City approves luxury public housing development on Gowanus Canal while it's still being dredged of toxicities

 

THE CITY 

 With nearly unanimous approval Wednesday from the City Planning Commission, the long-in-the-making rezoning of Gowanus heads to crucial negotiations between key City Council members and Mayor Bill de Blasio over the Brooklyn neighborhood’s future.

The final result will be key to the de Blasio legacy: It’s the administration’s first effort to use rezoning to spur racial and economic diversification of one of the city’s whitest and increasingly wealthy neighborhoods.

The proposal is also the linchpin of efforts to clear up the polluted area, home to the infamous Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site. And the rezoning bid comes as a similar de Blasio-sponsored effort in SoHo and NoHo in Manhattan appears bogged down by intense opposition.

“The status quo is not one that tends toward inclusion or remediation and open space,” said Michelle de la Uz, head of the nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee, which will build 950 units of affordable housing under the Gowanus plan. “People have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that more development can improve the neighborhood.”

Opponents, though, are pressing environmental concerns, from toxicity to the flooding brought by climate change.

“New York City may want to push this through as quickly as possible,” said Linda LaViolette, co-chair of the outreach committee of the opposition group Voice of Gowanus. “However, City Planning has yet to answer many important questions regarding the environmental impact statement.”

The plan to both rezone the area and clean up the pollution from decades of industrial activity has been in the works for years. The current proposal targets an 82-block area, from Atlantic Avenue to 15th Street, bounded by Fourth Avenue on the east and stretching west variously to Bond and Smith streets.

 he rezoning would allow the construction of more than 8,000 new apartments, open space and public amenities like schools. About 3,000 of the apartments would be deemed “affordable,” with many set aside for low-income New Yorkers.

Judge approves luxury public housing over-development around toxic Gowanus Canal

 

 NY Post

A Brooklyn Supreme Court judge allowed City Hall to move ahead Monday with controversial plans to build thousands of apartments near the Gowanus Canal, the site of one of the biggest pollution cleanups in the country.

Judge Katherine Levine made the ruling after the Department of City Planning offered to hold hearings for the proposal outside and virtually — instead of entirely by video conference, as officials had previously sought.

City planners have been pushing to rezone Gowanus since the Bloomberg administration — arguing the area would be far better served by building housing amid the city’s pressing shortage than by hanging onto warehouses, which have had little use since heavy industry moved out of the Big Apple.

Under the current proposal, developers would be allowed to build more than 8,500 apartments in the neighborhood — 3,000 of which would be rent-stabilized and set aside for low-income, working-class and middle-class families.

The exact income levels have not yet been determined. Officials estimate it could take until 2035 for all of the newly allowed buildings to be finished.

Superfund Saturday Night Fever

    

AMNY 

Potential exposure to COVID-19 apparently wasn’t risky enough for this illegal Queens party.

The NYC Sheriff’s office was at it again early Saturday morning, breaking up an illegal rave during the pandemic at a warehouse on the Brooklyn/Queens border — located within a radioactive Superfund site.

The operation took place at about 1:40 a.m. on March 6 at 1133 Irving Ave. in Ridgewood, which is part of the 3/4-acre EPA-designated Wolff-Alport Superfund zone. Cleanup efforts have been ongoing at the location to clean up decades-old radioactive contamination from within the property.

According to the Sheriff’s office, deputies staked out the location after receiving information about a potential rave there. They spotted a large number of patrons entering the warehouse, which had its security gate halfway rolled down. 

Loud music was also clearly audible to the deputies, who then moved in and broke up the party, law enforcement sources said.

Upon entering the warehouse, the Sheriff’s office reported, the deputies spotted at least 142 people dancing and drinking alcohol without wearing face masks. Authorities said the location did not have a valid liquor license to serve alcohol, nor did it have a valid certificate of occupancy.

The Sheriff’s office cleared all patrons without incident.

Two security guards — Bakari Brathwaite, 34, of Brooklyn and Walter Louis Jr., 34, of Kingston, New York — and a DJ, Jonathan Alvarez-Conde, 38, of South Ozone Park, received desk appearance tickets for charges including violating the health code and the mayor’s and governor’s executive orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Irving Avenue site used to house the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, which operated between 1920 and 1954. During World War II and in the years that followed, it extracted rare earth elements in such a way that it produced a byproduct sludge that contained thorium, a radioactive element.

