Jane Margolies

The Bolts were late for their game. Again.

Traveling from the West Village — by foot, by subway, and then by foot again — the tweens weren’t as late as they’d been the week before, after their bus had gotten stuck in traffic.

Still, the young athletes, wearing royal blue jerseys with red and blue belts to represent their middle school, 75 Morton, had to dispense with warming up. It was time to start the game.

“Playing the game is easy,” Ty Smith, one of Morton’s coaches, said. “Getting there is the hard part.”

His flag football team is not the only youth sports group crisscrossing Manhattan. Many schools in the borough, where real estate is at a premium, lack outdoor sports facilities and rely on the city’s parks for fields so their teams can practice and compete.

But those fields are more in demand than ever.

Manhattan has fewer fields than Queens and Brooklyn, for example, despite being far more densely populated. And with parents signing up their children for team sports in record numbers, the demand for fields far outstrips supply.

“At the end of the day, there’s just not enough space,” said Randy Williams, president of the Downtown Little League, which serves an increasingly residential Lower Manhattan. The league had nearly 1,200 kids on its 86 teams this year, and it still maintained a waiting list.

As more families decide to raise children in Lower Manhattan and along its West Side, and developers continue to turn every last parcel of land into a stylish mall or high-concept playground, open fields — where New Yorkers of all ages can toss Frisbees or kick soccer balls — have taken on a new value in and of themselves.

The conflict, simply put, is this: Some people want fanciful parks. Others, particularly those with children, prefer ball fields.

This has resulted in a sort of power land grab — with citywide repercussions — among schools and nonprofits. Competition for permits to play on public fields has never been more fierce. In Manhattan, for example, there are 224 fields under the jurisdiction of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, including 74 for soccer. Last year the department approved 1,219 permit requests for those fields and denied 556; this year it approved 1,158 and denied 725.

This land squeeze came to the fore over plans for Gansevoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park, the long and narrow system of repurposed piers along the Hudson River in Midtown and Downtown Manhattan.

Earlier this year, talks over what to do about Gansevoort, an enticingly large swath of open space along the river, located just a few blocks from 75 Morton, the middle school with the chronically late flag football team, came to a head.

The Hudson River Park Trust, the public corporation that develops and runs the park, hired the landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, the lead designer of the nearby High Line, to come up with a plan for the peninsula. It was to include a monumental sculpture by David Hammons, to be erected through an arrangement with the Whitney Museum of American Art, directly across West Street.

But when directors of youth sports leagues and after-school programs became aware of Gansevoort’s available acreage, they took action. They circulated petitions and packed community board meetings, urging Hudson River Park officials to include a large ball field in the $60 million project.

“We’ll use every inch,” said Leyna Madison, operations director of Manhattan Youth, a nonprofit that runs free after-school programs, including athletics, speaking at a meeting about the peninsula.

For Madelyn Wils, who since 2011 has been the president and chief executive of Hudson River Park Trust, being on the receiving end of community pressure is nothing new.

The park Wils oversees extends from just north of Chambers Street to West 59th Street, a 550-acre stretch bordering multiple neighborhoods and three community boards. Most everyone has an opinion about what they think should be in what they regard as their “front yard,” she said.

And as the West Side of Manhattan has filled in with residential developments in recent years — spurred, to a great extent, by the dramatic transformation of the once-dilapidated waterfront — there are far more families living near the park, now three-quarters complete, then there were when the park came into existence in 1998.

And their needs lent urgency to the question of how Gansevoort would be divvied up.

“It was a little tense,” said Wils on a recent tour of the park.

Most piers, because they are narrow, don’t lend themselves to full-size sports fields. But as they have been developed over the past 15 or so years, they have provided much needed green space.

The first part of the park to open, in 2003, was Pier 45, better known as the Christopher Street Pier, which in summer draws sunbathers by day and salsa dancers by night.

Pier 25, off TriBeCa, is packed with sand volleyball courts, a playground, mini golf, an artificial turf lawn and an array of lounge chairs facing the river.

Pier 57, at West 15th Street, was developed privately and leased space to Google and City Winery.

Meanwhile, the entertainment mogul Barry Diller is financing a new park and performing arts venue where the old Pier 54 once stood. Resting on Champagne-coupe-shaped concrete forms that were conceived by Thomas Heatherwick, who designed the Vessel in Hudson Yards, Pier 55, also known as Diller Island, is slated to open in 2021.

All these areas are connected by a popular Greenway, which draws serious cyclists and commuters on Citi Bikes and scooters.

The trust has earmarked $64 million to add greenery and help stitch disparate elements together into a unified park.

