Reporting Red Hook

Through the window of his office on Pier 41 in Red Hook, Greg O’Connell looks out over the New York Bay. The pale silhouette of the Verranzano Narrows Bridge looms in the distance. And on a parallel pier on the other side of a narrow slip, he can see the historic redbrick Beard Street warehouses, which he owns, jutting out into the calm waters.

But the view isn’t what drew O’Connell to Red Hook. An idealistic developer, O’Connell came to Red Hook to try to turn a depopulated, crime-ridden industrial wasteland into a vibrant waterfront community.

Developers are always looking for the next undiscovered neighborhood—places with untapped potential where property is cheap. O’Connell is no different.

“You have to go where no one wants anything, where they’re not even thinking about it,” he says. “You have to steal the property.”

In his worn polo shirt and denim overalls, O’Connell doesn’t look like a real estate mogul, but he owns about a million square feet of commercial property, plus some residential spaces. His buildings shelter nearly 100 businesses, including the giant Fairway supermarket, a set shop for The Blue Man Group, artists’ studios, new media companies and several non-profits that he gives a discounted rent. Many of his holdings are waterfront properties with views even more spectacular than the view from his own office—from the picnic tables behind the Fairway, customers can enjoy an ocean breeze and an unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty while eating their lunch or drinking a morning coffee.

O’Connell has lived in Brooklyn since the 60s, but he grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Queens. “Mainly teachers, firemen and cops” lived there, he says. Fittingly, his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a police officer. O’Connell tried both professions—substitute teaching for a few years after college, then joining the police force. But he wasn’t satisfied.

Three years later, still a policeman, he bought his first building, a four-family home in Cobble Hill. He fixed the place up, moved his young family into one apartment, and rented out the other three.
Throughout his career, he continued to buy and develop properties in Brooklyn, particularly in Red Hook, where he found abandoned or underutilized waterfront properties and bought them up for very little money.

Finally having found his true calling, O’Connell retired from the police force, but says his experiences as a cop and eventually as a detective helped shape the way he thinks about urban development. Working in Spanish Harlem in the violent 60s, he noticed that in the blocks where the houses were only a few stories high, there was less crime than in areas on his beat lined with imposingly tall brick buildings. He believes that stoops and benches help promote safe and lively communities, while high walls do the opposite.

Modern-day Red Hook was defined by urban planner Robert Moses who, in building the Brooklyn-Queens and Gowanus Expressways, created an artificial barrier between Red Hook and neighboring Carroll Gardens. On one side of highway, a brownstone community thrived; on the other, an isolated industrial community whose tenants live mostly in large public housing developments slipped into decline.

O’Connell found a clear articulation of some of his ideas in the work of one of Moses’ great critics, Jane Jacobs. In her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs decries the large-scale construction projects of modernists like Moses, and makes the case for a more organic, preservationist, mixed-use vision of urban neighborhoods.

O’Connell also favors mixed-use development. He talks a lot about balanced communities, believing that in a small insular environment like Red Hook, people’s lives are all interconnected, requiring everyone to consider everyone else’s needs. That’s why he says he believes in creating affordable housing as well as businesses and jobs, why he has contributed renovations at the local elementary school, and why he offers lower rents to non-profit organizations.

O’Connell’s strategy for creating such a balanced community is to buy up space so that he can use it as he sees fit. “The way to control things is just to own a lot of property,” he says. “If you purchase a lot of property, you can create a balance. A little job creation, a little arts work, a little public access—you create your own little orchestra.”

Many laud his vision, but not everyone appreciates his methods. “People either love him or hate him,” says Heather White, a local artist and tenant of O’Connell’s.

Local activist and co-chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association John McGettrick refers to O’Connell’s purchasing habits as “land banking.” He accuses O’Connell of, among other things, conflicts of interest, environmental violations, and breaking promises to the community.

In 1992, O’Connell purchased 28 acres of Red Hook waterfront from the Port Authority for about half a million dollars (the bargain and sale deed signed by O’Connell and a representative of the Port Authority confusingly says “$4000,000” then spells it out as “four hundred fifty thousand dollars;” McGettrick remembers $500,000; O’Connell himself studiously avoided the question).
According to McGettrick, the community supported the purchase, which went through without public bidding, in exchange for promises of a half a mile public esplanade, a two-acre park, and mixed-income residencies in the building that now houses the Fairway market. Today, rents in the building range from $2600-4600 a month for loft-style live/work spaces, and, he says, “the promised two acre park is now a parking lot for the Fairway.”

McGettrick concedes that the Fairway itself is a useful amenity, but says that at 123,000 square feet, it’s far too big for such a tiny community. By comparison, he says that the Fairway store in Harlem is 35,000, and the one on the Upper West Side is only 20,000, though both Manhattan branches serve larger populations.

Big box stores tend to open in clusters, and one of the reasons residents objected to the controversial Fairway development was the belief that once you allowed a store of that size in the community, you would only attract other big box stores, which would alter the character of the neighborhood. “And sure enough,” McGettrick says, “Ikea showed up about six months later.”

Though not directly involved in the Ikea project, O’Connell supports it, mostly because of the jobs it will create for people in the neighboring public housing development. “There are always a few doomsayers,” he says. “You’re never going to keep everyone happy, but if you get 95%, you’ve hit a home run.

O’Connell doesn’t see room for much more development in Red Hook. “There’s no such thing as vacancies now,” he says. He recently had to turn away a major broker looking for a 150,000 square foot warehouse space for Christie’s, the famous auction house. “You look back, and if I had told someone 20 years ago that I got a call from Christie’s and turned them down, they would have told me to have my head examined,” he says.
So what next?

O’Connell likes to talk about Geneseo, the small town in Upstate New York, where he went to college. It used to be a lively town full of Italian immigrants and quaint little shops, but these days it’s home to a big prison, and is basically a dead town. “You could buy the whole town for a million dollars,” he says. O’Connell wants to finish what he has started in Red Hook, but he’s already thinking about what he can do for the small towns of Upstate New York.

He also talks about reviving bigger cities like Buffalo. With its reputation as a frigid rust-belt town, this may sound like a risky plan, but imagine what people must have thought 25 years ago, when he began purchasing property in Red Hook.

“We used to say that we could see around the corner,” O’Connell says of his time as a detective. As a developer, O’Connell is still trying to see into the future.