Last update of this page was 7/28/23.

For visitors to PortSide after the park eviction

The deck of our ship, the tanker MARY A. WHALEN, is open for TankerTime with amenties for adults and kids: a free art table, free library in the #BookTent, toys, kiddie pool, hammocks, tables and chairs. The Tankerman’s cabin is open with stuffies, and kids books to read in there.

Why was beloved, award-winning PortSide Park evicted?

Invented reasons! PortSide Park was removed by order of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC). We got a cease and desist letter on 3:55pm Friday, 9/23/22 saying it had to go by Monday. That same week, most of the ships here were also evicted; they got 4 days’ notice. At the time of eviction, we thought they did this as retribution for our campaign to reform them #rethinkEDC that we had send to their newly appointed President & CEO Andrew Kimball in the spring. By April 2023, we saw they also had a real estate motive; the EDC released an RFP for Atlantic Basin for a last mile facility using the waterways (likely UPS) that would displace us. We remind everyone that from 2008 into 2011, the EDC promised a community give-back to Red Hook and benefit to the NY harbor maritime community in a home for PortSide that included 600 feet of Pier 11 to program, about 6,500 square feet in the adjacent warehouse, and ALL of the parking lot that held PortSide Park when no cruise ship was in. The EDC never delivered that and made us quasi-homeless for the better part of a decade, as in we had the ship but no publicly-accessible home for it and the rest of our plans.

Media coverage

We never contacted the media, but they found this story, proof that PortSide Park mattered.

• THE CITY

• Pix 11

• CBS News

• There was also a 1010 Wins radio story, but we can’t find a link to it.

See how heavily used and impactful this tiny park was (4 parking spaces in 2020, 5 parking spaces as of 2021) in searches of #PortSidePark on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Who controls this space?

It is Port Authority property, leased long term to the NYC EDC who manages it and subleases it to multiple entities. Ports America, the operators of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal have the lease on the parking lot within which PortSide Park was located. The NYC EDC has a dockmaster program called DockNYC to manage the boats on our pier 11 and others. That program is run by the company BillyBey. Lots of layers.

PortSide Park won a “Covid Everyday Heroes” award from Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in 2021 (right). Eric Adams is now the Mayor of NYC.

This all flies in the face of the Department of City Planning effort to create shoreline park access in underserved communities such as Red Hook. Listen to the Mayor make the pitch for more waterfront parks here.

There’s no justifiable reason we can find for this eviction to have happened, and we certainly can’t see a justification for the way it happened.

In the cease and desist letter, the dockmaster (DockNYC) acting on behalf of the NYC EDC, said our permit only allowed us to do programs on the ship. Correct, but our permit does not deny us the right to ask neighbors for space, and we asked Ports America if we could use their parking lot for a mini-park in 2020. They said yes. The cease and desist letter implies that PortSide has no right to negotiate with other parties for space. This feels punitive; and the thrust of all this feels arbitrary and capricious. It reflects no understanding of PortSide and Ports America pivoting during the pandemic for the good of all.

Here’s a copy of our berthing permit (like a lease for a ship). Note the 30-day revocable clause; the NYC EDC reserves the right to evict boat tenants on 30 days’ notice without explanation.

The Port Authority was aware of our minipark and accepted it, so the NYC EDC claim in statements to the press in some of the coverage above that the park violated their lease with the Port Authority is not convincing.

PortSide’s insurance did cover activities in this space, addressing a concern in the cease and desist letter about liability, and the stated entities were indemnified.

The cease and desist letter claimed that PortSide had created a dangerous situation for kids putting them near trucks. If the NYC EDC really thought PortSide Park was unsafe for kids, why did they wait so long to shut it down?

How are pedestrians able to safely walk to and from the NYC Ferry dock and cruise terminal if there are so many dangerous trucks? They are closer to the internal roadway than kids were in PortSide Park.

The EDC claimed the truck traffic would get worse as of Monday when they started construction of the ferry terminal 3 blocks up our pier. That implies that trucks would be driving up our pier, but then the NYC EDC should have contacted us to discuss how kids would safely use our gangway while trucks pass. They did not; proof of how bogus the safety claim was. Plus, the trucks have no interest in driving up our narrow pier to a site they can access more easily from the north.

