RNC suits vs. Hudson River Park gain steam three years later

An NYPD Corrections bus used to haul protesters to Pier 57 during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

By Chris Lombardi

Three years ago this week, 550 people from all over the country were sleeping at Pier 57, located at West 15th St. and the West Side Highway, and not because they wanted to.

Among them were Matthew Roth, a staff member of the Chelsea-based group Transportation Alternatives, who was there because he was fighting for the environment. Dennis Kyne, a San Jose writer, musician and Gulf War veteran, was there after protesting the new Iraq war. And Rebecca Stoneback, a jewelry designer, told newspapers she was just passing by Union Square when the police scooped her up and took her to the pier, where, she said, the floor was covered in grease and the air stank of chemicals.

All three are among dozens of plaintiffs now suing the city, the NYPD and the mayor’s office for the events of that week, during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Many are also suing Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT), the city-state agency that leased Pier 57 to the police during the convention.

HRPT is named as a defendant in at least five such lawsuits, most of which assert that the Trust should have prevented Pier 57 from being used to house anyone, since the agency had already known about documented unsafe conditions at he pier. “They own the pier. They’re responsible,” said attorney Rose Weber, who has 120 clients in 13 different lawsuits, all concerning what was known for a brief time as “Guantanamo on the Hudson.”

More than 20 RNC lawsuits, including the five naming HRTP, are now in the deposition phase, whereby testimony is taken from both plaintiffs and defendants. The first rounds of the battle so far have largely gone to the plaintiffs, including a Feb. 2, 2007, court order requiring the release of a flood of government documents related to the case. The city had tried to withhold the information on the basis of “national security.”

Meanwhile, the Trust had tried to withhold hazardous-materials reports about the pier, citing possible “enormous commercial harm” to their efforts to develop the pier. Court documents and HRPT’s own reports, obtained by Chelsea Now, raise questions about how and why Pier 57, which was formerly an MTA bus depot, became the city’s choice for processing hundreds of people during the 2004 RNC, most of whom have subsequently seen their charges thrown out of court. As depositions and competing exhibits flow before federal judges this fall, some of these questions may become clearer.

Right now, with all but a handful of plaintiffs and attorneys unwilling to cite the specifics of the case, here is a brief history of the pier and the facts that have emerged so far.

Pier designed for Normandy invasion turned over to buses

Pier 57 first became famous in 1952, when The W.R, Grace Company’s 19th-century pier was rebuilt with a unique “floating” design free of deep-water piles, designed by an architect who had made similar structures for the 1943 invasion of Normandy. But that was just as shipping in Manhattan began its long decline. In 1971, the 110,000-foot structure became a bus depot for the MTA, and remained so throughout even the boom 1990s, as Chelsea Piers began to rise to its north, until Hudson River Park Conservancy, a state agency charged with preserving the waterfront, switched its focus to development and began to propose parks up and down the river. The Conservancy’s 1998 environmental impact statement on the proposed park, conducted by the firm Allee, King, Rosen and Fleming (AKRF), noted the MTA depot’s aging material, never cleared for asbestos, as reason for concern as the Trust planned to move ahead with its plans.

In 2002, the newly established Hudson River Park Trust began to tout Pier 57 for development, pointing out that it is “eligible for listing on the National and State Registers of Historic Places because of its unusual design,” and on Sept. 7, 2003, the MTA buses were moved elsewhere.

Meet the new bosses, not the same as the old boss

Hudson River Park Trust, unlike the Conservancy, is focused specifically on New York City’s West Side park, which runs from Battery Park City to 59th Street. Its membership reflects its stated mission of ensuring development income for all projects. In addition to newly anointed chairperson Diana Taylor and her companion Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, the board includes Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff and a number of heavyweight in the development community, like the Georgetown Company’s Joseph Rose and Theodore Roosevelt IV, a partner at Lehman Brothers, Doctoroff’s old firm.

