Time to create a NYC Agency for Maritime

NYC needs more #Piers4Boats

Some of the reasons to have this agency were covered in a 17 minute talk given by our Executive Director Carolina Salguero on 4/16/25. See the video. An updated version of the PowerPoint from that talk is here. If your group would like a talk about this, send us an email here.

AS OF 5/1/25. MORE AS THE SITUATION EVOLVES.

The problem

For now, see our webpage Advocacy for a description of what NYC is missing in terms of maritime and the dysfunction and impediments to maritime activity. We’ll soon summarize this here.

The fix is described on that webpage too - it’s putting maritime people in charge of planning, designing, and managing NYC’s maritime assets and ensuring that they influence waterfront design around the City. If that solution seems obvious to you, know that is not how NYC has been doing it for decades.

We’ve been told there are a few ways to get a new City Agency for maritime. Here are the two we have been assessing.

1. Revise the City Charter.

2. Do it via legislation (a bill in the City Council).

Relating to on #1 above, there are now two charter revision commissions, one created by the Mayor focused on housing and one by the City Council in response. In early March, we were encouraged to testify at the Coucil’s commission.

On 4/21/25, we were given an update via conference call by the Chelsea Kelley of the Council’s commission and were told that they were only looking at issues that needed a referendum; and since a new City agency did not need that and could be accomplished via legislation, we were directed to an existing bill proposed by Councilmember Kamillah Hanks who represents the north shore of Staten Island. Her bill Intro 1239-2025 was first proposed in 2022. It has been reintroduced in 2025. It proposes an “office of the waterfront,” something more advisory than an agency managing maritime assets that we recommend. We were told that the bill can be revised as it moves along the process. We will reach out to her office soon and update you here.

The solution - talking points for testimony - once that time comes - or to bring you up to speed

NYC was founded here because of its maritime assets but has lost touch with how to use them.

Since the 1991 closure of the City department of Ports & Trade, there has been no one City agency planning, designing, and managing the City’s diverse maritime activity that includes cruise terminals, ports, piers for docking boats not in the cargo business (commercial and historic ships) ferries, industry workboats of all types, boats in the tourism trade, historic/cultural vessels, and recreational boating.  With the City acquiring the Brooklyn Marine Terminal from the Port Authority, the City will own and manage its first container terminal and needs an Agency dedicated to maritime to revitalize and grow that.

All maritime sectors in NYC have been trying to grow, but the City has let piers lie fallow and even fall into the sea for not understanding how to deploy them for maritime activity.  The redevelopment of the waterfront that surged in the early 2000s was driven by land-focused people, often by the real estate industry, and favored housing developments fronted by waterfront parks and esplanades. Those had much less maritime activity that they could have and that many of us called for. If our advice had been heeded, those new waterfront parks would have piers that could serve the blue highway. New piers have been built but not for boats! We were told in 2012, that the new north Brooklyn park piers were even built with the concept “boats block the view.” WHAT? Piers ostensibly for boats have also been designed and built badly (Pier 25, Hudson River Park).

NYC is missing the boat and all the transportation, economic, cultural, and recreational benefits of more fully using the waterways, the BLUEspace. NYC needs more #Piers4Boats.

We need an Agency for Maritime to:

• Take charge of all aspects of management and development of maritime facilities currently in the Department of Small Business portfolio and assets controlled by NYCEDC, including the Brooklyn Marine Terminal and both cruise terminals (Manhattan and Brooklyn), and NYC Ferry.  

• Expand transportation by water of people and freight, especially last mile freight, creating a marine highway, aka blue highway.

• Advise on waterfront resiliency plans since their design and construction uses marine construction trade skills.

• Support offshore wind developments.

• Reduce the red tape preventing maritime activity of all types.

• Provide expertise to other City agencies with waterfront and maritime assets and to the new large waterfront parks governed by authorities (Hudson River Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Governors Island, etc) to enable them to grow their maritime functions. 

• Work with NYS agencies to grow sustainable maritime activity and help NYS create its own maritime agency. Push back on the NYS DEC concepts that limit repairing or building new piers due to their concept that shade is negative for marine life.

• Work with maritime training academies and non-profits - including PortSide - to grow a stronger marine career pipeline.

The Department should have an operations department staffed by professionals with expertise in maritime facility management, including waterside and landside systems.  Staff should have training/credentials related to waterborne transportation, through training at maritime academies, Coast Guard, US Navy or direct industry experience. 

If you have follow-up questions or sugegestions, email us at Chiclet (at) portsidenewyork.org.

#RethinkEDC

As of 5/14/24, the content here is even more important. The EDC is now in managing - and replanning - what was Port Authority working waterfont from the Brooklyn Bridge Park south to Wolcott Street. That’s the Columbia Waterfront neighborhood and a large strip of Red Hook. The City/EDC are talking about adding housing and park to this port. More info on the process and how you can get involved on our blog at https://portsidenewyork.org/portsidetanke/2024brooklynportlandswap

It’s time to #rethinkEDC for a better PortSide, a better Red Hook, a better NYC!

Lightships warn sailors of hazards, and PortSide temporarily converted its historic oil tanker MARY A. WHALEN into a lightship by painting #rethinkEDC along her side (March of 2025, that was replaced by #PortSideNeedsaHome). The hazards of the EDC include chronic mismanagement (did you know that the fire suppression system in the vast Pier 11 Shed did not work for about a decade?), failed infrastructure; unfulfilled promises about job counts, indirect economic benefits, and community give-backs; wasting money and cooking the books, damaging businesses and nonprofits – and years of battering this award-winning, nonprofit with arbitrary and capricious behavior while not fulfilling their promise of a PortSide home with building space, space ashore, and more pier space.

rethinkEDC core documents

Our critique of the EDC is in two parts, what we submitted to the Department of City Planning Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (CWP) process in 2021, called “Appendix EDC” because it was the appendix to our letter about the waterfront in general, and a November 2022 update document, with the rest of this webpage constituting updates.

1.     Appendix EDC, 41 pages, submitted to the CWP. A table of contents and executive summary were added in this version; the rest is unchanged. The final 8 pages cover PortSide’s saga with the EDC, our on-again, off-again landlord in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn.

2.     2022 Update to Appendix EDC, 3 pages

3.     The rest of PortSide submission to the CWP (a 15-page letter) covers mostly non-EDC matters.

4.     PortSide’s press release about #rethinkEDC is here.

5.     The Port Authority press contact for comments about PortSide’s critique of EDC mismanagement in Atlantic Basin in Appendix EDC document and the EDC lease with the Port Authority below is Amanda Kwan at akwan@panynj.gov.

Summary of EDC planning for Atlantic Basin

The history of EDC planning processes for Atlantic Basin shows how many EDC planning efforts lead to no action, and how they have decided that they can sole-source in this location because it is Port Authority property, not City land where City procurement rules apply.

2023 updates:

• 2023 Blogpost about EDC management of the cruise terminal is here. More details below. 

• 7/14/23, following up to item directly below, the dockmaster now says they will accept our insurance but would limit us to 50 visitors at a time. That’s unreasonable; our insurance covers us for unlimited visitors and a ship our size can handle way more than 50. We see this as another EDC effort to execute death by a thousand cuts.

• 6/28/23, we received the EDC’s lease with the Port Authority for Atlantic Basin. It is here. Every claim the EDC has made about it to PortSide is false.

• 6/16/23, the EDC revoked permission for PortSide summer events using a concocted situation. Here’s our statement on that. What happened: We supplied our renewed insurance but did not sign the berth permit (a lease), as we were waiting to hear from the Port Authority about one clause. A few hours after the EDC cancelled our events on 6/16, the Port Authority emailed everyone a Shipkeeper Policy which answered what we had been waiting for - but the EDC did not then re-approve our events. We then demanded that the EDC revise the berth permit so that it finally reflects the actual insurance levels we carry. Since the start, we’d been told verbally by the dockmaster, and in some emails, that they (DockNYC) provide an additional layer of insurance coverage. We requested some other tweaks. See 7/14/23 update to this above. Note that we did not get the berth permit before the last one expired at the end of 2022; we got it 2/17/23, so EDC claims that the berth permit needs to be signed for reasons of public safety does not reflect how the EDC and their dockmaster actually work.

• Late April 2023, the EDC released an RFP for Atlantic Basin Anchor Tenant for all the space not dedicated to cruise terminal or NYC Ferry Homeport 2 the EDC is building. The RFP would displace PortSide. We think this is one motive for the EDC’s shutting down our programs in June; they’d like PortSide dead so they can have our space without the public blowback they’d get by evicting us. The RFP looks targeted at a last mile facility, but one using the waterways, most likely UPS because UPS has not built on the large Red Hook property where they demolished the Lidgerwood complex; and UPS got a lease on a large facility in Bayonne from which they can put freight to NYC on the water; and UPS has been studying using the waterways to move freight hyperlocally, including test runs with the Red Hook Container Terminal next to Atlantic Basin. There’s no available warehouse space in that terminal, but there’s a big warehouse in Atlantic Basin, the Pier 11 Shed, next to our ship, the same shed where the EDC promised PortSide building space years ago.
  Note that a company does NOT have to respond to the RFP to become the Anchor Tenant; it says that in the RFP. Also, the EDC told us in 2009 that they had determined that, since Atlantic Basin is not City property (it is owned by the Port Authority), the EDC did not have to adhere to City procurement rules, e.g. the EDC could “sole source,” but they had been advised against using that term. We submitted a response to the RFP to indicate that we still sought a home with building and more space than we have now. This RFP was cancelled the day after 5/14/24 press conference announcing that the City will take over this entire port from the Port Authority.

• April 2023, the MSC cruise ship MERAVIGLIA started docking in Red Hook’s Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. This led to massive traffic gridlock on the western side of Red Hook and a torrent of community complaints. The effects of EDC inaction are clear; the EDC had not upgraded site signage nor corrected directions on travel apps as PortSide had suggested in Appendix EDC, nor had the EDC created any traffic management plan in advance for how to fit traffic from the world’s 5th largest cruise into tiny Red Hook. Our Councilmember Alexa Aviles set up a weekly Zoom call with the EDC, the Red Hook Business Alliance (RHBA), of which we are a member, and community members. In this forum, the EDC has been very responsive. However, it is indicative of what PortSide calls the “colonial and extractive” way the EDC manages Atlantic Basin, that any benefits of cruise activity occur somewhere else; the arrival of MSC was announced by the Mayor on 12/7/22 as bringing great benefits, but there are no signs of ANY efforts to have Red Hook benefit:

• MSC donated $236,000, and the Mayor claimed 7 Red Hook GreenThumb parks would benefit, along with the Junior Ambassador program. The parks are not in Red Hook, they are over the highway in the Columbia Waterfront District, and the EDC evicted PortSide Park that was on the cruise terminal leasehold itself. The Junior Ambassador program is citywide, no guarantee that Red Hook youth are in it. On 5/1/25, we learned from CM Alexa Aviles office that the money for the Green Thumb parks was never paid.

• The Mayor announced, “The year-round cruises from the Brooklyn terminal will create a huge boost to our tourism and create up to 10,000 full-time jobs in the city, an equivalent to 10,000 full-time jobs, ”but there is no sign of any effort for those benefits to be in Red Hook. There is no promotion of Red Hook inside the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (BCT) or in Atlantic Basin, despite PortSide asking permission for years to install this and the EDC having promised that BCT would benefit Red Hook when they first proposed, in 2005, having a cruise terminal here.

The EDC lease with the Port Authority 

The lease is here. We sent a FOI request to the Port Authority for their lease with the EDC; because, starting Spring 2022, the EDC began saying (often) that they could not satisfy PortSide request X, Y or Z “because of our lease with the Port Authority.” Every time we checked with the Port Authority, we were told the EDC claim was incorrect, and senior staff at the Port Authority finally told us to submit a FOI request to get that lease. We did in October 2022 and got the lease on 6/28/23. Note that Atlantic Basin is owned by the Port Authority and rented to the EDC which manages it.

Why has PortSide launched #rethinkEDC?

To improve things! PortSide is an economic and community development change-agent organization - see our webpage Advocacy - but one stunted in physical size and capacity by the EDC.

With rethinkEDC, we aim for an expanding circle of benefits starting with getting what PortSide needs (finally), improving the management of Atlantic Basin so that it benefits Red Hook (finally), and improving the EDC situation for NYC as a whole.

We came to learn that what PortSide and Red Hook suffer at the hands of the EDC is not unique to us and here.  When behaving badly, the EDC has a pattern of unfulfilled promises; and then ignoring, deflecting, denying and misrepresenting including cooking the books.

The EDC subjects PortSide to a stultifying combination of over-control and ignoring reasonable requests. The EDC management style does not reflect real world operations. 

Trying to negotiate with them does not work and is a massive time suck for us and elected officials.

Over the years, many elected officials and our community board have pressured the EDC to resolve the issues, but the EDC ignores all suggestions and recommendations. The EDC tends to have a self-justifying attitude; a break in this was their receptiveness during summer 2023 weekly Zoom meetings about MSC cruise ship traffic run by Councilmember Alexa Aviles.

Our critique of the EDC submitted to the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (CWP) process in 2021 had no effect, more in rethinkEDC core documents above, so we created the rethinkEDC campaign.

