Stapleton Court apartments under construction, from the SIR platform, April 2011. Photo © by A. D. Coleman.
Winter did linger in the New York City area, but spring has finally sprung here. It’s gotten warm enough around these parts for my wife Anna and I to wander about our little township, historically know as Stapleton, taking note of changes and activity. The future of this bedroom community depends on new residential blood, which in turn will encourage and support new retail and commercial enterprises, so we pray for cinderblock, a sure mark of solid buildings that will go beyond the standard townhouse model — nowadays made mostly of 2x4s, plywood, sheetrock, styrofoam insulation, and aluminum siding — of which we have no shortage.
The first thing we notice: Construction has resumed at the site of “Stapleton Court,” a 162-unit mixed-income co-op development located on what was formerly an underused municipal parking lot on Bay Street in Stapleton. Originally slated to get underway in May 2008, the project went on hold — at least visibly — when the recession hit that spring, with only the foundations laid by the time winter set in last November. Its developers, BFC Partners, appear to have it now back on track. They’re building the second floor now; according to a worker with whom I chatted, they’ll have the fifth (top) floor up by the end of May.
Stapleton Houses, looking northeast down Broad Street. Photo © 2011 by A. D. Coleman.
This will be a notable enhancement of the neighborhood, the first substantial new residential structures built here since the Stapleton Houses project was completed on May 31, 1962, half a century ago. Stapleton Houses, which we can see from our rear windows, is the largest housing development on Staten Island: the 17.94-acre complex, bordered by Tompkins Avenue, Broad, Hill, Warren and Gordon Streets, includes six 8-story buildings, with 693 apartments housing about 2,148 residents. Plus a just-finished “community center.” In many ways it’s a cookie-cutter New York City Housing Authority warehouse for poor people, with all the ills endemic thereto, including crime, prostitution, and drugs. (On the plus side, depending on how you count, Ghostface Killah and RZA of the Island’s Wu-Tang Clan came out of this hellhole, as Ghostface recounts in this YouTube video.) More on Stapleton Houses in a future post.
Stapleton Court, Bay St., Staten Island, artist's rendering.
The “Stapleton Court” development’s design includes 208 parking spaces, 156 for its residents plus 52 metered slots. The one-time parking lot it has replaced didn’t get much use, it’s true, because this community has been economically depressed for decades (due in no small part to the siting of Stapleton Houses here), and the section of Bay Street that runs through Stapleton presently offers little in the way of shops, pubs, cafés, restaurants, and services that would draw traffic. However, if all goes well that’s about to change, so the city should start considering alternatives for municipal parking. One obvious option: the area on the other side of the Staten Island Railway, known locally as the Homeport, already heading toward a massive makeover.
SIR Platform, Stapleton. Photo © 2011 by A. D. Coleman.
Bay Street, on which this residential complex fronts, sits on one side of the tracks of the elevated Staten Island Railway (SIR), which runs right behind Stapleton Court on the block that it will occupy when finished. On the other side of those tracks, the elephant in the room, the Stapleton waterfront redevelopment, has started to lumber around.
This ambitious project will, for the first time, make intelligent use of a prime sweep of New York harbor real-estate. Ironstate Development, the Hoboken firm whose credits include the W Hotel and Pier Village in Long Branch, N.J., has committed to investing $150 million in low-rise middle-income apartments with street-level storefronts. New York City, in turn, will invest $33 million to create a six-acre waterfront esplanade and upgrade the streets leading from the Homeport to Stapleton. In addition, a new public launch site will allow non-motorized boats (think kayaking!) to access the river, plus docking for historic vessels.
Under the SIR Stapleton platform, April 2011. Photo © by A. D. Coleman.
Ironside plans two apartment buildings on 7.5 acres, with between 800 and 900 rental units. Estimated monthly rents: $1,100 for a studio to $2,000 for a two-bedroom. Approximately 30,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space will augment the apartments. This will turn Stapleton into a shopping and social hub once again; it served as such for Staten Island until the 1960s and the advent of the malls elsewhere in the borough. Open-air concerts and a farmer’s market number among the planned usages of the redevelopment’s public spaces.
Under the SIR Stapleton platform, April 2011. Photo © by A. D. Coleman.
Hint to the city: Those presently unused and otherwise useless city-owned strips of land underneath and alongside the elevated Staten Island Railway (SIR), mentioned above, would work perfectly for the farmer’s market plus a flea market and parking areas. The poured-concrete support columns for the SIR platform and tracks create slots that would provide just enough space for good-sized vendor stalls. Consider, as a model for this, South East London’s Borough Market, a cheerful, thriving open-air souk set beneath the railway viaducts between the river Thames and Borough High Street, just a short walk from London Bridge. I visited Borough Market several times last fall, during a professional trip to London, finding it packed with local shoppers and tourists. Just right for the new Stapleton.
Borough Market, London. Photo by Josep Renalias, courtesy Wkimedia Commons.
Stapleton Homeport, 2011
This revitalization represents part of a citywide initiative conceived by the Bloomberg administration under the acronym WAVES (officially known as the Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy), with the goal of reconnecting residents and tourists to New York’s 578 acres of shorelines. I’ve watched this waterfront sit idle since the homeport closed down at the end of the Cold War, saw it sliping into decay when I got here in 1967. High time for it to serve this community as a source of energy and revenue, which it hasn’t provided since its heyday as a locale for shipping piers, which ended around the time I moved to Stapleton in 1967. (Historical note: Stapleton officially became a customs-free port on February 1, 1937, and thrived as such until the advent of container shipping.)
In addition to the financial infusion the construction itself represents — the project is expected to generate 1,100 construction jobs — it should, on completion, create at least 150 permanent jobs. And that doesn’t count the clientele and money that will flow into the other businesses in Stapleton from the new residents and visitors drawn to this handsome addition to the city’s desirable places to live.
No construction underway yet that we can see, but word on the street has it beginning sometime in June. Meanwhile they’ve begun to prep for that in various ways: auctioning off equipment left behind by the U. S. Navy, emptying out the buildings repurposed by the city and state during the waterfront’s long post-homeport slumber.
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