Ikea-Red Hook: Christopher Ketcham Exposes the Fecklessness of New York's City Planners in New York Press

Christopher Ketcham published an excellent piece in the New York Press for March 16, exposing the fecklessness of our city planners in not only permitting but encouraging Ikea to build in Red Hook. It is called "Ikea vs. Red Hook."
Read it below. For permission to reproduce the entire piece we thank The New York Press. The piece originally appeared here.

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Ikea vs. Red Hook: The big box stores are inside the gates. Is resistance futile?

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
NEWS & COLUMNS

Diamond Tooth Lillie ran a brothel near Death Valley in the 1840s. Today a bar in her name sits on the waterfront in Red Hook. Among the regulars are oil- ship mariners from New Orleans and the Gulf, with stories of storms. And the old retired tug captains of the departed classic age of New York shipping, when Red Hook had jobs and the piers drew the cargos of everything. The waterfront still lives in one of the city's largest dry docks, a 750-foot wonder unknown to most, operating beyond the red brick façade of Beard Street. Like the dry dock, the brick was built around the time of the Civil War.

Coming soon to Beard Street: a 416,000-square-foot Ikea-plus-minimall. It will pave over the dry dock, the cobbles, the brick and the skeletons of the piers to build a parking lot and a charmless hangar—a suburb-scape in yellow and blue. There are as many as 300 high-paying skilled jobs at the dry dock, and hundreds more that service the dock, but the old jobs must make way for low-paid unskilled labor peddling the products of low-paid labor overseas.

In Western Europe, it is estimated that one in 10 inhabitants today were conceived in Ikea beds, brand passion that has helped vault company founder Ingmar Kamprad to pole position in the race among the world's richest men. In England, 33 million customers during 2003 visited an Ikea outlet, producing road traffic in "epic" and "horrendous" volumes, authorities across the British Isles report. The volumes have led to at least one Ikea sale-day riot in which 27 people were injured.

Expectations are no less hopeful for Ikea-Red Hook, the culmination of an almost decade-long quest to breach the city walls. Company analysts expect the Red Hook outlet to be the largest and most successful Ikea in the U.S., with an estimated $150 million a year in sales. Ikea-Red Hook is the first prong of a planned citywide takeover, a careful triangulation of the home-furnishings market. Of the 202 stores in the 32 countries where Ikea has set its outsize footprint, only 21 are in the United States and only two in the New York metro area (Elizabeth, N.J. and Hicksville, N.Y., on Long Island). Ikea now wants to slap a store in every borough.

The going has not been easy, due to citizen revolt. An initial hopeful siting in New Rochelle, in Westchester County, went down the toilet in 2001 at the hands of a highly organized opposition campaign. Ikea quickly turned to the less wealthy and arguably more vulnerable neighborhoods of Brooklyn, first to a rotting warehouse off the Gowanus Canal, which never got far as a site, and then to the slumping waterfront and degraded public housing of Red Hook, where everyone seemed to agree Ikea had found its proper home.

Some 600 jobs are promised to a community suffering a 20 percent unemployment rate. The promises came with Christmas parties and children's toys; some observers called the attention "open bribery." A few of the residents who most passionately stumped for the project at the community board and in the meeting halls suddenly appeared on the potholed roads of Red Hook driving new cars. Rumors flew that they were being paid off. Petition-gatherers went out offering t-shirts and bottled water in the summer heat to signatories, eventually garnering thousands of yes-votes. The community was apparently in favor, and those who weren't sometimes found themselves shouted down at meetings, vilified. And as it happened, the opponents mostly did not live in the public houses but in the so-called "back" of Red Hook, on the gentrifying cobble-stoned streets, and so the question became a race and class issue, with opponents cast accordingly.

Ikea promises the world, but the fine print said otherwise. The only solid deal, in the end, was that job seekers in the 11231 zip code, which includes Red Hook and several other neighborhoods, would be free to float their applications at IKEA two weeks before the process opened to the general public. A census check of unemployment in the 11231 zip reveals that the offer, as concerns the Red Hook houses, is pretty much meaningless: Unemployment is so wide in 11231 that the jobs promised could easily be filled by non-Hook (and non-poverty-level) residents who would enjoy the added benefit of avoiding the direct burden of Ikea's presence.

That burden, of course, is a flood of automotive traffic, but to read Ikea's impact analyses in Brooklyn, it would appear that aside from magically reemploying Red Hook, the store will have no effect whatsoever on anything else: not on traffic, not on the "working waterfront," and not on local retailers.

