Our exciting business plan! and updates!
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In Phase 2 of our build out, we propose putting our offices on top of the existing office suite on the east side and building a catwalk over to the warehouse space on the western side, near the water and our shop MARY A. WHALEN.
Last update 7/24/24
On 5/14/24, major news was announced affecting the area, PortSide’s location, and us: the Port Authority and New York City will do a “land swap.” The Port Authority will no longer own and manage the working waterfront from Brooklyn Bridge Park/Atlantic Avenue south deep into Red Hook to Wolcott Street, almost to Valentino Park. That is covered in our evolving blogpsost here.
The day after this news, the EDC cancelled the 2023 Atlantic Basin Anchor Subtenant RFP referred to below; but the fact that the RFP did NOT guarantee PortSide a home is a relevant indicator. The Master Plan promised by the EDC to create a plan for the “land swap” real esate IS an opportunity to finally get PortSide sufficient space to be serve the Red Hook community and the maritime community as we have planned since 2005 - and make us more sustainable. The EDC’s denying us the space they promised has prevented us from having the revenue-generating activities in all our business plans and from having the youth enrollment programs we intend (youth boat building, summer camp, after-school program), the services to workboats, robust visiting vessel progams, and more.
The 2023 RFP
In 2023, the EDC released an RFP “the Atlantic Basin Anchor Subtenant RFP” that did not guarantee us space. The deadline for the RFP was 2/14/24, and PortSide responded (see our response here) asking for space described below including what the EDC had promised us as a community give-back to Red Hook from 2008 into 2011 with updates and changes. Formule E moved out of the building space that the EDC previously promised to PortSide, surely due to the RFP, during December 2023. It is now available. The net effect of our proposal would allow us to satisfy long-standing plans to create a pipeline to marine careers for youth and adults, have more space for public programs, and create a PortSide campus in Atlantic Basin that will activiate the site and make it more hospitable, educational and an interesting and attractive maritime gateway to Red Hook as opposed to the bleak, run-down parking lot feel this place has now. The net effect is a PortSide Campus. See it in this exceprt from our March 2024 PowerPoint here.
We asked for more space inside the Pier 11 shed, 12,000 sq ft.
We asked for less pier 11 berth space since other boat tenants are now here
We asked for permission to build a small wet lab structure that the firm MADE has offered to design
We requested permission for a subtenant boat to be used for maritime training, and for small boat activities
We asked for permission to amenities for wildlife on land and water and interpretation of them and history of Atlantic Basin.
The vision and plan
PortSide NewYork plans to create a waterfront center that is an exciting maritime attraction and gateway to Red Hook, serves all aspects of the neighborhood (residents of NYCHA and private housing, retail, industrial and maritime businesses, the creative sector), visitors, and the working waterfront - with a strong pipeline to marine careers - and that serves as an example to NYC for how to combine working waterfront and public access and how to center maritime in economic and community development.
The past few decades of NYC planning have displaced actual and potential working waterfront spaces to develop luxury condos adjacent to waterfront parks with little maritime activity (none of the working waterfront sort, very little of the educational and recreational sort). In comparison, PortSide plans include:
In building space: a youth boat building shop (compare to Rocking the Boat), classrooms for school kids and where adults take classes get Coast Guard licenses, a big warehouse space for exhibits, conferences, performing arts, holiday market, and event rental space; maritime library, computer center, wet lab, small cafe, museum store, Red Hook tourism desk to draw cruise terminal passengers into the neighborhood. Our virtual guide Red Hook WaterStories would connect to all this.
On the pier: our ship MARY A. WHALEN and a landing for visiting vessels the public can ride (fishing, tour and dinner boats, historic ships and educational vessels). B-to-B services to workboats especially tugboat dock-n-shop, crew change, potable water, dumpster access and package pick up.
Outdoor parking lot south of Pier 11 Shed: PortSide Park + space for maritime festivals, shipwork projects, outdoor programs that don’t fit on the MARY A. WHALEN. From 2008 into 2011, the EDC promised this whole parking lot to PortSide to use when no cruise ship is in. It is an active parking lot serving the ships on cruise days.
Permission for a small wet lab structure, powered by solar and wind, to be located next to the water south of MARY A. WHALEN due to the increasing number school requests for marine life programs. The founder of the River Project is willing to advise as is the STEM teacher John Russo. The Red Hook architecture firm MADE has offered to design it!
All this is designed to inspire NYC to center maritime in waterfront redevelopment plans and use maritime as a driver for community and economic development. More #piers4boats we say!
The EDC promised space for this and didn’t deliever…
PortSide responded to the NYC EDC’s 2006 RFEI for Atlantic Basin. PortSide responded to the follow-up 2007 RFP.
