructed in 1869 (Patrick Keely, architect). The other parcel (lot 15) wraps around the rectory and consists of the church itself (also constructed in 1869 and designed by Keely), as well as the large parking lot to the west of the rectory and the 1960s (?) school on North 7th Street.
So the first question is, which properties did the church sell? The second question is, what does the new owner plan for the rest of the site? Taking at face value the claim that the church itself will be converted, there is still a huge development potential for the rest of the site (the larger site – excluding the rectory – is over 33,000 sf; that is a lot of development rights, even at the R6B zoning for the block).
UPDATE:The Real Deal posted the story last night; according to their piece, the lot is 37,500 sf (my figure was from Oasis). The article is also a bit squishier on the fate of the church (” the buyer may choose to develop within the existing structure of the building”), and it notes that the sale went into contract last Spring, and only closed this week.
NY Magazine’s annual list of reasons to love NY include two of my favorite things about Williamsburg –
Short answer – yes.
Yolane Almanzar of the fledgling New York World has a very thorough rundown of why Williamsburg and Greenpoint may never see a park at Bushwick Inlet.
The article is mostly about how grossly the city underestimated the value of the properties – by an order of magnitude, as it turns out. But the real issue is that by rushing to rezone without first acquiring (or at least negotiating prices for) the inlet properties, the city in effect raised the value of those properties to unattainable levels.
So now, more than six years after the rezoning became reality, and with thousands of new housing units already added to the area, the city has committed over $200 million to acquire part of a park, and will probably need close to that amount again to acquire the rest. (Putting aside the question of whether they can ever acquire the Monitor Museum site).
