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The Transformation of the New York Waterfront w/ Karrie Jacobs | The Nation Podcast · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the nation podcast where we take you behind the scenes of our biggest stories with the journalists who wrote them.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm DD Guttenblen, special correspondent and host of the nation podcast.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In its heyday, the Bush Terminal Industrial Complex spans several city blocks along Brooklyn's Waterfront and employed more than 35,000 people.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me say that again, more than 35,000 people.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Built by Irving Bush in the late 19th century, it was an early intermodal shipping hub.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Goods arrived by water and left by rail.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bananas, coffee and cotton came in through doors on one side of the warehouses and were loaded into trains on the other.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But after World War II, as trucks replaced rail and shipping patterns changed, the terminals purpose faded
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today Bush Terminal is again at the center of New York's vision for urban reinvention and a debate around development, displacement, and the future of work in the city.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joining us on a deep dive into Bush Terminal is veteran architecture critic and writer Kerry Jacobs.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her essay on the waterfront appears in our December issue.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kerry, thanks so much for joining us, and welcome to the nation podcast.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: well thank you for inviting me it's very cool to be here it's a pleasure now you mentioned in your piece that you used to drive past the the bush terminal in the eighties and it was utterly derelict at the time so talk us through sort of the the initial rise and fall of the terminal and how it came to be and who was Irving Bush
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Irving Bush was a late 19th century industrialist who had a vision for how good should be moving in and out of New York City, which oddly is not so different from the current vision of how good should be moving.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're trying to resuscitate
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: rail transportation and non-truck transportation, but anyway, he built this massive complex in which coffee and cocoa and bananas as you mentioned things came in by ship and went out by rail.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they came in a set of doors that were on the water side of this huge terminal and they went out the land side and were distributed throughout the city and beyond.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was a marvelous thing that was that thrived until after World War II when rail freight began to be displaced by trucking and bringing goods into the city by water and then rail became passe.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what I mentioned,
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the peace in a way is a series of incorrect impressions that I had over time because in the 80s I was living in Goannas and I would be driving on the Goannas Expressway and I would just see these massive, massive buildings that I assumed to know one was doing anything with and they were still somewhat alive as I mentioned in the peace tops the bubble gum and
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was actually based in Bush, Terminal, until the mid-90s, and people I personally knew worked there.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I never understood when my friend Mark New Garden, the cartoonist would say that he worked in this weird industrial building, I never understood where it was.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I never understood which weird industrial building, because the waterfront and Brooklyn in general was full of them.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, there's a lot of pieces here, and to me all fascinating, I live in Kabul Hill a couple of blocks from the Red Hook waterfront, and we're currently having big debates over what's going to happen over there, whether the city's going to build, high-rise housing, whether it's going to be accessible, but
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that's true about New York and ports, and it was summoned for me by the title of the piece, which is very evocative, of course, on the waterfront, is that the Brooklyn Waterfront used to be the biggest port in the world, and a lot of that was moved to New Jersey in the 70s.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, part of what happened is just moving shipping away from New York City, or
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, some of it has to do with container ports that as ships instead of having, you know, vast
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, holds full of cargo, all of a sudden, there was a different kind of ship and they were carrying containers and the ports in New York City in general, not just Brooklyn, we're not really set up to handle containers and so new ports were built in New Jersey that were better suited to the container business, but the whole story of
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: of New York City in the late 20th century and the early 21st century is about the changing uses of the waterfront in our relationship to the waterfront, and that's one part of the story.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the other part of the story is about manufacturing in of all places Midtown Manhattan, and the fact that it still exists barely.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, there's, I mean, that part of the story also just resonates very deeply with me for two reasons.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is that the nation's former architecture critic, Michael Sorkin, and I wrote a piece for Harper's in the early 80s.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: about the time-square redevelopment plan and at that point the plan was viewed they were going to knock down the theaters and put up these four cookie cutter office buildings on the four corners of time-square designed by Philip Johnson and I know them well.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Horrors and we stopped them which which is astonishing I mean you know the
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I remember at that point the New York Times had an editorial that was aimed at those of us who were campaigning to hold this development up saying, get out of the way of Times Square.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now Times Square is not the sort of CD entertainment zone it was in the 80s and people have mixed views about that and you can talk about the disnefication of 42nd Street, but those particular
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you, Michael Sorkin, and the Wall Street crash of the late 80s, you all worked together.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We all worked together.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the Wall Street crash since we're, since we're digressing here, Wall Street crash of the late 80s, I was at the voice then, and Mark New Garden did, if your friend did crash comics for us, which explained the Wall Street crash.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what I was thinking about is that when we wrote the piece about Times Square, at that point, I think it was two-thirds or half of every item of clothing worn in the United States was manufactured within a ten-block radius of Times Square.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's how dominant the garment district in Manhattan was in the 80s.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: before it all moved to China and India and Bangladesh and so part of it was manufacturing, but the other part and the other reason that this piece resonates very deeply for me and I think will be of great interest to our readers is because of the politics, the larger politics, which is the fight,
