Greetings!
URGENT!!!! Before Memorial Day Weekend, help PortSide NewYork FINALLY get appropriate space and terms. This award-winning organization has struggled for 16 years to get those. Our year-round program space is just a kitchen and double-wide hallway (the ship galley and fidley over the engine). Other site rules restrict us further.
Whatever else you may have suggested to the Department of City Planning Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (CWP), we ask you to support us by cutting and pasting the comment in blue below and submitting it here by 11:59pm TONIGHT. The CWP will be in effect FOR 10 YEARS.
Give PortSide NewYork a right-sized home in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook, Brooklyn so this award-winning organization can finally deliver on their mission. PortSide has struggled for 16 years to get space – and permissions on site – to create the innovative maritime center they have planned, and NYC needs as an inspiring model for maritime-focused waterfront development.
For PortSide to serve the forthcoming maritime middle school in Red Hook, going into a new building in September 2025 (which will be the only maritime middle school in NYC), PortSide needs building space, outdoor space ashore, and relief from constraining rules on site.
PortSide serves a diverse array of New Yorkers and visitors and wants to serve the working waterfront and bring that community afloat closer to the community ashore for the benefit of both. If PortSide can finally be allowed to grow, they will create, even more than they do now, a model for how maritime activity can be used for community and economic development.
Give PortSide:
- 12,000 square feet at the south end of the Pier 11 warehouse and shared use of the adjoining loading dock with a 20-year lease.
- Use of the parking lot south of that space, with the approval of Ports America which uses it when cruise ships are at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
- Permission to have revenue-generating activities (all are currently blocked) including vessels alongside their flagship MARY A. WHALEN that pay PortSide fees, retail (such as a museum store and café).
- Demand that the Port Authority of NY & NJ lift their fees on photo, TV and film shoots that make the MARY A. WHALEN too expensive for shoots to use, effectively blocking that potential revenue stream.
- Relief from the requirement that PortSide submit permits for every event with over 20 people. Their lease (currently a berthing permit for the ship) should allow them to conduct normal operations without suffocating interventions like this.
Deadline is 11:59pm tonight Friday, 5/28/21
Thank you! Let’s work together to grow NYC maritime activity serving all New Yorkers! And tourists too!
Best,
