Mission:

PortSide NewYork is a living lab for better urban waterways. We bring WaterStories to life.

PortSide’s History - written in 2021 with updates since

This story deviates from the usual nonprofit history by talking about institutional challenges and crises and not just successes.

I, Carolina Salguero, PortSide’s founder, decided it was time to tell this story to shine a light on impediments to activities on NYC’s waterfront, ours and those of others. I see PortSide’s saga as a teachable moment, 15 years of such moments, to share to help improve NYC’s waterfront management. This aligns with my goal that PortSide be a change-agent. PortSide’s history makes us informed about what needs improvement in this harbor, a reduction of red tape and more government transparency and fairness, and more boat-friendly pier design leading to an expansion of maritime uses of all types.

2021 is a prime time to kick this off given the massive change in NYC government that is coming with candidates running for Mayor, Comptroller, Public Advocate, 4 of the 5 borough presidents, and most of the City Council, including our District 38.

I also don’t see a way for PortSide to get much needed space and relief from the constrictions of red tape within the system. We’ve tried for 15 years. We are exposing our story to make some progress, for us and others.

The following focuses on the real estate side of PortSide’s story. For a program history, go to Program History Highlights.

2005

I founded PortSide in 2005 to rethink NYC’s relationship to the harbor by creating an innovative maritime center - a new model for NYC - showing how to combine the working waterfront and public access (busting local zoning conventions) while using maritime activity to drive community and economic development. The policy goal is to make NYC’s waterfront revitalization include more maritime, from freight and passenger boats, to education and culture related to the harbor.  This will be an alternative to the trend of putting big box stores and then luxury condos along the shore and treating the water as just something to look at – meaning esplanades and waterfront parks with no interaction with the water itself. Our focus is the BLUEspace, the waterways themselves, not the land along the edge captured by the word “waterfront.” We use the term “WaterStories” for our programs to capture our interdisciplinary focus and since “maritime” has traditionally been focused on the ship, not coast economies and populations. When academics hit Zoom during the pandemic, we met a global network of scholars using the term “coastal history” and found allies. PortSide’s WaterStories shares much coastal history.

This proposed PortSide maritime center will have a hyperlocal focus on benefiting the Red Hook community while also serving visitors (from tugboat crew to tourists) coming by land and sea. The physical PortSide will be the “living lab for better urban waterways” where we will “show by doing,” and be a “do tank” not just a think tank.  Its activities will be examples of the goals in our advocacy work.

Our first business plan of 2005, funded by NYC’s Department of Small Business Services, is based on having 8,500 square feet of building space where our programs will be concentrated next to the Fairway in Red Hook, Brooklyn on Greg O’Connell’s property and on having the ship MARY A. WHALEN serve primarily as a dock for visiting vessels (tugboats shopping at Fairway, educational ships, tour boats and more) with the MARY making occasional visits to other communities.

The towing industry, aka tugs and barges, are heavily present in Red Hook and nearby waters, and are a major target of our proposed pipeline to marine careers. We did extensive market research into salaries and hiring practices as well as their food shopping needs, along with research into what kinds of visiting vessels we could attract to the location, and what we’d earn from that in landing fees, and how such vessel visits would benefit Red Hook’s retail and investor pool by bringing in visitors, creating the first big year-round attraction in the neighborhood, and helping local residents by providing culture, education and job training experiences.

We will serve the diversity of NYC afloat and ashore, bring those two worlds together, provide services to the working waterfront, and provide, for the benefit of all, maritime-themed programs in education and culture (exhibits, films, talks, conferences, programs for school groups, boatbuilding for youth, classes for adult mariners) and a pipeline to marine jobs.

Our innovative, social entrepreneurship business plan has many revenue-generating components from ones typical of museums (café, museum store, rental space for events) to fees from maritime schools offering training on site, as well as landing fees paid by commercial vessels, plus Fairway paying 10% of total receipts for groceries bought by tugs that used our MARY WHALEN as a dock.  O’Connell did not provide PortSide a home despite discussing these ideas with us for several years.

I decide to buy the ship anyway in 2006 and seek a new location. I joke that I go from being the founder of a place to the mother of a homeless ship.  Homelessness is, however, as exhausting a condition afloat as it is ashore and not much of a joke at all.