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the 80s to the turn of the 20th, 21st century to get manufacturing uses out of valuable real estate.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So any place where you could make money turning it into residential, they were pushing manufacturing out, which is one of the reasons they ripped up the light rail lines that were all over the city.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: when Bush terminal was at its height because they, you know, they wanted to turn midtown and the area around the World Trade Center, the World Financial Center, into high-priced residential housing.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, the funny thing is there was a moment about 10 or 15 years ago where two trees the real estate company owned by the Willentuses was pushing to put in a new light rail line that would run from the vicinity of Bush terminal along the waterfront through red hook and all the way up the waterfront in Queens.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was early in the Wazio administration, and one of their arguments was that it would allow people who lived in some of the housing projects and queens and and ready to get to industrial jobs.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the real thing that would have happened had the project gone through is all the industrial land along the waterfront would have been resowned residential, which was the unspoken agenda of that project.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was a really interesting project because it seemed like an end run around the MTA, which I thought was very smart, but there was this other clearly, there was this other agenda for getting at those waterfront industrial places that could be very valuable residential land.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's always this tension and this struggle in New York City.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's you know,
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's interesting because you have these buildings that are massive and with big, big floor plates, so you can do, you know, they're very well suited to manufacturing, but as you're reporting discovered, the garment industry isn't eager to move to Brooklyn.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why is that?
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's interesting because the garment industry, I mean, like a lot of people, I grew up in the garment industry, my family, manufactured really ugly ski jackets that were sold at Sears and JC pennies.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I tell people that they say, oh, you must know how to ski and it's like, no, no, the word ski jackets like that.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, so I grew up with the kind of garment manufacturing that moved as you mentioned offshore beginning really in the 1970s into the 1980s and a different kind of garment manufacturing has evolved, which is highly specialized, high-end, tied to either the fashion industry in New York
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: or the needs of the theater district, which is to say it's stuff that sometimes is one of a kinds things that need to be manufactured very quickly and are bringing more money for garment than say the JC Penny ski jackets.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a different garment industry and it's very tied to the culture of Manhattan.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: that that that's not to say that they're there haven't been some garb and vending factors along the waterfront in Brooklyn.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean that's one of the many there are many many odd twists in this story.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of which is that in the 1980s, before James Town bought industry city, one of the complexes along the waterfront, another developer whose name I can't remember bought it, and that developer's plan was to sell pieces of the industrial building as industrial condominiums to garment manufacturers.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there have been many iterations of this plan, and that I'm not sure how successful that plan was not very I'm guessing, but it just goes around and around and around.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm glad you mentioned industry city because that brings up a lot of other interesting aspects of this story.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: enormous buildings and warehouses that stretch all along the Brooklyn waterfront from essentially house head park all the way up through sunset park so it's it's bush terminal it's industry city it's the Brooklyn Army terminal right and the Brooklyn Army terminal and bush terminal are still publicly owned but industry city was bought by private developer
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And is now kind of on some nights and some weekends is the White Hot Center of the universe, you know, there are.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Robin, you mean for well or more interesting, there there's definitely music and and you know outdoor dance parties and all kinds of stuff like that at night.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: that on a Saturday afternoon, it seems like all the young parents from that part of Brooklyn go there and their kids play and there's like a huge sandbox with little miniature steam shovels in it and kids are running around the parents are drinking and socializing and it's a scene and it's, you know,
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a lovely scene, actually, and the other thing, the other thing that I like to about it is there are Japan village, which is this complex of Japanese restaurants and bars, has also spawned this sort of Japanese retail zone that has an arcade full of claw machines, you know, the machines that you put a coin in and that you never win at.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It has more of those
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an interesting thing in this three city.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have mixed feelings about how it was redeveloped, but it is undeniably successful.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's interesting.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I went to the National Magazine Awards where there are a couple of years ago.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, really, yeah.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was like they were definitely, you know, making an effort to be edgy by having it in industry city.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was a very interesting space.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the other hand, getting there, it's, you know, these terminals, you have to like the art train.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The art train is your friend.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it was still a pretty long walk.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and those to the people there seem to be coming and going by cab, which is my sense of what happens when people go there for a nighttime entertainment.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, probably so.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna go like, but the other thing about Brooklyn Army Terminal is that it was designed by cask Gilbert, so, you know, it's an architectural landmark in a way that the rest of the complex, although they look very similar, they're not.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, the Brooklyn Army Terminal has this incredibly beautiful, weird at atrium.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: that was designed.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think for bringing things on a crane off of ships, and it doesn't do that anymore, but it's really a spectacular space.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I took my school of visual arts grad students there, which I think is how I got interested in the whole story in the first place.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's when I first heard about the new garment district concept, and they were, they had been bringing light manufacturing