Roosevelt’s great-great-grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt, was the father of the national park system, a fact noted with great sadness by environmental attorney Joel Kupferman, who is coordinating many of the RNC cases. “He has dishonored his ancestor’s memory” by entering such a pro-development group, said Kupferman, who noted that, in general, even many of the public servants, like Benepe and Doctoroff, were more interested in privatization than in ensuring the park served all New Yorkers well. The others, like Stringer and the head of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (now Pete Grannis), “need to take more of a leadership role,” said Kupferman. “Otherwise, why have a Trust at all?”

Preparing for many things at once

In 2003, as the Trust was getting underway, the big news in town was not the park but the Republican National Convention. Developer and leading New York Republican Roland Betts, owner of Chelsea Piers (and former co-owner with President George W. Bush of the Texas Rangers) had succeeded in his campaign to bring the 2004 Republican National Convention to New York. Bloomberg and Doctoroff celebrated the event’s anticipated tourist income, while the New York Police Department began to prepare for what they called a “National Security Event.”

As the Trust began to include Pier 57 on its list of “development opportunities, it commissioned environmental assessments for the pier in 2003. Soho firm Ove Arup and Partners was hired to conduct a new “Pier 57 Report.” AKRF, the firm that had led the 1998 environmental impact statement, was hired to evaluate the facility for the presence of asbestos. Both reports were prepared for the Trust’s eventual Pier 57 development partners, and both gave the future tenants a lot of bad news.

The Arup report pointed to a “very poor, soiled and dilapidated” ventilation system; plumbing with split pipes and “puddles on the floor”; still-original 1953 wiring that violated all recent codes and came with completely inoperable emergency lighting; and drainage so poor that there was “oily waste visible throughout the street level of the facility.” The asbestos report found “friable ACMS [asbestos-containing materials]” throughout the pier, at levels as high as 40 percent. “Access to these areas must be limited until these materials can be removed,” said the report, dated “May 2004.”

As far as could be determined by press time, the cleanup of the pier was then left by HRPT to whatever development partner the agency would ultimately choose. It is also unclear if or when the environmental assessment reports were given to the unexpected, temporary 2004 suitor for the pier: the NYPD.

Fencing with razor wire

A letter dated June 22, 2004, to HRPT from NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Administration Charles De Rienzo, former head of the Port Authority Police Department, formally requested use of Pier 57 as a “secondary processing facility” for the duration of the RNC. The letter also listed what NYPD intended to do to prepare for the convention, based on inspection of the pier by commanders who would be responsible for the operation.

These “relatively minimal modifications” would be confined to: “installation of fencing with razor wire; surveying and replacing any first-floor lighting as needed; surveying and repairing ventilation fans on first floor; surveying electrical system and hooking up backup generator if possible; painting certain areas of first floor; and installation of many telephones.” Neither that letter nor published remarks from police officials at the time mentioned the asbestos, oil on the floor or broken exit signs contained in the environmental assessment reports.

HRPT Vice President Noreen Doyle declined to comment for Chelsea Now about the events of 2004, citing the ongoing litigation. But according to board member Julie Nadel, neither she nor Trust President Connie Fishman ever asked the board to approve the July 26. 2004, agreement allowing the NYPD to borrow the facility. The board only meets six times a year, Nadel pointed out recently.

Nadel, a longtime parks advocate who has often opposed HRPT’s decisions, pointed out that no decision requires Board approval “unless the Trust is spending more than $100,000.” A request like the one from Police Commissioner Kelly, she added, might have appeared routine, the sort of thing any city agency would grant. “The way the memorandum was worded, it was only in case of some emergency,” said Nadel. “I’m not surprised that I was never told.”

Beside, said Nadel, any concerns might have felt impossible. “They’re a city agency. Going against the cops is going after Doctoroff, going against Bloomberg.” In retrospect, Nadel added, if the board had known about the NYPD’s plans for the pier, she thinks they would have done something very different.

“What the police did is un-American in the truest sense,” said Nadel.

Next week: what all that razor wire was used for, how the Trust responded, and why the NYPD is reluctant to release hazardous-exposure reports filed by its own officers on the scene.