New York City is not welcoming to innovative waterfront land-use ideas, as I now more keenly know; so for 10 years, we negotiate with the forces I founded PortSide to change while we struggle to find a long-term, publicly-accessible home and while operating our ship as a 613 ton “pop-up.”  We have looked at over 20 sites and negotiated with many.

From summer 2006 until summer 2015, our hefty, 172-foot ship MARY A. WHALEN is based most of the time in the Red Hook Container Terminal, where programs were largely impossible, and we negotiate for months to get permits so our ship can visit parks for short-term programs.

That period had PortSide maneuvering to survive battles between the Port Authority and their tenant American Stevedoring, our host in the container port (the Port Authority wanted no public access inside that port), battles between the Port Authority and the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) — talk about a clash of Titans — due to similar thinking about Atlantic Basin which the Port Authority owns and the EDC rents.

It feels like a game of Whack-A-Mole, and we are the mole! Add to that challenges at lots of waterfront parks and sites owned by the public sector.

From 2006 to 2015, just twenty days is the max lead time on any waterfront permit we used, even if we negotiate for months to get the permit. Funding for nonprofits requires long-lead times to seek grants and sponsors for programs that are delivered consistently not sporadically, so securing funding on that kind of notice is impossible.

We learn to be thrifty and speedy responding to short-notice permit approvals and flexible about location: we pop up in storefronts, parks, a shipyard, and on other ships. However, the resulting sporadic nature of PortSide programs also makes it confusing for people to grasp the scope of our intentions, a difficulty compounded by the obscurity of maritime to most New Yorkers. “What are you trying to do?” I am often asked. You get a big bang for your buck here though! Give PortSide $5 and you get what’s $100 worth of programming somewhere else.

Parlez vous maritime?

Maritime is a lost language in NYC, so it’s been hard for non-mariners to get what our vision is and what it offers. This city was once fluent in the maritime language, but no more.

• The water is now seen as a divider. “Red Hook is cut off on three sides by water” the media will often say, rather than seeing the waterways as connector, a resource for transportation, recreation, and when clean, sustenance.

• NYC waterfront parks do not design piers for boats (or design them badly). 

• Local media declare maritime a has-been, and the real estate sector trumpets that notion in support of its efforts to score waterfront property.

• The maritime industry adds to its own invisibility with a lack of PR and a “who’s asking” approach to outsiders.

• The public school system makes almost no use of the harbor. (The creation of one great harbor school is a drop in the bucket.)

Local maritime cultural institutions are small and not united, and many focus on the past, making them limited allies given PortSide’s future focus.

The fact that PortSide has no building and is reduced to a historic ship added another layer of confusion. Most people presume we are another preservation project, a history project.  Our forward-looking goals are hard to see while we are so associated with an old ship. For years, we don’t call our tanker a “historic ship” in an effort to avoid all that. We finally reverse ourselves, thinking “better to have one familiar aspect.”

Three years into this real estate saga, we think a solution is near.

2006

We respond to a 2006 RFEI and follow-up 2007 RFP from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) to have a home in Atlantic Basin. The EDC is a non-profit outside of NYC government that receives money from the City, and manages over 64 million square feet for the city, does much of its economic planning, and (after hurricane Sandy) does resiliency planning. Two of our RFP renderings are below.

Summer 2008, over a year after the RFP, the EDC begins making presentations about plans for Atlantic Basin, making public promises that PortSide will have a home with about 6,500 square feet of building space in the Pier 11 warehouse, 600’ of pier (half of Pier 11) to program, and use of a large asphalt area south of the warehouse when no cruise ship is in (it’s a vehcle waiting area for the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal).

The EDC then asks us to do “interim programs” in Atlantic Basin.  We do occasional pop-up events with and without the MARY A. WHALEN in 2008 and 2009, always asking when we’d get the long-term lease they had publicly promised.  The EDC then proposes we try something longer in 2010.

Bear in mind that none of this gives us stability, revenue-generating situations, a long-term agreement we can point to when raising money. It offers nothing that fosters growth.

2010, Kafka’s summer

Summer 2010, we get our first multi-week permit, all of 59 days, after negotiating with the EDC for SEVEN MONTHS with an hour and a half meeting every other Friday.  Talk about slow red tape. The EDC tells us that our permit is 1 day short of 60 days; because at 60 days, the lease between the EDC and the Port Authority gives the Port Authority the right of refusal on the permit.  

