Money can’t buy love, respect or even a zoning variance.
At a Community Board 6 hearing earlier this month, Thor Equities developer
Joe Sitt fished for new friends in the neighborhood that surrounds his
latest big-money buy — a large, rusting sugar refinery on Red Hook
waterfront with an unsure future under a proposal by Mayor Bloomberg to
limit residential development along the waterfront.
“[This site] deserves to be activated by the community,” he
told the board in a plea for an exemption from the so-called Industrial
Business Zone scheme so that he can tear down the Revere Sugar refinery,
for which he paid $40 million in September.
Since then, his vision for a shopping strip that would include a fish
restaurant, mixed-income housing and neighborhood shops has been entirely
unrealized.
“In order to even create a plan, we have to get out of the IBZ,”
his publicist, Lee Silberstein, told The Brooklyn Papers.
But getting out may be tricky.
Even residents in support of bringing new faces and shops to the neighborhood
are warily eyeing the developer.
“We can’t just have a block of manufacturing on the waterfront,
but we don’t want another boring place with hip luxury condos,”
said Kristine Fradenburgh.
Following the hearing, the waterfront committee voted against exempting
Sitt from the IBZ.
In what has become a persistent tug-of-war between residential development
and industry in Red Hook, two of the neighborhood’s largest landowners
— Tom Fox, who keeps his New York Water Taxis at the Erie Basin;
and Robert Hughes, who docks 200 barges there — testified that waterfront
condos can’t coexist with the diesel engines of a working port.
Sitt is best known for an also-unrealized plan to convert 12 acres of
Coney Island land that he owns into a Las Vegas-like pleasure mall.
