Yonkers marks $40M cleanup of waterfront site

Greg Clary
The Journal News

PCBs, lead, asbestos and other industrial toxins are all but cleaned up along a section of Yonkers waterfront being readied for housing, shops and a marina as early as 2013.

State and local officials gathered Thursday on Alexander Street to herald the just-completed $40 million cleanup of 15 acres — and celebrate the prospect of a Hudson River community to replace what for years has been little more than a contaminated mess.

"Repairing the scars of New York's industrial past isn't just an environmental imperative, it's the best economic development strategy around," said Pete Grannis, a longtime Albany lawmaker who now heads the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

"Some projects are small, some are pretty big," Grannis said. "As you know, this is a pretty big one."

The scope shows in the remediation statistics:

• 22 buildings, totaling 600,000 square feet, demolished.

• 90,000 tons of contaminated waste taken via rail to certified depositories.

• 1,000 cubic yards of building materials containing asbestos removed.

The two companies responsible for the pollution — Phelps Dodge Corp. and BICC Cables Corp. — ponied up the cash for the cleanup, based on a pro-rata use of the site, first developed for manufacturing in the 1890s.

Blackacre Partners has run the cleanup for the two companies since 2005 and is drawing on another $20 million pot of money through AIG/Chartus to begin cleaning up the nearby river bottom in mid-April, as soon as fish-spawning season is over.

Once that's complete, Blackacre principals Paul Adler and Debra Rothberg expect to be lining up a developer for the site, with an eye to putting up the 900 housing units Yonkers' master plan allows there.

No one would venture Thursday to guess what those units will go for, other than Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone saying the market will set the price. Adler said he's confident the recession won't be a factor when the the first units are expected to be ready in three years.

The site has an interesting history, including a stint as "Hollywood-on-the-Hudson" from 1999 to 2007.

Some of the more interesting things about Thursday's press conference were the stories about Robert De Niro coming north from Manhattan looking for production space with legendary producer Harvey Weinstein and continually asking what part of the Bronx this was.

Or Weinstein admitting early in the search that the media moguls didn't have many alternatives — after a spat with then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — so the deal was quickly settled.

Along the way, movies like "Zoolander" and a remake of the "The Stepford Wives" got produced there, and local celebrity sightings got everybody a little excited.

But the important point of Thursday's gathering is that people are starting to get just how valuable real estate on the Hudson River is, and in this case are willing to spend upward of $60 million to clean up the damage so they can cash in on that value.

On first blush, this site would not look like a great place to invest 60 very large, as one of De Niro's characters might say.

Train tracks run through a 15-acre site that was for nearly 100 years a manufacturing hub, with the Hudson River there to provide water access and a natural toilet, washing away industrial waste that didn't sink into the ground.

It was most easily identified by a huge, glass laboratory building known as "The Blue Cube."

As far as state environmental regulators were concerned, the more important designation was "inactive hazardous waste disposal site."

Amicone said he was looking forward to the day when the waterfront public park planned for the site links up the Westchester RiverWalk, a trail stretching from Yonkers to Peekskill.

"It's been a long journey," Amicone said. "We envision that this site will become one of the most sought-after residential places in all of New York State. ... But it had to start with cleaning up years and years — if not generations — of contamination."