TransGas No More

[From the Greenpoint Gazette]

On March 20, proposed plans for a TransGas Energy (TGE) Power Plant on the Brooklyn’s waterfront were laid to rest, thanks to the New York State Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environment (Siting Board).

The site lies north of the East Williamsburg State Park, along Bushwick Inlet at bordered by North 12th and North 14th Streets and Kent Avenue to the East River.

TGE filed a proposal to create a 1,000 megawatt cogeneration facility on late December in 2002. Originally, the plant was to be above ground, but TGE changed it to an underground facility in November, 2004. They changed the proposal again to an above-ground facility in the summer of 2007. The Siting Board rejected the proposals’ first and second phases as well.

The facility would convert natural gas into electricity for the City’s usage.

The proposal still resides on TGE’s website and includes both the above-ground and below-ground designs. The below-ground plans would include a waterfront park. The plant would have been the largest in New York City.

TGE made their proposal more appealing to the community with promises of affordable housing and better air quality.

According to the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Waterfront Task Force and the Pace Energy Project, the TGE plant would exude 1,075.32 tons of toxic emissions per year as well as increase levels of PM 2.5, which is a health risk, according to the U.S. Supreme Court and New York Court of Appeals, linked to asthma, cancer and heart disease.

The Siting Board is made up of seven members: four commissioners, from the NYS Departments of Environmental Conservation Pete Grannis, Health Richard F. Daines, M.D., Economic Development and Public Service, the latter serves as the Chairman of the Siting Board, Garry Brown. The role of the Board is to determine whether proposals for energy facilities adhere to the New York State’s Energy Plan and its impact to the environment and neighborhood.

According to the Siting Board, the facility is incompatible with health and safety concerns, doesn’t sit well with the City’s plans to develop the waterfront into a more recreational-TK friendly zone, harms to the environment and residential areas.

The Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront is already undergoing drastic changes, with housing developments rising and opens spaces for parks being cleared.

In its place, the City will create a waterfront park on Bushwick Inlet, 28-acres.

Aiding the fight against TGE was Greenpoint Assemblyman Joseph Lentol. “The Greenpoint Williamsburg area is quite simply starved for open space and this will only continue as more and more people move into our neighborhood,” Lentol. “This park will be a much needed victory for open space and our community. I am absolutely thrilled. “

According to Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said the park will include “boat launches, picnic grounds, soccer fields, wetland preserves and a 2-mile bicycle and pedestrian path along the East River waterfront.”

The City looked to acquire the land from Bayside Fuel in 2005, but TGE’s application was still pending. Now that the plan is rejected, the City is able to acquire the area, possibly through eminent domain

Memorializing Industrial Brooklyn

Greg Lindquist in his studio in front of an unfinished painting of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Red Hook.

Dreary and solemn, the Red Hook Sugar Refinery stood empty and alone, against the gray-streaked skies of Brooklyn. Nearby, graffiti covered a dark wall against that same sky.

These aren’t photographs. Rather, these structures, which are most likely soon to be destroyed and replaced by luxury apartment buildings and condos, will live in paintings done by 28 year-old Greg Lindquist.

With his show, Industry at the Elizabeth Harry Gallery in Chelsea, Lindquist is recording the changes in Brooklyn, specifically in Williamsburg, Red Hook and Greenpoint.

To Lindquist, the warehouses he painted are the markers of industrial Brooklyn and the U.S.

The buildings are “signifiers of the industrial revolution and of importing, exporting and production in the United States,” Lindquist said. “As globalization takes over our means of production, we’re passing on the blue collar jobs to other countries. So we no longer need these spaces, and they’re being turned into more housing and residential developments.”

“The common thing is decay and the replacement of decay with luxury and development,” he said.

Lindquist described his theme as “looking at landscape as a way of expressing, landscape as a memorial or landscape as a way of expressing memory.”

