Ask Aunt Chelsea, pp. 22-23
VOLUME 5, NUMBER 08
THE WEST SIDE’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
DECEMBER 12 - 25, 2012
CB4 Favors Pier 57 Plan BY MAXINE WALLY Buoyed by holiday cheer, new blood and a single-digit agenda, spirits were high at the beginning of Wednesday, December 5’s Manhattan Community Board 4 (CB4) general meeting — but as topics became more somber, the mood shifted. The Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT) opened with a presentation on the proposed redevelopment of Pier 57, located along the West Side Highway, at 15th Street. Their plan to revamp the pier is meant to reposition it as, in the words of HRPT
Executive Vice President Noreen Doyle, “a cultural hub” offering food, film and fashion. Anchored by a multifaceted destination marketplace, the pier will feature a rooftop park, sit-down restaurants, shops and interactive services (including a cooking school and rooftop farm). The project’s signature element will insert repurposed shipping containers into the shell of the existing structure and use them as storefronts and for other
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Sandy’s Surge Not Sinking Residential Urge at Pier 40
Welcome to a Neighborhood: Hudson Yards Breaks Ground BY SCOTT STIFFLER Grandiose by nature, groundbreaking events are typified by optimistic, sometimes overconfident predictions of things to come — but at December 4’s public unveiling of the Hudson Yards development, dirt appeared to be the only thing being shoveled
(despite a multitude of sweeping pronouncements by elected officials, union representatives and developers). Hailed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as “Manhattan’s final frontier” as well as “the next major step in our city’s ongoing economic revival,” Hudson
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON Although the real estate industry doesn’t want to hear it, there’s no doubt Superstorm Sandy has irreversibly changed the way we look at building on the waterfront. And that realization certainly also applies to the idea of building housing not just on the actual shoreline but out on piers — such as the Lower West Side’s Pier 40, which stretches 800 feet into the Hudson River. Over the past year, the Hudson River Park Trust has been advocating to widen the range of possible uses allowed
Yards will create nearly 23,000 construction jobs and eventually serve as either the workplace or home to an estimated 40,000 people. Spread over 26 acres, its 13 million square feet will include over six million square feet of
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on the sprawling, 15-acre West Houston Street pier, in hopes of coming up with some viable, revenue-generating development options. Prominent among that mix of options is residential housing, which is not currently permitted under the Hudson River Park Act of 1998. Earlier this year, an independent study by consultants of a range of potential uses for Pier 40 showed that market-rate residential housing — when compared with options
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EDITORIAL, LETTERS PAGE 8
HEDDA INTO THE HOLIDAYS PAGES 11-14