January 24–30, 2020 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 3
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Towers tirade
Residents slam Two Trees development
at heated meeting in Williamsburg
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A Dumbo-based development
firm gave a top-notch
presentation regarding a pair
of 600 and 650-foot skyscrapers
and park planned for the
Williamsburg waterfront —
only for a group of locals angry
and fearful over the massive
building scheme to tear it apart
at a meeting on Jan. 15.
“A beautiful presentation
— I’m totally against
it,” said longtime resident
Roberto Rodriguez at Community
Board 1’s Land Use
committee. “You’re not going
to see me swimming at
that beach.”
Two Trees development is
looking to erect the mixeduse
towers — which would
rise from the base of an industrial
fuel-oil-storage complex
at River Street — that
would host 1,000 units, including
250 apartments priced at
below market rate, along with
a new YMCA and the waterfront
One woman who lives two
blocks away from the site confronted
Two Trees CEO Jed
Walentas at the Wednesday
meeting, complaining that
the buildings would block
her view of the waterfront
and asking the firm to wait
until they wrap their nearby
mega-development on the site
of the former Domino Sugar
Refinery.
“You need some visual areas
of respite. I’m getting totally
fenced in,” said North
First Street resident Jenice Malecki.
“Why don’t you wait until
you see what happens with
Domino Park? I say, Walentas
can wait.”
This was the second time
the developer and his team
came before the Williamsburg
and Greenpoint civic
panel to present their controversial
project — a prior information
session hosted in a tiny
meeting room left many curious
residents who couldn’t fit
inside stranded at the door of
the board’s cramped Graham
Avenue office on Jan. 7.
The board scheduled a second
Photo by Kevin Duggan
meeting with the same
presentation at the Swinging
Sixties Senior Center on Ainslie
Street where it holds its
monthly full board meetings,
but even that larger venue was
too small to hold everybody,
and some would-be attendants
were turned away.
Several speakers voiced
their support for the project,
including many who admitted
to having ties to Two Trees.
“Any economic opportunity
along the waterfront is
going to bring more people
along there and will be good
for small businesses like ours,”
said Andy Mullins, of the ice
cream company OddFellows,
which is a tenant of the developer’s
60 Water St. building
and who will add another outpost
at Two Trees’s recently
opened One South First commercial
tower this summer.
One recent newcomer who
moved to the to the neighborhood
some two years ago
said that while gentrification
drives out many poorer residents,
Williamsburg has become
a more welcoming place
in recent years thanks to Two
Trees’s projects.
“All over this city there’s
gentrification and I’m not saying
‘Too bad,’ but I have a lot
of respect for Two Trees for
what they’ve done with Domino
Park,” said Jeff Gross. “I
understand that many many
years ago it was a very dangerous
neighborhood. Now, I
have to tell you, I love walking
around Williamsburg.”
But another woman complained
that the influx of residents
and visitors drawn to
the new development would
overcrowd the planned waterfront
park, while putting
a strain on the area’s infrastructure.
“That doesn’t mean one
person per apartment, that’s
a lot of people for a tiny, tiny
park,” said Zora Rasmussen.
“It doesn’t get me excited
when I’ll be getting on the
L train.”
While emotions ran high
at the meeting on Wednesday,
some residents said they
would withhold judgement on
the massive new development,
saying there was plenty to like
in terms of the new amenities
Two Trees promised.
“I got to say I’m a little on
the fence,” said Hugh Patton.
“There’s a lot of it that’s very
thoughtful and great, even
though selfishly, it will cut
off a little bit of my view.”
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James Corner Field Operations and BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group / Two Trees
Residents packed into the Swinging Sixties Senior
Center to hear about Two Trees’s plan to build two
massive towers at the Williamsburg waterfront.
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