Before the ill effects of radioactivity were realized, the workers at the company were said to have dumped the sludge into the nearby sewers — causing the radioactive element to spread throughout the immediate area of the site. This practice was ordered stopped by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947.

Glendale residents raise concerns of soil contamination from Superfund site.

 

QNS


State agencies briefed the public on Monday about a Glendale superfund site that will have another round of remediations in the near future after the toxic PCE has been determined to be no detriment to public health.

The Department of Environmental Conservation and the Department of Health held a meeting on March 11 in a small room of the North Forest Park library where residents complained that they were not properly notified of the contaminants beneath the soil in their community.

But DEC claimed there was little chance the public could be breathing the chemical since it is deep underground and a study of 10 homes in 2006 showed no sign of PCE in the air – an admittedly small size – but that 30 year project would flush the soil of the contaminant.

“We should have had flyers coming to our house, we should have been informed by you people,” one attendee said. “Nothing.”

This is why there’s nobody here tonight, nobody knows,” another person said, with many attributing QNS for learning about the meeting.

With most of the contamination up to 100 feet below the surface at the deepest parts, DOH does not consider soil vapor intrusion to be an issue for a few reasons: because although the PCE is concentrated in the ground water, there is a layer of clean water between the chemical and the surface; homes are not at risk because the foundations, unless there are crack in the pavement, will seal out the vapors; and there is no risk of people ingesting PCE because the surrounding communities are on the municipal system which is supplied from upstate.

But Robert Nardella, 78, however, maintained concern about his home after the presentation because of the claim by DEC that the underground plume had migrated west at a shallower level and pointed out that some residents may have dug wells on their property over the years as a means to water their lawn or fill above-ground pools to get around water restrictions.

“Why is it being addressed again?” Nardella told QNS. “I was confused as to why this is coming up again when they did everything to minimize our concerns, you know, saying there was no more vapor and that it’s going deeper and deeper into the ground.”


Nardella was also concerned about his home, which was built in the early 1930s which just have wood floors over dirt in the basement, offering no protection from possible soil vapor intrusion.
“There are still many homes next to that site that have dirt over a wood floor, mine included,” Nardella added. “If there are any vapors coming up, I don’t have any protection.”

Businesses evicted from Superfund site

From DNA Info:

The auto parts company that Albert Rodriguez built up over the last 20 years on Irving Avenue will soon be gone — for his own good, according to federal regulators.

His garage, Primo Auto Parts and Services, and six other businesses sit on the radioactive remains of the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, a property stewed in carcinogenic toxins.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that all the tenants in this industrial corner of Queens must leave to allow the agency to remediate the site.

Business owners were caught by surprise by the announcement and left wondering what they're going to do next.

The agency has budgeted $1,112,500 to help move the tenants, according to the EPA's report on the remediation released Tuesday, but it has not given specifics on how the money will be spent or when the businesses will be evicted.

The business owners first got wind that they might have to move off the site permanently at a public meeting in August where the EPA presented four different plans, including one that would let them stay on site and another that would allow them to leave temporarily and return after remediation.

"I thought there was some chance we could stay," Rodriguez said in Spanish. He had left the meeting hopeful that he'd still be able to save his businesses.

The .75-acre site operated as a chemical company from the 1920s until 1954, according to the EPA. Wolff-Alport imported radioactive monazite sand from the Belgian Congo and used the factory to extract rare earth metals like uranium and thorium.

The EPA believes the toxins were dumped in the sewers and buried there.

LIC hipsters just want to be assholes

Dear Crappy,

Today I decided to savor some sunshine and take a walk. I felt enjoying my community's "public"/"park" spaces was in order, so I headed over to the Manhattan Avenue Kayak Launch. The attached photos, which I knew you would find interesting given recent events, were taken at 1:17 pm. Although they pretty much speak for themselves, I will elaborate a bit. The bearded fellow (to the right) was engaged in a conversation with the fellow in the orange shirt (to the left). About what is anyone's idea. At one point there was a fellow to the left of the orange shirted fellow. He appeared to be taking photos of the bearded guy and the orange shirted guy talking. He could have been taking photos of the bulkhead (Queens side, obviously) of the former bridge which once spanned from Manhattan Avenue to Long Island City. Or both. Too difficult to tell.