But completing the park has proved to be challenging.

There is still no consensus about what to do with the hulking, deteriorating Pier 40, at West Houston Street. The former cruise ship terminal contains four playing fields used by teams of all ages, and its parking lots currently generate $7.5 million of the park’s $30 million annual budget. Redeveloping the site to secure funding for annual expenses has been part of the park’s plans from the beginning. New fields, Wils said, would be included in any redevelopment scenario.

But work is already underway at TriBeCa’s Pier 26, which will have a cantilevered boardwalk and an estuarine habitat below, and plans have been approved for West 59th Street’s Pier 97, which will feature steel-and-aluminum shade canopies and a playing field for small children.

And then there’s Gansevoort, which is far wider than most of the piers, as it’s the remnant of a landfill expansion that was part of short-lived Thirteenth Avenue.

The David Hammons sculpture is currently being installed there, and a sandy area is also planned, fulfilling the trust’s longtime dream of a beach in the park.

Still, given Gansevoort’s size — and Manhattan’s field deficit — the question of how much space to set aside for competitive sports has dominated discussions.

“The issue is whether it’s for the community or tourists,” said Graeme Birchall, president of the Downtown Boathouse, a nonprofit based at Pier 26.

He cited the High Line, which has become a major tourist draw. “Pier 55 is going to be a tourist pier, Pier 57 is a Google pier,” he added. “For the community, the question is, Which pier is for us?”

When it comes to getting playing time on the existing fields in Manhattan, new schools are at a disadvantage. For example, 75 Morton, home of the Thunderbolts, opened just two years ago in response to the demand from families in the area.

A widespread practice of grandfathering — both in Hudson River Park and in spaces run by the city’s parks department — means teams that have held permits for a given field in the past are likely to get them again.

Josh Heim, a Morton gym teacher, said that when he tried to secure permits to nearby fields, he found his options were limited.

The system affects high school teams, too.

On a recent afternoon in De Witt Clinton Park, on the western edge of Midtown, three high schools — Beacon, the High School for Environmental Studies and the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex — shared one soccer field.

“Sometimes we have five, six teams here, with everyone in a different corner,” said Martin Jacobson, the longtime boys soccer coach at MLK.

Jacobson was the one who actually had the permit for the field that day. He has become adept at applying for them.

The MLK soccer team has won the Public School Athletic League championship 18 times. Many of its players are offered college scholarships.

Heim said that some of 75 Morton’s eighth-grade athletes are eyeing high schools with competitive sports teams to help put them on a college-scholarship track.

Without a permit to a nearby field, Smith’s flag football teams don’t get much practice. When they do, it’s in the school gym, which is too small for a full scrimmage.

Public school leagues got fewer field permits from the parks department this year than they did last.

Aimee Boden, the president of the Randalls Island Parks Alliance, which oversees 62 constantly booked fields on an island in the East River, said that the proliferation of pay-to-play leagues, which include travel teams, has helped drive up the competition.

“They keep expanding, almost irresponsibly,” she said. “And then it becomes the parks department’s problem to find them fields.”

After the community meetings about Gansevoort, the trust and its landscape architects decided on one field for the peninsula. It will accommodate middle school games but will not be large enough for regulation high school competition.

Construction is slated to start next fall and wrap up in 2022.

The sports contingent, while generally pleased with the size of the field, had ideas about how to get the most out of it.

At the final meeting with the trust, Mark DeLaBarre, a parent of a student athlete at Morton as well as a baseball coach, posed a very specific question: “Will there be 24-hour access?”

This article originally appeared in

Are Parks for Strolling or Sports? In New York, It's Complicated.

NEW YORK — When the Thunderbolts, a junior varsity flag football team, straggled onto the field in Manhattan’s East River Park the other day, the coach for the opposing team was clearly frustrated; his players had resorted to scrimmaging among themselves.

The 47-foot-tall, cast-iron structure in Marcus Garvey Park was the last of its kind in the city.

At their peak in the early 1870s, 11 watchtowers served New York City. Men used them to scan the surroundings for smoke or flames and let firefighters know where to go by the number of times they rang their bells.

But by 2015, the city’s one remaining tower, built in 1856, was falling apart. Acting on the advice of engineers, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation set about dismantling the Harlem tower and placing it in storage, 12 miles away, in Queens.

Harlem residents and preservationists, who had long fought to save the tower, worried that once its bell, beams and fluted columns were packed into crates and carted off it, the tower would never be reassembled or seen in the Mount Morris neighborhood again.