We face considerable pushback from the Port Authority the moment we arrive.

Among their actions, the Port Authority cuts off the electricity and then buries us in ever-increasing permit requests.  For three weeks of July, the incoming red tape is so intense, it shuts down all programming.  It is more Whack-A-Mole.  The requests can be weird and conflicting, Kafkaesque becomes my favorite word.  I write a parody newsletter The Daily Molehill as a cathartic exercise for the staff; this here is the first time we share it publicly. After weeks of this, the EDC contacts the Port Authority and tells us they said “we have a lease, this is our tenant, you have no right to get involved this way.” Whatever they said, we don’t get more emails.

We soldier on in what I call “The Survivor version of cultural programming,” but there isn’t enough lead time to publicize the many and diverse events (concerts, films, talks and walks), meaning attendance is small. Thanks to the red tape, we curate beautiful gems that few people see. There was not enough lead time to apply for grants or seek corporate sponsor and - get this - the EDC said we could NOT approach Cunard to seek sponsorship. This huge corporation is docking their ship QM2 within feet of our location and our long-term site plans would make an amenity for their passengers, and we can’t ask them for sponsorship.

In the fall, the EDC asks us to do an architect’s building code review for an office suite in part of the Pier 11 building allocation, which we do, while continuing to ask for a lease.

2011

Then, in spring 2011, the EDC says they will not give us the space.

They say “we want more big events like Summerstage.” 

Never mind that they had not provided conditions that make it possible to plan such a large-attendance event or that they promised a home to a nonprofit that uses maritime as a community and economic development tool instead of creating megaconcerts.

Things are dire.

Our temporary home in the Red Hook container port has gone gone from tough to untenable. In 2008, federal regulations kicked in, meaning people need a Homeland Security ID, a TWIC card, to walk to our ship across the port unescorted. Each TWIC card holder can escort 5 people; our visitors are thus limited to our number of TWIC card holders times five. Our regular staff is four.

September 2011, the Port Authority tries to evict us when they evict our hosts American Stevedoring, and I get Councilman Brad Lander to intervene.  

As push-back, in February 2012, on one day’s notice, the Port Authority says only 1 PortSide TWIC card will be valid for escorting guests, mine. That means that PortSide’s max visitor count shrinks to 5 (and that’s only possible if they all come at once), and I have to escort all visitors back and forth the 6 blocks to the gate. One Monday, I make 10 such trips (hard to get work done making all those trips).  I learn to ride two bikes at once, I ride mine and push a bike for a visitor.

We develop gallows humor. “MARY needs better berth control” is one punning slogan, but we are desperate. 

2012, the threat of closure plus hurricane Sandy

On February 28, 2012, we announce that we will close by April 30th if we did not find a home.  We launch a petition which puts our story in a larger context and call for conditions to improve for all historic ships in NYC.  Our plight is covered by high-profile media including CBS and the New York Times.

Offers of help pour in.  We enter into negotiations with two sites and do not close in April since so many entities are trying to help us find us a place. We continue negotiations locally and in Yonkers into the fall. To get away from the Port Authority special TWIC card restrictions on us, and so people can meet with us, we move our office off the boat into a donated storefront for several months.

Then Sandy hits on October 29, 2012.

During Sandy, I and our Historian/Curator Peter Rothenberg stay aboard and protect the ship from Sandy damage; but Sandy damages everything we had off the ship – a lot of stuff  – and floods all our real estate negotiations to a standstill. 

I figured no one is coming to help a nonprofit that was largely closed (due to being locked up in the container terminal) so I tell the crew “we are not going to sit on our hands and wait, let’s go ashore and help.” That is the genesis of PortSide’s Sandy recovery work for Red Hook and then years of resiliency planning and related public and school education programs.

Sandy is devastating for PortSide; but it keeps us in Red Hook and sustains us by giving us an intense, urgent purpose: helping our neighbors. Sandy also changes our programs because we realize that we need to talk about the destructive aspects of the waterways whose benefits we have been touting.

I and PortSide are recognized by the White House for saving our historic ship from the storm and for our Sandy recovery work in Red Hook and honored by the NYS Senate. Next, I am appointed by the Governor’s office to Red Hook’s NY Rising committee, part of a state-wide program to help hurricane-damaged communities create a local resiliency plan.

PortSide is now homeless but a recognized player in recovery and resiliency planning, a classic PortSide dichotomy!