Cheers!

Your comrade on other side of the creek,

NYS

Parking one's boat on a Superfund site as well as on top of a gas line - not too bright.

Realtor pushing for hotel by Newtown Creek

From the Queens Courier:

Today Newtown Creek stands as one of the “nation’s most polluted waterways,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as a result of industrial contamination from nearby factories and raw sewage dumping that dates back to the 1800s.

But listed as a Superfund site since 2010 and with an ongoing remedial process, brokers at Greiner-Maltz Investment Properties are marketing a site across from a section of the infamously contaminated body of water that could be in high demand after the grimy, toxic 3.8 mile creek is cleaned up.

The site sits at the edge of Ridgewood near the border of East Williamsburg and Maspeth to the north. It begins where Metropolitan and Onderdonk avenues intersect, and is surrounded by various factories in the neighborhood.

An existing 4,225-square-foot building with the address 46-00 Metropolitan Ave. is on the site, which is being used as an auto junk yard. The property has up to 40,720 square feet of buildable space zoned for manufacturing, but an investor could redevelop it into a hotel with — views of the now-mucky creek — brokers said.

See that off-color section of water? That's poop, folks.

What to do with abandoned gas plant site?

From the Forum:

Assemblyman Phil Goldfeder (D-Rockaway Beach) this week presented recently appointed National Grid President and Executive Director Dan Seavers with a community-drafted proposal for repurposing a manufactured gas plant (MGP) in Rockaway Park.

Prior to its descent as a derelict area in the community landscape, the Rockaway Park MGP, in operation from the 1880s to the mid-1950s, served as a successful gas production site and storage facility governed by the Long Island Lighting Company. The site subsequently went through a series of changes in ownership and in 1998 was transferred to KeySpan, a New York City-based natural gas distributor. Shortly after the site’s acquisition, it was named a DEC State Superfund Site and was added to the State’s Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites, designated as class 2 , meaning that it is considered a substantial threat to public health and/or the environment and requires remedial action to dispose of toxic waste and polluted substrate.

In 2008, National Grid assumed cleanup efforts when it purchased KeySpan, and has been working to restore the integrity of the plant site since. However, due to deteriorating bulkheads at Beach 108th Street, these efforts were suspended indefinitely. Now, with the repairs on the Jamaica Bay bulkheads nearly finished, the last phase of cleanup up at the MGP site is set to begin.

In anticipation of the site’s decontamination, Assemblyman Goldfeder conducted an online community survey last year inquiring from residents what they thought the fate of the MGP should be. Survey participants were eager to share opinions and sent in hundreds of ideas ranging from commercial development to cultural centers, which Goldfeder presented to National Grid.

Radioactive Ridgewood!

From WPIX:

A block in Queens has earned the title of the most radioactive area of New York City and it has many residents worried.

The property on Irving Avenue in Ridgewood once belonged to a chemical company until the late 1950s.

Now there’s an auto body shop, an ice making facility, a construction company, and a deli.

The EPA has put out a warning for the body shop workers and residents who use the sidewalks saying they have a higher risk of cancer.

The feds have laid a new concrete floor in the auto shop.

Last fall, the EPA proposed adding that neighborhood to the list of federal Superfund sites.

The agency is trying to decide what to do about the area.

Yesterday, they decided in favor of Superfund designation.

Ridgewood site to be added to Superfund list

From the Daily News:

A Ridgewood building in which chemists once developed materials for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project is on tap to become the third Superfund site in New York City.

Radioactive contamination still lingers around the former Wolff-Alport Chemical Co. on Irving Ave., which shuttered in the early 1950s. The property now houses several businesses including a deli and auto body shop.