But their worries were proved wrong. The pieces were not only watched over, they were restored, and the ones that were beyond repair were faithfully replicated. Recently everything was trucked back to the park, unpacked and reassembled.

The Harlem Watchtower will officially reopen Saturday.

“It feels wonderful,” said Valerie Jo Bradley, a longtime Mount Morris resident and co-founder of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, who has been on the watchtower watch since 2000. Others were involved before that. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Harlem’s tower was constructed by Julius Kroehl atop a heap of Manhattan schist called Snake Hill. But almost as soon as the tower was erected, there were problems.

The bell cracked and had to be replaced. Tension rods had to be installed “to pull the tower back together,” said John Krawchuk, who was the director of historic preservation in the parks department for many years and is now executive director of the Historic House Trust of New York City.

By 1880 the watchtowers went out of service, and they were eventually torn down, except for the one in Harlem. It has remained an integral part of the neighborhood.

For decades, at the community’s request, the bell was rung twice a day, at 9 a.m. and noon.

When Robert Moses was parks commissioner, he wanted to get rid of it, but residents lobbied to protect it.

In 1936, laborers for the Works Progress Administration created a plaza around the tower, enclosed by stone walls. Known as the Acropolis, it became the setting for Easter Sunday celebrations and more.

“It was a place to hang out — where the children would go and when they didn’t come home for dinner, their parents would find them there,” said Syderia Asberry-Chresfield, the former president of the Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association, which raised money for the tower’s restoration. When her 90-year-old aunt was a teenager, she met the man she would marry there.

A funeral takes place at the tower in a dramatic scene in Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man.”

The tower was deemed a New York City landmark in 1967 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

But official recognition did not staunch deterioration. By 1994 steel bracing had to be erected around the tower.

Eventually the Acropolis and the larger park — renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973 in honor of the Jamaican-born Black nationalist — became a haven for drug dealers and addicts. The Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, founded in 2000 to reclaim the area for community use, made restoring the tower a priority.

Around that time, Angel Ayón, a preservation architect and recent immigrant from Cuba, heard about the tower at a party. Soon after, he went to see it and was captivated.

The tower became the subject for his independent research project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His findings made their way to the parks department, where over the years many in the agency have taken up the watchtower cause.

When Mitchell Silver became parks commissioner in 2014, he met with members of the community who were concerned the tower would languish in storage.

“I assured them we would make sure it was protected and keep them updated over the process,” he said.

When bids for the restoration came in high — because of the specialized nature of the cast-iron work — additional money was allocated.

“From my perspective,” Silver said, “this project was so important, I was going to fund that shortfall.”

The work cost $7.9 million. Funding came from the mayor, the New York City Council and Manhattan borough president.

The repair work, overseen by the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, involved shipping the bronze bell, which weighs 5,000 pounds and is over 5 feet in diameter, to a foundry in the Netherlands.

Cast-iron parts went to a foundry in Alabama. They were painted the original taupe color that had been discovered under 15 coats of paint.

New tension rods were made of stainless steel to distinguish the 21st-century parts from original ones.

“This is a unique structure in New York City and the U.S.,” said Krawchuk earlier this week, standing on the lookout, where one can see to the bridges over the Hudson and East Rivers. “And it’s had a lot of backers.”

Ayón, who discovered the tower when he was 27, is now 47, with gray in his beard.

He lives in Brooklyn but said he will make the trip back to Harlem for the ribbon-cutting, at which the bell will be rung.

“I can’t wait to hear how it sounds,” he said.

The Miraculous Revival of the Last Fire Watchtower (Built in 1856)

NEW YORK — Four years ago things were not looking good for the Harlem fire watchtower.

Songwriters tickled piano keys for sheet-music publishers. Dentists buzzed their drills. At one company, milliners made fezzes for the Masons.

Things began to change after 1959, when St. Martin’s Press moved in and started to expand, snagging offices when other tenants departed. By 2004, its parent company, Macmillan Publishers, had taken over all 21 office floors of the building.

But now, 117 years after the Flatiron opened, those floors are vacant. Lured by lower rents downtown and the chance to consolidate staff in a modern workplace, Macmillan moved to renovated floors in the Equitable Building on Lower Broadway this month.

For many in book publishing, the departure marks the end of an era, when authors having meetings at the Flatiron was a rite of passage.

“My publishing life was born and raised in the Flatiron,” said Louise Penny, a bestselling crime writer who even has a Flatiron charm on her keychain. “Behind the breathtaking and famous facade was a rabbit warren, some might say rat’s nest. Books and files were piled everywhere.”