Beloved, respected, award-winning PortSide has been strung along by the EDC since they promised us a home (2008 into 2011) as a community give-back to Red Hook. Note that the EDC admired PortSide’s plans so much that the EDC proposed in their 2008 Maritime Support Services Location Study that such a maritime hub should exist in each of the five boroughs. But the EDC did not let us create our maritime hug and did not make any of those five hubs themselves, and left our ship stuck in the Red Hook container port for the better part of a decade until we got out summer 2015 and back to Atlantic Basin. Over the years, the EDC has obliged us to complete make-work projects such as the 2018 business plan to get the building space they promised us from 2008 into 2011, and so much more.  

EDC retribution

The EDC is known to dislike any criticism. As PortSide began publishing our critique of the EDC, retribution started. First, was the change to our berth permit that no longer allows our ED to live on the ship, an abrupt change which made her homeless as of March 2022 and negatively our safety/security plan.* Next, was the EDC’s abrupt eviction of PortSide Park in late September 2022 using bogus claims of danger to children in proximity to trucks. Next, questions were raised about our insurance and about the message #rethinkEDC we painted on the side of the ship. The EDC shut down our public event schedule on 6/16/23; see update section above. We see a theme of trying to paint PortSide as a roque, non-compliant and unsafe organization. We think it would be better for the EDC to constructively engage with criticism and suggestions - and recognize the value of PortSide what PortSide provides as everyone else does. * Shipkeeper issues seems resolved as of June 2023. We say “seems” since our berth permit has not been finalized as of 9/9/23.

• Proposals to fix the EDC's relationship to Red Hook & EDC's performance in Atlantic Basin

  For proposals on how to Proposals to fix the EDC’s relationship to Red Hook see this document. Red Hook, we’d like your feedback and involvement! Our suggestions include ways to address the problems described in our critique of the EDC’s performance in “Appendix EDC” above. In short:

  1. PortSide finally gets adequate space. The EDC funds us to renovate building space they give us.

  2. Red Hook gets a share of the revenue from the site.

  3. A Red Hook stakeholder group is established to work with the EDC to plan how that revenue is used.

  4. Red Hook entities are paid to execute the proposed fixes and those proposed by the stakeholder group if locals have the skill set.

  5. All prior EDC promises are fulfilled, and Atlantic Basin is run better so that it delivers indirect economic benefits, fosters community development, is more integrated into the fabric of Red Hook, and is more hospitable to tenants and passengers of NYC and cruise ships. Everyone wins.

• What’s the EDC?

  It’s the biggest influence on the NYC economy most people have never heard of. It is NYC’s largest landlord managing over 66 million square feet of property. It is a nonprofit, a quasi-governmental organization with a contract renewed each year to do projects and manage real estate for the city. It is NOT a City agency.

  As described in a 2020 City Council report, “NYCEDC is a self-sustaining non-profit organization that was created to drive and shape New York’s economic growth. It uses City resources to create a bridge between City agencies, private businesses and local communities.” The EDC was formed in 1991 and grew dramatically in size and power under the last two Mayors.

  The City Council does not vote on the EDC’s budget, though revenue the EDC generates from managing City properties goes into the City budget. That means the Council has little control over the EDC’s performance. Former City Comptroller John Liu (now a NYS Senator) called the EDC “a slush fund of power for the Mayor.” The EDC has a master contract with the City of New York via the Department of Small Business Services (SBS) which is reviewed for approval annually by the City Comptroller. Multiple City Comptrollers have issued highly critical audits of the EDC.

  Over time, the EDC has taken over more and more functions of City agencies, such as City Planning, Design and Construction, and Parks. As of March 11, 2020, it was managing 470 capital projects of its own, and 560 for other agencies.

  1.     Manages around 200 City-owned properties, space as diverse as Times Square properties and the Brooklyn Army Terminal industrial park.

  2.     Manages hundreds of capital projects for City agencies including building facilities for the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Brooklyn Public Library, Parks.

  3.     Plans big economic development projects like the rejected Amazon HQ2 in Queens.

  4.     Planned much of NYC’s response to the pandemic.

  5.     Does rezonings (which used to be only done by the Department of City Planning).

  6.     Plans resiliency (flood protection) projects.

  7.     Has major impact on NYC’s food supply because it runs the Hunts Point Market where perishable food (fruit, vegetables, seafood) arrives, the Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market and 6 food markets such as the Essex Market.

  8.     Manages the NYC Ferry system (the private company Hornblower runs the boats, the EDC controls the plans for the system and the docks) and the cruise ship terminals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  9.     Manages a large portfolio of maritime locations via Dock NYC.

  10.                        And more…

• What’s the problem?

  1.     Incompetence. This compromises all they do. They build things that don’t work. They install the wrong thing. They move slowly and are hard on contractors and vendors. They lack vision. With high staff turnover, the EDC lacks deep institutional knowledge and doesn’t learn from their mistakes because they don’t listen. All that makes it hard to do capital projects well, and a major capital project tasked to the EDC is planning NYC’s resiliency/flood protection infrastructure.

  2.     Destructive planning and contracting method. EDC staff don’t create the plans; they seek others to do the work with EDC staff managing the contracts. This is done by putting out Requests for Proposals (RFPs), Requests for Expressions of Interest (RFEIs ), and Requests for Quotes (RFQs) which oblige companies to prepare proposals in order to get the contract. The EDC terms are difficult and hyper-detailed which drives away respondents and favors huge firms that can handle the high friction in the EDC system. Respondents have to do the work of imagining the solutions and writing the proposals for free, to face the known risk that the EDC uses this process to plunder ideas from a respondent and give them to other, favored applicants. The EDC staff which has high turnover, can lack the expertise to asses the responses; and the turnover makes it hard to offer the continuity needed for long-term capital projects such as planning the City’s flood protection. The EDC also takes a long time to finalize contracts resulting from this approach, and time is money spent. All this reduces the applicant pool over time, reducing the source of ideas/solutions. It’s a perverse system with high barriers for entry that produces many RFPs and studies that go nowhere, all of which exhausts respondents, wastes money, drives out small innovative firms, and is a poor way to find good solutions. As evidence, see the history of EDC planning processes for Atlantic Basin, with many unfulfilled promises along the way.

  3.     Selfish developer – Where the EDC manages property, they relate to the neighboring community like a remote, extractive, colonial power, taking all the revenue and benefits, and ignoring needs, requests and complaints. The EDC generally does not re-invest in the local community or collaborate to create community benefits and synergies. On 11/7/22, we heard that the EDC has offered to redirect 50% of Coney Island boardwalk lease revenue into the Coney community; there should be more of this. The EDC totally fails to understand how to create indirect economic benefits (using the activity on the EDC site to trigger positive effects off the site). They regularly promise jobs and community give-backs they never deliver. Frustration and rage are standard community responses to the EDC’s presence in a neighborhood.

  4.     Lack of equity – The EDC by choice and by the MO described above favors mega real estate developments, developers, and corporations. The EDC fosters gentrification by design and/or without any concern for the effects of the gentrification caused by their plans. The EDC version of development continually displaces the community. The EDC has historically favored luxury residential development over manufacturing and been disdainful of blue collar work.

  5.     A difficult landlord – By turns unresponsive and micromanaging and sometimes bullying, the EDC has leases with punishing terms such as a business can be displaced on 30 days notice without explanation (as in the berth permit for all the ships in Atlantic Basin most of which were evicted on 4 days notice in late September 2022).

  6.     Uncontrollable. There are few ways to control them because they are NOT part of City government, so the City Council does not vote on their budget. They are unresponsive to elected officials, the community, and the media. Multiple audits by multiple Comptrollers have cited problems to little effect. The Mayor controls the EDC, and if the Mayor likes the that kind of power, we get this result.

  7.     Fakers. They do astro-turfing (running fake grassroots groups) and pretend to use government fairness rules when, in fact, they award contracts to whoever and however they like. They have engaged in illegal lobbying. They hire PR firms to manipulate public opinion and media reporting.

  8.     Evasive. They avoid media FOIL requests for information.

  9.     Wasting our money. They cover up by paying for their inefficiency and errors with revenue from the City property they manage, in effect sucking up money that should go to the City budget (which the City Council does vote on) by paying for their mistakes and pet projects. A recent and glaring example is during the pandemic how they used revenue from Times Square properties to subsidize the NYC Ferry.

  10.   Way too big. The EDC’s power, and range of activities grew a lot under Mayor Bloomberg and also under de Blasio. Item description

• Action items

  If you have a tip about EDC activity in your community or workplace, send an email to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org. If you want your contribution anonymous, let us know, and we will not reveal the source.

  • Amplify this campaign by using the hashtag #rethinkEDC.

  • If you want to support this effort more actively, send an email to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org. We could use the help of a PR firm. We can use thoughtful creatives to help with social media messaging, making graphics for #rethinkEDC, etc.

  • If your preferred media have not been reporting on the EDC, contact them to suggest that they do so.

  • NYC is represented by a lot of new elected officials. Ask them how they think to fix the dysfunction that is the EDC. Reform it? Shrink it? Give much of its work to existing City agencies? After the ravages of the pandemic, NYC cannot allow the failure rate of the bloated EDC to be the norm.

  • You can also support by donating, as time is money; and we have spent a lot of time on this. Also, what the EDC has done to PortSide has negatively impacted our budget. Click the yellow DONATE tab on this page. Thanks!

• About the EDC performance elsewhere in NYC

  EDC issues are not a bug but a feature! PortSide’s advocacy work and research has us in contact with businesses, nonprofits and community groups around the City. We read extensively on economic development since a goal of our planned innovative maritime center (thus far largely blocked by the EDC) is using maritime for community and economic development. As a maritime organization, most of the following relates to waterfront issues; but we include some links about inland matters to demonstrate that PortSide’s experience with the EDC and the EDC’s mismanagement of Atlantic Basin are not one-offs or just about the waterfront; they are symptomatic of the EDC in general. If you have suggestions, please email chiclet@portsidenewyork.org.

  NYC COMPTROLLER AUDITS OF THE EDC

  See the collection here.

  Several NYC Comptrollers in a row have issued critical audits of the EDC. The most recent one by Brad Lander’s team, the audit of 7/6/22, focused on the EDC management of NYC Ferry and was highly critical. The audit found that the EDC hid over $224 million in expenditures and hid real ridership numbers and demographics, and the EDC’s financial decisions resulted in over $66 million in unnecessary expenditures, plus other problems.

  IN 2012, NYS AG FINDS EDC GUILTY OF ILLEGAL LOBBYING

  The NYS Attorney General (NYS AG) found that the EDC had participated in illegal lobbying working with local development corporation (LDC) groups in Willlets Point and Coney Island. “These local development corporations flouted the law by lobbying elected officials, both directly and through third parties, to win approval of their favored projects. As a result of today’s agreement, these organizations will reform their practices to comply with the law and end lobbying through proxies in the communities they serve,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. Press release

  In a 12-page agreement, the EDC was ordered and agreed to restructure: “WHEREAS, after OAG commenced its investigation, the City caused to be formed two new Type C not-for-profit corporations: (l) New York City Economic Growth Corporation ("EGC") and (2) New York City Land Development Corporation ("NYCLDC"). NYCLDC was incorporated pursuant to Section l4l1 of the N-PCL. Subject to satisfying the statutory requirements for merger, EDC intends to merge into EGC. It is anticipated that NYCLDC will enter into a contract with EGC for the performance of administrative support services by EGC for NYCLDC. Upon the merger the name of EGC will change to New York City Economic Development Corporation”

  Among the terms of the agreement are:

  • A ban on lobbying the City Council in connection with development projects;

  • A ban on employing lobbyists or government relations consultants, participating in the development of third-party communications with the City Council, using others LDCs to lobby, or otherwise lobbying indirectly;

  • Mandatory compliance training for directors, officers and employees; and

  • Public disclosure by EDC of any funding provided to other LDCs or personnel overlap with other LDCs.

  Media reporting of this matter, while John Liu was Comptroller:

  1.     New York Times article from 4/28/10 “In examining one of New York’s most powerful agencies, which is involved in projects in places like Coney Island in Brooklyn and Willets Point in Queens, Mr. Liu said he found a lack of transparency and loose internal controls. “It has become a powerhouse agency, but we have very little understanding of what comes in and out of it,” he said. “You cannot see anything that is going on.” The audit represents a stinging critique of an agency that under Mr. Bloomberg has swelled in the size of its budget and in its importance as the primary vehicle for an aggressive development agenda.”

  2.     DNAInfo 7/3/12 after the EDC found guilty of illegal lobbying and astroturfing “City Comptroller John Liu praised the ruling and said that the city’s economic development process "is in dire need of greater transparency, accountability, and inclusiveness." "While these revelations of illegal lobbying are alarming, we cannot say that they come as a surprise. For some time, this mayor has been using the Economic Development Corporation to create ‘Astroturf’ groups to support his agenda, reward allies and dole out welfare to wealthy corporations," he said. "While New Yorkers fund the EDC to create jobs — those jobs seldom materialize," he said.

  July 13, 2023, new EDC problems with their Willets Point plans came to light via a Carpenters Union protest. The EDC is violating terms of the agreement and not using union labor on their Willets Point project.

  MEDIA COVERAGE OF OTHER EDC PROJECTS

  Citywide

  • This June 2014 Alex Ulam article in Dissent Magazine about NYC economic development policies overall focuses on EDC work during the Bloomberg era and shows that the pattern of EDC issues we cover on this webpage goes back at least that far.

