Activity is about to begin booming along the Greenpoint waterfront, and the latest project to go public is 77 Commercial Street, which will contain two residential towers rising 331 and 429 feet. The buildings will house a total of 720 units, with the project’s 760,000 square feet of development to include ground floor retail, community facilities, and 320 parking spaces – all revealed with a host of additional details in the project’s environmental impact statement.
Alongside the development, the proposal entails the creation of ‘Box Street Park,’ at the MTA’s 65 Commercial Street. Several dozen Greenpoint residents have been vocal opponents of the development, but the current land is an empty waste, and all of the waterfront sites are adjacent to Newtown Creek, which is heavily polluted. The actual Superfund site sits upstream, but – unknown to most New Yorkers – the creek was the site of a major oil spill that began in 1978, and remedial action only began in 1990, with the disaster ranking as the largest oil spill in U.S. history prior to the Deepwater Horizon incident.
Located in the depths of the environmental impact statement is language indicating air quality around the building rests just below hazardous, with long-term non-carcinogenic compound exposure ranking .81 and short-term exposure coming in at .91, both “below the level (of 1) that is considered by the EPA to be significant.” Living in New York City, the air is never pristine, but the push for residential development along the Greenpoint waterfront should be followed by the closing of nearby industrial facilities, which continue to pollute both Greenpoint and Newtown Creek.
Indeed, even with clean-up since the oil spill, problems remain. Per MetroFocus, “The EPA finally declared Newtown Creek a Superfund site in September, 2010, and a preliminary study thereafter determined that multiple companies are responsible for the pollution in the creek, which is evaporating into the air. Also, fish cannot survive in the water.”
Though neighborhood NIMBYs do not seem to be concerned about living adjacent to a toxic waste dump, the fight against 77 Commercial Street and Greenpoint Landing persists.
Subscribe to the YIMBY email newsletter and receive the latest new development news in your inbox., and follow New York YIMBY on Instagram and Twitter for information in real time.
Subscribe to YIMBY’s daily e-mail
Follow YIMBYgram for real-time photo updates
Like YIMBY on Facebook
Follow YIMBY’s Twitter for the latest in YIMBYnews
Correction – The entire Newtown Creek is a Superfund site. True the most toxic area is upstream.
NIBMYs such as myself are concerned about our air quality, but the fact of the
matter is we have not been living right next to the creek. All of
Greenpoint is set back from the creek by these huge development sites.
The sites are very deep.
The airflow tends to follow the creek. I would like to see the VOC number
when the air flow is heading down stream. It is also my assumption that the
air testing was done on the street side where the air has a chance to mix with cleaner air, not the creek side. The bottom line is it’s not ok to drink a
16 ounce soda in this city, but it is just fine to have people living by
the most toxic waterway in America!