Literary agent Christopher Schelling is equally nostalgic. “Symbolically it means something,” he said of Macmillan’s move, recalling how he often warned his writers that the conference rooms inside the Flatiron were definitely not as stylish as the building’s exterior. But that this was part of the fascination of the place.

“Everyone loves coming to the building,” said Sally Richardson, chairman of St. Martin’s Press, who worked in the Flatiron for five decades. Richardson helped to organize a goodbye party that drew hundreds of former employees, including some who flew in from other cities.

Although the MAC Cosmetics and Argo Tea stores on the ground level are still bustling, the floors above have been silent since June 14, awaiting crews that will rip out dropped ceilings and drywall partitions, among other tasks.

“Right now the building is looking terribly shabby,” said Richardson, who also spoke of the idiosyncrasies of the heating system — built around cast-iron radiators — that meant she might start her work day wearing a winter jacket and end it in a sleeveless T-shirt. “It’s a quirky place.”

The Flatiron is not the only classic New York skyscraper that is reinventing itself. The Empire State Building recently underwent a major renovation that made it more energy efficient. The Chrysler Building was just sold, and the new owner considered turning it into a hotel. The top floors of the Woolworth Building, once called “the cathedral of commerce,” are now luxury condos.

Although it is unclear who the future occupants of the Flatiron will be, it will remain an office building, said one of its owners, Veronica Mainetti, president of the Sorgente Group of America, which specializes in sustainable renovations of historic buildings. “The building was born as a commercial property, and we want to keep it as such,” she said.

Harry Black of the Fuller Co., which built the Plaza Hotel, the Macy’s building and the original Pennsylvania Station, also erected the Flatiron Building, which was the first skyscraper north of Union Square. He commissioned Chicago architect Daniel Burnham to design it.

Burnham’s skinny building — a clever architectural solution to an unusual lot — shot straight up from the ground, with no setbacks, its three sides covered with classically inspired terra-cotta ornamentation.

Critics hated it; The New York Tribune called it “a stingy piece of pie.” But the public “was mesmerized,” said Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of “The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City that Arose With It.”

There was no other large-scale development surrounding the Flatiron at the time, so the building’s odd shape would cause the wind to whip around it. Skeptics predicted it would blow over, but its sturdy steel-skeleton construction held up.

The Flatiron’s interior would not fare so well. The water-powered elevators were famously slow and leaky. Miriam Berman, who worked as a graphic designer in the building in the 1970s and ’80s and now gives tours of Madison Square, recalled that the elevator cabs “bobbed around when you arrived at your floor,” before settling.

When John Sargent, who was appointed chief executive of St. Martin’s Press in 1996, arrived to meet with the staff for the first time, it took him several minutes to ascend from the lobby. “Someone asked me what my plans for the company were,” he recalled. His response: “I’m going to get the elevators fixed.”

Sargent, an outdoorsy New York native who grew up in Wyoming and eventually occupied the top office of the building’s prow, became frustrated at the slowness of the process, so he came up with a publicity stunt: He would rappel down the side of the building in the presence of a newspaper reporter and photographer.

“Editor desperate to reach the ground floor,” he intoned in a recent interview, envisioning the newspaper headline. He never pursued the plan, instead appealing to the owners, who installed modern elevators in 1999.

The building also had drafty copper-clad wood-framed windows, which resulted in manuscripts flying around offices and snow drifts forming on the window sills, said Sargent, who is now chief executive of Macmillan. Most of the windows were eventually replaced, but since there was no central air-conditioning in the Flatiron, individual air conditioners continued to poke out of them.

These units will be eliminated in the coming months, as central air and heating will finally be installed. A new sprinkler system and a second staircase will also be added, bringing the building up to code. Once again, the elevators will be upgraded. And the lobby — the original was lost years ago — will be redone.

Once the interior offices — quirkily configured because of the shape of the building — are demolished, open floors, albeit triangular, will be left behind.

The work could cost $60 million to $80 million and take about a year, according to GFP Real Estate, a family-owned business that owns dozens of buildings in the city.

The owners have hired a high-profile broker, Mary Ann Tighe, of CBRE, a commercial real estate firm, to market the property.

“Our goal is a single tenant,” she said. “We like the idea of the Flatiron being associated with a single brand,” like Macmillan, which even launched an imprint named Flatiron Books during its tenure there.

By Labor Day, Tighe hopes to be able to start showing a few of the opened-up floors to potential tenants. Some coworking firms have already made offers, according to the Flatiron’s owners. A restaurateur recently checked out the top floor. A major tech company has also toured the space, the owners said.