During his undergraduate degree at the North Carolina State University of Design, Lindquist was taken with World War II monuments and memorials. Going to Europe on a grant, he traveled through these areas and read about their histories. He was interested in “hat role in our collective memory, like concentration camps and these spaces from World War II and the Holocaust played in those cultures.”

Then, while at Pratt for his MFA, Lindquist shifted his focus to what he referred to as “abstract paintings based on the landscape.”

He came to realize that what he was drawn to wasn’t memorials of specific events, but really just landscape as memorials.

“I realized when I looked around me,” Lindquist said, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is happening right here, right now,’ and I felt an overwhelming urge to document that.”

In regards to development in Brooklyn, Lindquist said, “It’s a really complicated issue. It’s really exciting for me to see this happening, but at the same time, I’m really skeptical about the amount of urban planning that’s gone into it.”

He finds that the new luxury buildings “disrupt a certain continuity of urban fabric.” Though, he does make the comparison between the new developments and his own work.

“I’m making luxury objects as well, but commenting on them,” Lindquist said. “The most ironic thing that could happen is if I make these paintings, and then someone buys them and puts them in these condos. This hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.

“That’s the complexity of art,” he continued. “You’re equally condemning and celebrating something, and they both use the same material vocabulary of construction and decay.”

Lindquist paints over stretched linen over rigid supports, because the linen will show up behind the paint. He’s “interested in the materiality of the object.” He also uses an acrylic stainless steel medium which further enhances the industrial feel to the paintings. For the paintings in Industry, Lindquist walked around Brooklyn and took pictures, which he then digitally edited and created into slides. He painted from those slides.

Lindquist became interested in abandoned landscapes since growing up in North Carolina. He explored the North Hills Mall in Raleigh in 2003, which, at the time, was being demolished. “It was really intense,” he described, “because you go inside these spaces that you see filled with products and people and then you see it empty with everything removed from the shelves.” This was during the beginning of the Iraq war and he said, “You see all these crumbly things and it’s very desolate and kind of apocalyptic at the same time.”

“It was one of the first malls in the East coast, so it had a lot of history to it, too,” he added. “So I have some relationship with empty spaces that I feel drawn to and feel the need to make things about.”

Next on his list are surface mines in Arizona, which relates to his show, "Industry."

“These mines have been shut down and they have very interesting geometric patterns and formations and a completely different color palette,” from Brooklyn.

The former Eastern Block countries also hold Lindquist’s interest. He heard of a concrete factory that was the sole concrete factory for the entire Soviet Union. “It’s this massive, sprawling Community concrete architecture,” he described.

Often, Lindquist thinks about whether he’d move his studio and home to Manhattan. Recently, Lindquist and his brother stayed in Manhattan at a friend’s apartment. After spending some time there, “it got really disorienting, claustrophobic and kind of dense pretty fast.”

When they came back to Brooklyn, they walked by McCarren Park and Lindquist realized there was still snow in the ground. He didn’t see any snow in Manhattan.

“That kind of indicates that open space is still here [in Brooklyn],” Lindquist said. “And it also goes back to the point of that open space being quickly supplanted by development. There is this overwhelming urge to do something about it, but as an artist, I don’t think I’ll ever be an activist.”

After bringing up the point that being an artist is similar to being an activist, Lindquist replied, “That’s the main goal in making art: to raise awareness. You are alerting people to your cause.”

"Red Hook Revere Sugar Refinery (Flattening the Remains, The Age of Steam)", 2007, oil on metallic on linen, 17 ½ x 50 inches.

Behind the New Domino

The New Domino. © Rafael Vinoly Architects PC.

I now hold two newspaper-related jobs: my job at the Brooklyn Rail as a layout editor/writer/photographer/all-round favorite person, and now, thanks to my friend Kevin, a new job at the Greenpoint Gazette, as a reporter, and layout editor as well.