To reduce exposure, the Environmental Protection Agency has conducted regular testing and installed shielding material under the floors and the sidewalk, said Judith Enck, a regional administrator for the agency.

Ridgewood site may be Superfund eligible

From the NY Times:

City, state and federal agencies have long known that an industrial site in Ridgewood, Queens, contained radioactive material. The location, currently home to an auto repair shop, a construction firm, a warehouse and a deli, was once used by the Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, which sold thorium to the federal government for research on atomic bombs.

Until recently, officials considered the contamination level low enough not to be of concern. But over time, regulations changed, and inspectors began making repeat visits to the site, conducting surveys of radiation levels. The latest comprehensive federal study, released in February 2012, found levels significant enough to conclude that “workers at the auto body shop and pedestrians who frequently use the sidewalks at this location may have an elevated risk of cancer.”

With that, the site will soon be considered for Superfund status, the Environmental Protection Agency said.

The Wolff-Alport Chemical Company was, for three decades, a supplier of rare earth metals, the agency said in its report. The company dumped thorium and some uranium into the sewer system as waste byproducts until 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission, the successor of the Manhattan Project, began buying thorium for research, according to government documents.

Stephen I. Schwartz, editor of the The Nonproliferation Review, a journal on nuclear weapons, said the Manhattan Project and ensuing research left contamination sites around the country, but most fall under the Department of Energy’s purview and have been addressed. A sprawling site in Hanford, Wash., is still under remediation.

In Queens, the owners of the auto repair shop and the construction firm said no mention of the possible radioactive contamination was made when they began renting their spaces. The auto repair shop moved in 14 years ago; the construction firm moved in six years ago.

The nondescript building sits along the border with Bushwick, Brooklyn, near Long Island Rail Road tracks. Residential homes line nearby streets, and a day care center and a public school sit two blocks away. An agency representative said these locations did not show high levels of radiation.

Will the real Bill DeBlasio please stand up?

From The Daily Beast:

In 2004 de Blasio was a paid adviser to John Edwards’s presidential campaign. And in this year’s mayoral race, his rhetoric about “a tale of two cities”—a line he has used to critique growing income inequality—has echoed Edwards’s rhetoric from 2004 about the “two Americas.” Yet while serving on the City Council, he frequently found himself on the wrong side of progressives in his district (admittedly not hard in ultraliberal Park Slope) and was sometimes blasted for favoring developers and real-estate interests over community concerns about congestion and quality of life.

For example, he sided with a developer in opposing the designation of the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site—even as nearby residents said that the city was ill equipped to carry out the cleanup on its own. He pushed to allow luxury housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park. And he was one of the primary backers of the controversial redevelopment of Atlantic Yards into a basketball arena for the Brooklyn Nets—a nearly decade-long fight that pitted local residents against powerful real-estate interests.

De Blasio’s most important maneuver has been to capitalize on liberal frustration with Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“He said that it was necessary to stop the tide of gentrification, but everyone knows this was the most gentrifying thing to ever happen to Brooklyn,” says Lucy Koteen, a local political activist who backs current City Comptroller John Liu. “He is not wrong about the ‘tale of two cities.’ But look at his record. Did he help level the playing field, or is he on the side of developers who have gotten rich displacing people?”

From the NY Post:

The City Planning Commission rep appointed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — a critic of big developers — voted with the administration 93 percent of the time, records show.

One of those votes was to approve Extell’s West Side tower that includes a “poor door” separating subsidized tenants from those paying market rents.

A de Blasio spokesman said the rep actually fought “the poor door,” but Extell found a way around her objection.

De Blasio’s rep has voted in favor of 554 out of 595 projects since 2010.

Capital New York has a good wrap-up of his development stances in the past.

Brooklynites have brains

From NY1:

Decades of pollution left the Gowanus Canal toxic. The federal government designated it a superfund cleanup site.

Developer Lightstone Group believes its planned 700 unit residential buildings are environmentally friendly, and that some of the associated construction will actually help clean the water.

More than a dozen residents, though gathered on the bridge over the canal Thursday expressing their concern to mayoral candidate William Thompson.

"We're very concerned about what we see as a very wrongheaded, ill-conceived design," said Warren Cohen of Save Gowanus.

