Opponents of an Ikea big box store on the Red Hook waterfront protested outside a public hearing at the City Planning Commission this week.

“Ikea on the highway, not the waterfront,” yelled out Lou Sones, a Red Hook resident who is leading the fight to prevent the Swedish furniture retailer from opening a 346,000-square-foot store along the Erie Basin.

Armed with placards, the group of 20 residents circled outside the meeting at 22 Reade St. in Lower Manhattan Wednesday morning.

“Ikea stinks,” read one sign that was hand drawn by 7-year old Will Dudine. The boy lives just blocks from the proposed development.

At the same time, a group of Ikea supporters, mostly senior citizens from the Red Hook Houses public housing project, sat inside, in chairs set up just outside the jam-packed meeting room.

“I don’t see what they’re complaining about, they’re going to be the first ones coming in and shopping,” remarked one Ikea proponent, bedecked as the others in a bright-yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Ikea a Great Idea.”

Dorothy Shields, president of the Red Hook Houses East Tenants Association, sat with them and said the community desperately needs the “jobs and benefits” Ikea officials have promised.

The home furnishings giant hopes to construct New York City’s first Ikea store at the former New York Shipyard site between Dwight and Columbia streets along the Erie Basin.

The plans also include 1,400 parking spaces and more than 70,000 square feet of additional retail and restaurant space in addition to a 6.2-acre waterfront public esplanade.

The megastore is expected to create 600 new jobs and Ikea has sold itself to local residents, primarily from the unemployment-ridden housing project, by promising to create a job training center a year before the store opens and to open the hiring process to local residents two weeks before anyone else.

“We have a lot of teenagers who are just idle, they are out selling drugs,” said Mable McConey, who has lived in the Red Hook Houses for the past 39 years and hopes Ikea will offer new opportunities to the community.

The Ikea proposal has only furthered the divide in Red Hook, pitting the Red Hook Houses proponents of jobs, whose fellow public housing residents comprise roughly 70 percent of the neighborhood’s population, against other residents concerned about the traffic the largely car-dependent store will bring as well as whether a box store is appropriate development for the scenic waterfront.

John McGettrick, co-chair of the Red Hook Civic Association, said at the protest rally that Ikea was using the promise of jobs to garner support for the project.

“It’s being used to divide people on the basis of something that’s not actually there,” he said.

Sones added, “We would have more jobs if there was proper waterfront development.”

The group and other anti-Ikea activists have put forth a proposal by Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse (SBER) — a development company known for adaptive reuse projects — for a sprawling, 70-acre, retail, residential and commercial development that would include the New York Shipyard site.

That plan has been dismissed as impracticable by Community Board 6, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Borough President Marty Markowitz.

Despite verbal and written commitments by Ikea following Community Board 6’s vote to approve the store’s rezoning application, none have been legally binding. Those include an agreement to provide job training before hiring, a review of traffic conditions a year after the store opens, and a restrictive covenant preventing any development on the waterfront esplanade.

Jerry Armer, chairman of CB6, has said that those will remain just recommendations unless City Council members agree to adopt them as conditions of their approval of the Ikea application when it comes before them this fall.

©2004 Community Newspaper Group