Usually, when the city plans a $66 million project to revive a neighborhood, it’s not criticized as too anemic.
But that’s exactly what’s going on in Stapleton on Staten Island, which has a North Shore version of Manhattan’s Battery Park in the works. The city plans to revitalize a former Navy home port into a complex with commercial space, a banquet hall, recreation center, waterfront esplanade and 350 apartments.
Kevin Barry, vice chair and founding member of the Downtown Staten Island Council, says, “The design could have been two slender towers instead of sprawling outward, which would mean more people and added commercial vitality to an area that needs it.”
Despite the demand for more housing, there won’t be high-rises anytime soon.
Last month, Staten’s Island’s Community Board 1 approved a plan for the Special Stapleton Waterfront District that would limit building height. The board voted 22-1 to go along with a city plan to cap the height of buildings at 50 feet, or approximately five stories.
But Barry said what’s needed is “more in the range of 15- or 16-story housing.”
Barry said the effort to preserve the downtown area for mixed-use zoning would arrest development at just the time when there should be encouragement of new buildings.
“We need quality housing,” he said. “Although the area is designated for mixed use, with commercial ground floors and limits on height to five-story developments, we need more than five-story developments.”
He argues that’s because the North Shore’s time has come.
“People are moving back to urban areas, crime is down, it’s safer and more cultural,” he said. “We’ve even got a free boat ride that takes just 22 minutes to get into Manhattan.”
There are other concerns with the city plan, including that the new project will split the neighborhood in two.
The proposed construction at the Stapleton waterfront is on the other side of the Staten Island Railway tracks from the existing Stapleton neighborhood. “It’s literally dividing the town into rich and poor, two sides of the tracks,” says Barry. “We wouldn’t want to see the town of Stapleton thwarted in building up an area by the waterfront.”
Stapleton is the site of another disputed development plan, a proposal to build 160 co-op apartments — 60 percent market rate to 40 percent subsidized — in what’s now a municipal parking lot and an adjacent bank along a main street in the town.
The plan includes about 180 parking spots for the residents as well as for shoppers, with spots set aside for the public.
In this car-dominated borough, the issue of parking surrounding the development has been heated.
In part, that’s because municipal parking lots are getting scarcer on the island — the St. George municipal parking lot is also slated for development.
As revitalization moves forward, the idea is to avoid other past mistakes seen on the island.
“We don’t want to recreate the kind of stock that exists on the southern island — stucco- and vinyl-sided townhouses,” Barry said.