Many are worried the development will make flooding in their neighborhood worse during storms.

"It's safe for them," Cohen said. "They stay dry. We get wet, and unfortunately, we get wet with toxic water."

Yet when development happened on brownfields in LIC, and along Flushing and Newtown Creeks, no one said a thing.

Wake the hell up, Queens.

Boat race a pro-development stunt

From DNA Info:

Critics are calling a boat race on the Gowanus Canal this weekend an "irresponsible" stunt designed to advance a pro-development agenda.

They point to the fact that the Lightstone Group, a developer that wants to build a 700-unit housing project on the polluted canal's banks, is a sponsor of the race.

"Lightstone is trying to send the message out that it's safe to be in the canal and it's not as bad as everyone says, but I think most likely it's worse than everyone says," said Carl Teitelbaum, a member of Save Gowanus, which advocates for "responsible development" on the canal.

He noted that recent heavy rains have churned up putrid scents from the canal. "The idea of putting people in there, of putting kids in there — it's completely crazy," Teitelbaum said.

Close to 30 teams have signed up to brave the canal's toxin-laden waters — which are a SuperFund site — during a regatta this Saturday. The field of competitors includes a Canadian team, a paddle boarder and City Councilman Brad Lander.

Standard Motor Building is toxic

From the Queens Gazette:

State environmental officials have classified land beneath, and west of, the former Standard Motor Products building on Northern Boulevard in Long Island City a Hazardous Waste Site.

The state has added the site as a Class 2 Inactive Hazardous Waste Site as part of its list of Superfund sites, meaning the level of toxicity at the location “represents a significant threat to public safety or the environment”, officials at the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said.

DEC officials said the agency will oversee a three-month project to decontaminate an open area located at the west side of the building at 37-18 Northern Blvd., adjacent to the Sunnyside Rail Yards in Long Island City.

According to DEC officials, Standard Motor Products is responsible for the cleanup that will cost the firm $416,000 in construction fees with an annual cost of $289,000 for five years.

The six-story building, owned by Acumen Capital Partners, is currently occupied by a number of commercial interests, including several production companies that utilize newly created soundstages. In addition, the owners several years ago leased the rooftop of the building to Brooklyn Grange – a commercial urban farm that grows a variety of produce and farm fresh products.

Live next to Lavendar Lake!

From the NY Post:

They’ve gotten the green light — so long as developers of housing along the toxic Gowanus can keep out the bright-green canal water.

The City Planning Commission today OK’d the controversial plan to build 700 rental apartments along the shores of the highly polluted Brooklyn waterway after the developer agreed to a redesign protecting residents from flooding that might be brought on by a future Hurricane Sandy.

The Manhattan-based Lightstone Group is set to break ground later this year on the project along the shores of Bond, Carroll and Second streets after satisfying new floodplains for the next century set up by feds.

Lightstone is pulling the housing back another 17 feet so that 66 ¹/₂ feet will separate the canal from the closest planned building.

Lobby areas would be raised more than two feet so they’re 10.6 feet above the floodplains. Heating, air conditioning and power systems would be moved out of the basements of each building and relocated to upper-floors.

Lightstone’s project would include 560 market-rate and 140 affordable rental units. The firm insists that the decade-long Superfund cleanup won’t affect construction.

But Councilman Brad Lander, who represents the area, said he “still believe[s] it’s a mistake to move forward with” such a densely populated project near the canal.

Ya think?

Contaminated Whitestone soil came from Brooklyn

From the Times Ledger:

Months after a state agency fined two companies working on a brownfield site in Whitestone for importing unauthorized soil onto the property where a high-end residential development is planned, TimesLedger Newspapers has learned that some of the soil in question came from a former Superfund site.

The property in question is called Waterpointe, a proposed development of expensive homes near the corner of 6th Road and 151st Place.

...well before Edgestone acquired the property, additional soil was dumped on top of the DEC-approved material under Barone and EBI’s watch. This eventually led the agency to fine the two companies a total of $150,000, half of which will be nixed if the problems are corrected, and prompted a cleanup of the unauthorized material. Some of that material included soil from a former electroplating facility in Brooklyn, Gordon said Tuesday night.