If the NYC EDC really wants to resolve safety issues they could finally provide PortSide the building space they promised us from 2008 into 2011 at the south end of the Pier 11 warehouse next to our ship, and for which they made us do yet another business plan in 2018 - which became clear in 2019 was a make-work excercise they never took seriously. We could have all the little kids inside there, plus many more programs and revenue-generating activities that the NYC EDC has denied us either by lack of space or lack of permission. PortSide needs more space so that we can do programs that don’t fit on the ship and do more than one program at a time. Our ship MARY A. WHALEN is beloved and compelling; but she doesn’t even have enough space to host standard DOE class sizes (20+) on anything but a moving tour format.

The reality: The pedestrian path is closer to trucks than people were in PortSide Park. We see no increase in trucks due to the construction of the ferry homeport as their cease and desist letter claims. Construction started 9/26/22. That homeport will be some 500’ (a block) up the pier, concentrated at the north end of Atlantic Basin and wrapping around the north end of the Pier 11 warehouse, so the idea that the ferry homeport construction work will run trucks up this narrow pier rather than coming from the north end is ridiculou and did not happen.

The NYC EDC’s arguments feel contrived, and PortSide stands by its safety record of no injuries or incidents and no insurance claims in all the years we have operated in industrial areas, parks, and storefronts and on our ship MARY A. WHALEN since we were founded in 2005.

There were lots of options beside eviction. There were ways to alter the park without removing it (installing protective barricades to separate park and parking lot) as the Formula E car race did in 2021 and 2022.

How this eviction happened

On Friday, 9/23/22, at 3:55pm of Rosh Hashanah weekend, the NYC EDC demanded that PortSide Park be removed via an email, and PortSide Park had to be removed by Monday, 9/26/22. We immediately launched this new webpage (which continue updating) and social media posts to tell people about the closure, to get things they wanted, and to pitch in helping us deliver or dumpster things.

We received no heads-up about the park being a concern of the NYC EDC until that email from our dockmaster Donald Liloia of DockNYC acting on behalf of the NYC EDC. The letter starts “It has come to the attention of Billybey Marina Services, LLC (“Billybey”) that PortSide New York (“PortSide”)” has created the park. This makes it sound as if they just found out. However, the dockmaster Donald Liloia who signed the letter asked PortSide in early summer 2020, around the first month of PortSide Park, if we could provide wifi for the ticketing kiosk of the Governors Island ferries that began running from Atlantic Basin, Red Hook that summer. He also works for the ferry company NY Waterway that runs those ferries. PortSide provided that wifi in exchange for some donated IT upgrades, and PortSide Park became the waiting area for those ferries; so the park was an asset to the dockmaster in his NY Waterway capacity. 33,000 of their ferry passengers came through here in 2020; 45,000 in 2021. This was all clearly visible to the NYC EDC. Another major category of PortSide Park were riders of NYC Ferry (run by the NYC EDC), plus the people who came here solely to enjoy the park.

It is also worth noting that the NYC EDC had previously promised that WHOLE parking lot to PortSide. That was back from spring 2008 to spring 2011, when the NYC EDC promised PortSide a home in Atlantic Basin as a community give-back to Red Hook and amenity to the working waterfront (given services we planned but the NYC EDC has not allowed us to do here). We were promised use of that parking lot when no cruise ship was in (the trucks provisioning the cruise ship terminal used to wait there), plus 600’ of Pier 11 to program, plus some 6,500 square feet inside the south end of the adjacent Pier 11 warehouse.

The NYC EDC never delivered that community give-back; and in 2011, the NYC EDC told us they would not provide PortSide a home. We got back to Atlantic Basin in May 2015 thanks to then-Councilman Carlos Menchaca because the NYC EDC needed his approval for a development in Sunset Park. We returned and only got berth space for the ship and immediately began asking for the building space.

As of Friday, 10/19/22, the NYC EDC has sent a graffiti removal truck to remove the blue paint (see photo above) that was part of PortSide Park. They worked Friday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The paint remover and rinse water went into the storm sewer and directly into the harbor. No idea if they will try to remove the pink too.

How PortSide Park came to be - responding to the pandemic

The cease and desist letter is correct in that we did not ask the EDC’s permission for PortSide Park. Under the urgencies of the pandemic, we decided to serve desperate people who were showing up and afterwards work out acceptance with bureaucracies known to be slow and we knew to be busy with the pandemic.

