Losing Buildings on Staten Island
While one city agency is looking to preserve historic buildings on Staten Island, another wants to demolish them. As we reported earlier, the Parks Department is refusing to renew the lease for the Cedar Grove Beach Club in New Dorp and intends to demolish the majority of the historic buildings to supposedly convert the property into a public park. We use the word “supposedly” because Parks has not released any plans for the site, nor has the agency specified where the funding for these capital improvements might come from. HDC has requested information from the Parks Department in mid-July through a Freedom of Information Law request although we have not received any response to date. The New York Times recently covered the story and extensively quoted Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe’s defense of the eviction of the tenants and demolition of the buildings as a return of the property to public use. Commissioner Benepe is quoted as saying “There aren’t any other parks in New York City with private residences on them, especially on prime waterfront,” which is a debatable distinction when one considers the controversial towers that have been developed as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park. The important fact remains that Parks has not revealed a public plan for the site, has not revealed how the city intends to develop the site and has not, to our knowledge, even begun to do an environmental assessment of what development is allowable on the site and what kind of environmental mitigations might need to be done (Cedar Grove Beach Club has been determined eligible for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places). Especially considering the sweeping bi-partisan support from elected officials on the local, state and federal level, it would seem obvious that this is a premature scheme and the sensible thing for the Parks Department to do would be to enter into an open public process with the community while allowing the people who have been responsible, paying stewards of this site for 50 years to continue their tenancy.