COVER STORY, SEPTEMBER 2004

WHAT'S OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Redevelopment of the Hudson River’s former industrial sites revitalizes towns and promotes environmental awareness.
Luci Cason

Polluted and virtually abandoned for decades, waterfront land along the Hudson River used to be thought of as America’s dumping ground.

Not anymore. Cleanup efforts and new legislation have heralded a push to redevelop and revitalize land along the Hudson.

“The river, by and large, was abandoned back in the early 1970s because it had so many pollutants,” says Anthony Campagiorni, president of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation (HVEDC).

“The river is cleaner now than it has ever been, so people want to live by the Hudson,” he says.

Through creative adaptive reuse, a plethora of under-used factories and warehouses along the river provide the perfect opportunity to fulfill communities’ desires to be closer to the Hudson.

“The Hudson was the first commercial river in the U.S. and there are a lot of former factories that are never going to be used again as factories,” says Campagiorni.

Established little more than a year ago, the HVEDC has already helped develop 1.9 million square feet of under-used former industrial sites, known as brownfields, by marketing them to potential developers.

“The HVEDC was built on a principal of marrying economic development with environmental preservation,” says Campagiorni. “One of our goals that we focus on is brownfield redevelopment – taking the old industrial sites on the Hudson River and turning them into viable commercial options.”

Recently, the HVEDC facilitated the development of a former General Motors plant, which will be developed into a mixed-use project in Tarrytown, New York.

Ranging from vacant gas stations to former factories, many brownfield sites lay fallow because it seems too expensive and too risky to redevelop them. Campagiorni notes that recent New York legislation and a new state initiative called the Brownfield Cleanup Program have made it easier and more cost-effective to remediate former industrial sites, 117 of which the HVEDC has identified in the area.

Ned Sullivan, president of the Poughkeepsie, New York-based non-profit environmental group Scenic Hudson, is also pleased with the new legislation.

“It’s an improved law that provides a number of elements that may be beneficial to brownfield sites,” he says.

Still, by any standards, brownfield redevelopment can be problematic. Remediation can present a host of challenges, including toxin cleanup and retrofitting. But, says Campagiorni, “On the flip side, what you already have, usually, is the infrastructure.”

With all the benefits of redevelopment, it’s not surprising that communities would be supportive of, and eager to become involved in, the refurbishing of brownfields in their areas.

“From a community perspective, why we’re so excited about brownfields is that it doesn’t tax the environment anymore. It’s an existing building. If you can take that building and rehabilitate it, it’s not taking any more open space,” says Campagiorni. “So, if we can take the buildings we have and adaptively reuse them, it’s better for the community. It takes away an eyesore. Plus, it puts that building back on the tax rolls, as opposed to taking raw land and building on that,” he says. “Right now we are trying to raise the visibility of opportunities in the area.”

One riverfront development that is getting a lot of attention these days is the Long Dock Beacon project in Beacon, New York.

Spearheaded by non-profit organization Scenic Hudson, Long Dock Beacon, scheduled to open early 2007, will be the redevelopment of land formerly used for industrial purposes.

Founded in 1963, Scenic Hudson is an environmental organization that works with citizens, government and businesses throughout New York to preserve land, create public parks, reclaim city waterfronts and promote community planning, environmental education and access to the Hudson River.

Recognizing that former industrial sites along the Hudson would one day be redeveloped, Sullivan says that, over a 10-year period, Scenic Hudson has been purchasing property in and around the city of Beacon in anticipation of development, in order to ensure that the community’s green areas would remain unblemished. The group had originally planned to create a park on the waterfront property, which was being used as a junkyard and storage facility for oil, coal and salt.

However, after conducting a series of meetings designed to solicit the public’s input, Scenic Hudson realized that the community wanted a mixed-use development.

“They wanted to re-establish the link between the city of Beacon and the waterfront,” Sullivan notes.

Although Scenic Hudson has assisted with brownfield redevelopments in cities such as Yonkers and also owns waterfront land in Peekskill and Haverstraw, this will be the first time that the group has been key in developing a property it owns.

