Seaport Advocates Told to Turn Anger Into Persuasive Ideas

Left: Protesters at a meeting last November where the Howard Hughes Corp. unveiled its original proposal for redevelopment at the Seaport. Right: Roland Lewis, at a meeting of Save Our Seaport, called on its members to come up with alternate ideas for the development. Photos: Carl Glassman (protesters); Amanda Woods (Lewis)

For months, the grassroots group Save Our Seaport has led the charge against a 50-story residential tower proposed by developer Howard Hughes Corp. on the site of a former fish market building. They attacked the prospect of a 600-foot-high building on the waterfront as a sore thumb rising above the historic neighborhood, and a spoiler of views of the Brooklyn Bridge.

But at a meeting of the group last week, with about 30 people in attendance, speaker Roland Lewis, the president and CEO of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance and now a leading voice for the Seaport’s struggling New Amsterdam Market, urged the group to take a different, more positive approach: present concrete alternatives for the Seaport’s development—and fast.

“They’re moving forward with the Howard Hughes development,” Lewis said. “What do you really, really want? Is it a shorter building? Is it a building someplace else?”

Lewis’s urging for a counter proposal comes as Robert LaValva, founder of the New Amsterdam Market and a vocal—some say politically divisive—opponent of  the Hughes Corp.'s development plans, has at least temporarily stepped out of the limelight.

Hughes Corp. is now working on revising its plans for the Seaport’s redevelopment, including the tower, though the developer has yet to say when those plans will be announced and ready for a city-mandated approval process.  Still, Lewis said, it’s urgent for the group to say what it wants Seaport redevelopment to look like.

"It's the 11th hour," he said. "The train is leaving the station."

Madeline Rogers, a member of another Seaport advocacy group called Seaport Speaks, said she agreed. “I think it is incumbent upon us to present what Roland calls a 'counterweight' to Hughes,” she said. “Hughes is coming up with these elaborate plans and saying, look what this place can be. We need to find a way to say, here’s an alternative.”

“What we have to do now,” she added, noting that there are several Seaport groups with similar interests, “is solidify and put pressure on the city, which really holds the cards.” 

The proposed tower has become a distraction from a wider range of concerns about Hughes Corp.’s development, according to Rogers. Some contend that the developer, who is building a new mall on Pier 17, will over-commercialize the historic neighborhood.

“I think in some ways the tower has become such a focus of opposition that we’re forgetting all the other damage they can do, and will do, apart from the tower,” she said. “That’s only one piece of it.”

A New York Times op-ed article in late July, co-authored by Lewis, insisted that there are “dozens” of alternatives to Hughes Corp.’s development plans for the Seaport: turning the district into a market center, re-organizing it around a campus of public schools, or making it a port for sport and commercial fishing vessels, among others.

Lewis called on the group to present alternatives to Councilwoman Margaret Chin, the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which oversees the property, and the mayor.

His call to action comes in the wake of a lengthy series of sessions by the Seaport Working Group, a large task force of Lower Manhattan civic leaders, elected officials, business owners and Hughes Corp. representatives, who came up with a set of wide-ranging guiding “principles” for the Seaport’s future.

“Alternatives to the proposed 50-story tower should be sought and any building on the New Market site should be contextual with the buildings within the South Street Seaport Historic District,” the task force said of the tower plan.

Just what those alternatives, if any, will look like remain to be seen. And time, Lewis said, is running out.

“I think there has to be a finite set of asks that you’ve got to come to terms with real fast,” he told the group. “Otherwise, you get nothing.”