  • Amazon HQ2 and other flops

  • 3/28/19 Crain’s EDC's recent challenges extend well beyond Amazon debacle. The article starts with a roster of EDC bellyflops.

  • THE CITY, 8/28/19, despite the NYS Attorney General finding the EDC guilty of illegal lobbying in 2012 as above, the EDC continues to use lobbying techniques to push their agenda. After failing to push the Amazon HQ2 deal through past local opposition in Queens, the EDC paid a consultant $80,000 for a ‘“reputational rescue” make-over and new PR plan instead of investing money in how to do better economic development or work better with communities. Quotes in the article show how community voices and elected officials resent the EDC’s focus on lobbying and PR rather than focusing on community needs.

  • Coney Island: planning for NYC Ferry and boardwalk leases

  • The NYC Ferry was started by the de Blasio administration as a project tasked to the EDC. Note that NYC does have an agency tasked with ferries, that is the DOT; it runs the Staten Island ferry. As much as PortSide is a passionate advocate for maritime transportation, there is much about how the EDC runs NYC Ferry that concerns us. Despite NYC’s economy having been ravaged by the pandemic, de Blasio was eager to grow the NYC Ferry network in what looked like an effort to cement a legacy project of his. The EDC’s urgency to expand the ferry into Coney Island shows classic EDCitis: astro-turfing, falsifying data, ignoring community input and concerns.

  • 11/12/22 Hell Gate EDC stops creation of Coney Island ferry though they installed the dock and spent millions of dollars and years planning. This article covers many issues cited in earlier media stories below.

  • 8/1/19 Brooklyn Paper, the EDC claims the ferry site has not been chosen. In fact, that site was chosen, dredging started, and then the community spotted pollution being created by the job.

  • 12/13/21 New York Times, environmental data about toxic risks of dredging from Park’s Department scientists was suppressed by the Parks Department. Community advocates believe this was done due to pressure from the EDC and a conflict of interest within Parks. The Kaiser Park fishing pier needed repair, the EDC fixed it; but then wanted to use it for the ferry landing.

  • Brownstoner 6/2/22 Coney NYC Ferry project on pause after extensive community pushback, a DEC fine for violating dredging standards, and more.

  • 11/17/20 Coneyologist (Charles Denson) Environmental Racism and the Coney Island Ferry

  • 10/5/22 Brooklyn Paper about Coney board walk leases, an editorial by Kouichi Shirayanagi & Craig Hammerman. Many Coney voices have been frustrated with how the EDC runs the boardwalk, and that they even manage the boardwalk leases at all. Some Coney voices demanded that EDC share revenue from the boardwalk leases with the community, instead of the EDC taking it all. One of those, Craig Hammerman was District Manager of our local community board CB6 for years and brought his knowledge of the EDC saga with PortSide/Red Hook to Coney when he moved there. In a CB13 meeting on 9/28/22, Coney scored a win when the EDC offered to share revenue by redirecting 50% of the boardwalk lease revenue to local parks. See the meeting video link here queued up to the start of the EDC presentation. The same Coney voices want to have a say in how and where the revenue is redirected and don’t necessarily want it going to the Parks Department.

  • East New York

  • City Limits 11/15/21 De Blasio Said East New York’s Rezoning Would Spur Industrial Jobs Boom. That Hasn’t Happened.

  • Essex Street Market

  • The Lo-Down 9/29/15 “Anne Saxelby says “enough is enough.” After years of frustration dealing with New York City’s Economic Development Corp. (EDC), operator of the Essex Street Market, she has run out of patience. Saxelby, head of the vendor association, told The Lo-Down recently “The EDC continues to demonstrate ineptitude in managing this market… They are masters of inaction and bumbling. We want alternative management now, if it’s not already too late.” Anne Saxelby is unavailable for follow up; she died 10/9/21.

  • Hunters Point, Queens and NYC Ferry

  • This 12/6/22 Sunnyside Post article describes common community frustrations with the EDC, e.g. a lack of transparency, outreach and communication to the point of presenting a plan once the public comment period is over. As an advocate for growing maritime activity, PortSide is concerned that growth of a ferry system is negatively impacted by the EDC’s approach to communities as it so often creates distrust and then opposition.

  • South Street Seaport area

  The EDC plays a large role in developing and managing property on the waterfront and inland in this area of Manhattan as well as making the resiliency plans for the area. For decades, staff and volunteers of the South Street Seaport Museum have privately lamented the recurrent challenges to the museum presented by the EDC; however, the museum stays officially quiet, putting them in what we call “the Commiseration Society.” The organization Save our Seaport raises issues publicly as does Manhattan Community Board 1.

  Undated statement by The City Club of New York on their a webpage about the South Street Seaport, “The City, through the Economic Development Corporation has for two decades been selling off its birthplace, the South Street Seaport, piece by piece. This great Historic District and its cultural center and interpreter, the South Street Seaport Museum, has been treated by the EDC as a checking account”

  Sunset Park

  The EDC runs multiple sites in Sunset Park including Bush Terminal which was rebranded as Made in NY, Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market, Brooklyn Army Terminal, South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT). The EDC has also run several planning endeavors on the Sunset Park waterfront including the Sunset Park Vision Plan of 2009. We will populate this section more soon.

  Readers need to understand that local maritime businesses have been straining to grow for years. They are eager for waterfront/pier/dock space. The EDC’s inability to “activate” maritime sites is thus noteworthy. The EDC floundered for years trying to activate one major site, the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT). One EDC plan would have had Axis importing cars on barges crossing the harbor. PortSide had been told by a rail expert that the plan would never work, and it never did get off the ground. SBMT then lay dormant for a while. Next, the EDC proposed that SBMT be a staging area for the New York Wheel, a huge Ferris wheel they planned for the north shore of Staten Island. A shipment of parts arrived in 2016, but that Staten Island project sputtered, stalled, and then failed (see below).

  When the EDC sought a long-term lease for SBMT while Carlos Menchaca was Councilman, he refused to rubber stamp this request; and in the push back, the President/CEO of the EDC Kyle Kimball left. Menchaca got the EDC to sign an LOI that required the EDC to take community input into their forthcoming SBMT RFP, to have the resulting plan for the site benefit the community (the usual EDC model is that they take all the revenue and give back nothing), and that the EDC complete some unfinished promises in his district. All of those were in Sunset Park except providing space for PortSide in Red Hook. That is how our ship got out of the Red Hook Container Terminal on 5/29/15, but we did not get all the space the EDC had promised us from Spring 2008 into Spring 2011. We’ve been trying to get the building space portion of that ever since.

  Staten Island

  The EDC has several projects and sites on the north shore with a strong track record of inaction and/or failure. When the New York Wheel project tanked in 2018, that also represented an EDC failure in Sunset Park at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT), the second EDC failure there (see above). The nonprofit National Lighthouse Museum has had a particularly difficult time with the EDC. The difficulties prompted the board to disband at one point. One of their board members contacted PortSide around this time; we had no solutions to offer, we were facing the same uphill battle with the EDC.

  • 10/24/18 Staten Island Advance Exclusive: New York Wheel project is dead

  • 9/1/20 THE CITY Staten Island Outlet Mall Struggles to Pay Back $8.5M City Debt. The Empire Outlets mall never flourished. This EDC project opened May 2019 with only half its stores filled and struggled to pay its loan from the EDC. It cost $350 million to build. Nearly $100 million came from state and city subsidies.

  • 2/14/22 The Real Deal BFC’s Empire Outlets on Staten Island enters foreclosure.

  • 4/12/22 North Shore residents to NYC: ‘We want our waterfront back’ The New York Wheel project destroyed a park that had been at that location; and years after that project failed and the site was left fenced off, the community wants access to the waterfront again. The community is frustrated by the process as well, “I really would like to see us begin to have a conversation that changes the whole dynamic of this waterfront and gives it a plan. ... We need you to work with the community work, with our council members’ office and begin to talk about how do we change the dynamic of this ridiculous waterfront. Every single project on the waterfront, whether it was NYCEDC supported or not, has failed,” the Staten Island Urban Center CEO added.”

  • 10/16/22 Staten Island Advance: Languishing Staten Island waterfront projects will be addressed in ‘coming months.’ Here is the opening paragraph: “A host of failed economic development projects cover the Staten Island waterfront, and most point back to one agency — the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC).”

  • 9/11/22 Staten Island Advance Editorial “We’ve waited long enough: City must fix Pier 1 on the North Shore” about Pier 1

  • National Lighthouse Museum

  • 11/19/09 The board of the National Lighthouse Museum, Staten Island, New York, disbands. The EDC figures prominently in the struggle that led the board to do this. We know because they called us seeking advice; you can also read about it at that link.

    • 1/28/14 Staten Island Advance Staten Island's National Lighthouse Museum in limbo. The EDC would not grant a lease until they raised more money; the assurance of a lease would help the museum raise funds. The EDC has trapped PortSide in similar chicken or the egg dilemmas, wanting us to have a bigger budget after their behavior made budget growth impossible.

  Willets Point

  In 2012, the NYS AG found the EDC guilty of illegal lobbying in Willets Point (and Coney Island). More in a section near the top above. July 13, 2023, new EDC problems with their Willets Point plans came to light via a Carpenters Union protest. The EDC is violating terms of the agreement and not using union labor on their Willets Point project.

  ACADEMIC AND THINK TANK REPORTS ABOUT THE EDC

  • 2/7/22 Social Justice Commission Report, Pages 63 through 67, the section “Economic Development,” expresses concerns about the EDC and proposes solutions. This report was created by a commission impaneled by civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel and presented to Mayor Eric Adams on 2/7/22. A year before, in January 2021, PortSide reached out to Siegel to discuss concerns about the EDC, and we had several lengthy conversations.

  • 6/28/21 Abolish the EDC by Avi Garelick and Andrew Schustek. An excerpt says “The EDC uses its immense powers and subsidies in the name of job creation—but it’s unclear how many jobs it actually creates. At a 2019 City Council hearing, then-Councilmember Ritchie Torres skewered then EDC CEO James Patchett for the corporation’s anemic progress on the de Blasio administration’s marquee jobs program. “Anyone who heard the mayor’s [2017] State of the City would believe there are actual jobs…but anyone who believes that is operating under a false assumption,” Torres said. While promising 100,000 good-paying jobs, EDC could only claim credit for 3,000 — which took $300 million in public spending to create.”

  • 12/23/21 NYCEDC Function in Regard to NYC Gentrification Projects, by Marlon Bailey. In this big picture criticism of the EDC, NYS Senator Julia Salazar is quoted saying, “The city and state can sustain projects that can support a healthy local economy without supporting bad economic development projects and enormous tax subsidies for corporations, as the EDC does.”

  EMPLOYEE REVIEWS ABOUT WORKING AT THE EDC

  • glassdoor reviews reflect some of the issues we cover in our critique of the EDC, especially in the section “Institutional Culture” in Appendix EDC.

News & Updates

NEWS 12/1/22: PortSide is subjected to censorship energy. After posting the press release here, we began getting emails from the EDC, our dockmaster, and then the Port Authority saying the #rethinkEDC slogan on the side of our ship was not in compliance with the EDC-Port Authority lease (e.g., advance written permission for signs/advertising is required - who knew? And this is considered “expressive activity” which we are told needs a permit.) The EDC has not constructively engaged with our criticisms or proposals.

12/14/22: One week ago, the Mayor and EDC announced that MSC Cruise ships would come to Red Hook next year. We congratulate our friends at Ports America for the increased business but must point out after checking with the Parks Department that the official announcement includes 1) false info and 2) possibly false info and 3) missing info. 

1.     MSC Cruse is donating $236,000, and the City is claiming that seven Red Hook GreenThumb parks are benefitting. There are no such parks. There is $71,000 going to seven community gardens across the BQE in the Columbia Waterfront District. The Red Hook park that should have benefitted would be to return our pandemic popup PortSide Park that the EDC evicted in September, making several misrepresentations (that it was dangerous for kids due to trucks, and trucking near it would increase with the construction of NYC Ferry Homeport 2.) The balance of MSC’s donation of $236,000 is going to the City Junior Ambassadors program for 7th graders.  No idea if any Red Hook kids are in that, but we all know there are lots of Red Hook youth programs for whom that would have been a very impactful amount of money, including PortSide.  Red Hook should directly benefit from the MSC generosity, not programs elsewhere; and proper economic development would have the EDC share Atlantic Basin revenue with Red Hook, not have the City lean on foreign companies to donate to City agencies.

2.     The City is claiming that 10,000 NYC jobs and 150 jobs in the Red Hook terminal will be created due to the MSC ships coming. The EDC has a history of inflating job counts here and elsewhere. Back when the EDC promised benefits from the cruise terminal to Red Hook before it opened, the EDC said it would create 290 permanent, full time jobs in Red Hook. A year later, the Observer said 8-10 jobs had been created. See page 15 of our critique of the EDC here for more on that. These MSC ships will not be “port of call” ships when passengers visit the location. That being the case, how will 10,000 NYC jobs be created by these ship calls? It is possible that passengers will spend time in NYC before and/or after their cruise; but the City should show the math for how they came up with a job count this high.

3.     The news of the MSC ships should have included an update on the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal shorepower situation – way overdue to be fixed as Eric Adams, while Brooklyn Borough President, committed $750,000 April 2021 to fixing it.

