WGPA

The Waterfront Preservation Alliance of Greenpoint and Williamsburg is no more (don't panic).

Effective more less immediately, we are changing our name to the Williamsburg Greenpoint Preservation Alliance. This new name reflects our mission as a neighborhood preservation advocacy organization, and confirms our commitment all of Williamsburg & Greenpoint area, not just the waterfront.

The first incarnation of this change will be the switch of our domain name from waterfrontalliance.org to wgpa.us, which will take effect in the next couple of days. We expect that both domains might be unavailable for a day or so, but we will be back as wgpa.us very shortly. Once we return, there may some residual weirdness, as pointers point to non-existent points. But all of that should be ironed out fairly quickly.

Waterfrontalliance.org will not go away, however. It will reappear very soon as the new web home of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance (currently located at waterwire.net). This excellent group's mission is advocacy for the city's 500+ miles of waterfront, so the domain name is far more fitting for them than us.

Despite what the banner says, you are now looking at the website of the Williamsburg Greenpoint Preservation Alliance (WGPA.us). Things around here looked pretty ugly for most of the day, but that was a function of our updating Moveable Type and all the various templates and config files. The actual changeover was very quick and painless, thanks to our hosting service.

It is very likely, though, that there is some ugliness or unupdated code lurking around here somewhere. If you see anything, email us at wpa[at]wgpa.us (yeah, we need to change that wpa too...).

Domino Sugar (photo: themikebot)

This past Tuesday, Community Preservation Corporation Resources (CPCR) and its team made their first formal presentation on the "New Domino" plan to the community at large. The forum was a special land use committee meeting of Community Board 1 at the Swinging 60s Senior Center on Ainslie Street. CPCR (the lead developer), it architects, landscape architect and attorney gave a 45 minute presentation, which was followed by about an hour of Q&A from the community.

The project is largely unchanged from what was presented to community groups over the summer, so there was little in the way of new news. In terms of preservation, there was little in the way of content overall. CPCR is, of course, preserving the refinery (they mentioned on more than one occasion that they supported the designation of the refinery). The development plans still call for the removal of all of the other Domino buildings on the site, including the Adant House. Although the project's preservation architect (Beyer Blinder Belle) was there and made a presentation, they did not have any details on the proposed addition to the refinery. Even the program for the refinery remains vague - there will be one story of retail, two stories (100,000 sf) of community facility, and the remainder market-rate residential (and to be fair, CPCR said at the outset that a lot of aspects of their proposal were still under development).

The one piece of actual preservation news is that CPCR more or less committed to retaining the Domino Sugar sign and incorporating it "somewhere" within the project.

Most of the Q&A focused on questions of building heights and the overall project density, with the most impassioned comments reserved for CPCR's plans for the former Domino parking on the east side of Kent Avenue. There, the developer is proposing to build to a density of 6.0 FAR, with buildings up to 14 stories tall. This height and density far exceeds anything approved for non-waterfront blocks in the larger Greenpoint-Williamsburg Rezoning (typically, the higher-density inland blocks were rezoned for a density of 3.0 FAR and a maximum building height of 7 stories). CPCR cited the neighborhood context as supporting this height and density, but that context amounts to pointing to the Esquire Building, until the recent building boom, the tallest building in all of North Brooklyn, and easily three times the height of the average building in the Southside.

The timeline for the project is also a work in progress. CPCR expects their application to rezone the six Domino blocks from manufacturing to residential to be certified in January 2008. If that schedule holds, the Community Board will hold hearings on the application in January or February, and final approval of the rezoning could come as early as July 2008. In the meantime, CPCR agreed to return for a follow-up informational meeting with the community. Hopefully that will include more details on the preservation and reuse of the refinery.

59 Kent Street (ca. 1910: F. Nelson, architect).
Photo: moufle

The Landmarks Preservation Commission has posted its designation report for the Eberhard Faber Historic District (warning: pdf link). As usual, LPC has done good and diligent work, nailing down dates and locating architects (although the report neglects to mention buildings such as this that were excluded from the district as the result of some prophylactic demolition.

Among the interesting items, LPC has learned that 60 - 64 Kent Street was designed by well-known Brooklyn architect Theobald Engelhardt in 1895. Engelhardt designed hundreds of buildings in north Brooklyn during his career (sound familiar?), including St. John's Evangelical Church on nearby Milton Street (in the Greenpoint Historic District). He also designed the North Side Bank at 31 Grand Street and the Weidemann Cooperage at North 12th and Wythe Avenue, two buildings that WGPA is advocating for Landmark designation (oh, and the Old Dutch Mustard Building (RIP).)

The Eberhard Faber designation, which the Landmarks Commission approved on 30 October, still has to be approved by the City Council.

Raising the Liberty Pole, 1776
Source: Library of Congress

In early America, the 25th of November was traditionally celebrated as Evacuation Day - the anniversary of the day that the British troops left New York City in 1783. Once upon a time, particularly in the New York area, Evacuation Day was considered a more important holiday than Independence Day. New York City had been occupied by the British for much of the war, and they City was the last military post given up by the British upon their surrender.

As the British sailed through the Narrows and out of New York Harbor on 25 November 1783, one of their last sights was that of the American flag flying atop a liberty pole that was raised next to the New Utrecht Reformed Church in what is now Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. (New Utrecht was one of the six original towns of Kings County, along with Brooklyn, Flatlands, Flatbush, Gravesend and, of course, Bushwick.) The sixth incarnation of the New Utrecht liberty stands today in the location of the first liberty pole - at Christopher Columbus Avenue (18th Avenue) and Liberty Pole Boulevard (84th Street).

Erected in 1945, the current New Utrecht liberty pole is 106' high, and is topped by a wooden eagle and weathervane that topped the original pole. It is said to be the last remaining liberty pole in the 13 original colonies. The existing church was erected in 1828, and in 1966 it became one of the first landmarks designated within the City of New York; in 1998, the designation was expanded to include the parish house and the liberty pole itself.

More information:

Thanks to Walter Greenspan for bringing this to our attention.