From 2008 to Spring 2011, the NYC EDC promised PortSide a home in Atlantic Basin as a give-back to Red Hook for the NYC EDC master plan for Atlantic Basin that caused a lot of community uproar.
The EDC promised Red Hook that PortSide’s home would be 600’ of pier to program, about 6,500 sqft in the Pier 11 Shed warehouse (we had asked for more than 2x that), and use of the parking lot south of that building when no cruise ships were in (they use that space for parking when ships are here).
From 2008 through 2010, the NYC EDC made PortSide do “interim programs” and then made us do an architect building code review from late 2010 into 2011 for the office suite inside the promised building space. The NYC EDC then backed out on the deal. PortSide remained quasi-homeless and locked up in the Red Hook Container Terminal for most of a decade.
May 29, 2015, PortSide returned to Atlantic Basin thanks to the NYC EDC’s needing the approval of Councilman Carlos Menchaca for a deal in Sunset Park at SBMT. Menchaca made the EDC sign an LOI with community benefits, and we got space for the ship. We began asking for the formerly-promised building space. The pier was fully rented.
November 2017, the NYC EDC said we had to do a new business plan for the same building space during 2018. We did and presented it in January 2019. All about that below.
During 2019, Menchaca and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez tried to negotiate with the NYC EDC. PortSide did not get what we needed. In 2020, we planned to go public with this story, but the pandemic hit.
Fed up with the EDC’s chronic unfairness and misrepresentations, and seeing a pattern of chronic incompetence and many cover-ups, in November 2022, we launched a campaign to reform the EDC called #rethinkEDC. We would rather inspire change via creating the PortSide waterfront center, but the exposé mode has been forced on us.
A summary of EDC planning efforts in Atlantic Basin since 2005 is here. It’s been a tumultous history with few EDC plans working out.
September 2022, the EDC evicted beloved, award-winning PortSide Park that we installed June 2020, with permission of Ports America who has the lease on the space, in response to community needs during the pandemic.
June 2021, PortSide submitted a critique of the EDC to the “Comprehensive Waterfront Plan” (CWP) process of the Department of City Planning. In that, we upped our demand to 12,000 square feet (since 6,500 was never enough) and a 20 year lease because it had been THIRTEEN YEARS since the EDC first promised PortSide building space (and more) from 2008 into 2011, and has yet to deliver it (more on that saga here). This was not just a promise to PortSide, it was a COMMUNITY GIVE-BACK TO RED HOOK. At the same time, we asked people to support our effort to get buiding space and less oppressive terms by submitting comments to the CWP process of City Planning. OVER TWO THIRDS of all comments submitted (200+) supported PortSide’s ask below.
PortSide’s 2018 business plan
On Monday 2/25/19, we presented to Brooklyn Community Board 6 (CB6) Economic/Waterfront/Community Development & Housing Committee (EWCDH) with an update on our business plan requested by the NYC EDC to enable PortSide to expand into the warehouse adjoining our ship MARY A. WHALEN. This presentation put our real estate story into the context of waterfront planning issues given the mission of the committee.
Here is the Powerpoint that we presented, lightly edited to add some slides to cover things that were conveyed orally.
Here is the handout we had, info on how to make this all happen by joining PortSide as a board member, advisor, fundraising committee member, etc.
What follows are some renderings from our business plan and below that photos and videos from our presentation of the business plan to the NYC EDC on 1/8/19.
Plan below: The orange outline is the square footage amount that the NYC EDC promised PortSide from 2008 through early 2011 (yes, we are trying to get space that was previously promised to us). The other lines reflect our requests to increase the space. We presented justifications for each bump out. 12,000 square feet, a space reaching to the top line in the drawing below, would make the most viable iteration of PortSide and would be the most logical division of space. The U-shape that the EDC promised PortSide from 2008into 2011, is too small, awkward to use, bifurcates access to the mezzanine over the existing office suite, does not have a wide enough connector between water and inland sides for fire safety movement from east to west, and makes a weird space for an adjoining tenant.
Below: The volumes of the space demarcated by the orange outline. We propose that our space go up as far as the grey of the floor in this rendering
Our presentation to the NYC EDC
We did this as a walkabout through the site, followed by a sit-down meeting in the conference room.
The space in question is divided into distinctly different subspaces:
a loading dock along the eastern/inland side
next to that, a suite of offices used by prior port uses
next to, west of that, a large garage space carved out of the warehouse space which we would make into a boat building shop
at the far west, and next to the pier, a high-ceiling warehouse space
We would change these spaces over time, in a phased renovation concurrent with our use of them, and end up putting our own offices above the existing office suite (elevating it for flood protection), using the space below for program space, building a catwalk from there to the western wall, improving the bathrooms and more. Our years of operating as a pop-up will be very helpful in this scenario. The local firm H.L. General Contractors offered to donate the conversion of the existing office suite, adding a proper public bathroom. They constructed the buildings for the local BASIS school (and own that property) and Red Hook Initiative (RHI). We identified other sources of pro bono labor, so build-out could start before completing a massive capital campaign.