Late April 2023: The EDC released an RFP for Pier 11, Atlantic Basin - Anchor Tenant Sub-Lease. The space occupied by our flagship, the tanker MARY A. WHALEN is available in the lease, meaning no home for PortSide is guaranteed, and we clarified during the EDC’s site visit that no home is guaranteed. The RFP expresses interest in a last-mile facility, though unlike the other ones currently built or being built in Red Hook calls, for use of the waterways (waterborne freight). This aligns with the freight plan announced by Mayor de Blasio in the last days of his term called Delivering Green which proposed that NYC Ferries “moonlight” and move last mile freight at night, after the hours of passenger service. Note that the EDC is currently building a large homeport for NYC Ferry in Atlantic Basin so a part of their ferry fleet would be here on site, next to a mostly empty warehouse, next to the Red Hook Container Terminal that has already done a test run with UPS for moving tractor trailers across the harbor by barge. We also note that UPS has not built on the former site of the Lidgerwood complex that occupies two blocks of space north of Valentino Park and abuts the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal Wolcott Street entrance. The EDC also received a $5.16MM grant from the federal DOT Maritime Administration (MARAD) to build landings to receive freight being distributed locally. Many things thus suggest that the RFP seeks a maritime-focused last-mile facility.

PortSide has advocated for waterborne freight (also called “marine highway”) since we were founded in 2005 (see pages 3 and 4 of this 2006 testimony), and we have done extensive research into how the current last-mile facilities built and planned for Red Hook and Sunset Park could use the marine highway. See our 2023 blogpost here. However, we do not think that the execution of the marine highway idea should cost PortSide a home. A better plan would enable the growth of this maritime nonprofit, which consistently comes up good ideas and delivers impactful and award-winning programs. The EDC has for years cherrypicked from PortSide plans and recommendations and put those ideas in their RFPs and work without enabling PortSide, the source of such good ideas, to thrive. The EDC should finally fulfill promises to Red Hook and PortSide going back to 2008 for a right-sized PortSide. Those plans we recap in our blogpost about the 2018 business plan for building space here that we did at the EDC’s request.

PortSide comments on the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan

• Overwhelming support for PortSide ignored by CWP!

  TWO THIRDS of all comments, over 200, were submitted to the CWP process referencing PortSide, all of them in favor of our demand to have the EDC finally “right-size PortSide” and give us the space and permissions we need and merit. See our list of requests on the webpage about our 2018 business plan here.

  Here is the list of all comments to CWP supporting PortSide. We have edited the list to remove email addresses, so bots don’t harvest email addresses and spam them. For media who would like contact these people, please send an email to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org. We will then forward your request to them.

• PortSide 2022 analysis of the final CWP

  We note that the final Comprehensive Waterfront Plan ignores its own mandates.

  The CWP repeatedly calls for community stewardship, input, and engagement of NYC’s waterfront and serving low-income communities of color, communities lacking waterfront access and amenities. PortSide is an award-winning example of waterfront stewardship! The 200+ comments above are massive community input. PortSide went from visible and embraced in the prior CWP “Vision 2020” to erased in the latest plan — even though TWO THIRDS of all comments submitted were about us.

  Note that “Vision 2020” mentioned PortSide or our ship Mary Whalen by name 3 times. “Vision 2020” also affirmed PortSide plans without using our name in the goals of the following sections:

  REACH Neighborhood Strategies 14 S.-BROOKLYN UPPER BAY SOUTH, Pg. 142

  “Piers 7-12

  Build a multi-use path to connect Atlantic Basin to the Brooklyn waterfront greenway.

  Explore preservation of historic properties and creation of waterfront interpretive center focused on history of working waterfront. Pursue development of a “hub” for maritime support services in Atlantic Basin. Study opportunities for active water-related public uses in Atlantic Basin, such as recreation and educational programming. “

  “Sunset Park

  Explore locations for a maritime support services “hub,” where workboats can receive services such as provisioning, crew changes, wastewater removal, and fuel. “

  How can DCP not mention PortSide in a plan touting the importance of community input when the community input overwhelmingly supports PortSide? Was someone’s thumb on the scale to erase that much community input, or is the CWP just an exercise in virtue signaling?

  We also note that all terms relating to maritime appeared much less often in the new plan. DCP produced a waterfront plan with little focus on maritime!

  To see the shift in values from the CWP of 2010 (“Vision 2020”) and the one from 2021, see our word analysis comparing terms used in the two plans here.

  The mismatch between DCP words and City action was starkly clear fall of 2022. In early October, Mayor Eric Adams was promoting the need to grow shoreline parks in neighborhoods like ours in this DCP video, released just a week after the EDC evicted PortSide Park, a pandemic popup that provided a beloved, heavily-used minipark in the kind of neighborhood the video says needs such a park.

EDC issues in Red Hook’s Atlantic Basin, summer 2023

For the TLDR folks:

The NYC EDC promised Red Hook a lot over the years starting in 2005. The EDC did not fulfill those promises to Red Hook about how their management of Atlantic Basin would benefit the community. Spring 2023, Councilmember Alexa Avilés intervened to fix the latest batch of EDC problems: she ran months of weekly Zooms with the EDC and community members over the summer; she co-authored a City Council bill Intro 1050 that would oblige the EDC to fulfill some of those promises. In response, in September 2023, the EDC put out a press release with yet more promises.  Many people are concerned about the EDC’s RFP for Atlantic Basin that they released witthout notifying local people as it looks to be planning a last mile facility, but one using the waterways, and many last mile facilities have been built in Red Hook during the pandemic, with more on the way.

June 6, the EDC shut down PortSide programs while we were trying to get the EDC to renew our berth permit (a contract for our ship MARY WHALEN to be here). We get Councilmember Avilés involved in this too; but the EDC keeps moving the goal posts and the process drags on until October 6, so we lose the whole summer program season.

Our nonprofit PortSide has monitored the EDC’s performance in Atlantic Basin for years (see webpage here) and is one of the victims of EDC unfulfilled promises; so on behalf of all, in late 2022 we launched a campaign to reform the EDC called #rethinkEDC. The EDC is the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit, quasi-governmental organization that does a huge amount of work for NYC City government. 

In detail

The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (BCT) in Red Hook is located inside the “Atlantic Basin” facility owned by the Port Authority and managed by the NYC EDC.  PortSide is in here on Pier 11 aboard the ship MARY A. WHALEN. In 2023, use of BCT on Pier 12 soared to unprecedented levels with many more ships and weekly visits by the biggest ship we’ve ever had here, the 5th largest cruise ship in the world MSC Meraviglia as of April 20, 2023. The max passenger count plus crew count of that ship at 6,636 is about 2/3 of the population of Red Hook.  The western side of the peninsula of Red Hook was buried in traffic, causing the B61 bus to be re-routed and an ambulance to drive down the Van Brunt Street sidewalk. Businesses couldn’t get staff and customers in. The gridlock lasted for hours.

How much traffic?  What we now know is that standard volume for the MSC ship Meraviglia is 400 to 600 vehicles inbound per hour from 7am until 11:15am, tapering down to 200 vehicles when it ends at noon, according to measurements on 6/4 and 6/11. Red Hook was already agitated about traffic due to number of last mile facilities built here during the pandemic.

Full traffic report here.

* We have two air quality monitors on our MARY WHALEN’s wheelhouse: see Purple air map and our Davis AQI.

Many Red Hook people complained to Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Councilmember Alexa Avilés. Those elected officials wrote a joint letter to the EDC.  Alexa sent the EDC another letter on 8/7/23 about shorepower and other cruise EJ issues.

To tackle this, Avilés set up a weekly Zoom call with the EDC, the new Red Hook Business Alliance (we’re members and were on these Zooms), and residents Kiki Rakowsky and Matias Kalwill. These weekly Zooms ran throughout the summer and focused on improving the traffic situation, though other issues lurked in the background:

• the cruise terminal had never delivered economic benefits to Red Hook.

• the EDC had not fixed the shorepower, though they promised to in 2019 (after years of dodging questions) and getting $750,000 from Borough Hall in April, 2021. The air pollution* is a burden on this EJ neighborhood and does not help fight climate change.

• the EDC had not delivered the home they promised to us PortSide on round one (2008 into 2011) or just the building space after the 2018 business plan they made us do. Then, on June 6, 2023 they cancelled our summer programs during an unfair process to renew our berth permit (a contract for our flagship MARY WHALEN to be here). The berth permit negotiations, with CM Alexa Aviles’ office assisting, were not concluded until 10/6/23, so we were prevented from having 2023 summer programs. This may cost PortSide some $30,000 in grant money, deprived us of the opportunity for the many fundraising/friendraising concerts we planned, reduced the number of volunteers we recruited since people often learn about us and volunteer via events; AND deprived those that we serve of our programs.

• The EDC released an RFP for Atlantic Basin Anchor subtenant that looked like a plan for another last mile facility – NOT a popular idea in Red Hook - though one using the waterways - and would displace the MARY WHALEN, making PortSide homeless.

During the first of the weekly Zooms with the EDC, Susan Povich, head of the Red Hook Business Alliance and owner of the Red Hook Lobster Pound asked if the EDC had made plans to deal with the huge surge in traffic. The answer was ‘no” and indicative of the extractive way the EDC has run this entire facility (taking the revenue and not givnig back nor mitigating negative effects).

This compounded the nothing the EDC had done over the years to make the cruise terminal easy to find and the Atlantic Basin facility easy to navigate (despite many PortSide suggestions).  There was a lack of signage inside and out. They had not communicated directions to all the wayfinding apps the way the Port Authority does for the airports, so hundreds of drivers were misled by uninformed apps. Part of the problem is that the MSC passengers are coming in individual cars, not in coach buses like many of Cunard’s QM2 passengers (a ship that carries half the number of passengers), so the MSC Meraviglia meant many more vehicles and non-professional drivers who might know how to get here.

Chaos ensued, some of it dangerous since pedestrians were not well separated inside Atlantic Basin from moving and parked cars and huge trucks; and the corner of Pioneer Street and Conover was a mess with bikes coming off the Greenway to encounter a gridlock of double-parked cars and clumps of cruise passengers with rolling luggage. The pedestrian gate at that corner is not wide enough to handle more that one person at a time, so pedestrian clustering and clogging was intense. 

The vehicular entrance to Atlantic Basin was gridlocked, so passenger pick-up and drop-off began occurring blocks away from BCT, congesting local streets further.   

Local users of the Red Hook/Atlantic Basin ferry stop found the ferry system overwhelmed and hard to use. No extra boats were added on cruise ship days.  

None of this worked well for anyone.

Avilés and/or her Chief of Staff Ed Cerna ran weekly Zooms, and Red Hook voices shared the latest documentation of problems and offered many solutions.  Community people basically tackled a long list of operational challenges that the EDC should know to do and should have done.  Here are some early suggestions from PortSide. The EDC was very responsive, and hired traffic engineers who also made suggestions, and things improved each week.

Here are some immediate changes during cruise days:

• The interior roadway of Atlantic Basin was changed to 3 lanes, 2 in and 1 out.

• The exit for BCT on MSC days became Wolcott Street to get vehicles out faster.

• People were paid to direct exiting vehicles as to the best way out of Red Hook.

• The MSC ship sailed later to allow for more time for boarding.

• The wayfinding apps were all notified of how to get to and into Atlantic Basin. NYPD were stationed at several intersections.

• Crossing guards were added to the corner of Pioneer and Conover and the crosswalk just inisde Atlantic Basin by that corner.

• The block of Conover south of that corner had the bikepath protected by road cones so that cars could not use it as a loading/unloading zone.

• By October, the EDC added ferries on days when cruise ship passengers were visiting NYC, and more.

During the last Zoom of the summer on 8/11/23, the traffic engineers hired by the EDC presented this report (the source of the traffic study slides on this page). The understanding was that the Zoom working group would take a 2-week break and resume to discuss economic development, eg economic benefits for Red Hook – something the EDC had totally failed to deliver to Red Hook in their management of Atlantic Basin, and had not shown any signs of attempting.

Alexa Avilés team did a great job ensuring progress, but a Councilmember should not have to spend this kind of time on operations. This is the kind of work a good economic development agency would do on their own.

Intro 1050

During the first month of weekly EDC Zoom meetings, Avilés had also been partnering with the Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who has the larger Manhattan cruise terminal in his district, to co-author City Council bill Intro 1050, released May 25, 2023, which would oblige the EDC to do what it has not done on its own. The bill mandates that the EDC supply shorepower at both terminals, only allow ships that use shorepower to visit NYC, and create traffic management plans.  

Avilés and Bottcher held a press conference about Intro 1050 on Red Hook’s Pioneer Street on September 18 with a cruise ship in the background. 

Tweets about the press conference 

• Councilmember Alexa Avilés

• Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso

• NYS Senator Andrew Gounardes

Reporting about the press conference 

• Streetsblog

• AMNY

• Brooklyn News 12

The surprising EDC response

Ten days after the press conference about Intro 1050, on September 28, 2023, the EDC surprised everyone by putting out a press release with promises about shorepower use, traffic plans, and community benefits. The relevant Councilmembers Bottcher and Avilés were not quoted (a deviation from protocol), nor were any Red Hook voices. The EDC has a history of NOT fulfilling promises in Red Hook, so having the EDC promise more things has not been reassuring.

Additionally, the terms in the EDC proposal leave much to be desired. Here are some observations:

• The EDC proposed their own (slow) schedule for installing shorepower, did not separate the BCT shorepower timeline from Manhattan (fix ours already, Manhattan doesn’t have any yet, so why should Red Hook have to wait until Manhattan’s is installed?). 

