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The case for keeping industry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Greenpoint was zoned for manufacturing and is still used for that purpose. But is it possible to reimagine what an industrial corridor can look like?

Greenpoint Ferry Terminal and Transmitter Park along the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York.

Greenpoint Ferry Terminal and Transmitter Park along the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. Source:  Massimo Salesi

This is an adapted excerpt from "Earth A.D. The Poisoning of the American Landscape and the Communities that Fought Back" by Michael Lee Nirenberg. It is published here with permission from the publisher Feral House. The above is an affiliate link and we may get a small commission if you purchase from the site.

A working body of water

Earth A.D. book cover

One surprise that emerged throughout these interviews was the pro-business stance that many of the activists have staked out. Historically, the environmental movement has always had such an adversarial attitude toward industry that it struck me as unusual to hear activist groups sticking up for manufacturing and trade maintaining a permanent presence on the waterfront. It’s a core principle for many of these groups and many citizens that I’ve spoken to support keeping Greenpoint [in Brooklyn] industrial. That certainly means different things for different people.

Paul Pullo, activist, former owner of Metro Fuels: When we bought this property in 1986, this was a dead-end street with no fire hydrants, no sidewalks. There was nothing. This building you are in was a two-story abandoned building. The oil terminal was not maintained. Half of it was closed down. It was just kind of derelict. To be very honest, everything here was derelict. Just abandoned. When we bought this building, it was not a part of the oil terminal. This was a separate building that I bought from the owner of the building on the corner, which used to be a glue factory.

Across the street was the ExxonMobil plant. It was all tanks.

Winifred Curran, associate professor of geography at DePaul University; co-editor, "Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification": The important thing about Greenpoint was that it is zoned for manufacturing, and therefore is still used for manufacturing. Much of where environmental gentrification is happening these days is in industrial areas of the city, where there’s been declining industry or abandoned industry.

What we’ve seen since is the way in which developers have been very creative about what they can do even within the manufacturing zoning designation. That’s especially true of two particular land uses. One is hotels: That’s an anomaly of New York’s zoning code is that hotels are allowed in areas zoned for manufacturing, so we’ve seen a rise in that kind of activity. And the second is storage units, self-storage. Which is a great way for developers to scoop up a lot of industrial property and then just sit on it for a while, until the market demand is there and they can realize that there was a profit for them. We’re seeing both of those things as an active threat to what is happening in Greenpoint, as well as spaces considered manufacturing that really aren’t.

One of my favorite quotes from one of our informants was, "Two architects and a 3-D printer count as manufacturers." That kind of luxury office space in manufacturing areas is the other mode of threat. That fluidity of what the zoning can mean, even within what’s supposed to be a protected zoning designation, that’s been a really interesting thing to watch in terms of how this has evolved in Greenpoint.

Much of where environmental gentrification is happening these days is in industrial areas of the city, where there’s been declining industry or abandoned industry.

Acacia Thompson, archivist for Brooklyn Public Library’s Greenpoint Environmental History Project: Some things that NAG (Neighbors Against Garbage) did and [Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning (GWAPP)] has done is to try to make sure to keep industry here, but to try to get them to do things that make their industries safer for the community. That was an important lesson to learn about that. Then talking to Paul [Pullo] about how he’s done his best to make sure that his family business operates as safely as possible in the community.

Pullo: Both of my grandmothers were born in the neighborhood, so the family goes back a long time. On my father’s side, my grandmother was a midwife who basically delivered half of Greenpoint at the time. Her brothers were in the coal business. Her two sons, my father and my uncle, started a heating oil business in 1942 because they felt it was more modern than their uncles in the coal business. That’s how that started.

It wasn’t a very large business. They were basically driving delivery trucks. They would pick up the oil in a place like United Metro here with tanks and deliver it to homes. They would also install heating oil systems because a lot of the houses back then didn’t have central heat.

Thompson: One thing that I was naïve about was how the creek and sort of the plume spill area is still a huge economic engine. The creek is an economic engine still. It’s not as if it’s just being cleaned up passively and nothing is going on. Everybody sees something going on, but do they really understand that there is still a lot of refineries going on, there’s still waste transfer stations out there? I didn’t understand until quite late about how organizations like Newtown Creek Alliance’s mission is partly to help keep industry on the creek. I was sort of dumbfounded. At first, that was sort of bizarre to me. But then I understood that so much of what’s happened in the neighborhood, as far as when redevelopment was happening or the waterfront rezoning was happening, it was always about making sure to keep industry here and not to let it go, to make it work more with residential and commercial, but also to make it safer.