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: a fairly large jewelry manufacturer with amazing machinery, you know, spitting out chains of different sorts.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there are all these different permutations of industrial, industrial revitalization that are happening in spots along the waterfront.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One industrial revitalization, we're obviously 100% for at the nation.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's another word for
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lovely spots where parents are sitting and drinking and their kids are playing in sand boxes and you can buy high-end Japanese manufactured goods that were less keen on here and that's gentrification.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I wondered if you could talk about the tensions between gentrification industrial revitalization and waterfront real estate, which is what this ultimately is.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, industry city has had its conflicts, its political conflicts with sunset park, which has been working class heavily Hispanic and Chinese neighborhood in recent years.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they definitely wanted to go much bigger in terms of entertainment.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think they were shut down to some extent.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: That said,
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was, for a long time, a place where light manufacturers, designers, artists, artisans of all sorts were able to get very cheap space.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is not the case anymore.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gentrification.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there are worse forms of gentrification if the entire waterfront had become condos, which was entirely possible.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that would be worse than what industry city has done if it was successfully rehabilitated as a place for manufacturing and for other sorts of
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think is, I mean, I take your point, which is that, you know, however pleasant the amenities, it's still bringing manufacturing jobs and non-white-collar jobs to a neighborhood with a large working-class population.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a sense of whether there was significant displacement at industry city and whether there is likely to be significant displacement around Bush terminal?
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm in terms of industrial uses or in terms of residential.
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In terms of, in other words, the people who live in Sunset Park, are they now being priced out of Sunset Park by people who want to walk to industry city on a Saturday.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure it's at that point yet.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would be a little bit more worried about the people who live in sunset park being driven out by whatever immigration enforcement Trump messages us with.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the prices, I was actually recently looking at rental prices.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I live sort of at the far south end where Park Slope runs into Windsor Terrace, runs into Greenwood, where the prospects express the way
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was looking at apartment prices in my neighborhood and looking for their south and looking and they definitely drop off considerably when you get to sunset park.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know what those prices are relative to what they were in the past.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I assume that they have gotten higher.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Bush Terminal is still owned by the city.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So presumably the new administration will have considerable say in what happens to it.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: What?
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since it doesn't look like it's going to be the new garment center.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think the options are and which ones do you think are both most likely and would be best?
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, they are...
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: say it now has an acronym that's made and made de and I forget what that stands for exactly, but I think the first word in that is manufacturing.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think they are still trying to attract different kinds of like manufacturing, just not specifically garment makers.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know,
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there was sort of the idea that the way to rehabilitate cities was to, you know, attract the arts, which was a lovely idea, and I'm, you know, pro arts, but it turns out that small manufacturers are better economically and create jobs for more people and are better engine of revitalization in a lot of ways than say somebody making sculpture or painting.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think there's a lot of incentive for the city to continue to promote and to promote light manufacturing and buildings that are historically industrial.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it would be foolish not to, which doesn't mean, of course, that that's what they're going to do.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I believe that who they're trying to get to move into that building are light industrial tenants still.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And are they keeping them as purely manufacturing or are they because this was, you know, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Soho was a light manufacturing district, right?
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the the incorporation of live work spaces basically made made that come to an end.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the thing that the thing that made it come to an end was Robert Moses, wanting to put a highway through.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that did diminish the value of that neighborhood to the point where artists could could afford to move in their intros.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So again, well, but it sounds like artists could afford to move to Bush terminal intros if they were allowed to or they allowed to.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, well,
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what the rules are, whether, I mean, industry city had been very popular with artists, but is more extensive now.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the goal is to get manufacturers in, but I'm not sure that there's a band specifically on people making art.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure if you could specifically band people making art.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know.