And we start our long struggle with FEMA to do our own Sandy recovery project which involves lots of red tape, something that defines our workday already.

PortSide’s powerful impact, despite it all

While tackling such external impediments and dramas, and operating in the cramped quarters of a retired 1938 oil tanker under-restoration, PortSide continually creates many harbor firsts with our innovative waterfront programs (we call them WaterStories) on the MARY A. WHALEN, on other ships, ashore and in the digital realm (see our e-museum in particular).

We consistently win awards, honors and appointments to government committees.

We serve diverse stakeholders, and our work has impact, including wonky efforts focused on policy change, Sandy recovery work and resiliency planning, culture, youth education, or workforce development. Here are some examples:

• Education: In 2019, after just over a semester of PortSide programs with Red Hook’s PS 676, that K-5 school decided to become a maritime STEAM school, Brooklyn’s first public maritime elementary school! We are also positioning this story as inspiration to the DOE to embrace the harbor as a teaching tool beyond schools specializing in maritime. In 2021, the DOE announces that PS 676 will become NYC’s first maritime middle school.

• Heritage: Our African American Maritime Heritage program is the only one in the region to our knowledge.

• Resiliency: There is all that we did locally since Sandy, and our Sandy recovery work inspired a national program, FEMA’s Sandy High Water Mark signs, adopted in NYC by NY Emergency Management. In 2023, we’re impactful actors and content experts responding to the US Army Corps massive HATS resiliency plan. We help get an extension to the public comment period, do deep Red Hook research and extensive local outreach to galavanize Red Hook and our local electeds into action, and we raise awareness of Aggeres temporary surge-powered flood barriers (alternatives to massive permanent walls).

• Workforce: Our ship is the only Brooklyn training site for the union District Council 9. We have offered youth internships to a CTE high school.

• Opening waterfront spaces to the public: We created the first public programs in a Port Authority port, including an opera aboard our ship, and helped make that historically remote agency more open to community programs and education; and in 2020, the Billion Oyster Project expanded to the space we last used in the container port. We did the first public programs at GMD Shipyard and also in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook over several years, cracking open this place that is now publicly-accessible 24/7. We see many of our ideas in NYC’s comprehensive waterfront plan Vision 2020 and subsequent site developments.

• Boating: We invented kayak valet, a practice now used around the harbor which facilitates people visiting locations by kayak.

• Advocating for waterborne freight and passenger movement: We are part of the coalition of voices that pushed for more ferries and were thrilled by the launch of NYC Ferry, though we have concerns about how the EDC has run it, cooked the books, etc. Since our early days, we have talked about increasing use of the waterways to move freight within the city and regionally from our ports. One of our arguments was that if we manufactured less, we would be shipping more and should use the waterways to decongest our roads and reduce our carbon footprint. That was obscure talk at the time of our 2006 testimony. Thirteen years later, the surge in e-commerce now has non-mariners talking about using the waterways to bring packages to Red Hook’s forthcoming UPS warehouse and other sites. In 2018, the EDC launched Freight NYC. In 2019, the EDC put out an RFP to begin distributing food from the Hunts Point market by water, just as we advocated in 2005. During the pandemic, there was a big construction boom in last mile facilities in our neighborhood Red Hook and others around NYC. We were on many Zooms and email threads explaining how the marine highway could be used to move this freight; see this blogpost. April 2023, the NYC EDC released an RFP for Atlantic Basin that looks targeting at creating a maritime-focused last mile facility. More multiple reasons, we think their target tenant is UPS. HOWEVER, this RFP would displace PortSide - it’s typical EDC cluelessness to destroy this nonprofit that has been a source of ideas that they use (without attribution or thanks).

During all that, PortSide continues pushing for space and permits to fulfill our original goal of a multi-service maritime center with B-to-B services to the working waterfront, public programs and revenue-generating elements for us.

2014, an attempt to move to Sunset Park

In 2014, eager to get away from the restrictions in the container port, we look at moving to Sunset Park, to the Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT) Pier 4 at 58th Street. The site has many disadvantages, it is far from our roots and any residential community, has no building space for us, and is run by the same challenging EDC; but we are desperate. The EDC’s dockmaster (DockNYC) says we can move the MARY A. WHALEN there, we just need to hang some tires to protect the not-great fendering design.

