Bedford + Bowery
October 20, 2015
Halloween came early for a developer seeking to take over a controversial plot on the Williamsburg waterfront; this afternoon activists hauling coffins and headstones tried to spook Midtown Equities out of building on land once destined to become a park.
Led by the open space advocacy Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, about ten people dressed in black gathered on the corner of East 17th Street and Fifth Avenue and marched four blocks up to the offices of Midtown Equities, which is reportedly in negotiations to take over the eight-acre site where the former CitiStorage warehouse burned down earlier this year.
They brought with them a cardboard coffin reading, “Midtown Equities Tower Deal DOA RIP.” Another piece of cardboard, shaped as a tombstone, read “CitiStorage Rezoning RIP”; another, shaped as a small coffin, folded open to reveal a printout of a resolution from Community Board 1 opposing any rezoning that would open the way for developers to build on the waterfront land between North 10th and 11th Streets….
Ken Fisher, a spokesperson for Midtown Equities, said he wasn’t ready to share the company’s “vision for the site,” but told Beford + Bowery, “We respect the community’s concerns about the future development of the site, which the owner put on the market after waiting a decade for the city to decide how to proceed. And we hope to fashion a plan that can at least in part include significant public park as well as provide other important benefits as the property will not continue to lay fallow indefinitely.” …
[Brodsky] …“As a business guy I just don’t see how they’re going to get the whole park. As long as the majority part of [my] property becomes a park. That’s up to the community, not me. If a 28-acre park were realistic I’d be on their side, but it’s not realistic.”…
(photo credit: Joshua Alvarez)
