Ikea Dock Destruction: 'Billion-Dollar Boondoggle'?

I'll never understand why the city let this be paved over. What a loss.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 9:38 AM

9:38 Because this is America and there is such a thing as private proprty. The shortsightedness is EDC's as this was abandoned for years.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 9:47 AM

But I thought the best use of a industrial waterfront property is a parking lot for a swedish big box store?

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 9:49 AM

This is more Gargano/Pataki baloney. Short-sighted sleaziness.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 9:55 AM

The article says the city will lose $50-$150 over the next five years because it doesn't have enough graving docs. It did NOT say that it will lose $1 billion - that's the cost of building a new dock. Assuming the IKEA does at least $10 million a year (which is a safe bet) then its a wash, plus some of the community that lives in Red Hook may actually get jobs nearby.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 10:06 AM

$50=$150 mm loss over the next 5 years in exhange for 500 retail jobs. Assume that those 500 jobs earn an average of $40K per year and you get a benefit of $20 million per year or $100 million over 5 years. So, sort of looks liek a break even propostion, except there is no cost charged for killing Red Hook with traffic.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 10:22 AM

New York City is no longer an industrial/manufacturing city. This is an unstoppable trend that started in the 1950's.
Most of the maritime activities, including container ports and ship repair have relocated to the western side of NY Bay in places like Elizabeth, NJ, which is still very much an industrial city. Rosie the riveter and ship building is to us what whale hunting is to Nantucket. History.
Gotta keep up with the times.
I think the new park next to the IKEA is beautiful. demolishing the old, unremarkable, brick warehouses opens up the views, which are really extraordinary.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 10:22 AM

McGettrick is a friggin liar. He's anti-industry and favored converting the Todd Shipyard's into luxury housing like Marina de Ray in LA.

Claims he's an enviromentalist while cruising around the neighborhood in his V8 engine.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 10:32 AM

All this sounds a little far fetched -

-1st of all 90% of the "save the dock" emphasised the historical importance of the dock and only a little bit mentioned that the dock still had any real economic future - I can find little that says the dock was much utilized prior to its filling in

-2nd there is no way that it costs 1 Billion dollars to rebuild the Red Hook Graving Dock. Maybe if you factor in buying market rate property ok - but otherwise the Red Hook Graving Dock was essentially a 100+ technology that amounted to little more than a very large trench and the ability to drain. - If it costs a billion to build such a facility - then the 2nd Ave subway should end up in the 30-40B range.

-Finally, if the Red Hook Graving Dock was so important - you have to figure it would be at least mentioned in the report - yet not a single word

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 10:36 AM

Please, give up the anti Ikea rants already. It's brought jobs to the neighborhood and will bring extra business to both the old and new Red Hook community. You don't hear old timers whining about Ikea, only the newbies who moved in over the last 10 years or so.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 11:43 AM

BTW the report say it will cost $50-$150M due to a shortage of dry docks (not just graving docks) - therefore even if the Red Hook Dock was still operational, NYC Region would still have a shortage and we will lose some of that $.
So it isnt that the loss of this one dock cost 50-150M - and it is totally misleading to say that by allowing Ikea to fill-it-in, it was a loss of $50-$150M. The 'loss' of economic activity (in maritime repair/maintainace) associated with this one dock is a FRACTION of that figure.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 11:57 AM

Gee, 10:36, how do you know that the 2nd Ave Subway ISN'T going to cost in the 30-40b range?

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 11:59 AM

Old timers? What old timers still live in Red Hook? How many have other people talked to?

In all my years in Red Hook, I've only run into two old-timers who were there before the housing projects were built. One was homeless and the other was about to die of old age.

Neither one liked the newbies, the housing projects or the Ikea, all of which had destroyed the neighborhood they once knew.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 12:01 PM

That graving dock was working up til the land was sold and the company running it was given the boot. (The company offered to buy the dock portion from IKEA and they refused.) If you doubt that it was functional go to Google maps and pull up a red hook map and you can see the satellite photo is just old enough that there's a ship in the dock being worked on. Also these docks service important municipal boats that belong to the police and fire dept.s, among others. These boats will need upkeep regardless if the city is moving away from being industrial/manufacturing oriented. The ignorance and arrogance on this blog is staggering. B'stoner you should run a link to last week's Brian Lehrer Live, which did a show with a huge portion devoted to Red Hook and the IKEA that discussed these issues and how expensive new graving docks are to build. There's also a good article in the Brooklyn Papers discussing how the IKEA landed in Red Hook after being rejected by other Brooklyn communities, the residents of which are now all too glad to tell Red Hook residents they don't have a right to take issue with IKEA being sited in their neighborhood.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 12:03 PM

More drydocks are needed, according to local boat captains. Sometimes it they have to wait months to get into a drydock for routine repairs.

The GMD shipyard in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is doing as much business as it can handle with its drydocks. The shipyards in North Staten Island are full, too.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 12:06 PM

12:03 - working or not - an economic decision of Billion dollar proportion should not be made to simply accommodate the repair and service of some municipal boats. (which btw are small enough to NOT need a graving dock).

It may be true that losing a graving dock in Red Hook was a mistake BUT given all the FUD surrounding the Ikea - that btw currently seems WAY overblown- I have serious doubts about this new charge of 'boondoggle'.

It shouldn't be too hard to find some real metrics on how much business the dry dock was doing prior to Ikea, and how many people it employed. (but interestingly such objective data appears to be missing from all such reports about this issue)

I have to wonder whether this would even be an issue if instead of an IKEA the dock was filled in for a park or some sort of other non-controversial and non-big-box development.

It is also interesting that the single most important development that could make NYC a viable port again - the Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel - gets ZERO press and was killed by total Nimby on the part of the Juniper Park Civic Association (in cooperation with a real failure by Bloomberg).

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 12:31 PM

Next thing you know city planners will be trying to turn the Gowanus Expressway into a parking lot too!

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 3:48 PM

Sweden is destroying the fabric of communities all over the United States. it's a full scale invasion.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 8:32 PM

Ikea has lovely fabrics. Check the catalog.

Posted by: guest at June 23, 2008 9:40 PM

I didn't realize you were such an Ikea shill. Did they hand you a free sofa for this blog post? Shabby journalism at its best.

Posted by: guest at June 24, 2008 2:35 AM

the NY Post can hardly be considered a "newspaper", it is the political tool of the far right.

Posted by: guest at June 24, 2008 3:45 AM