• The EDC is offering to create a community benefit fund via a head tax on cruise passengers, but that is not fair to Red Hook. This neighborhood gets no significant economic benefit from the cruise ships whereas Manhattan does, and the EDC makes money here via more than the cruise terminal. In short, Red Hook deserves a share from ALL that the EDC makes in Atlantic Basin and should get a higher percentage than Manhattan since Red Hook gets almost no indirect economic benefits from the cruise terminal but Manhattan gets lots.

• Also, the EDC proposes to manage the community benefit fund, but why would Red Hook trust the EDC to run the community benefit fund they are proposing? They’ve ignored the community for years.

• The EDC should fulfill some old promises, one being space for a fully-realized PortSide NewYork, NOT displacing us via an RFP.

EDC backtracking

At some point in the year, the EDC began to backtrack on one improvement, their new BCT schedule webpage. In 2023, they FINALLY separated Brooklyn and Manhattan cruise shedules onto separate webpages (something PortSide suggested for years) and grew it to include all we had suggested. The backtracking shows how the EDC evades accountability and transparency. The colums on the right side of the page have changed. At the point we think they were the best, they showed if a ship was shorepower compatible and if it had connected to shorepower.

• It’s no longer possible to tell if a ship connected. As of November 5, 2023, and for some time now, the two right columns say if the ship is shorepower compatible and if it is BCT shorepower compatible; there’s no info about actual connection.

• At some point, the EDC also began deleting the list of ships that had already been here this year, so it’s not possible to see at a glance how often cruise ships are impacting Red Hook in terms of ship exhaust or vehicle traffic.

Similarly, the EDC’s new language about the Brooklyn shorepower evades accountability. This year the EDC began saying “we are proud of the Brooklyn shorepower installation for being the first on the east coast.” That positioning is slippery PR and severely disrespectful to the EJ community of Red Hook that fought to have the shorepower installed and then suffered years of EDC evasion about why it isn’t working and years of EDC delays fixing it.

For a detailed history of the BCT shorepower saga, visit Adam Armstrong’s blog (active into 2018) and very active Twitter feed.

EDC machinations with PortSide’s 2023 berth permit

PortSide’s experience renewing our berth permit in 2023 reveals the kind of EDC machinations that are chronic.

Starting Spring 2022, the EDC would deny PortSide requests saying “it violates our lease with the Port Authority.” We’d check with the Port Authority; and in every case, the EDC statement was false. For example, no, the EDC is not prevented from renting us the size building space for the term we requested in our 2018 business plan.

After checking with the Port Authority several times about such EDC claims, the Port Authority told us to FOIL the lease (submit a Freedom of Information Law request, the official way to get info from governmental organizations). We did that immediately in October 2022. 

During our berth permit negotiations, in April 2023, the EDC claimed another PortSide request violated their lease, our desire to again have a shipkeeper (overnight presence on the ship). Unfortunately, the Port Authority didn’t respond for almost two months, so the EDC said our summer programs were cancelled since we hadn’t signed the berth permit while were waiting to hear from the Port Authority. The Port Authority responded promptly to the cancellation of PortSide’s summer programs by sending their lease with the EDC (and no, shipkeepers are NOT prohibited) and by sending a Port Authority shipkeeper policy (which the EDC ultimately ignored).

We got our Councilmember Alexa Avilés involved and asked for her to run Zoom meetings with the EDC as she had done for the cruise traffic issues above. We are certain that her presence and pressure helped, but the EDC kept up the machinations. Next, the EDC said we needed more insurance. We got more. Then, they said we needed even more insurance, and we got more. 

Then, the EDC claimed our insurance didn’t cover liquor use; but we clarified that it did. This dragged on until Friday 10/6/23, so we lost a whole season of summer programs, which may cost us grant money.

In the end, the EDC ended up deleting the reference to the new Port Authority shipkeeper policy we put in our draft of the berth permit, so the position of their landlord was only relevant when the EDC was misrepresenting it to deny PortSide something. If the Port Authority position didn’t support the EDC’s position, then the EDC ignored it.

As we say, time to #rethinkEDC for a better PortSide, a better Red Hook, and a better NYC.

PortSide NewYork wins White House "Champions of Change" Sandy recovery award (Originally posted May 2013)→

PortSide NewYork is honored to have won a White House "Champions of Change" award for our work during and after hurricane Sandy. We hope the award will allow us to continue our Sandy-aid work, launch new resilience training programs, and attract more assistance to Red Hook. Things look promising; the phone has started to ring.  Until we finish the blogpost about Part II of our Sandy story, we've added photos to a press release below to tell that story. Part I of the story, how we protected the MARY A. WHALEN from Sandy, can be read here.

PortSide's Story Ashore

PortSide is based on a historic ship, the tanker MARY A. WHALEN, which the organization succeeded in getting listed on the National Register of Historic Places just days before the storm.  In the face of Sandy, PortSide’s first responsibility was to protect the MARY from damage, and to prevent her from damaging the property of others.  The sad fate of the tanker JOHN B. CADDELL, which went aground during Sandy, is an example of what can happen to an untended ship this size. PortSide assembled a crew of volunteers to prepare the MARY over five days before the surge and to ride out the storm on the vessel.

After assessing the damage to their archive of historic papers and artifacts stored in the shed, the PortSide crew entered Red Hook on Wednesday afternoon to find that the community had not fared as well. PortSide made an immediate decision to drop their own issues, decamp from the ship, and offer to help. The result was the Sandy aid station "351". 

Realty Collective's listings were replaced with emergency info (Copy)

At first the internet was down and we ran a Clear wifi hotspot modem up the tree for two days to get a signal (Copy)

Applying to FEMA in the back room (Copy)

Susan Povich, Red Hook Lobster Pound (L) and Rob Walsh, Commissioner Small Business Services (R) (Copy)

inflating a new air bed to replace a flooded mattress (Copy)

The queue to talk to the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce (Copy)

"Brooklyn, only the strrong survive" on t-shir of Steve Tarpin of Steve's Key Lime Pie (Copy)

James Ellis (r) of Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce ever at the ready! (Copy)

Architect's advice on rebuilding (Copy)

People in to warm up and charge up (Copy)

"351" was a stop for outside aid workers to connect with Red Hook (Copy)

Outside "351" Realty Collective's listings racks were great for emergency info (Copy)

Mayor's office Restoration staff at "351" (Copy)

Craig Hammerman, District Manager of Brooklyn, Community Board 6, in his nomination of PortSide for the “Champions For Change” Award, said “PortSide NewYork’s innovative approach was to apply their experience with cultural pop-ups to create an immediate, inventive community-based Sandy aid station that continually changed services in response to needs and opportunities.  PortSide deployed a deep knowledge of the community to pull it all off.”

Essential to the PortSide effort was the ability to rapidly identify partners and forge agreements. On Thursday night, PortSide Director Carolina Salguero began assessing what other groups were already doing, and where PortSide could best use its capabilities. Salguero worked with Realty Collective, a community-minded real estate brokerage with offices in the Columbia Waterfront District and Red Hook neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Realty Collective donated a storefront at 351 Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, complete with free electricity, internet and a phone line, despite the fact that their principal Victoria Hagman was herself a Sandy victim whose Red Hook home was flooded.

Over Thursday night, Realty Collective and PortSide secured the co-operation of Gallery Brooklyn, who shares the storefront with the brokerage.  The result was an only-in-Red-Hook blend: an aid station run by a maritime organization in a real estate office that was also an art gallery. 

PortSide gathered volunteers off the street to get six computer workstations, office furniture and equipment from PortSide’s offices on the tanker to set up at “351”. The internet was down, so PortSide volunteer and museum curator Rothenberg ran a Clear wireless hub up a tree for two days until a PortSide contact at the Port Authority, who had previously worked to establish the cellphone network in the northeast, helped get Red Hook’s Verizon internet and cellphone service reconnected.

 “351” became a haven for people -- to escape the cold, to charge cell phones, I-pads, and power tools, to check e-mail to blow up a new air bed, to start the FEMA application or an insurance claim, or to wait for an escort to enter an apartment building whose electronic doors didn’t lock without power. Sandy victims remarked that the gallery environment with bright art on the walls was uplifting. The Director of Gallery Brooklyn, Jenna Weber, was so moved by the scene that she offered to donate 10% of exhibition sales to Red Hook relief.

PortSide’s MO was to respond to initiatives or needs coming from the community, through both action and communication. Emergency information replaced real estate listings in the storefront window. “351” was the first small business recovery center in Red Hook, before IKEA’s aid center opened or the FEMA trailers arrived, and served as a hub for Red Hook residents and business people to learn about aid programs while gaining emotional support and tips from one another. Residents and businesses could use the space to set up their own meetings – one day included overlapping sessions with a restaurant supply vendor and a legal aid clinic with 20 lawyers. Realty Collective invited Katrina-savvy architect Jim Garrison from the Pratt Institute to talk to a packed house about resilient ways to rebuild. PortSide served as a conduit to and from the growing sources of outside aid: elected officials, the Mayor’s office, FEMA, and the Department of Small Business Services.

Residents of Pioneer Street showed extraordinary initiative and cooperation on their one block and brought many ideas down the street to PortSide, who helped manage them and shared them with other Red Hook residents.  One example was the coordination of the services of angel electrician Danny Schneider, who arrived from nearby Park Slope in Brooklyn and went on to inspect 60 homes at no charge and to repair many.  (He also volunteered in the Rockaways.)

PortSide closed the center in early December. During PortSide’s time ashore, the shorepower connection to the tanker MARY A. WHALEN was knocked out, and PortSide operated for 35 nights with flashlights and one 15 amp extension cord.

Today, PortSide continues providing Sandy relief work via other social media, working with elected officials and on post Sandy initiatives from the Mayor’s office, and by responding to requests from residents and businesses. Plans are being developed for programs that will help Red Hook learn from its own response and develop response plans for future floods. PortSide wants to bring its two constituencies, the world ashore and the world afloat, together. Inland people can be trained in the mariner knowledge base that enabled PortSide to prepare the ship for the storm and which might have prevented a lot of the damage.

PortSide's nominator for the award, the District Manager of Brooklyn Community Board 6 Craig Hammerman wrote “PortSide’s work is an example of the community-based, mutual-aid system that has caused the heavily-damaged neighborhood of Red Hook to become a model for New Yorkers looking for lessons in the Sandy story.” 

 Statement by Carolina Salguero, Director of PortSide NewYork

All of us here at PortSide NewYork are very honored to receive this White House award and look forward to meeting the other winners so we can learn from their stories. After that, we look forward to growing the post-Sandy flood preparedness programs we would like to offer Red Hook and beyond.  We would like to thank the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for their support during Hurricane Sandy while we were in their Red Hook container port.  We offer profuse thanks to our partners at “351”, Realty Collective and Gallery Brooklyn, who opened their doors to Red Hook and made the aid center possible. Victoria Hagman of Realty Collective is really a gem to have given so much at a time when her own home was so destroyed by Sandy.  We would like to thank all those volunteers who came in to help, especially the angel electrician Danny Schneider who did work in Red Hook and the Rockaways at no charge.  Speaking personally, I was very moved by the collective spirit which sustained Red Hook in those first dark days.  Let’s keep that spirit alive; it takes a village, we were all it, and we need to keep that spirit going forward.

Statement by Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY):

“PortSide NewYork is to be commended for their work protecting the MARY A. WHALEN and establishing relief services for Red Hook.”

 Statement by New York State Senator Velmanette Montgomery
“It gives me great pleasure to give my highest recommendation for consideration as a Champion for Change” to PortSide NewYork.

PortSide NewYork is headquartered on the MARY WHALEN, a decommissioned tanker ship in Red Hook, a coastal community in Brooklyn. PortSide NewYork has been working for years to preserve and communicate the seafaring history of Brooklyn to our schoolchildren and new neighbors. They have embodied community service every day of their existence, but during Superstorm Sandy, they showed exactly how deep commitment to service and community could be.

Thanks to their professional preparations, the MARY WHALEN weathered the storm and the destructive surge in fine shape, but the same could not be said for Red Hook itself. The neighborhood was devastated and lacked electricity and other services for weeks afterward.  The staff of PortSide NewYork, led by the indefatigable Carolina Salguero, came ashore and set up a communications hub and aid center in a donated space. They set up meetings between residents and elected officials, engineers, lawyers, electricians...anyone who needed something came to them and PortSide NewYork reached out to find it. I don't know what we would have done without them.”

Statement by Rob Walsh, Commissioner of the NYC Department of Small Business Services

“Immediately after Hurricane Sandy, I was out in impacted neighborhoods like Red Hook speaking to small business owners about their needs and how the City could help. It was incredible to see the individuals, organizations, and business owners who stepped up to help each other out. PortSide New York served as a strong partner, helping us get the word out about the City’s low-interest loans, matching grants, and other assistance available to small business owners impacted by Hurricane Sandy, and I congratulate them for this well deserved award.

Statement by Carlo A. Scissura, President & CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce “Red Hook was one of the neighborhoods hardest-hit by Sandy. It’s because of groups like PortSide that we were able to help businesses in the neighborhood,” said Carlo A. Scissura, President & CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. “By housing members of our staff during those critical weeks following the storm, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce was able to help business owners fill out essential loan applications and other paperwork in order to get their stores open again. PortSide’s aid center became a critical hub for the community and a place where they could get relief. We could not have done our work in helping local businesses without them.”

