-
7. Neighbors Against Garbage
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CHAPTER 7 NEIGHBORS AGAINST GARBAGE Activism and Uneasy Alliances on the Waterfront many of the insurgent agents that appropriated BEDT for recreative and other purposes were largely unaware of or unconcerned about the broader conflict over the future redevelopment of the Williamsburg waterfront. As the 1990s progressed, more people began to discover and use the Northside waterfront for more activities, more of the time. And by the turn of the millennium, the sheer volume of users and the regularity of their activities surely suggested, as a few told me, that this was “the people’s waterfront.” Only part of this circumstance was accidental. Behind the scenes a group of local residents had been fighting for a decade to permanently secure this waterfront “for the people” while fighting off less desirable counterproposals made by more politically connected parties and City Hall. By 2003, the conflict over the waterfront’s future and which parties would determine and control its use seemingly reached its nadir when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his planning department introduced a sweeping proposal that would rezone 170 blocks of Community District #1, including most of its East River frontage, from manufacturing to residential and mixed-use districts. By the time the City Council approved the controversial measure in 2005, several large waterfront properties, including those that were a part of BEDT, had already changed hands in speculation of the transformation the rezoning would enable. But the “underutilized and vacant land” that became the rationale for 186 neighbors against garbage the city’s plan was not inevitable, nor were 30-plus-story residential towers arrayed in a necklace of green spaces the only potential vision for redevelopment contemplated by city agents.1 In fact, the conflict over the rezoning and the transformation it soon facilitated obscure an earlier conflict between local residents and government-allied interests. The glass and steel condominium towers constructed between North 4th and North 7th streets after the 2005 rezoning and the breezy esplanade that now links them betray the radically different vision of the waterfront held by Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani. A decade earlier, when residents (both those new to the neighborhood and longtimers) began to envision a waterfront reclaimed for public recreation, light industry, and revived maritime uses, Mayor Giuliani and his administration saw this same edge as the key to the city’s seemingly intractable solid waste problems.2 I retell the story of this conflict here, largely from the perspective of the Northside residents who formed Neighbors Against Garbage to fight the expansion of a waste transfer station at the south end of BEDT and a later proposal to build the city’s largest waste-handling facility across all seven blocks of the terminal. By the end of the 1990s, these activists had emerged victorious, keeping the water’s edge from becoming a walled-off dump. NAG’s actions allowed the unplanned occupations to flourish at BEDT for a few years more while it fought and sometimes collaborated with city and state agents. But the defeat of the waste carters also allowed the Bloomberg administration to later pursue its own vision for this edge. In effect, NAG members and other local activists were enablers of the rezoning and its results, even though many of these same residents bitterly opposed this action. NAG’s story as told in this chapter begins in the early 1990s and continues through the immediate aftermath of the garbage controversy in the early 2000s, when these activists working within the context of an unusual alliance of a state agency, a national not-for-profit land trust, and a prominent university formed a novel partnership to develop the waterfront park they had long envisioned. Even though the partnership fell apart in 2003, the larger vision of a public park at BEDT anchoring a larger ring of recreation spaces to the north and south is becoming reality. But it comes at a cost: the condominium towers that were never a part of the vision of these activist residents. Their story differs from those previously told in this book: It is not about on-the-ground insurgency of opportunistic recreation seekers. While most of the constituencies of the undesigned did little if anything to advance their cause throughprotestorparticipatorypolitics,NAGmembersbycontrastvociferouslyassertedtheirrightstothewaterfront through these modes of contestation. For nearly two decades, these residents were the terminal’s most vocal stakeholder and a forceful advocate for local interests across the entire Greenpoint–Willamsburg waterfront. Even today, as [18.118.120.109] Project MUSE (2024...