James Gandolfini tried to whack it. Lou Reed couldn’t stand it. The “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery told The Daily News: “It’s not a bunch of wealthy people who are just complaining that their views are going to be blocked. It’s about the actual livability of the neighborhood.”
But, of course, it was a bunch of wealthy neighbors complaining.
After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. The project took nearly a decade and cost a king’s ransom. Luxury apartment developers in the neighborhood predicted Armageddon. Instead, apartment prices went through the roof. The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.
There are a couple of larger lessons here. They are not so much about Nimbyism, but about how residents of a neighborhood react when faced with development absent real planning, and about why it makes sense, economically and in terms of public health and social justice, for disparate communities to share burdens like parking for sanitation trucks.
At issue was not a stinky garbage-processing plant. The garage, at West and Spring Streets, was always to be just a place to park, fuel, repair and clean sanitation trucks, more than 150 of them, with the shed, across Spring Street, used as a storehouse for some 5,000 tons of salt to clear roads after snowstorms. The site was hardly a charmer: It used to be divided between a United Parcel Service truck lot and an old, much smaller sanitation building. When there was not enough room to park, idling vehicles often spilled out, blocking traffic.
Still, opponents imagined something worse arising, and rallied to cancel or at least shrink the project. They argued that the garage should not be housing trucks for three Manhattan districts. The fight became one of the toughest urban land-use battles of the Bloomberg era.
Now that the garage has opened, it clearly is, among other things, a whole lot nicer than what used to be there. The sleek new $250 million building is a five-story, 425,000-square-foot structure sealed behind a sound-blocking glass curtain wall that is in turn masked by 2,600 custom-made perforated metal panels, like fins. Differently colored levels, designating different districts, glow behind the fins on the south end of the building.
These fins reduce heat and glare, block views of the trucks inside, as neighbors demanded — and calm the facade, unifying the garage’s exterior. Decades ago, the Sanitation Department painted all its trucks white, conveying a message of cleanliness; the fins take a similar tack, giving the garage the appearance of a shiny machine. To create an impression that the building is not so massive, the architects have rested the upper glassed-in stories atop a dark-brick ground floor that is set slightly back, so that the garage seems almost to float on its base. Subtly angled, it opens up views to the Hudson River from the street. A green, sloped roof captures rainwater to clean the trucks. It’s a pity the roof isn’t open to the public. It’s lovely.
But the real scene-stealer is the salt shed, a 69-foot-tall enclosed cubist pavilion made of glacial-blue faceted concrete in the shape of a salt crystal. The city operates 40 salt sheds, many of them hardly more than shacks. This one is the Sydney Opera House by comparison. It cost a whopping $21 million, but considering what billionaires now pay to squirrel away middling Modiglianis, it seems a bargain. Its 34-foot-high door opens to a soaring interior where I could picture summertime performances with crowds massed outdoors. Michael Friedlander, director of special projects for the Sanitation Department, recently told my colleague David W. Dunlap that, because of its six-foot-thick walls, the shed could survive whatever cataclysm befalls New York, leaving future civilizations to ponder why we worshiped salt.
The complex was conceived by Dattner Architects in association with WXY. I toured the project the other day with Gia Mainiero from Dattner and Claire Weisz from WXY. The designers clearly recognized an opportunity to elevate utilitarian buildings in a way that would honor the area’s historic industrial character.
Neighbors saw the project differently, of course. Much of the resistance was plainly territorial, but you can’t discount residents’ reaction to what seemed like out-of-control development. The Trump SoHo hotel, a sore thumb of a glass tower, was rising on Spring Street. Philip Johnson and Alan Ritchie’s Urban Glass House, a high-end condo development, had already opened, and after the economy tanked in 2008, its owners were especially vociferous about the crippling impact they believed the sanitation garage would have on their bottom line.
Then there was the rezoning of Hudson Square in general, which paved the way for even more luxury buildings.
The situation brings to mind the protests underway in Brooklyn, where residents are up in arms about a range of proposed projects, including two residential towers that would rise at Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, a hulking redevelopment on a former hospital site in Cobble Hill and the replacement of the low-rise Brooklyn Heights library branch with a market-rate condo tower where a smaller library is to be tucked into the ground floor.
Individually, there may be economic logic behind each of these developments. But local residents fret about the overcrowding of public schools, strains on public transit, the loss of emergency medical services and more waves of gentrification even as City Hall lacks an effective master plan to coordinate growth. Instead, there are just piecemeal, opportunistic proposals.
City leaders would be wise to guarantee that additional schools, parks and other sites and services that neighborhood residents actually want are provided in return for the increases in density or other changes the government seeks. But that’s not how New York operates.
So, no surprise, neighborhoods greet nearly all change with hostility, one of the larger lessons of the sanitation project.
The other?
No neighborhood welcomes a sanitation facility. That said, city residents depend on the Sanitation Department not just to keep streets and sidewalks clean and safe but to respond in crises like Hurricane Sandy and the 2001 terrorist attacks. On Sept. 11, 2001, sanitation trucks blocked incoming traffic on bridges and tunnels. Distributing sanitation projects equitably across the city also reduces the miles driven, which lowers carbon dioxide emissions and improves air quality.
Environmental justice advocates agreed that the Spring Street site was a no-brainer.
In retrospect, it was a kind of savior, too, ensuring that a valuable piece of property facing the river would not turn into another skyscraper blocking light and further upsetting the scale and historic character of the neighborhood. The community opposition, along with demands by the city’s Public Design Commission for improvements, drove up construction costs for the salt shed but also helped keep the height of the garage to five stories, in line with neighboring warehouses, despite the Sanitation Department’s plea for another story. And it helped keep the focus on good architecture.
That’s the other lesson here, about shared responsibility and quality design. Opponents of the sanitation project in Hudson Square may not have gotten exactly what they wanted. But they were fortunate.
They got something better.
An earlier version of the headline with this article referred imprecisely to the site of the complex. It is on the northern edge of TriBeCa, not in TriBeCa.