Then, the EDC starts a public outreach process about locating Vane fuel barges at BAT. The EDC tells me “you have to wait until we work this out, Carolina" even though the community wants, in exchange for Vane barges, community maritime programming, something PortSide can offer.

The EDC insists it needs to confirm the Vane deal before committing to any community programming, rather than offering PortSide as a community give-back (the way the EDC had used us in Red Hook. A home for PortSide was the 2008 community give-back that the EDC didn’t give to Red Hook).  

Further, the EDC rep Lydia Downing, tells a Brooklyn CB7 meeting that the EDC needs the rent from Vane to cover the costs of installing fendering on the pier to make community maritime programming possible; but the pier DOES have fendering. Not great fendering, not a full pier of fendering, but more than enough to host lots of community programs on the north side of the pier. Vane is to be on the south side. Below is a photo of some of the BAT fendering on the north side at that time.

The Vane situation turns into a fierce community argument; the Sunset Park community does not trust the EDC after many years of the EDC’s not building the waterfront park they’d promised. Detect a theme? Sunset Park fights back, supported by Councilman Carlos Menchaca (see his statement). The EDC loses. Vane does not get a home there, neither does PortSide.

2015 back in Atlantic Basin with less than promised 7 years before

Since 2008, when the EDC promised us a home in Atlantic Basin, the EDC has continued planning processes for Atlantic Basin with little happening. Many elected officials lean on them to give PortSide a home there.  Then, in a twist of fate, the EDC needs councilman Carlos Menchaca’s agreement on a lease for SBMT in Sunset Park.  Menchaca will not grant that unless the EDC meets certain conditions about that site AND gives PortSide a home.  Check mate!

In May of 2015, ten years after PortSide was founded, thanks to the resulting SBMT agreement between the EDC and Menchaca, we get our first docking permit for longer than a few weeks (it was for 3 years) and are able to leave the Red Hook Container Terminal.

We return to Atlantic Basin in Red Hook, Brooklyn where we are now. From 2008 into 2011, the EDC had promised us a home here with building space, use of the asphalt, and half the pier to program. The original promise would give us revenue-generating space, space for winter activities and for permanent installations like a boatbuilding shop, room for exhibits and conferences and teaching Coast Guard certified training classes, plus proper space for offices, archives and supplies.  

In 2015, we only get berth space for our ship.  The ship was and is highly limited as an operating space in every way:

• After years of being locked up in the container terminal under tightening security regulations that shut down our volunteer program, the ship is bedraggled. She needs several summers of exterior and interior painting and other repairs before being in condition for many programs:

• The MARY A. WHALEN is not architecturally suited for many programs beyond being a museum of herself. We are inventive about re-purposing the tanker, but we need building space period.  Our current indoor program space is basically a kitchen and hallway (the ship’s galley and fidley)! See below. In the era of covid19, we don’t have enough indoor ship space to socially distance staff, and we sure don’t have enough for indoor programs.

• We need building space to earn revenue (to have space rental revenue that is so key to museum funding). We can’t do that with the ship until she has the Coast Guard equivalent of a building permit. For two years, we work with the Coast Guard to get “Attraction Vessel” status that will allow us to charge for use of the boat: to rent the ship for events, accept donations aboard and charge a fee for programs. (The Coast Guard acts like an all-in-one agency when assessing a ship as a safe space for commercial business, equivalent several NYC agencies that do that for buildings: DOB, FDNY, Consumer Affairs, etc.) The Coast Guard’s first assessment is “the ship is not a ship” from a regulatory point of view. We push back, appeal, and win. The ship is now a ship in their eyes. Then, they reinspect. In late 2019, we get their inspection report that says we have to take her to a shipyard to be hauled out to have the hull blasted and painted and any necessary repairs and allow the Coast Guard to inspect at that time. We also need their punch list of changes they say we need to make to get the MARY accepted as an “Attraction Vessel.”  We need to raise money to execute that punch list and haul the ship out.

Ongoing red tape limitations, over-control and non-response

We cannot get positive answers to reasonable requests. Note that most of the “no” answers below come without explanation or negotiation.

1. Can we have a sign on the NYC Ferry dock saying we are here? (No) The sign would also include the URL to our helpful virtual guide to Red Hook. This answer shows no understanding of marketing a destination to increase ferry ridership nor to fulfill the EDC’s promises to Red Hook that the cruise terminal will benefit the neighborhood by bringing visitors to the retail sector, nor does it acknowledge our basic need to promote ourselves on site.

