Fireworks Set Off Sparks of Anger in BPC

By Barry Owens
SEPT. 1 , 2006

On a mid-July night in Battery Park City, the architect David Rockwell threw a loft party for 400 friends in celebration of his 50th birthday. There was food put out from about 20 of the city’ top chefs (many from restaurants that Rockwell had designed). Clowns and players from Cirque du Soliel performed and circulated through the crowd. And at exactly 9:30 p.m. a spectacular fireworks show was launched into the Lower Manhattan sky in honor of the birthday boy.

The party recieved a glowing account in Business Week magazine. Local reviews were less kind. Alarmed by the sound of unannounced exploding fireworks on a Wednesday night, Battery Park City residents began firing off e-mails.

The emails were addressed to Jim Lauer, the chief inspector of the explosive’s unit for the New York City Fire Department, which handles the permits for all fireworks shows in the city. For the past year, his office has mass e-mailed Downtown residents a listing of the times and locations of the shows. The monthly list and mailing began at the urging of Community Board 1.

“This is B.S,” one e-mailer, a Gateway Plaza resident, wrote. “I am really pissed. There is NO mention of ANY fireworks event in this neighborhood in this sheet.”

Another wrote: “Sounds like Beirut. What idiots are behind these fireworks?”

Later called before CB1’s Quality of Life Committee, Lauer brought the letters with him and read them aloud.

“I don’t need this,” he said.

Anyone with enough money or political pull, he told the committee, can get a permit for a private fireworks show with little more than a day or two notice.
“These people have money to burn” Lauer told the Trib. “What am I going to do, say no?”

According to the list, there have been 18 permits approved for shows in New York Harbor so far this year, three of them launched from a barge just 1,000 off shore near Battery Park.

“Is there any way that we could get less fireworks?” asked Pat Moore, the committee’s chairwoman.
“You could move,” said Lauer.

The Hamptons or Greenwich, Conn., are out. Those affluent areas have far more personal fireworks shows than Manhattan, said Philip Butler, a producer with the Grucci Family, which creates most of the shows in New York Harbor. Butler said shows in Lower Manhattan are scaled back in size.
“We do not use the salutes, which is the boom-boom stuff that rattles your chest,” he said.

The personal shows, which Butler said make up nearly 90 percent of Grucci’s business, start at $5,000 and can go as high as $100,000. At the Ritz Carlton in Battery Park City, for example, a $40,000 package includes a night in the Presidential Suite and a personal fireworks show by Grucci. The July 19 Rockwell show, a so-called “national-class” presentation in the $10,00 range “is very rare,” Butler said. “It is almost a once in a lifetime event.”

The more frequently purchased personal fireworks show is the “city class,” of the kind that was launched the night of Aug. 27 off a barge in the harbor near Battery Park. That show was in the $5,000 range and was commissioned for a wedding reception held at Castle Clinton. The father-in-law of the bride, who lives in New Jersey and applied for the permit, is apparently a man of means, if not wide recognition.

“You wouldn’t have heard of him,” Butler said.

“Listen,” an exasperated inspector with the city’s explosives unit told the Trib late last month. “If they have the dough, they can have the show.”