Friend of Seaport tower foes to join Landmarks
Authority picks Brookfield to run marina
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RISTORANTE ITALIANO
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A local leader who has lent a sympathetic ear to South Street Seaport preservationists fighting the proposed development project there, has just been tapped to join the city Landmarks Preservation Commission — the same commission which is about to begin reviewing the proposal. Mayor Bill de Blasio last week nominated Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corp., to the 11-seat commission. Chen, 62, said he has a lifelong love of the sea, and has taken a particular interest in the South Street Seaport Historic District. “My father was a seaman who died at sea,” Chen told Downtown Express Jan. 21, the day his appointment was announced. “I believe in the [South Street] Seaport…. That’s the quintessential — our local [development corporation] points to the sea. This is the essence of the area.” Chen attended a Save Our Seaport rally against the Howard Hughes Corp.’s project in October, 2013, and said he was pleased to learn there that another attendee, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, has a deep connection to the South Street Seaport Museum since her grandfather was involved in its creation. “I was there not to protest, just to listen,” Chen added. Similarly, Chen attended Community Board 1’s public hearing on the landmarks application for the proposal last month at St. Paul’s Chapel, but did not speak. That standing room only hearing drew hundreds, and it appeared there were more supporters than opponents of the project, so he got to hear both sides. Chen said he had not decided if he should recuse himself from voting on the Seaport proposal, and he wanted to check with Landmarks Chairperson Meenakshi Srinivasan to see if she thought he should. The commission is expected to begin reviewing the application sometime soon. Feb. 17 is the earliest possible date. It’s not clear if Chen has taken any public positions against the Hughes proposal, and any statements he may have made about the need to preserve the Seaport Historic District would essentially amount to the commission’s mandate for all of the city’s historic districts. Last week, he did not offer an opinion as to whether he thought the
BY DUSI CA SUE M ALESEVI C
Downtown Express file photo
Wellington Chen
Seaport’s district should be extended to include the New Market Building, site of Hughes’ proposed 500-foot tower, which has been the center of much of the opposition. The 1939 building was used a part of the Fulton Fish Market and is included in the non-binding national and state historic districts, but the Landmarks Commission has rejected previous attempts to include it in the city historic district, and appears to have no interest in revisiting the issue. But C.B.1 is poised to pass a new Seaport resolution, which includes a renewed call to landmark the New Market. (The board was to take the matter up Jan. 26, but the meeting was canceled because of an expected blizzard. The tentative date is now Feb. 5) The community board resolution will be sent to the commission, which is likely to soon include Chen and Kim Lee Vauss, an architect with Outsource Consultants who was also appointed last week. Their appointments to the unpaid positions are subject to City Council confirmation and its Rules Committee will consider the nominations on Feb. 4. But there is no reason to think there’ll be any hitches there. City Council fights over landmarks appointments are unusual to say the least, and in Chen’s case, he has a long-standing and friendly working relationship with Councilmember Margaret Chin, a tower opponent whose district includes Chinatown and the Seaport. With the Chinatown Partnership, Chen has pushed to keep the streets clean as one of many efforts to help the neighborhood’s small businesses. Though he will occupy the only “lay member” seat on the commission, meaning he has no professional landmarks expertise on landmarks, he is experienced on the issue.
The speculation is over: Michael Fortenbaugh is officially out of North Cove Marina as the Battery Park City Authority named Brookfield Office Properties and its partner Island Global Yachting the marina’s operator at their Thurs., Jan. 22 morning meeting. Brookfield Properties will pay $4.5 million in license payments over ten years, as well as an up-front capital improvement offer of $450,000 for the marina: lighting, new signage and landscaping, said Shari Hyman, president and C.O.O. of the authority. Fortenbaugh’s North Cove Marina Management was paying the authority $300,000 a year and offered $400,000 during this bidding process. The meeting took place at 200 Liberty St., once the World Financial Center and now Brookfield Place. Supporters of Fortenbaugh, who has run the marina for the past ten years, lined up downstairs to attend the meeting. The room adjacent to the boardroom was packed and many carried signs that said “Stop
Albany Pay-to-Play.” Dennis Mehiel, the chairperson and C.E.O. of the authority explained its position before a vote was taken on the request for proposals, or R.F.P., for the marina operator. Community Board 1 had passed a resolution in December asking that the B.P.C.A. to withdraw the current R.F.P. process and asked for more community input. Elected officials then wrote a Dec. 29 letter to the authority supporting C.B. 1’s unanimously passed resolution. Mehiel said that the authority was “pleased” and “overwhelmed a little bit at the tremendous interest” that the community has shown in the meeting. “In two and half years or a little more that I’ve been here, I’ve never seen such a crowd,” he said. He stressed that the authority has protocols that are not subject to discretion. Mehiel said that the authority “satisfied” itself that it had made the right decision on the successful bidder in the extra time that it had after the unplanned delay at its December meeting — the
board did not have a quorum for the vote because Mehiel did not attend and member Martha Gallo recused herself. “We took that time, went back, spent a little bit more time with the successful bidder, clarified our expectations and their commitments,” he said, “and decided again that we are doing the right thing for Battery Park City residents, for the marina, for the community at large and, of no small significance, for the taxpayers.” Mehiel said that when the R.F.P. was issued, the current operator, Fortenbaugh was invited to bid. He did not refer to Fortenbaugh by name, calling him the “incumbent.” “We got the bids in. We looked at it, we saw the deficiencies,” said Mehiel. “We do value incumbency, we do not ignore incumbency so we decided to invite all the bidders in for additional meetings.” Mehiel did not offer details of the bid’s “deficiencies.” The authority has received letters and phone calls from the community, the
community board and elected officials, he said. “It’s all their right to do that,” said Mehiel. “But when you think about it, what it really amounts to is an individual bidder in a R.F.P. process who believes he is unsuccessful and decides to mount political pressure on the authority to subvert our process and preserve his economic interests in the operation of the marina.” The crowd in the back started booing. “When we don’t respond with a change in our process or protocol, we are accused of running a process subject to political manipulation by the governor of the state of New York,” said Mehiel. “We start with political pressure to change the outcome. If it’s not successful we accuse the authority of having political pressure to have made the decision that we are going to vote on this morning.” He also answered questions about the fact that his yacht has sometimes docked at Brookfield’s partner, Island Global Continued on page 11
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