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, interesting, I mean, you have this wonderful image.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: visual image of the doors like the doors of an advent calendar where they sort of pop open on one side.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's particularly for listeners in the New York area if you haven't been there, it's definitely worth going and taking a look because they are striking buildings.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the one thing that surprised me when I was there in August is that I was walking on the streets surrounding Bush terminal and security guys wanted to know what I was doing there.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't quite open to the public yet, but there is a park that's going to be on one of the pears, and I think it will be more publicly accessible as time goes on.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that New York, I mean, I suppose this strikes me because I live in a, you know,
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've never really had a big public debate about, I mean, New York was a city where the 19th century and the 20th century, the waterfront was almost entirely cut off, largely by Moses' highways in Manhattan, but in Brooklyn, by industrial areas.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, also, you know, the pears when New York City was the waterfront was primarily a port in Manhattan, you had no waterfront, you know, the public could go to a battery park that was all the waterfront to access there was.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't just Moses, it was also that the pears were commercially owned and not accessible to anyone who wasn't going on an ocean liner or wasn't a long shormon.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So our attitude about what the waterfront is and who it's for has changed dramatically.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've also developed a lot of the waterfront land as residential, which is lovely except for this one thing, which is sea level rise and global warming, make waterfront locations more hazardous for people to live in.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's our relationship with the waterfront is incredibly complicated.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's a really interesting, long, messy story.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: that goes beyond manufacturing and beyond gentrification.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's sort of coming to terms with the fact that we live in an island city, or mostly an island city.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that's exactly what I was getting at.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: For whatever reasons, for the most recent part of its history, New York's waterfront was not public space.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not publicly accessible.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a campaign, I suppose, part of the fallout from not doing Westway was that the West sidewaterfront became publicly accessible, and then so Manhattan's waterfront is now largely publicly accessible.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's never been a kind of big public discussion about what, I mean, Brooklyn's waterfront is much longer, much more extensive.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the Queen's waterfront similarly, and yet there's never been a, you know, we don't think about the fact that, for example, Brooklyn and Queen's are on Long Island and Island.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the funny thing is the funny thing is I, not not the next piece I'm writing for the nation, but the one after there's a group of artists called Works on Water and they have been walking, doing a project of walking the entire New York City water front for years and they started doing it in cooperation with the department of city planning which was trying to promote a new plan for the waterfront and I went walking with them a few
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: along the Queen's waterfront.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was stunning.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had never walked along
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, a lot of the queens.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know the Brooklyn waterfront pretty well, but I've never really walked along much of the Queen's waterfront.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was glorious.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was amazing.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where were you?
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we wound up just past Douglas Vanner.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: We started at, oh god, I can't think, it's one of the old forts.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Near Willick's point, but not quite.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can't think of the name of the fort.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we were sort of walking on the waterfront alongside a highway, which, of course, I can't think of the
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: for long ways.
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, Douglas didn't matter and where the waterfront is all private property.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was really interesting.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was just an astonishingly beautiful piece of waterfront that I'd never given any thought to before.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, if you're taking the train to the plane to Kennedy, right, and you look out the window in Jamaica Bay, you're in one of the most pristine wildlife sanctuaries in the United States, but to get there, to walk around, is a hell of an effort, hundreds of thousands of people train through it every day, but to actually get to it and be there is more difficult.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it's
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very interesting as living patterns change and manufacturing patterns change.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: New York has this incredible wealth of waterfront land, and a lot of it is either publicly owned or derelict.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the Brooklyn Waterfront became publicly owned because it was derelict, and there hasn't really been
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: a big public conversation about it.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe your article will help to spark that at least for this section of the Brooklyn order front.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I'm, as I say, I'm endlessly fascinated with the water front and our relationship with water, which is very complicated these days.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And have you heard anything about, I mean, it sounds like this process of redeveloping
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: as it were in the background.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I, I don't think I've ever heard Eric Adams pronounce the world's Bush terminal.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you have any sense of whether there's going to be continuity of effort, whether the newly administration has, well, I mean, it's interesting because Andrew Kimball, who I mentioned in the piece, who was the guy who was running the Brooklyn Navy Art and sort of envisioned it as this green manufacturing center, which it sort of became.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: then took a job at industry city and was part of the private redevelopment of industry city.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's who Adams installed as the head of the economic development corporation.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's although the plan to turn Bush terminal into the new garment district began under DiBlasio,
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: it was completed to the extent that you might call it complete under atoms as overseen by the EDC run by Andrew Kimball.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know what Mayor Mombani is going to do with the EDC, usually mayors install their own head of the EDC.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: EDC economic development corporation.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, which is this public private entity that develops mostly public land in New York City.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's, it's, it really interesting question.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, obviously, these projects, industrial projects were not, they did not seem to be Adam's priority, but Adam's priorities were never entirely clear.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And meanwhile, it did keep progressing, which is interesting.
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think one of my takeaways, you'll tell me whether there's something else that one should have taken away.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of my takeaways from your pieces that there are thousands of square feet of magnificently developed industrial space
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: with no clear, with no clear use yet insight.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's a sense of outright, but that doesn't mean that at some point you soon emerge.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think half of New York City is looking for space in the other half of New York City is creating space, and they just don't always find each other.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right, well, watch this space.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carrie Jacobs, thanks so much for coming on the nation podcast.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're very welcome.