Opponents aren't convinced. In February, a lawsuit brought by a citizen group led by activist John McGettrick, locally famous for his handle-bar moustache and constant ball-busting, charged that city regulators failed to hold Ikea accountable to key environmental and planning standards. According to the lawsuit, which has been adjourned until mid-April, Ikea's analysts routinely underestimate traffic counts and the effects of the congestion, the pollution, the asthma from the pollution and the people hit and injured by cars (as many as 20,000 new car trips will pass across the neighborhood on an average sales-intensive Saturday).

The lawsuit also claims that Ikea's blueprint illegally ignores existing zoning requirements for the maintenance of a working waterfront. By "waterfront," does Ikea mean desultory promenade next to a hideous parking lot? Or is "waterfront" the currently operating and profitable dry dock that services a dozen ships a year?

The general reasoning of the suit is that Ikea's biggest store in the nation will sit at the lousiest possible site, the butt-end of a peninsula far from highway access, and somehow this rotten planning went unquestioned at the highest tiers of government.

I'd add another charge to McGettrick's suit: Why were alternatives to Ikea conspicuously derided and ignored? The developer that conceived the Baltimore harbor retail waterfront, Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, offered up for the Ikea site a blueprint of hotels, marinas, restaurants, small businesses and artist studios—an eclectic plan that would have created more sustained and diversified and ultimately better-paying jobs than Ikea ever will, while preserving the ghostly old buildings, re-using the past for the present and the future.

But the plan was considered dead upon arrival. Roberta Gratz, author of Living City, told me that like Ikea's cookie-cutter floor-plans and furniture and business model, city government also wants formulas: big numbers, big plans that are top down, with none of the mess and confusion of organic entrepreneurialism, of "individuals working together from the ground up." Business by the people, as Eccles & Rouse envisioned, is not good business, because there's risk.

So it is no surprise that the concerns outlined by McGettrick—and the alternative offered by Eccles & Rouse—were largely elided by the agencies and elected bodies empowered to watchdog development in the city. On the borough level, there was the execrable Marty Markowitz, borough president, who with his usual cheery style of a hog on an oats binge signed on to Ikea-Red Hook from inception. It is Marty's office that appoints community board members, and the message from on high was clear.

At least one member of Community Board 6, which covers Red Hook, was driven to resign in disgust at the board's "rubber stamping" of the Ikea project. Edie Stone charged that the board's executive committee routinely ignored her voice and "the voices of the affected board members." The executives of CB6, Stone wrote in her letter of resignation, "preferr[ed] instead to hold private meetings with developers." Stone also noted the historical fact that Red Hook has been long reserved for "toxic industry, big box stores, and public housing, none of which would be tolerated in our 'brownstone' neighborhoods." Indeed, even Michael Bloomberg told reporters he'd oppose an Ikea if it were slated for his neighborhood.

Stone was not alone in protesting the Ikea vote. Lou Sones, one of the four members out of 50 to turn against the project, said that board president Jerry Armer put Ikea on a fast-track. "I've witnessed hours and hours of the landmarks committee discussing where a windowsill should be on a landmarked building and here was the discussion on Ikea, a project that would change the face of the neighborhood, and the hearing was cut short. It lasted one hour," Sones said.

On New Year's Eve, Ikea began illegal demolition of a Civil War-era façade on Beard Street and was caught in the act by regulators from the city Department of Environmental Protection, who cited at least 18 code violations and could end up fining the company's contractors as much as $180,000. Ikea had pressed ahead with the demolition despite entreaties from city and state preservationists and a request by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hold off until an assessment of the historic value of the buildings could be completed. As Lou Sones drily noted, "Ikea has broken the law 18 times before they've even opened up."

Meanwhile, the DEP and the Army Corps are looking into preservation issues surrounding the dry dock. The Municipal Arts Society and the Roebling Society of Engineers, the State Historic Preservation Agency and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are together clamoring to hold on to the dock and the Beard Street buildings, to make of them something like the Cannery in San Francisco or Quincy Market in Boston.

What's at stake is not merely the collective memory that lives in the old brick of the city, but the kind of economic order that New Yorkers wish to build. The easy thing to do is topple the old buildings and fill up the seventy-story length of dry dock with the detritus of the brick and brownfield poisons—Ikea's plan—and pave it over and then permanently mark with white paint the outlines of where the dock once sat, like a chalking at a murder scene.

Then, bring in suburbia. Make sure most of the "risk" in this venture is covered by government hand-outs and tax breaks. Make sure, too, that you've secured the hidden subsidies to drivers who will swarm into the neighborhood, the tens of millions of dollars in congestion and pollution and accident costs borne by society. Sitting in Lillie's Bar I think: It's the railroad scam all over again. The railroads snatched land through eminent domain; IKEA gets land in a sweetheart deal. The railroads opened up the west. Ikea will open up Red Hook to more, and bigger, big-box development. Après Ikea, le deluge.

Volume 18, Issue 11
© 2005 New York Press