Scott Pfaffman in front of his property at 360 Van Brunt (Copy)

One building grew their collection of work gloves out front (Copy)

The queue for aid supplies inside Visitation Church (Copy)

Occupy was a force running a lot of the aid work at RHI (Copy)

Meetings were held at Kentler Gallery (Copy)

Nydia Velazquez and Rob Walsh lead the first meeting for small businesses at Kentler Gallery (Copy)

There was an aid center in the cellar of the River of God Church at 110 Wolcott Street (Copy)

For weeks, demolition garbage lined Van Brunt for many weeks (Copy)

With the power off, Stop One staff ran around the bodega with flashlights and served customers from a window (Copy)

Thousands of volunteers flooded into Red Hook, which were dispatched from SBIDC's Van Brunt Street office by Friday the week of the storm (Copy)

Reginald Flowers of Falconworks Theatre group leading a community meeting at PS27 (Copy)

Statement by Danny Schneider, Principal, Schneider Electrical Contracting
“Hurricane Sandy threw Red Hook into a tail spin.  Residents rose to the occasion and with tenacity and synergy, and strengthened their character.”

Statement by Adam Armstrong, Pioneer Street Homeowner, blogger “A View from the Hook”

In the chaotic aftermath of Super Storm Sandy, PortSide New York provided a vital and invaluable resource for the residents of Red Hook. After riding out the storm and saving their own ship, the MARY WHALEN, PortSide came ashore, quickly set up shop at 351 Van Brunt Street and proceeded to make a base - a visible and accessible storefront - from where they could reach out, provide information, resources and assistance to their land lubbing neighbors, most of us who were desperately trying to recover from the immense damage that had been done to our homes and our unique, waterfront neighborhood.

PortSide and their team of volunteers co-ordinated tradesmen to go and physically assist our residents, and they gathered and disseminated information about anything they though would be helpful - FEMA, legal assistance, insurance matters, Con Edison, National Grid, the Rapid Repairs program, etc., and provided a connection to our representatives in government. On many of these matters, PortSide organized meetings and reached out to our residents, and in the case of our street - Pioneer Street - she co-ordinated the creation of a comprehensive contact list so that everyone on our block could share information and provide support to each other. It was - and still is - a wonderful way for the residents of Pioneer Street to keep in touch and get updates on our street's recovery, with Carolina Salguero, PortSide’s Director, checking in regularly to see how things are going and, many month's later, still providing advice and information wherever and whenever she can.

Statement by Gallery Brooklyn

“Gallery Brooklyn raised over $1K from the sale of Brooklyn-born artist, Jeremy Hoffeld, whose oil paintings gave comfort to the shell-shocked residents of Red hook. The funds will be donated to the Red Hook Initiative, a non-profit organization that provides enrichment geared toward the arts for children of the Red Hook community."

About PortSide NewYork

PortSide NewYork is honored to have won a White House "Champions of Change" award for our work during and after hurricane Sandy. We hope the award will allow us to continue our Sandy-aid work, launch new resilience training programs, and attract more assistance to Red Hook. Things look promising; the phone has started to ring.  Until we finish the blogpost about Part II of our Sandy story, we've added photos to a press release below to tell that story. Part I of the story, how we protected the MARY A. WHALEN from Sandy, can be read here.

PortSide NewYork educates people about the BlueSpace, the water part of the waterfront.  PortSide works with the community ashore and the community afloat; our goal is to bring the two closer together, to foster their mutual understanding and to create synergies between the two.  PortSide programs are diverse—they include maritime preservation, visiting vessels, arts and educational programs, community service and advocacy.  What unites them is the focus on water and waterfront issues. Our mission is to bring NYC’s BlueSpace to life.

PortSide has its offices aboard a historic ship, the MARY A. WHALEN, and with her, PortSide has created the world's only oil tanker cultural center, a ship in the National Register of Historic Places. PortSide runs many programs on the MARY, and we run many off the ship as well. 

PortSide NewYork is negotiating with GBX▪Gowanus Bay Terminal for a homeport in Red Hook, Brooklyn!  At our prospective home, the tanker MARY A. WHALEN will be publicly accessible directly from Columbia Street across from IKEA.  [Note: MARY A. WHALEN relocated to Atlantic Basin May 2015]

PortSide’s electricity on the ship was repaired after 35 nights of reliance on flashlights and one 15-amp extension cord.  PortSide seeks professional conservator help with two waterlogged books from the 1850s (stored in a freezer since the flood) and restoration of the antique replacement parts for the ship’s engine which were stored in the shed.

More info

Official description of the White House Champions of Change Sandy awards

"Across the areas impacted by Hurricane Sandy, ordinary Americans are doing extraordinary, innovative things in their communities to respond to and recover from this disaster. By partnering with the whole community, we, as a nation, are better positioned to meet the unique needs of communities and neighborhoods across America."  

PortSide NewYork, and the other 16 winners, were at a White House award ceremony on April 24 for a panel discussion and remarks by the head of FEMA Craig Fugate and the head of HUD Shaun Donovan.   Carolina Salguero, Director of PortSide NewYork represented PortSide on the panel. A video of her remarks is here.

FEMA handled the Sandy nomination process.  The head of FEMA Craig Fugate spoke at the White House Champions ceremony and explained that the awards were important for underlining how the public was now being viewed by FEMA as survivors (not victims) and partners in recovery (not just recipients of aid). 

Thanks to Craig Hammerman, District Manager of Brooklyn Community Board 6 for nominating us. You can read his nomination here. 

For PortSide's latest Sandy relief information, see our regularly updated blogpost and follow us on Twitter

Imagined Futures - Red Hook - with Holes in the Wall Collective

PortSide is part of the Red Hook scavenger hunt that kicks off Saturday, 10/14/23 and runs the rest of the month. Our ship deck will be open for TankerTime on Saturday from 10am to 6pm. This is part of the Red Hook Weekend organized by Holes in the Wall Collective which launches a year-long effort. Imagined Future is about addressing climate issues and creating a more sustainable future. Here are related PortSide efforts:

• Our advocacy calls for greater and more sustainable use of the waterways, the BLUEspace.

• A subest of that is getting last mile, ecommerce shippers to use the waterways (marine highway), the greenest form of transportation. This would reduce fuel use, air pollution, traffic, and in Red Hook, reduce subsidence (sinking of the streets), a growing problem due to increasingly heavy rains due to climate change.

• See our work on resiliency (related to water, PortSide’s mission space). This started with our Sandy recovery work which earned us a White House award. NYC flooding is getting worse due to climate change and involves groundwater, sewage, rain, and harbor water.

• The U.S. Army Corps (USACE) created a draft flood protection plan (HATS) for the NYC-NJ region which only addressed flooding from the harbor. PortSide educated Red Hook and mobilized the community to push back and submit comments, and we helped get the comment period extended for NYC. See that work here.

• #rethinkEDC, our campaign to reform the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC), a quasi-governmental organization that is PortSide’s landlord and NYC’s largest landlord and does many projects that City agencies used to do. The EDC does NOT fulfill promises to Red Hook (including space for a fully-realized PortSide). The EDC is also NOT doing economic development for Red Hook; they are extractive (keeping all the money they earn here and not investing any back into Red Hook). The EDC runs the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, Atlantic Basin with the boats on Pier 11 (including our MARY A. WHALEN), the huge Pier 11 warehouse, all the bus and truck parking on the east side of that warehouse, and the NYC Ferry system. The EDC earned money off the Formula E car race.

• our historic ship MARY A. WHALEN, last of her kind in the USA, on the National Register of historic places, a beloved floating cultural center, and home world-famous shipcat Chiclet.

• youth education programs - educating the next generation

• African American Maritime Heritage - inspiring people today by recovering erased history

You can help by getting involved! Please see our webpage volunteer.

Holes in the Wall Collective is putting together a weekend of Red Hook programming about the realities and hopes for a thrivable climate future October 13th-15th as part of our Imagined Futures. Imagined Futures is a year-long, city-wide initiative working in 5 NYC neighborhoods, partnering with 5 local breweries to raise money and elevate the stores of 5 New Yorkers and bring issues out of academic and think tank spaces. It begins in Red Hook, with Karen Blondel, recent winner of The David Prize and President of the Red Hook Houses West Residents Association at a Friday, 5pm event at Strong Rope. The effort will also raise awareness of endeavors in the 5 communities that work to create the future we want to see “Imagined Futures.” They say:

“Red Hook is an extraordinary microcosm of a neighborhood both uniquely vulnerable to climate change and an example of creative resilience and resourcefulness… We're putting together a walking tour, talks and interactive installations to get us in the big questions of housing/ new economies/ community resilience/ displacement, creative adaptations.”

By 3/31/23, US Army Corps HATS flood plan needs to hear from you

Updates since close of comment period

11/15/23 press release from officeof Congressman Dan Goldman:

 In short: the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) invoked the agency’s role as formal non-federal sponsor of HATS. NYS DEC’s letter to USACE triggers a federal requirement that HATS include comprehensive flood protection (not just protection for storm surge/harbor seawater overriding the shoreline.)

STATEMENT FROM CONGRESSMAN DAN GOLDMAN ON NEW YORK STATE REQUIREMENTS FOR COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS FLOOD PROTECTION PLAN   

Washington, D.C. – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) today issued the following statement after the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) sent a letter requiring the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to revise their $52.6 billion New York and New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Study (HATS) storm surge protection plan to include a comprehensive approach to address a multitude of flooding risks. This announcement comes after Congressman Dan Goldman and Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez led twelve Members of Congress from New York and New Jersey in sending a bipartisan letter to the USACE expressing concern that the Corps plan to address flood risk insufficiently protects New York and New Jersey against multiple varieties of flooding.   

“I am thrilled that the New York State DEC formally requested that USACE revise their flood protection plan to include a comprehensive approach to flood risks across the New York and New Jersey harbor and tributaries.   

“While the initial proposal failed to sufficiently address the flooding risks faced by our communities, I am encouraged at the hope for a revised plan that will protect New York and New Jersey’s coastal communities.   

“Our states face a multitude of flooding risks, including not only storm surge but tidal and river flooding, heavy rainfall, groundwater emergence, erosion, and sea level rise. To ignore these flooding threats that endanger our region would be an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars.  

“I am pleased to see that the New York State DEC has heeded the calls to ensure our communities receive comprehensive flood protection in accordance with federal laws. With this important letter from DEC, I expect USACE to promptly issue comprehensive implementation guidance and not delay compliance with the Water Resources Development Acts any longer. This must include a period of public review and comment to ensure that this revised plan adequately addresses community concerns.  

“Disadvantaged communities across our region must receive proper protection from all forms of flooding, and they must be included in reviewing and considering these plans. I look forward to working with all stakeholders to ensure that the new plan is comprehensive and has the best interest of New Yorkers at its core.” 

9/13/23 excerpt from press release from office of Congressman Dan Goldman:

CONGRESSMAN DAN GOLDMAN AND CONGRESSWOMAN NYDIA VELÁZQUEZ LEAD MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN DEMANDING COMPREHENSIVE FLOOD PROTECTION FOR NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY  

Upcoming U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Flood Protection Plan Only Protects Against Storm Surge, Neglects Tidal and River Flooding, Heavy Rainfall, Erosion, and Sea Level Rise Threats  

Members Urging U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to Update Protection Plan, Bring into Compliance with Water Resources Development Act and Justice40 Initiative  

Read the Letter Here 

Brooklyn, NY – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) and Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez (NY-13) today led twelve Members of Congress from New York and New Jersey in sending a bi-partisan letter to the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) expressing concern that the Corps plan to address flood risk insufficiently protects New York and New Jersey against multiple varieties of flooding. The upcoming plan fails to address tidal and river flooding, heavy rainfall, groundwater emergence, erosion, and sea level rise. Their plan also does not comply with the Water Resources Development Acts (WRDA) of 2020 and 2022 or President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative (J40).  

“With the passage of WRDA, Congress directed the Army Corps to formulate a plan that protects the region from tidal and river flooding, heavy rainfall, groundwater emergence, erosion, sea level rise and storm surge,” wrote the Lawmakers. “However, after seven years of planning, the Army Corps is proposing to spend $52.6 billion to protect our constituents from only one kind of flooding - storm surge. Members of Congress worked diligently to pass WRDA on behalf of our constituents in communities that remain vulnerable to multiple flood threats, and we urge HATS to comply. To ignore the more frequent flooding threats that plague our region is an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars.”  

In the letter, the Members list actions that they would like USACE to take to better protect millions of residents in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area from flooding:    

1. Promptly issue implementation guidance on applicable directives in 2020 and 2022 WRDA legislation; 

2. Factor that guidance into the current draft environmental impact study (DEIS) to conduct additional analyses and develop additional alternatives; 

3. Ensure that disadvantaged communities are properly protected; and 

4. Issue a Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for public review and comment before reaching the Agency Decision Milestone.  

The New York-New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Focus Area Feasibility Study (HATS), and its upcoming Agency Decision Milestone (ADM), tentatively scheduled for release this summer, does not comply with the Water Resources Development Acts (WRDA) of 2020 and 2022 or President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative (J40).  