Lisa Bloodgood, director of advocacy and education, Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA): I remember when I first looked at a map of Newtown Creek. If you look down at it and you look all around, you see the residential blocks and they’re all really small blocks. But you look and it’s all industrial and it’s these big, massive areas. In my mind I was like, "Oh, well, that’s just all of the areas that need to be reclaimed and made into wetlands and it’ll be this beautiful restored wetland area." That was before I knew anything about the creek, just looking at the map. There are industrial waterways all around the world and that’s not going to change. But what we have an opportunity to do is to find these creative solutions. How do you have this hard-flat edge and still create habitat? How can you redesign a bulkhead to serve industry and serve mussel populations?

Kate Zidar, green infrastructure research engineer; former director of Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA): What can we learn from the East River waterfront? If you’re an environmentalist, and you understand that this began with incineration, the garbage portion of this story is just a great narrative through-line, because if you understand why we needed to fight incinerators, you understand why we needed to fight the marine transfer of waste and you understand the toxic effects, intergenerational effects of gentrification in New York City. You can stack all this together and see that you must not gentrify, you must not rezone Newtown Creek.

There are industrial waterways all around the world and that’s not going to change. But what we have an opportunity to do is to find these creative solutions.
 

A city needs an industrial area. It needs to move things. A city of islands needs to move massive amounts of material by water. And that has to do with climate change, it has to do with air quality and it has to do with equity in the land. All of that plays out on Newtown Creek; all of that plays out in Gowanus. All of that plays out on Staten Island, all of that plays out in New Jersey. There’s a unifying thing, too; it’s not just Newtown Creek, and it’s just that Newtown Creek is a big, old one right in the geographic center of the city. If not there, then where?

Bloodgood: It’s funny; sometimes you’ll meet the industrialist, who’s like, "Wait, you’re sure you’re supporting me? You sure you’re not just out to, like, you’re not going to trick me?" And then it’s really interesting to the ecologists or the other activists, environmentalists will come up to you and go, "Wait, you’re saying ecology and industry can get along? What are you saying?"

Curran: What activists have been very explicit about is wanting to envision and enact the 21st-century industrial corridor. Rather than just continue old-school industry, and holding on to old industry no matter what, but rather to be very much a part of reimagining what an industrial corridor can look like, and what that means. It doesn’t have to be just dirty, oil-spewing things. That’s because the history of the industrialization that had happened in New York, and Greenpoint in particular, most of the worst, dirtiest industries had left the neighborhood. I think no one is that sad when an oil refiner leaves the neighborhood, or animal rendering. But much of what is driving the manufacturing sector in Greenpoint now is smaller-scale, artisanal work. We have a lot of craft manufacturing businesses that are, for example, in the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center are a lot of very small-scale, artisanal, woodworking, design-oriented kind of jobs. In the industrial parks, you see a lot of food manufacturing — stuff that is really kind of core to what we imagine New York City to be. Your muffin company is right next to your wonton company. Manufacturing does not have to mean pollution.

It can mean good jobs. It means local entrepreneurship. It means walking to work and supporting diverse local economies. I think that’s what people really want to get on board with, with industrial corridors that we don’t have to have this 19th-century image of what industry is. That industry is, in fact, much cleaner than people think it is, and much more of a driver — has a much higher multiplier effect on the local economy than retail and the construction jobs that will come from condos and that kind of thing.

Paul Parkhill, urban planner; former director of planning and development, Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC): These emerging small industrial businesses that were often creative businesses, sometimes immigrant-based businesses, they were different from the old massive factories — the Domino Sugars and the Navy Yard, everybody brings their lunch pails to work kind of places. GMDC was created to help foster those kinds of businesses, by creating stable below-market [rents] — not deeply subsidized, because it wasn’t.

We’ve always felt like good environmental policy and good economic policies go hand in hand. You can have business and people and nature co-exist if it’s sustainably done well and done right.

Curran: One of the business owners [Pullo], who was most in the forefront until recently because he sold the business, [his business] is called Metro Fuel. It’s not often that you think of a fuel company being at the forefront of the greening of an area. But he was. He was absolutely one of the most active business owners in the area in terms of advocating for this stuff.

That’s what the focus should be, rather than on the shiny new thing. The Brownfield Opportunity Area was supposed to be this opportunity to maybe think these big thoughts, and sort of have a systematic vision for how these things could happen. But what seems to have happened, thus far anyway, is that there have been a lot of studies and reports, and then not a whole lot of money put towards actually accomplishing any of those projects. That’s the other thing, too. The vision on the ground was there, in terms of activists and even individual business owners. But even in what technically should be a friendlier policy environment, with a Democratic mayor and governor, has not necessarily been as friendly as we would like to see.

Marc Yaggi, executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance: We’ve always felt like good environmental policy and good economic policies go hand in hand. You can have business and people and nature co-exist if it’s sustainably done well and done right.

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