2. Can we install interpretive signs in the weed patch from NYC Ferry dock to our ship? (No answer). These would be educational, improve the site’s appearance AND create a trail from the ferry to us.

3. Can the 4 parking spaces along the fence blocking view of the ship be moved.  (No answer)  There is a 7’ high chain link fence with barbed wire between us and the public. Add a row of cars along that and you can’t see the ship, and the net effect suggests that the ship is not a feature and is not publicly accessible. One doesn’t assume the latter since this is working waterfront pier, not a park.  1-3 in this list are placemaking and wayfinding ideas to make us more findable and make passage through Atlantic Basin educational and more appealing. The latter becomes even important once there is a NYC Ferry stop here.

4. Can we install a solar-powered, goose nest cam in the weeds inside the Cruise Terminal fence? (8 months to get a conditional yes, and then the staffer leaves the EDC.) The Port Authority and cruise terminal operator approved this in days. This would be a no-impact-on-landlord educational amenity that would stream content to the benefit of thousands of people. A local school wanted to partner in the set-up.

5. Can we have a small, commercial, first-responder boat alongside? (No) These boats are like AAA on the water. Hosting such a vessel would increase boater safety in the Upper Bay since there is no such commercial service based here now, it would lighten the workload of NYPD and Coast Guard boats, and would give us a partner vessel we could use for maritime training, school programs and to revive our popular Operation Christmas Cheer program.

6. Can we have revenue-generating vessels tie up alongside our ship and keep the revenue? (No)  When commercial boats have docked alongside us, the DockNYC dockmaster got the wharfage fees, not us.

7. Can we have a museum store to give us revenue?  (No). We have asked this since 2009.  Back then, the Port Authority said there is no retail allowed on our maritime property unless there is a ferry terminal like the one at Battery Park City. Once the NYC Ferry was announced as coming to Atlantic Basin, I brought this up again (c. 2017). The EDC then said that their lease with the Port Authority prohibits retail.  In April 2019, I met with a senior person at the Port Authority, who said that retail WAS allowed on their maritime property, that the Seaman’s Church Institute had even operated a bar/restaurant inside a NJ containerport.  Since that 2019 meeting, we think this is approved but are waiting for another staffer to work through our punch list of requests, including the following two. The pandemic stalled discussion on this.

8. Can we have a part-time restaurant/bar on site for revenue? (No) Restaurants are a key funding stream for many museums ashore; and the NYC boom in floating oyster bars tells us that a part-time version on the MARY A. WHALEN would generate a lot of money and attract new audiences and fans (after we get the Coast Guard status “Attraction Vessel” for the ship that would allow us to earn money on the boat). We would seek a commercial partner to run this. The EDC keeps saying their lease with the Port Authority prohibits food and drink sales on site (as in the retail above); but lots of special events on site have food: the Red Hook Crit bike race, the Formula E car race, trade shows at the Cruise Terminal, and a local ice cream truck drives through here vending all the time. It seems everyone else but PortSide can sell food.

9. Will you waive the requirement that PortSide needs to submit an event permit for every event of over 20 people up to 80 people as the Port Authority, the EDC’s landlord did in September 2020? (no answer for years, in 2023 we get evasive answers). We began asking this around late 2017 to early 2018. We got no response from the EDC. From May 2020 to early 2023, PortSide ignores this to serve the public curing the pandemic in PortSide Park. In 2023, after the EDC evicted PortSide Park in September 2022 on baseless claims of safety issues, we resume submitting event permits while asking for this nanny state proces to be dropped. We get evasive answers. This is a time-consuming process that prevents us from being able to host most ideas the community has brought to us?  Most places, a tenant lease allows them to do standard things, not for PortSide under EDC management in Atlantic Basin.

2017, and then the car race happens

All the red tape above is a big struggle and time suck.

The lack of building space also causes a lot of struggles as we try to do public programs on the deck of the ship around shipwork and inclement weather. By 2017, we are caught up on a lot of the painting and make plans to do more programming, then the EDC announces that the Formula E car race will be an annual event in Atlantic Basin.

The car race is a massively disruptive force. Not only do we have to respond to lots of planning scenarios and questions as site managers try to figure out how to shoehorn a race into an industrial park full of tenants, the physical construction and removal of track, barriers, grandstands, and walkways over those is centered next to us and goes on for almost a month.

