South Street Seaport     

SEAPORT TALK: SEAPORT WORKING GROUP AND SEAPORT CHARRETTE
 

Talk about the South Street Seaport continues.   

On March 20, the Seaport Working Group met for the fourth time to talk about the Seaport. This group is composed of elected officials, Community Board 1 representatives, community stakeholders and members of The Howard Hughes Corporation, which has a long-term lease on parts of the Seaport, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the Seaport landlord.

The meeting took place in the office of New York State Senator Daniel Squadron. As in previous sessions, no press was present and a statement was issued after the meeting. It said:

"The Seaport Working Group continued its discussion of the important issues to consider in the development of the South Street Seaport area. We began with an introduction of the new facilitator, Jonathan Martin, Ph.D. AICP, full-time professor of Urban Planning in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment at Pratt Institute. We then heard a presentation from the South Street Seaport Museum about the history and current status of the piers, property spaces, and historic ships. Last, the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability gave a presentation about resiliency challenges and regulations."

The next meeting will take place on Thursday, March 27 at 5 p.m. in the offices of the Economic Development Corporation.

Many things about these deliberations aren't clear. Apparently, how long they will go on has not been discussed. Nor has it been discussed as to how recommendations will be made when the Working Group gets to that point. Will each person on the committee have one vote? Will some votes count more than others? This is unknown.

Moreover, it has been said from the beginning that the recommendations of the Working Group are advisory, not binding.  

The Catch & Release pavilion under the FDR Drive.

On Saturday, March 22, there was more talk about the Seaport, this time from the AIGA/NY Design Relief group that installed the "Catch & Release" pavilion this past winter under the FDR Drive near John Street.  That pavilion was outfitted with ropes and pulleys to which people attached cards on which they wrote their thoughts and thanks to those who had helped them during and after Superstorm Sandy. The idea was to create an outlet that people could use to say what had not yet been said - or as the Design Relief people said, "to make the invisible visible."

The talk on Saturday revolved around the idea of "placemaking," introduced and explained by Susan Silberberg, the keynote speaker at a charrette held at Pace University. Her speech described ways that communities have seized the initiative to make "great public places," often doing so with little or no money.  

Susan Silberberg.

She mentioned traditional public places such as the Athenian agora (marketplace) and the New England town green. "Industrialization fractured the bond between people and public places," she said. "When you lose your public places - your meeting places - you lose your sense of who you are."  

She advocated a "bottoms-up" approach to placemaking, instead of a "top-down" approach imposed on the community.  

But what do you do, inquired Michael Kramer, who is a member of the Seaport Working Group, "when the city has decided that they want to privatize our district and hand it over to Howard Hughes, who is a developer - who is developing Pier 17?  We've reacted - the Community Board has passed lots of resolutions, Save Our Seaport has done petitions. We've done a Town Hall meeting. Where does placemaking come in after the fact?"

Silberberg confessed that she didn't know much about the specifics of the Seaport situation.  

She said that it was necessary to ask, "What does the city want out of this? Why are they doing this?

Following Silberberg's presentation, there was a charrette, with maps of the Seaport unfurled on  tables and the people clustered around each table invited to put dots on the map to indicate places in the Seaport that they particularly treasured. They filled out cards describing those places.

Joanne Gorman, one of those who attended, said that Silberberg's talk made her think in terms of how placemaking would apply to the Seaport - "in particular what the community can do to take more control over this 'place'. Right now, for better or worse, The Howard Hughes Corporation is doing all the public 'placemaking'.  Their signage is everywhere; they are occupying and taking control of all the public spaces - the Fulton plaza being the most visible example."

Some specific ideas came out of the discussions around the tables: the need to activate Peck Slip while it is still under construction and ways to remove some of the construction disarray near the Brooklyn Bridge.    

"There is a plaque that commemorates the site of George Washington's first presidential mansion underneath the Brooklyn Bridge at the intersection of Pearl and Dover streets near an entrance to the FDR Drive," said Community Board 1 chair, Catherine McVay Hughes, who attended the charrette. "However, it is hidden with the fences and construction. It is time again to see what can be done under and near the Brooklyn Bridge to clean it up and to make it an inviting place instead of one to avoid and one that collects trash."

Though that wouldn't address the overarching question of how the Seaport should be developed, it would at least be an improvement.  

Diane Harris Brown speaking at the talk and charrette on March 22 about the South Street Seaport. She is director of educational and community programming for the James Beard Foundation and is a member of the Seaport Working Group, as is Michael Kramer, sitting behind her. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)