In addition to Velázquez and Goldman, this letter was signed by Representatives Yvette Clarke (NY-09), Adriano Espaillat (NY-13), Hakeem Jefferies (NY-08), Michael Lawler (NY-17), Greogory Meeks (NY-05), Grace Meng (NY-06), Jerrold Nadler (NY-12), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Donald Payne (NJ-10), Patrick Ryan (NY-18), Paul Tonko (NY-20), and Ritchie Torres (NY-15).  

The comment period closed. Below is our work until that deadline

PortSide’s comment is here. We continued working on this after posting a draft comment here on 3/29.

The deadline for comments is 3/31/23. If you don’t speak up, you can’t be heard! Please submit comments. See the tips for making comments below. You don’t need to be an expert. Express concerns if you have them, suggestions if you have them.

PortSide Zoom - learn more about alternatives to USACE HATS plan:

Don’t like The Big Grey Wall proposed by USACE HATS?
Learn about alternatives!
The recording, chat and transcription for the Zoom on 3/20/23 are in Dropbox at the same link used to register www.bit.ly/ALTresiliency. Download the one-page PDF in there; it’s a handy intro to all this.

• Presentation by Belgian firm Aggeres of their surge-powered flood barriers (SCFB)

• Presentation of landscape architecture resiliency by Walter Meyer and Tom Asbery from LOCAL

• Screening 9-minute segment of this TEDx presentation about “Red Hook Island” – a barrier island proposal by Red Hook resident Alex Washburn

3/7/23 BREAKING NEWS! The deadline for comments has been extended to 3/31/23.

The USACE presented at a Zoom Town Hall, Monday 3/6/23, 7pm hosted by Congressman Dan Goldman and Brooklyn Community Board 6.

• Recording and presentation and Zoom chat are here.

• Issues we raised at that Town Hall are here. We have yet to write a final comment.

• Brooklyn Paper article about that Town Hall is here.

Thanks to CB6 and Congressman Dan Goldman for hosting this Town Hall. Thanks to Congressmembers Dan Goldman and Nydia Velazquez for getting the Army Corps to do this - finally - and for getting the extension of the comment deadline.

March 31, 2023 is the newly extended deadline for comments on a MASSIVE $52 billion plan for flood protection by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) called HATS, short for Harbor and Tributaries Focus Area Feasibility Study. 

The catch? The thing is 569 pages long, and it’s webpage has additional documents, videos, and interactive pages! In total, it is 4,000 pages.
Send comments to nynjharbor.tribstudy@usace.army.mil
The website is here.
The 569 page plan is here.
What they call the Readers Guide is contents, a description of which document (website link) contains what. Since some of those links have no description in the name, this is key to finding stuff.
The interactive NYNJHAT Study StoryMap is here.
Their glossary of acronyms is here.
Pg 7 of Sub-appendix B1: Shore-Based Measures  has a map showing the different kind of structures “measures” proposed to protect Red Hook and their locations.

• Where to submit comments

  Mr. Bryce W. Wisemiller
  Project Manager
  U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New York District
  Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, Room 17-401
  c/o PSC Mail Center
  26 Federal Plaza
  New York, NY 10278
  917-790-8307
  nynjharbor.tribstudy@usace.army.mil

  Ms. Cheryl R. Alkemeyer
  NEPA Lead
  U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New York District
  Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, Room 17-420
  c/o PSC Mail Center
  26 Federal Plaza
  New York, ny 10278
  917-790-8723 nynjharbor.tribstudy@usace.army.mil

• Tips on writing a comment letter from Councilman Lincoln Restler

  See the guide here.

At right, that big grey wall is what they are proposing for much of Red Hook. A flood gate would go at the mouth of the Gowanus Canal.

This “Floodwall Concept for Coffey Street and Ferris Street” shows they need to make a 25’ wide trench and have to drive piles 75’ deep to support these walls. Red Hook buildings have cracked during recent pile driving for new construction. These flood barriers look to involve driving a LOT of steel H-piles. Would vibrations from installing piles this deep damage buildings? One negative impact looks certain, such a deep, wide, long installation along Beard Street would cause traffic gridlock in Red Hook due to how it would likely reroute and delay the last mile trucks using the two Amazon facilities on Beard Street, plus IKEA shoppers.

For years, PortSide has asked if surge-powered flood barriers such as the Aggeres SCFB in the video below could work in NYC. In the video, incoming flood waters push the flood barrier up! We’d like the SCFB and other non-permanent barriers assessed, so we had Aggeres present during our 3/20/23 Zoom, linked above.

A 2/22/23 email from Aggeres says “We engineered the SCFB barrier up to 3m high (which is feasible). In theory the barrier could even be higher, but then many other factors must be taken into account (foundation, very large concrete basins, etc). We have installed barriers up to 2m protection height.” Here is an engineering animation of how the SCFB works.

The plan the USACE has tentatively selected, called Alternative 3B, proposes a 14-year construction project with 12 storm surge gates around waterways of the NYC region such as the Gowanus Canal, Newtown Creek and near the Verrazano Bridge). It would also create barriers along 41+ miles of NYC’s shoreline, including seawalls and floodwalls in Red Hook and elsewhere in south Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, East Harlem, and all of the Rockaway Peninsula 

You can see 3B, the Tentatively Selected Plan (TSP), running through Red Hook below. This is from Pg 7 of Sub-appendix B1: Shore-Based Measures. The circles in the colored lines are the only places they have planned an opening in the barrier wall.

PortSide has focused on resiliency topics for the decade since Sandy; but we do NOT have time right now to digest and summarize 569 pages for you – we have to deal with our campaign #rethinkEDC, and work on our own Sandy recovery since FEMA gave us a deadline of 7/31/23 to finish the project. So… here’s what we’re offering you:

1.       Honesty about our limitations on this as per above.

2.       The info bove and below. Request for comments to the blogpost that we can incorporate to improve this resource.

• Excerpts from the 569 page HATS to help you tackle this

  We did word searches. Red Hook is mentioned 18 times. Sunset Park, our neighbors across Gowanus Bay and part of our City Council district D38, only got mentioned 2 times (both about rail yards). Gowanus is mentioned 25 times. See page 13.

  NYCHA is mentioned only once ☹ and for something in Manhattan.

  Page 6 is overview map of the whole thing.

  Page 8 Project Cost includes item Cultural Resource Preservation.

  Page 220 shows RH map and barrier locations.

  Here’s a one pager showing a Red Hook flood wall section at Ferris and Coffey Street next to Valentino Park.

  Pg 160 summary of Red Hook’s resiliency projects – this does not mention the HUGE resiliency project underway to protect the NYCHA properties (Red Hook Houses East and Red Hook Houses West)

  “Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY The City of New York is expected to complete the design phase of the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project (RHCR) by the end of 2022. RHCR is an integrated coastal protection system for more frequent, lower intensity coastal storm surges and tidal flooding. Community engagement is a key component for project development since the earliest stages of project feasibility. The project has also aimed to maintain access to the waterfront, and create improved public spaces in response to six years of community engagement. The Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project will be a critical step toward ensuring a more resilient Red Hook community in the face of future extreme weather and a changing climate.”

  Pg 219 “The Gowanus Canal storm surge barrier would provide coastal storm risk management in the neighborhoods of Gowanus, Red Hook, and Park Slope, Brooklyn (Figure 49). The storm surge barrier would include a navigable miter gate. It would span approximately 200 feet from shore to shore and would have one gated navigable passage 100 feet wide, with a sill elevation at -21 feet NAVD88. The proposed structure crest elevation is +16 feet NAVD88. On the east side of the storm surge barrier, shore-based measures such as deployable flood barriers and floodwalls tie into higher ground. On the west side of this storm surge barrier, shore-based measures are proposed to provide flood risk reduction for the Red Hook neighborhood and are placed in proximity to, or at the coastal edge. These shore-based measures may potentially include seawalls, levees, floodwalls, and deployable flood barriers.”

  Pg 248 & 241 show that one concern/motive of theirs is to keep water from getting in the Battery Tunnel and BQE trench near here: “major vehicular tunnels in the Study Area would also be increasingly exposed to coastal flood risk in the future without-project condition”

  under Surface Roads “For example, the proposed alignment of shore-based measures in the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn includes several vehicular gates that, when deployed, would block vehicular, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic.”

  Pg 482 Summary of Construction Footprint and Operations and Maintenance Impacts Associated with the TSP (Alternative 3B) on Roads, Bridges, and Tunnels. For example, the proposed alignment of shore-based measures in the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn includes several vehicular gates that, when deployed, would block vehicular, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic.

  Pg 520 Impacts Associated with the Alternative 3B on Schools “There are four public schools in the storm surge barrier managed risk area of Red Hook, Brooklyn.” Do public schools only count?! How about the 3 other schools (2 charter, 1 private), and we count 3 public schools not 4.

  Pg 524 Summary of Historic Properties. We note that the list does NOT include a category for National Register ships! Red Hook has two, our MARY A. WHALEN and the LEHIGH VALLEY 79 of the Waterfront Museum. We note low income communities like ours DO have historic properties but that listing them doesn’t happen much in our kinds of neighborhoods, plus the local NYC preservation process, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), has NOT been receptive to Red Hook efforts to landmark buildings (Todd Pump House, Todd Graving Dock, Bowne Storehouse, Lidgerwood), and many historic structures were leveled to make space for last mile centers. However, we do still have historic properties listed (the Parks Rec Center) and unlisted (brick and stone warehouses by the water in particular). In short, privileged communities get preservation; low-income communities of color don’t. Does the Justice40 Initiative of the White House come into play here?

• Info from prior public meeting webinars.

  Monday 3/6/23, 7pm, at a meeting co-hosted by CB6 and Congressman Dan Goldman’s office, the Army Corps (USACE) presented at a Zoom Town Hall

  • Recording and presentation and Zoom chat are here.

  • Issues PortSide raised at that Town Hall are here. We have yet to write a final comment.

  • Brooklyn Paper article about that Town Hall is here.

  Rebuild by Design has a webpage with 8 videos

  1 hour and 15 minutes webinar recorded February 22, 2023 with Gowanus Canal Conservancy on the panel along with Hudson Riverkeeper, Newtown Creek Alliance, Baykeeper, Miami Waterkeeper

• Info on other & prior resiliency plans in Red Hook

  See PortSide’s history in Red Hook WaterStories here.

• New White House EJ Initiative Justice40

  See the USACE one-pager on their EJ position and Justice40 here.

  It says “If there is a localized concern regarding the plan that might impact a disadvantaged portion of your community, we want to know! Comments Please!

  Send comments with subject line EJ to nynjharbor.tribstudy@usace.army.mil

• What environmental groups are saying

  There is opposition to HATS from environmental groups. We share this Gothamist article without endorsement (as we said up top, we have not had time to drill down on this).

PortSide tribute & thanks to Bonnie Aldinger

Bonnie aldinger kayaking, April 2021, by carolina salguero

PortSide thanks to Bonnie Aldinger

We were devastated when breast cancer felled Bonnie Aldinger on 1/12/22. She was a friend, an inspiration, and one of PortSide’s longest-standing volunteers and supporters, having got in touch due to our Kayak Valet event in 2006. Over the following 16 years, she volunteered, donated, and supported us with blogposts and free photo services. She was a radiant light of eternal good cheer, smart, principled, hardworking, a fighter for social justice. After she passed, we learned that she bequeathed $9,147 to PortSide NewYork. Thank you, Bonnie! You are so missed!

Please read more about her in our our tribute below.

Bonnie is on the table in the galley of the mary whalen

• Originally, Bonnie’s creative outpouring went into the blog Frogma here, but she used Facebook more after a Wordpress redesign.

• Bonnie’s own Facebook page remains as a legacy here.

• Bonnie was a member of the wonderful Sebago Canoe Club. They memorialized her on May 21, 2022, and we attended instead of running TankerTours that day, the date our ship MARY A. WHALEN was launched. A summary of their deeply moving Bonnie memorial activities is below our tribute.

PortSide tribute to Bonnie Aldinger

Copying text from our January 14, 2022 Facebook post below. That post is here if you want to share it or see the moving comments of appreciation there.

NY harbor has many lights, and one has just gone out.

Bonnie K. Aldinger’s writing and photography illuminated the harbor, and Bonnie has transitioned to the Sebago in the sky.

Bonnie got in touch with PortSide in 2006 when she heard we were running a Kayak Valet event, the K word getting her attention. Since then, she volunteered here on physical tasks and supported us via so many blogposts.

Bonnie was all over the harbor for years and is beloved because of her radiant positivity while involved with waterfront nonprofits, businesses, boat clubs, and list serves. She had an endlessly upbeat approach to everyone and everything everywhere. She worked for Classic Harbor Line, volunteered many places, was a devoted member of the Sebago Canoe Club, and on her own, kayaked and camped down hundreds of miles of the Hudson River.

She was propelled by more than her paddle on those trips; she was propelled by joy and curiosity, and she then shared that with the rest of us in words and photos on her blog www.frogma.blogspot.com and Facebook page.

Fish, birds, water, weather, the skies, sunsets, boats of all kinds, the history and the future of the harbor, and seals sparked her enthusiasm. Did anything not? And flowers and food; don’t forget the food! Lots of posts about growing and cooking food.

April last year, weakened when her cancer recurred in March, Bonnie still wanted to get out on the water. I picked her up in a borrowed car; she was avoiding public transportation to protect her immune system ravaged by cancer and chemo. She wanted to see seals in Jamaica Bay. She wasn’t sure she could paddle that far. She made it, they were there, and she was jubilant. She probably would have been jubilant even if they weren’t there as enthusiasm was her engine.

