Pier 76 Is Slowly Crumbling, Costs $150 Mil To Fix

Hudson Park River Trust CEO Noreen Doyle told Community Board 4’s Waterfront, Parks and Environment Committee that it’ll need $150 million worth of capital improvements for Pier 76. Otherwise, it may just wash away in the river.

However, as Doyle made clear over the course of an extensive presentation, any development plans to plug that hole are not set in stone. It was, as she repeated multiple times, a moment full of “challenges and opportunities.”

The 5.6 acre pier was an NYPD tow pound until 2021. This was demolished to make way for a minimalist urban park, which Doyle referred to as “interim public space.”

However, marine borers–tiny waterborne animals such as naval shipworms and gribbles–have significantly eroded the pier’s wooden piles over time. Unfortunately, Doyle says, this means that neither green space nor a commercial building can be “structurally added to the pier in its current condition.” Even more tellingly, she said that Pier 76 can’t function as a pier in any real sense of the word: “Even a small little boat is not allowed to tie up alongside it.”

This has all lead to a possibly dire financial situation for the self-sustaining Trust. “If we don’t start on the long path of thinking about the future of reconstructing the pier, it will neither be the public open space that it’s supposed to partially be, nor a contributor to the health and overall cost of maintaining the Hudson River Park,” Doyle emphasized.

The $150 million estimate is, Doyle claimed, “unfortunate” and a “collective challenge.” She told CB4 that “betting the house” on government or state funding is not a “guarantee by any stretch of the imagination.”

The Hudson Park River Project is not necessarily going broke, Doyle noted, pointing to a graph that projected a budget surplus of $11.2 million by the year 2043. However, capital improvements such as the ones needed at Pier 76 are projected to total $29.8 million, leaving a financial gap of $18.6 million.

Filling that gap with a “pizza shop” is not going to work, Doyle said, getting a few chuckles. In fact, some development possibilities the Trust outlined include an office building or a hotel. Building an lucrative office high-rise comes with the obvious caveat, Doyle added, that there’s not “much of a market out there” currently.

Residential development has been ruled out, due to waterfront prices being too high to meet acceptable affordable housing benchmarks. A parking garage or a casino is also a no-go. “We all know you hate parking garages,” Doyle quipped.

As far as the maximum height of any development goes, the Trust is envisioning no more than “11 or 12 stories.” Readjusting the pier’s parameters to open up “more space for open space” or create better “traffic flow” is encouraged.

When the presentation wrapped up, CB4 members had plenty of questions. David Holowka wanted to know if the development project could be phased. For example, he wondered if the Trust could introduce an initial commercial site on the pier “that had its own foundation in advance, to begin generating revenue?”

Doyle seemed intrigued. They could pursue such an idea “if you all could trust us to begin doing something like that...which I’m not sure everyone would,” she said.

Maarten de Kadt, the committee’s co-chair, spoke on the elephant in the room. Since there was indeed no set plan in place, creating a “scattershot” process of determining what would happen to the pier, perhaps the Trust had the opportunity to do a design contest. This would involve soliciting ideas from numerous “architects and planners, using the various parameters you’ve set out.”

Doyle, tellingly, was not entirely certain how that would play out. “You can do the best planning these days, and discover that offices want ‘this’ instead of ‘that.’ It’s hard to predict now whether there’s a specific use and user,” she concluded.