Documents obtained from the DEC via a Freedom of Information Law request showed that the soil she was referring to came from 154 N. 7th St. in Brooklyn.

That is the same address where in 1997 a company called All Plating Corp. was abandoned and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency later cleaned up leaking hazardous materials under its Superfund program, according to the EPA. A Superfund site is a hazardous waste site that poses harm to surrounding communities and is cleaned up under the EPA.

In two instances, Barone told TimesLedger Newspapers that the fine from DEC and subsequent required cleanup were due to a paperwork error. In essence, Barone Management and EBI did not do enough testing on the material it brought in to satisfy DEC requirements, he said.

A new environmental company overseeing the site estimated that removing the unauthorized material would take between weeks and months and would cost at least about $500,000.

Sounds just a little insane

From DNA Info:

Brooklyn concrete magnate John Quadrozzi wants to take toxic sludge dredged from the Gowanus Canal Superfund site, ship it by barge to Red Hook and dump it into the Gowanus Bay to expand a shipping terminal he owns.

The proposal, discussed at a Brooklyn Community Board 6 committee meeting Monday night, would allow Quadrozzi's Gowanus Bay Terminal on Columbia Street to accommodate larger ocean-going ships by extending the terminal into deeper waters.

The plan would also create more land above water, adding to the property that Quadrozzi rents to industrial businesses.

Many questions — from who would pay for which parts of the project, to what exactly will be dredged from the canal, to where the sludge will be shipped, how it will be treated, and whether Quadrozzi can even legally expand his terminal — have not been addressed.

Cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, [Quadrozzi's spokesperson] said, would involve dredging only the lowest-level contaminants, which would then be mixed with a "concrete-like…stabilizing material" that could safely be deposited in open water as landfill.

Bloomberg doesn't see flooded Gowanus as a problem

From The Politicker:

With Hurricane Sandy hitting New York, flooding has already occurred along the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal. Though the worst floods are expected to occur this evening when high tide combines with the strongest part of the storm surge, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his deputies don’t expect the toxic waters to do serious damage. Politicker asked the mayor whether he expected heavy flooding on the Gowanus tonight and what environmental or health risks the waters might pose for residents at his press conference at the Office of Emergency Management in Downtown Brooklyn early this evening.

“Tomorrow morning, it will be all over,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “It will be all over late tonight. Actually, the Gowanus Canal flooding should be going down in a couple hours.”

Mayor Bloomberg also invited Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway to weigh in on the situation with the canal. Mr. Holloway said he didn’t think the waters would put people in danger and he’s confident the city can clean up and flooding along the waterway, which is one of the most polluted in the country.

State encourages kayaking and fishing in Newtown Creek

From The Brooklyn Paper:

Boating on Newtown Creek is safe, but be careful around the seafood and don’t take a dip, a new state study concluded.

Kayaking in the putrid Greenpoint waterway is not dangerous as long as paddlers avoid drinking or touching the water and do not schedule boat outings after big rainstorms, when raw sewage floods the creek, according to state health and environmental officials analyzed water and sediment samples along the 3.8-mile waterway.

“Because people do not usually submerge their heads in the water during these activities, the presumed volume of incidental water consumption is lower than swimming, and subsequently, the risk of illness can also be assumed to be lower,” the researchers said.

Brooklynites should be wary about eating anything they catch in Newtown Creek because of high bacteria levels, said state scientists, who recommended that women under age 50 and children under age 15 refrain from consuming any fish caught in the waterway. Men over age 15 and women over age 50 should limit their intake of North Brooklyn seafood at one meal of bluefish, carp, and bass per month, and no more than six crabs per week, the study said.

Is it just me, or does this sound totally ridiculous? You may not submerge your head in the water when you kayak, but you are breathing in toxic fumes coming off the water. It's a friggin' Superfund site, for God's sake! And how can they suggest anyone "limit" the amount of Newtown Creek seafood they consume? Keeping anything caught in the Creek should be against the law, period. Prediction: Many lawsuits in about 10 years when kayakers and fishermen are suffering from cancer.