One year, portasans are concentrated near us; another year it’s dumpsters. Visitation plummets the moment the build-out starts, meaning that our limited public program season, as we can only program on the deck of the ship from May into October, loses a month, the key summer one of July. By August, the blistering heat makes it tough to be on our deck, and many New Yorkers are away for vacation.

Note that the EDC tells the media, the first year of the race, that there are no negative impacts on Red Hook as the race is all inside Atlantic Basin, as if there are no tenants in here being pummeled.

By year 2 and 3 of the race, many site tenants leave due to the disruption, including Phoenix Beverage which had the master lease on the Pier 11 warehouse.  The race put them in the position of having to negotiate compensation for impacts, and make contingency plans, for all their disrupted tenants, some of whom had to move out for 1 to 2 month periods.  In addition, according to one warehouse tenant who has since left, in 2018, Formula E tells tenants in the warehouse that Formula E now has the master lease on the warehouse (Phoenix has just left) and their rent is going up a lot. According to that source, tenants leave as a result. However, Formula E does NOT get the master lease; as of sometime in 2018, the EDC runs the nearly-empty warehouse themselves.

What kind of model of economic development model is the EDC using if they displace long-term tenants for a two-day race?

Late 2017, the EDC offers us one shred of hope

Soon after we return to Atlantic Basin in May 2015, I learn that the previously-promised building space in the Pier 11 warehouse adjacent to our ship is empty and begin efforts to get that space.  After a lot of pressure on the EDC by a lot of elected officials, at the end of 2017, the president of the EDC James Patchett comes to the Mary Whalen with Councilman Carlos Menchaca and offers PortSide a means to get the same building space they promised us from 2008 into 2011: complete a new business plan.

He tells us that the EDC legal department says that our prior 2006 RFEI and 2007 RFP responses are too old to give us the space with doing a new business plan. We find this curious but have no means to push back.

We work on the business plan during 2018 and present it January 2019. The photos below show us presenting the plan in one of the rooms of the office suite we could be using now.  

Check out the many and diverse letters of support sent to the EDC on our behalf!  People want a full-blown PortSide!  Let’s do it already!

Our business plan team works hard, with the expectation that this was a fair process, that a solid business plan, on top of our record of impactful programs under arduous circumstances, will prompt the EDC to finally give us the building space.

I know that getting the space will, on top of relieving space pressure on PortSide, trigger excitement, which helps fundraising, and give us a place to do that fundraising while we continue negotiating with the Coast Guard for the Attraction Vessel status for the ship.

Instead, the whole business plan seems to have been theater, a make-work process for PortSide, a means for the EDC to say “we gave them a chance, we gave this a look.”

The lead EDC guy at our 2019 business plan presentation Matthew Kwatinetz, an SVP of EDC Asset Management, has done no real homework on the matter.

“What do you mean you were promised a home here before?”

After I show the first Powerpoint slide below that says PortSide has been promised a home here before, he says “Wait, back up. What do you mean you were promised a home here before?”

To say this, he cannot have read the business plan, or even the Executive Summary, or been briefed on the 3 years of EDC public presentations and promises about giving us a home here. It means he is unaware of years of media articles, and years of many elected officials hammering the EDC to do the right thing and give us the space they promised.

Kwatinetz announces that PortSide needs fundraising to get the space, that he wants to see a ramp-up plan. It is clear to me that is another make-work exercise, plus we need to space to earn and raise money!

What the EDC does not see is that PortSide’s growth and budget is stunted by what we we are subjected to - and that the EDC plays a large role in that. 

The EDC also does not see the signs of PortSide’s vitality. In just over four years since we left the containerport, we advanced our FEMA Sandy recovery project (still open), did the 2018 businesses plan, accomplished a lot of ship restoration, grew the board, and — to make us grant-ready — built a consistent resume of programs, many of them new. 

The EDC does not see the quality of what PortSide does, a consistent record of winning awards and creating innovative, impactful programs.

The EDC should live up to the word “Development” in its name and foster our growth by providing space. They put up an extraordinary amount of resistance to prevent giving us less than 7,000 square feet (though we really need more space).

