After 11 weeks during which little information emerged, on June 2, the Seaport Working Group was finally ready to reveal the guidelines that it had developed to shape the future of the South Street Seaport. The community room at Southbridge Towers was packed.

"I think you'll be impressed," said Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who was one of the forces behind the creation of the Seaport Working Group. "We need your input."

"In January, we all heard the call to rethink the current proposal for the waterfront," said City Council Member Margaret Chin, who, last March, played a pivotal role in getting City Council to approve developer Howard Hughes Corporation's plan to demolish the existing mall on Pier 17 and build a new one. "In particular, we realized the need for the public planning process before any ULURP."

Chris Curry, executive vice president of The Howard Hughes Corporation, talking to City Council Member Margaret Chin at the Seaport Working Group open house.

The upcoming ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure) to which Chin referred has to do with Howard Hughes' previously expressed desire to build a 50-story, luxury hotel and apartment building on the site of the New Market Building on South Street, to move the landmarked Tin Building and add a story to it and to make other changes to the historic Seaport.

Because City-owned property is involved, some of it landmarked, any disposition of it has to be approved by Community Board 1, by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (for landmarked buildings), by City Planning, by the Manhattan Borough President and by City Council.

At a Town Hall meeting in January 2014, many members of the community expressed opposition to the Howard Hughes plans. There are those who now say that that ULURP shouldn't happen at all - that the Howard Hughes proposals and the deals that EDC made with Hughes should be trashed and that a master planning process for the Seaport should begin that is not simply reactive to the Howard Hughes vision.

The Seaport Working Group's guidelines were created by a task force composed of elected officials, Community Board 1 members, Seaport residents and businesses, representatives of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (landlord for much of the Seaport) and The Howard Hughes Corporation. Given that (so far) EDC and Howard Hughes are still in the driver's seat, the Seaport Working Group guidelines are supposed to give them context for a new proposal that would reflect community needs and demands. The guidelines are advisory and not binding.

There are eight guidelines, each of them bolstered by "principles." The working group concurred that the Seaport's "character and sense of place" needed to be preserved. The South Street Seaport is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Manhattan, with a history that goes back to the Dutch settlement in the 17th century. Many of the buildings in the Seaport date to the early to mid-19th century.

The working group wanted to see the South Street Seaport Museum, whose electrical systems in its Fulton Street galleries were destroyed by Superstorm Sandy and have not been repaired, again become "the cultural anchor of the district."

There was an expressed desire for more publicly accessible open space. 

Under the headline, "Preservation," the working group said that it wanted to "Maintain the historic character, visual corridors and sense of place of the Seaport through the preservation and creative adapative reuse of existing historic buildings to the greatest extent practicable."

This guideline obliquely addressed the fate of the New Market Building, constructed in 1939 for use by the Fulton Fish Market. It is not landmarked and The Howard Hughes Corporation had said that it wants to tear it down and erect a hotel/apartment tower on that site.

Although EDC had secretly signed a Letter of Intent with Howard Hughes on Dec. 12, 2011 granting it the right to pursue the possibility of a "mixed use project" along the lines of what Hughes subsequently unveiled, the Dallas-based developer does not have an automatic legal right to the New Market Building or to the land and pier on which it rests.

A guideline subsumed under the headline "Vitality" states the desire to "Create a Seaport that supports commercial vitality through diverse retail programming."

Finally, at guideline No. 6, " Building Heights & Views," the working group explicitly addressed the subject of a tower. "Buildings developed on properties adjoining the South Street Seaport Historic District should not adversely impact neighborhood scale and character," the guideline says. Under that, the task force stated that, "Alternatives to the proposed 50-story tower should be sought and any building on the New Market site should be contextual with the buildings within the South Street Seaport Historic District."

People who want to preserve the New Market Building for "creative adaptive reuse" should not immediately begin to celebrate, however. It's possible (parsing the language of the guideline) that an alternative to the proposed 50-story tower could be sought and not found, depending on who's looking, and it's also possible, according to the language in this guideline, that the New Market Building could be torn down and replaced with something less than 50 stories in height.

In any case, neither Howard Hughes nor EDC are required to abide by the guidelines.

Howard Hughes is supposed to make a presentation to Community Board 1's Landmarks Committee on June 16, with a proposal about the Tin Building, the Link Building on Pier 17 and about kiosks to be placed under the FDR Drive, in part, where the New Amsterdam Market now sets up. At one time, HHC was supposed to make a presentation of its revised plans for the Seaport to the Seaport Working Group on June 12, but that meeting was cancelled because Hughes said that it needed more time.

Chris Curry.

"I heard all kinds of things from Chris Curry [executive vice president of The Howard Hughes Corporation]," said Community Board 1 member Paul Hovitz. "The only people that are opposing the tower are people from Southbridge Towers and people from that Save Our Seaport group," Curry said, according to Hovitz.

Hovitz further quoted Curry as saying, "Most people don't care if there's a tall building over here. They only want us to revitalize the area, so we don't think that we have that much of a significant opposition."

To read the Seaport Working Group's guidelines, click here. Comments will be accepted through Friday, June 6.

Some of the members of the Seaport Working Group.

A detail of the Keuffel & Esser building as it looked in 2009.  (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)