“We’ve taken risks as an organization in acquiring contaminated property and incurred expenses in cleaning it up even before we had a development partner,” says Sullivan of the Long Dock Beacon site.

After developing a conservation and development template — a conceptual plan for the property, which will break ground in February 2006 — Scenic Hudson put out a request for qualifications and chose Albany, New York-based Foss Group Beacon as the developer of the property in 2002.

“We described our objectives for the property, which was to remediate it, restore it for public use and to facilitate economic development,” says Margery Groten, senior project manager for Scenic Hudson.

“It’s unusual for an environmental organization like us to delve into this realm of development,” concedes Sullivan, a former New York state department of environmental conservation deputy commissioner and environmental commissioner for the state of Maine.

Long Dock Beacon is hardly a typical development, though.

Planned with a prevailing theme of environmental awareness, this $32 million green development will dovetail with the already 2,000 acres of highland property in and around the city of Beacon that Scenic Hudson has preserved.

The project is intended to complement a revitalized Beacon Main Street and a Rivers and Estuaries Center, part of which will be located at Beacon Landing.

Located on a 23-acre parcel, 16 acres of which will be a large public park, Long Dock Beacon will include recreation areas, docks, canoe and kayak put-ins, a quiet harbor — only allowing electric and manual-powered watercraft — fishing pier, nature trails, conference center and three restaurants. About 1,000 square feet of retail, designed not to compete with the retail of Beacon’s Main Street, will provide for the basic needs of Long Dock Beacon visitors.

The development will also include a greenhouse — which will provide educational opportunities and herbs and flowers for the restaurants — wellness center, boardwalk, civic plaza, a small office component and a 140-room hotel. A second phase will include expanded office and hotel space and possibly some residential development.

The as-yet-unnamed hotel is going to be, “hopefully, the greenest hotel in the country,” says Groten. Like the rest of the Long Dock Beacon project, it will be designed with sustainable systems and materials, and the environmentally friendly hotel will also use alternative heating, cooling and energy sources.

The hotel “will have those kinds of unusual green features that you don’t find in other kinds of hotels in this country,” says Groten. “We’re shooting to achieve a LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) goals certification, a national standard for environmentally sensitive design.”

Patkau Architects and Gruzen Samton, the project’s architects, are designing Long Dock Beacon using environmental strategies and technologies and a pier-like design that, aesthetically, fits in with the surrounding area.

Expected to attract convention attendees and businesspeople from Manhattan (which is a little over an hour away by train), the hotel will truly be one-of-a-kind.

“There have been projects similar to this all over the country but most of them have been institutional or governmental buildings,” says Groten. “It’s a very unusual concept for a private mixed-use development like this. There’s really no good example of a green hotel in this country. There are in Europe, but not here.”

Hopefully the Long Dock Beacon project will prove that economic development and environmentalism are not mutually exclusive.

“We’re in an area here where people are very conscious of the environment,” says Campagiorni. “I think you’ll see a lot more of the conscientious type of developer.”

 

Regional Marketing Effort Focuses on Hudson Valley A new public-private partnership called the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation (HVEDC) is making sure the Hudson Valley becomes well known as a business destination. The group recently launched a $7.5 million marketing strategy to attract businesses to the region. (For more information on the Hudson Valley area, please see page 20.) The international marketing initiative is being funded by Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corporation and is being undertaken in conjunction with the Empire State Development Corporation, environmental organizations such as Scenic Hudson and Hudson River Valley Greenway, and economic development agencies in nine counties flanking both banks of the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Initially, HVEDC will build on a solid foundation in four well-established clusters — semiconductor and microelectronics manufacturing, biotech and pharmaceutical, information technology, and insurance and finance. The group will also focus on marketing buildings and sites that have already gone through the local land-use planning process and have been targeted for development or redevelopment. Top priority is being given to buildings with a minimum of 50,000 square feet of office, industrial or warehouse space, shovel-ready building sites of at least 5 acres and brownfields where remediation has been done or is nearing completion. Close to 150 buildings and sites are now listed on a searchable database on the organization’s Web site, www.hvedc.com. — Anthony Campagiorni, HVEDC president and CEO

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