The space they offered way back in 2008 was a cramped, awkward U (see below) that has a bizarre cut-out jutting into our space. The U makes it hard to ensure fire-safety egresses and connections between the east and west pods. During our 2019 business presentation, we argue that cutting a line straight across the warehouse, more to the north, will give us a more ample and workable space.

The space limitations of the U make us eliminate, in round 2 of the business plan (there are 2 rounds in the EDC structure for this process), a small wet lab which would be a powerful addition to Red Hook where many kids have no contact with beach, water, and marine life. One school year, we found that none of the 1st graders from Red Hook’s PS 676 had been to a beach, and they were ecstatic, fascinated to see the shell of a dead horseshoe crab. All those students lived in public housing or shelters. Red Hook has the largest public housing development in Brooklyn, the second largest in NYC. It would be a powerful educational asset for such children to have access to a small wet lab.

The prospect of creating such a wet lab in a disadvantaged community attracted a team of excited advisors willing to help launch it. The founder of the marvelous River Project was willing to help, so was the Director of Education at Gotham Whale and a teacher on Long Island. We created a design, like a storefront, with public-facing windows and tanks so the public could look in 24/7 to maximize the impact of the program.

2019, the car race gets the space

The EDC rented the building space we’d been seeking (and more) to the Formula E car race, despite much of the adjoining Pier 11 warehouse being empty. That car race occurred just 2 days per year for 3 years and was only going to be 1 day in 2020 before being cancelled by coronavirus.

Instead of allowing year-round programmer and community asset PortSide to finally flourish, the EDC has chosen to use the space to store race barricades, jersey barriers, containers of stuff. See below. Not even the office suite (shown in the photos of us presenting the business plan) was given to us. Formula E has it in their leasehold but is rarely there except during the month of build-up to the race, the race, and race track deconstruction. They have rented additional office space inland. At minimum, this suite of office spaces could be PortSide’s without hurting their operations.

2020

During the pandemic, the high-ceiling warehouse portion of the space with its big roll-up doors could be a powerful asset for PortSide mutual aid work. It would make a great food pantry, a space for the emergency laundromat organized by our board member Natasha Campbell, and a safe, well-ventilated classroom space for school programs.

Stay strong, people! With your help, we believe that getting the building space can become a reality so that PortSide can fulfill our vision of creating an impactful living lab for better urban waterways! PortSide has been making plans for this Atlantic Basin location since responding to the EDC’s 2006 RFEI, so we have many ideas and partners identified.

Over the years, while directly serving the public, in our efforts to make NYC’s waterfront revitalization more maritime-focused, we have written policy papers and testimony, spoken on panels, conferred with elected officials and answered questions from the media. Some good changes have come, especially much about the 2010 comprehensive waterfront plan called Vision 2020, but this is so much yet to do.

I have learned that NYC’s public sector likes to tout NYC as a hotbed of creativity, but it’s not so open to new ideas itself. Its approach is too often like the photo below.

Truth be told, this is a simplified version of PortSide’s saga - there were more challenges than this - but this is long enough for now. Stay tuned for more frank talk like this during our advocacy projects as we work to foster more effective city policy and more maritime uses of our city’s waterfront - and to get PortSide a proper home! More on our webpage Advocacy.

To further our progress, please donate, volunteer and/or join our board, and share this link. I thank you for your support!

Select Awards, Honors & Appointments

• 2019 | Honored as a “Spirit of McAnaney” for efforts supporting preservation and public spaces in New York City by the Friends of George McAneny, honoring Carolina Salguero

• 2019 | Awarded City Lore “People's Hall of Fame” Waterfront Hero.” Presented to Carolina Salguero

• 2017 | Presented with Congressional Record by US Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez citing the importance of the ship MARY A. WHALEN and PortSide programs

• 2014 | Appointed by District 38 Councilman Carlos Menchaca to the Sunset Park Task Force to advise the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) about development plans for the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal

• 2013 | Bestowed a White House’s “Champions of Change” award for our hurricane Sandy recovery work

• 2013 | Honored for our Hurricane Sandy recovery work by the NYS Senate. (Resolution sponsored by Senator Velmanette Montgomery, co-sponsored by Senator Daniel Squadron)

• 2013 | Appointed by Governor Cuomo's office to Red Hook's NY Rising committee, a statewide program to make communities more resilient

• 2013 | Received the "New York Harbor Historic Ship Steward Award of Excellence” from The National Maritime Historical Society

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