The dockmaster had locked the pier once Governor Cuomo said all non-essential business should close, so the public could not get to our ship deck, so we could not provide outdoor, socially-distanced TankerTime or any form of pandemic mutual aid on the ship as other Red Hook nonprofits were doing outside. Other Red Hook nonprofits were offering food pantry services and PPE give-aways; but PortSide, locked up behind the gate, could not use our ship this way.

We created PortSide Park after people began showing up in May 2020. They were sitting and lying on the asphalt, picnicking, tailgating and engaging in sports. (The full story is in this blogpost). Seeing people increasingly showing up outside the fence, we asked Ports America, the operator of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal if we could set up a mini park in just four parking spaces along the fence beside our ship. We received approval and regularly check in with them to make sure things are working OK and safely.

We did not ask the NYC EDC because the NYC EDC often does not answer requests at all and often says no to reasonable requests such as “could PortSide have a sign on the ferry dock saying we are here and providing info on our virtual guide to Red Hook?” The NYC Ferry marketing team has wanted such a sign because we are an attraction that could bring riders, but the EDC said no. PortSide has a long history with the NYC EDC promising us things and not delivering them and of being unresponsive. We told the Port Authority what we did some months later, and the park was accepted, and they proposed feauturing PortSide in a newsletter.

In 2021, Ports America let us use the guard house for a free library after the Friends of Sunset Park offered us two car loads of books, expanding PortSide Park to five parking spaces. In 2021, we painted the asphalt in the park footprint to lower the temperature on hot, sunny summer days and make it easier to clean.

The park, in fact, contained the public in a supervised space, lit at night, increasing safety for all, not creating danger as the cease and desist letter suggests.

Gratitude

Thank you, Ports America for the space. It was a place for happy for so many diverse people. Thanks IKEA for donating umbrellas in 2020 and again in 2022. Thanks Materials for the Arts for the bistro furniture and the boxes of plastic fish the kids loved to play with. Thanks to Molly Malone for donating her rooftop garden after the pandemic economy forced her out of Red Hook. Thanks to so many of you who donated funds, time, toys, plants, books and more.

PortSide has loved serving the community during the pandemic via the park and free library and loved meeting so many people this way and seeing people meet each other. It was hard to mingle during the darkest days of the pandemic, and it sure happened in PortSide Park, safely outside. We learned that this space meant so much to people who visited in person and - something we never expected - the many virtual visitors who delighted in seeing photos and videos of the park on social media, many of whom donated funds, string lights, books, and toys even though they lived far away. For example, across the continent in California, Chris Welton, Captain of RV SPROUL, was watching PortSide Park on Facebook and offered to fix a beloved toy shopping cart and made axles, bushings and got new wheels and shipped it all to us. That was a toy shopping cart that had been donated by Sue Sardzinski, a retired teacher on Long Island.

We appreciate that so many people came the weekend of the eviction to say goodbye to the park and to collect a memento or recuerdo of the park.

Minutes after getting the cease and desist letter, PortSide also contacted Julie Cavanaugh, Principal of PS 15 and delivered to the school fifteen planters with plants, the picnic table, the two long white benches.

We are working on finding a home for all the books. If you can take large quantities of books (we don’t have time to negotiation a lot of small batch deliveries), please send an email to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org.

Thanks to the volunteers who helped move things and lent vehicles to remove the park! Love you all!

Ship cat Chiclet

Chiclet was the official greeter in PortSide Park. For fans of Chiclet, she goes where there are people for her to meet and watch. You can now find her up on deck during TankerTime or near the gangway. She misses the park too.

More public access changes on Pier 11

While we have you, most of Pier 11 will likely clost to public access. The Monday of the week we got the NYC EDC’s cease and desist letter, the NYC EDC also evicted all the boat tenants except PortSide/MARY A. WHALEN and Clipper City (the tall ship just forward of us). They were evicted to make way for the construction of the NYC Ferry homeport. They had four days notice to leave, some of the having to find a new location in that time. One company moved to Jersey City.

We expect this means that the pier north of the MARY A. WHALEN and CLIPPER CITY will cease to be public-access once the NYC Ferry Homeport 2 is done and maybe before then. NYC Ferry Homeport 1 is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; you can see what that looks like when you go to the Navy Yard ferry stop.