She inspired me to start kayaking. I will be grateful for that for the rest of my life. PortSide’s yellow kayak will now be named BONNIE, and I hope we can inject Bonnie’s love of kayaking into others via that boat.

Bonnie was from Hawaii, and though not native Hawaiian, she expressed perfectly their term of aloha: “Aloha is an essence of being: love, peace, compassion, and a mutual understanding of respect. Aloha means living in harmony with the people and land around you with mercy, sympathy, grace, and kindness. When greeting another person with aloha, there is mutual regard and affection. This extends with warmth in caring for the other with no obligation to receive anything in return. The direct translation from Hawaiian to English is the presence of divine breath."

In the last days of December, she started home hospice without announcing that publicly, and posted joyful reminiscences on Facebook. Then, on 12/29/21, Bonnie revealed on Facebook that her end was near, apologizing for not being able to respond to everyone in this time and not wanting to be a downer “I have been trying not to make a big deal of it here on FB and also trying to keep things cheerful.” Love gushed back in the comments, and Elel Calabasas spoke for us all saying, “Bonnie, I have NEVER seen your strength, positivity, and pure aloha matched anywhere. You are forever the ichiban numero uno top banana of awesome. ”

She made her last post on 1/8/22, updating her cover photo with a shot she took showing her kayak bow heading out into Jamaica Bay with a flock of paddlers. I took it as a post expressing that she was leaving on her last voyage. Joy, excitement, sharing, caring for others, even in her last days.

She showed us how to kayak, and she showed us how to travel that last stretch of life.

With love and admiration forever, Carolina Salguero

Photos of Bonnie at PortSide below: stopping by at the end of her solo 7-day paddle down the Hudson. Three photos of her., dirty, busy and happy, helping move vintage engine parts from the Pier 9B warehouse onto our ship in preparation for moving to Pier 11.

Sebago Canoe Club Tribute to Bonnie Aldinger, May 21, 2022

May 21, 2022 was an emotional day at Sebago, their season opening day was dedicated to Bonnie Aldinger.

There were two paddling trips leaving in the morning, followed by lunch with rememberances, and a ceremony on the floating dock. Many people created ways to memorialize Bonnie Aldinger. Her blog name FROGMA was put on a sail. Vicki brought a plate of sea shells from around the world and invited people to toss one into the water as they thought about Bonnie. One of her friends in the Irish music scene played music as we queued up for the buffet. Our ED Carolina Salguero remembered Bonnie’s excitement about the Hawaiian sailing canoe Hokulea coming to NYC and made a Polynesian sailing canoe model out of driftwood and natural materials that would decay into the Jamaica Bay Bonnie loved so much.

Conversations were long, deep, and loving, and many stories were shared.

Carolina’s memorial canoe

6/23/22 Red Hook last mile, ecommerce meeting

During the pandemic, a huge surge in building last mile, ecommerce facilities occured in our neighborhood of Red Hook and just across the Gowanus Bay in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. This is part of a citywide and national pattern.

Thursday, 6/23/22, 5-7pm, a meeting on last mile, ecommerce facilities in Red Hook was hosted by our Councilmember Alexa Aviles and Brooklyn Community Board 6 (CB6). See CB6 last mile resource page here.

There was no offical virtual component planned, so PortSide was asked to livestream this by community members behind RHAFTS (Red Hook Advocates For Traffic Solutions). We streamed it and share our Zoom video and chat below, along with the video recording by Red Hook resident Mike McCabe of Occupy Radio. Two RHAFTS members monitored the chat in the PortSide Zoom, the person using the name Carolina Salguero in the chat is Alyce Erdekian using our account. Carolina was running the cellphone camera.

There were three official presenters:

1. Department of City Planning (DCP)

2. Department of Transportation (DOT)

3. New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC or EDC)

The meeting had 3 breakout groups and McCabe’s camera was sometimes in a different group that our cellphone camera handled by our ED Carolina Salguero, so the content of the two documentations is not exactly the same.

There was an updated agenda in the presentation

1. Land Use & Zoning with DCP, EDC and DOT, facilitator Christina Bottego of CM Alexa Aviles’ office

2. Transportation Strategies & Infrastructure with DOT and EDC, facilitator SG (we don’t have full name)

3. Community Engagement Needs, facilitator Bryan Gross, of CM Alexa Aviles’ office

PortSide NewYork coverage

• video of the meeting (Zoom); passcode: 7$93Z9Dh. It was useful to have this live option, but the wifi was poor and the sound is poor. Better viewing for after the event is Mike McCabe’s below.

• Link to Zoom chat file from the meeting; passcode: 7$93Z9Dh

• Edited version of chat file (pdf) with chatter about poor sound quality removed - complete chat file is with the video.

Mike McCabe coverage

• video recording for Occupy Radio

Official presentations (pdfs)

The PDFs below are scans of hardcopies. We have requested native/original digital copies because text in this kind of PDF is not searchable, can’t be readily copied, and the complicated maps are harder to read and can’t be readily copied and shared. We will update this page when we get them.

• NYC Department of Planning presentation DCP’s role in this topic centers around zoning and land-use with a lot of community pushback on the concept that huge last mile, ecommerce fullfillment centers should be “as of right,” eg. needing no special permits or review.

• NYC DOT presentation On this topic, DOT is involved for handling road traffic and its impacts, truck routes, the location and safety of curb cuts, and developing new loading/unloading zones on the street for last mile users. The DOT traffic focus is on traffic on the land, whereas the role of NYC EDC below on this topic is more about use of the waterways to move freight.

• NYC EDC presentation The EDC is less known to many people than the DOT or City Planning. The EDC is a large nonprofit, quasi-governmental organization with a huge portfolio of City projects. On this topic, they are often referring to waterborne, maritime options, eg, “the marine highway.” This relates to their role running the NYC Ferry system with the idea that those boats could move freight at night, their role running many city piers via the DockNYC program (PortSide’s ship MARY A. WHALEN is on a DockNYC pier) where those docks could handle inbound or outbound last mile freight, and their role in doing freight planning via the FreightNYC program. Bear in mind that policy papers like FreightNYC are vision and priority statements not detailed operational (action) plans, and that the EDC has a track record of more study than action.

Look for a forthcoming PortSide blogpost explaining all things “marine highway.” For now, the MARAD (federal DOT Maritime Administration) webpage about that is here.

None of the 3 Powerpoints aboved was designed in a way to be easily readable when projected at a public meeting: the fonts were way too small, there was way too much on each page. Even in the front row, it was a strain to the text in the bullet points, and the keys in the color coded maps were impossible to read. We recommend that City presenters design Powerpoints for public meetings that can be read at public meetings!

We suggested to CB6 and Councilmember staff that that the presentations be provided by email BEFORE the meeting so people can actually see and read it and thus more of the meeting can be spent on informed discussion. If not, much of the meeting is spent conveying the official point of view, and a lot of community time is spent on things such as “what’s that slide say?” 

Check the new RHAFTS website for lots of info. Contact them at RHAFTS123@gmail.com

Trucks on Van Brunt Street in red hook 6/21/22

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see MAIDEN, the racing yacht educating & inspiring girls, Wed 6/22, 9am-1pm

Tracy Edwards (L) and Mikaela Von Koskull (R) sailing in the Whitbread Race

Here is a great opportunity from PortSide!  Meet a woman captain and female boat crew fighting sexism and inspiring girls around the world. 

The racing yacht MAIDEN is coming to PortSide Wednesday 6/22/22 from 9am to 1pm. RSVP asap to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org.

We ask that groups RSVP with the number of people and approximate time of your visit so that we can make plans to accommodate all smoothly and not over book. Note that schools have been invited to attend. If you have flexibility in your schedule as to what time you can be here, pleaes give us the details as we may ask you to adjust your schedule if you are coming at a projected peak visitor time.

MAIDEN is famous for competing in the Whitbread Round the World race in 1989/1990 skippered by Tracy Edwards MBE. Tracy was expelled from school at 16; and at 26, she organized and skippered the first all-female crew in the Whitbread race after having sailed that race one time as a cook. Tracy and her crew faced rampant sexism (many men thought they would never survive, forget win two legs of the race); and a few years ago, Tracy started the nonprofit Maiden Factor Foundation to use the boat to empower girls via education by sailing around the world, inspiring girls where ever they stop. The boat is in NYS during June as part of their round-the-world tour.

About facing the sexism in sailing back in the 1980s Tracy said, "if the world doesn’t exist as I want it to exist, then I need to change it.” 

Come meet Tracy and the women who sail MAIDEN now.  The experiences being offered:

• The 58' MAIDEN will tie up next to PortSide's flagship ship MARY A. WHALEN in Red Hook. Students will be able to see MAIDEN from the deck of our ship.

• Meet Tracy Edwards.

• Talk to the women crew of MAIDEN who will explain their maritime jobs and skills (a lot of STEM), why they do this, what it's like to sail the open ocean where waves can be as high as the boat is long and answer questions.  

• Students can ask the crew about the experience of girls and women in the countries they are from and the countries MAIDEN has visited with them aboard. Plus, ask whatever you want!

• Maritime skills (knot tying, handling rope, etc.) will be demonstrated.

• We will screen MAIDEN videos inside the MARY A. WHALEN as an immersion experience (visiting for a short stint to get a taste of MAIDEN not sitting down to see it all.)

• Maritime twofer! First-time visitors to our ship MARY A. WHALEN will be able to have a look around. We will not give tours of our ship at this time, but our crew will be on hand to answer some questions.

More about Tracy Edwards, MAIDEN and their foundation at links below:

MAIDEN Factor Foundation website 
Trailer for 2019 movie about MAIDEN
TEDtalk by Captain Tracy Edwards
Review of that movie by New York Times 6/6/19
Royal Yachting Association video
New Yorker article 7/9/19

Please share this and RSVP asap to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org.
Open to all genders. 
If you want to volunteer to help run the event, please let us know. 
Directions to PortSide here.

Hope to see you aboard!  

Tracy Edwards (silver hair) greeting MAIDEN crew in NYC by Peter Rothenberg/PortSide

MAIDEN arriving in NYC at 5pm yesterday by Carolina Salguero/PortSide

Help make Red Hook more resilient on Thurs 3/17

front of resiiency postcard portside will be distributing during 2022. back of postcard is at bottom of blogpost

Dear Red Hook friends,

PortSide has an opportunity to work with a group of visiting High School students who will distribute poscards with flood prep info arojund Red Hook on Thursday morning March 17.  There is a Facebook event at https://fb.me/e/4tr9QIRPi you can share.

We are especially interested in getting High School students involved so that they get a cultural exchange experience of working with the visitors while helping those visitors understand Red Hook and find their way around.

Would you like to get involved? If so, please RSVP asap to chiclet@portsidenewyork.org. Please share this blogpost!

Thursday, 3/17 Schedule

9:30 am         45 minutes orientation presentation about Red Hook’s Sandy story with time for QnA.
10:15 am       15 minute break and time to get postcards, Red Hook maps and clipboards to students
10:30 am       Head out to distribute postcards and do some surveys
12:00 pm       Debriefing session, recording a video of student impressions and feedback
1:00 pm         Lunch

1-3 and 5 take place in the office suite at the SE corner of the Pier 11 warehouse. That is between our ship MARY A. WHALEN and Pioneer Street. Thanks to Formula E for the use of this office space.

 We seek people for the following roles:

• A Red Hook business owner who was here during Sandy.

• More People to accompany the visiting students as they distribute postcards (see photos top and bottom)

Program and backstory.

PortSide was approached by CAStrips, an international organization that organizes school field trips. They are bringing 30 students from the Houston International School Awty to NYC to do community service and learn about infrastructure. 

Since 2022, is the 10th anniversary of Sandy and we saw during hurricanes Henri and Ida last fall that Red Hook people could use info on flood prep, we proposed that the Awty students kick off PortSide’s 2022 outreach about flood prep. 

PortSide is creating a postcard in English, Spanish, and Chinese to hand out around Red Hook, directing people to info we offer at https://redhookwaterstories.org/tours/show/9. The 3/17 distribution event will only reach part of Red Hook; we will focus on stores on this one. 

If you can’t get involved with this event, we hope you will join a future one. CAStrips wants to send more students in May, and we hope to have all-Red Hook groups do distribution too.

Overview of the orientation speakers and content:

• PortSide

• NYCHA residents here during Sandy - Karen Blondel and Vanessa McKnight are speaking

• Medical Matt (Matt Kraushar, MD PhD) who set up medical response corps after Sandy, mostly serving NYCHA residents. He will participate from Germany via Zoom.

• Jim McMahan “Map Man” who made Red Hook’s Sandy flood map will be represented by this video

• Red Hook business owner who was here during Sandy, if we get one

PortSide will talk about our experience protecting our ship from hurricane Sandy, what we learned about Red Hook damages while running our Sandy recovery center and then a virtual one and while appointed to NY Rising; resiliency planning we have done and that NYC government has planned and/or executed through the years since Sandy (some of it you can see within yards of our ship).  We will refer to City-executed resiliency plans for Red Hook on this webpage. We will refer to Resiliency 101 info in our virtual museum. PortSide has a FEMA Sandy recovery project, so we can speak as a storm victim too. 

Image below is the back of the postcard that will be handed out during this event, and over 2022. The front of the postcard is at top.

back of resiiency postcard portside will be distributing during 2022. frontof postcard is at top of blogpost