Brownfield brainstorming – City looks for more input on Public Place’s future

City officials returned to Community Board 6 this week, asking local residents and interested parties to further refine their vision for the future of a colossal but contaminated Carroll Gardens site.
The Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) again led small discussion groups, which focused their attention on the 11.5-acre site, a brownfield known as Public Place, located at the southeast corner of Smith and 5th streets.

HPD’s Gabriella Amabile said the intent of agency’s May 8 appearance was to further narrow the community’s urban design goals.

Already, Amabile declared, “there is consensus around a lot of these uses.”

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This time around, participants called for open space, better access to the canal, affordable housing, and retail uses, particularly along Smith Street. A municipal gym, light manufacturing uses and office space were other ideas.

Participants at the last interactive meeting held in April also suggested the need for new housing, retail uses, and some open space.

Height limits for new construction ranged from low rise, brick and brownstone homes, to 12-story buildings.

Red Hook developer Greg O’Connell, a community board member, suggested that the site was a good opportunity to build “lower profile” housing, as taller buildings are already rumored elsewhere along the canal.

O’Connell suggested planners “work backwards,” determining how much access to the canal and public space be developed first, before a discussion on housing and retail is broached.

“You want people from all parts of Carroll Gardens to have access to the waterfront,” O’Connell said.

It was suggested that higher buildings be constructed along Smith, with lower-rise properties on the 5th Street side.

Marlene Donnelly, a member of the group Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus Gowanus, attended the meeting, but said she would probably not come to the next one.

“The noise became so loud that no one could speak. To make yourself heard in any group you had to raise your voice. The tone of the meeting was very bad,” she said.

[In a rather chaotic discussion group observed by this paper, it seemed that all participants were determined to talk over one another.]

She said there was no real intention to “listen to any ideas—other than bringing housing to the site.”

“There was no community exchange of ideas,” she added.

Donnelly, a Gowanus resident, said the city-owned property should be used for parkland.

“To me, Public Place needs to be turned over to the service of nature and our biosphere, dealing more with the effects of global warming,” she said.

“This is a site that is publicly held—and they want to give it to developers,” she said.

“I left the meeting feeling like, ‘Why should I ever go to one of these again?”

Planning the future of Public Place is proceeding simultaneously as a clean-up of the property moves ahead.

From 1860 to the 1960s manufactured gas plants operated on the site, leaving contaminants deep in the ground, and leaching into the canal.

The design of the clean-up plan, overseen by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, will take about a year to be completed.

“To get this to happen within a future most of us will see, we have to take these parallel tracks,” said Jerry Armer, the chair of the Board’s Land Use Committee.

In February, HPD introduced one possible plan for the site, which included the construction of up to 600 new units of housing, in the form of three-story townhouses and a 12-story building.

But HPD officials insist that development at Public Place is not predetermined.

“The site is large enough to accommodate many goals,” Amabile noted.

In the second quarter of 2007, the city will issue a Request for Proposals, an attempt to find developers interested in the site.

Amabile said she planned to synthesize the data gathered at the meetings into the RFP.

Throughout, she said, the plan can be tweaked. “It is not a static plan,” she said. By Gary Buiso

©Courier-Life Publications 2007