So here's my first published piece:

Earlier last week, the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) released new plans for the New Domino, the site of the former Domino Sugar Refinery, in Williamsburg. The plans were presented to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) and Community Board 1 (CB1) on Tuesday, February 6 for their approval. The groups failed to come to a final vote.

The New Domino is being designed by architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle. They have previously worked on the Coney Island Strategic Plan and worked with Atelier Jean Nouvel on the D.U.M.B.O. Waterfront Project.

The designs for the New Domino include retail on the ground floor, which will hopefully include a grocery store. The second and third floors will contain community facilities. There will be parking in the basement and the remaining floors will be reserved for mixed-income housing.

The newly designed features of the changes is the five-story glass-covered addition to the main building. "In order to have the entire site blend together in a contextual way," explained Richard Edmond, Senior Vice President of Beyer Blinder Belle's PR firm, "we're adding the glass to the refinery. By the same token, the towers are being made to look like the refinery."

Surrounding the former refinery will be four towers, two at 40 stories tall and two at 30 stories. These buildings will be designed by Rafal Vinoly Architects. Of the available 2,200 units, 660 will be allotted for affordable housing. Those units will be distributed through two lotteries: half reserved for those residing within CB1's region and the other half for the city. If the plans are approved, the affordable housing would be built first, with the glass additions financing that construction. According to Edmond, the New Domino will offer 30 percent more affordable housing than is required everywhere else in New York.

Although the Domino Sugar Refinery was designated as a New York City Landmark in September, 2007, plans to redevelop the area were already in place. The Refinery, built in 1884, was also deemed part of Brooklyn's endangered waterfront back in June, 2007 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

During Tuesday's meeting, Robert Tierney, chair of LPC, said the factory "celebrates a time when industrial Brooklyn was kind and Domino was its crown."

The landmark status, however, fuels the ongoing debate to preserve the factory as much as possible. The most noticeable missing element in the presented designs was the yellow Domino Sugar sign. The sign wasn't included under the preservation plan, but various groups insist on saving it.

The LPC was unhappy about the missing sign, according to Gerald Esposito, CB1's District Manager.

Esposito believes the sign should be saved and integrated into the facade of the building. It loses its status as a landmark if it is set up along the East River like the Pepsi-Cola sign, another proposed solution.

"The sign is more historic than anything else in the factory," Esposito said. "I remember riding the train over the Williamsburg Bridge and seeing it."

In response, Edmonds said, "We have not come right out to say we're going to save it, but we want to. However, there are a lot of engineering complexities involved."

The glass additions were another point of discontent. Simeon Bankoff, Executive Director of the Historic Districts Council (HDC), challenges Beyer Blinder Belle's and CPC's claim that the glass additions must be built in order to fund and build affordable housing first. Bankoff said, on HDC's blog, that rents from the luxury apartments and retail spaces would be more than enough to finance the affordable housing. She referred to the glass additions as "inappropriate on top of a landmark building."

Like Bankoff, LPC and others who oppose the new designs, Esposito is also displeased with the glass additions. Because some buildings around the factory are being destroyed and the factory itself gutted, he suggests reusing those bricks in the design of the addition. That way, the area would preserve its industrial look.

Esposito also finds the entire housing developments "overly ambitious. The developers are providing a lot of housing in an area devoid of services--no hospitals, no grocery stores." He continued, "They're just building houses, houses, houses under the guise of affordability."

Vinoly Architects' proposed plans for the surrounding area include a 1,300-foot long esplanade, which is reminiscent of the Battery Park City waterfront. In the center will be a three-fourth acre park and there will be water taxi service to Manhattan at the formerly-closed Grand Ferry Park next door.

The plans still need to go through the basic seven month ULURP process. After that, CB1, the borough president and the city council need to approve. Interestingly enough, the area isn't under the recent Greenpoint-Williamsburg Zoning Resolution but it is still being governed as such.

If given approval, Edmonds hopes to start construction in 2009. After that, the project would continue in phases. The entire project would cost approximately $1.2 to $1.3 billion.