We started our pitch on the NYC Ferry dock to emphasize our theme that Atlantic Basin is the “maritime gateway to Red Hook” and merits the enhancements PortSide proposes. Several of these (1-3 below) involve using information from our e-museum Red Hook WaterStories.
better signage/intro to Red Hook on the dock
educational info for waiting passengers including our flood-prep resiliency info
wayfinding and educational info strategically positioned throughout the site
an expanded, year-round PortSide in the southern end of the warehouse enabling us to do more programs than on our ship MARY A. WHALEN and serving as a welcome center in the maritime gateway to Red Hook.
The goal is a PortSide that better serves Red Hook AND that creates a compelling gateway to Red Hook that helps draw cruise terminal and ferry passengers into the neighborhood.
Below: Councilman Carlos Menchaca was a powerful advocate for PortSide NewYork. He negotiated with the NYC EDC to get us our current space for our ship, the MARY A. WHALEN, in 2015; and he has followed up with strong support for our efforts to get the building space here that was promised to us by the EDC from 2008 through early 2011.
Below: PortSide NewYork presentation of our business plan to NYC EDC on 1/8/19. Carolina Salguero positions our plan as creating the maritime gateway to Red Hook, speaking on the NYC Ferry dock. Our plan includes expansion into the building alongside our ship MARY A. WHALEN.
Below: Let’s make this weed patch educational! Carolina Salguero explains how changing signs will explain this urban wild patch, it’s nesting birds, plants and maritime WaterStories, the connector between the NYC Ferry dock and our ship MARY A. WHALEN.
Below: Hear one of our partners, Shannon Hummel, the founder of Cora Dance, explain the potential of the warehouse section of the space to impact Red Hook and the performing arts community of NYC. This building space will allow PortSide NewYork to better serve Red Hook, both via our own programs and by having space that we can make available for community meetings, events and performances by other non-profits. Our lead architect Severn Clay-Youman of Civic Architecture Workshop, a board member of Cora, is at left. The liferaft behind them will be a mobile Children’s Reading Room.
Below: a rendering of the planned community and performance space Shannon spoke about in the video above.
Community Sailing Proposal
The day before Thanksgiving 2018, PortSide was offered all the boats from a Community Sailing program that lost its space.
Our outreach in Red Hook shows many people interested in having such a program here. See our flyer at right. We need to find a waterspace for the boats during the summer. Atlantic Basin is full, has ferry traffic and exiting Atlantic Basin puts you in very fast currents with heavy ship traffic.
If this is a go, we propose to have the Community Sailing program use the above “warehouse” portion of the space from January to May (when it is too cold in there for exhibits and performing arts) as a winter shipyard to repair and store the sailboats. Our boat building program in an adjoining space could also roll projects out into this space. It can simultaneously be used for messy educational projects such as a pop-up wet lab and maker space for projects with schools. This could also be a rain-proof place to build floats for the October Barnacle Parade and host a Red Hook Winter Holiday Market before the sailboats get in there.
Below left: Shannon and Carolina explained how the loading dock will be a great outdoor stage or place for classes, small ship repair and STEM projects. Several community members helped set up and were in attendance.
Below right: an example of how PortSide used this loading dock in the past with our WHSAD interns to restore wheelhouse windows from our ship MARY A. WHALEN.
Below: AE Superlab bring their model of the building to the meeting. Principal Ahmed ElHusseiny is at left, Edson Pinto at right. The quotations over the windows were excerpted from letters of support that were submitted to the EDC. The windows look out over the loading dock towards Imlay Street.
Below: This meeting showed how easily this conference room can be used for conferences, book readings, talks, small exhibitions. This shows about a third of it. The person speaking at center, Carmen Rainieri of SKANSKA, is our construction estimator on this project. March 2022, with the permission of Formula E (the EDC rented the space to them after PortSide did the business plan) was used for an educational program with 40 students from the area and ones from Texas - proof that this space is usable with little investment/changes.
Below: Plans for this space by Severn’s firm CIVIC ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP
Below: We received over 30 letters of support. Quotations from them ringed the room.
What PortSide means to people. Read the support letters
Support messages from elected officials and our local community board CB6 below. More letters from elected officials are coming:
Compilation of over 30 letters of support from elected officials, and members of the land and maritime communities.