The neighborhood has become a popular spot for the tech industry. Overall asking rents for offices in Madison Square and Union Square surpassed those of midtown in 2018, according to Cushman &amp; Wakefield, a commercial real estate company. Today, rents in the area average over $80 per square foot.

Mosette Broderick, a professor and the director of urban design and architecture studies at New York University, said that a landmark building like the Flatiron might also appeal to a European firm that wants a foothold in New York, finding the “vintage quality” of the building more appealing than a brand-new glass tower.

At this point, the owners said that they are more focused on finding the right tenant for the Flatiron than securing a top-dollar rent.

“People want it, but who’s going to be the best?” said Jane Gural-Senders, the executive director and a principal at GFP Real Estate. She is also the firm’s asset manager for the Flatiron. “You want something that’s going to bring greatness.”

NEW YORK — Ever since the Flatiron Building was erected at the foot of Madison Square Park in Manhattan in 1902, it has brimmed with tenants, most of which were small businesses.

End of an era for the flatiron building

And on Peck Slip, where assorted small-scale buildings were lined up in the 18th and 19th centuries, clay smoking pipes and pieces of an old chamber pot were found in 2013 and 2014, when a post office was converted into the Peck Slip School. Students there study the artifacts as part of a fifth-grade archaeology unit.

But these days, their parents and other Seaport locals are more concerned about what might lie under the parking lot across the street from the school: elemental mercury, the toxic remains of a thermometer factory active in the 1800s.

Nineteenth-century maps and records show that Giuseppe Tagliabue, an Italian immigrant, had a five-story factory here in which mouth-blown glass tubes were filled with liquid mercury. Tagliabue apparently made a thermometer for Cooper Union, “one of the largest ever manufactured.”

At the moment, there appears to be no danger to the children or anyone else, as long as the asphalt that covers the lot remains in place, acting as a cap.

The danger could occur if the cap is removed. And in construction-happy New York, that is always a possibility.

The Howard Hughes Corp., which controls a significant portion of the South Street Seaport under a lease with the city and has been updating the area, recently purchased the parking lot, adding to its Seaport empire.

Although it has no approved development plans for the site, Howard Hughes is proposing to remediate it, which typically is done right before building starts.

South Street Seaport, a popular tourist spot since the 1980s, is a designated historic district. A vestige of New York’s early days as the country’s leading port, this roughly 10-block hub on the East River contains a unique collection of early-19th-century brick buildings. They stand just four or five stories high on cobblestone streets, some of which now house shops and restaurants. Nearby are several residential towers.

From the river to lower Broadway, extending slightly past the district, about 14,500 people lived in the area in 2016, according to the American Community Survey. And the population is growing.

Many residents are already resistant to the neighborhood’s losing its historic character; that toxic mercury could be underneath 250 Water St. and released around children has come to underscore the tension between residents and the real estate developer over the future of the Seaport.

“We’re opposed to overcommercialization, overdevelopment and toxic contamination,” said Elaine Kennedy, a retired physical therapist who has lived across the street from the parking lot for 43 years and is a member of the nonprofit Save Our Seaport.

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, a preservation group, said the Seaport was no place for “an enormous anywheresville tower that will drain the life out of it like some weed that overshadows all the small plants.”

But some development experts believe that it’s time to update the Seaport. “We can’t as a city allow a critical site like this one to remain undeveloped when there’s so much need for housing, for commercial space,” said Seth Pinsky, executive vice president of the developer RXR and a former president of the city’s Economic Development Corp.

Howard Hughes is “doing what a developer does in terms of trying to build on the parking lot,” said Lynne Sagalyn, a real estate professor emerita at the Columbia Business School and author of “Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.” Speaking more broadly of the neighborhood, she added, “That area has languished too long.”

The Seaport issue comes at a time when high-rise developments are cropping up all over the city, as developers maneuver around zoning rules while promising to provide much needed affordable housing.

On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for example, Extell Development replaced a supermarket with an 80-story condominium (and provided an affordable housing development nearby). Proposals for three more supertalls in the area have prompted lawsuits.

“The buildings are too tall for this site,” said the Manhattan borough president, Gale Brewer, who wants the development proposals for the Lower East Side to go through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure rather than gain approval, as a “minor modification,” from the City Planning Commission. “It destroys the character of the neighborhood,” she said, “not to mention the view of the Manhattan Bridge.”

But while the Seaport has concerns in common with other New York neighborhoods when it comes to aggressive development, it is an undeniably special place. And many want it to stay that way.

“People go down to the Seaport because it speaks to our collective memory, our collective thoughts about what is New York City,” Bankoff said.

The Seaport is both a city and federal landmark. The National Trust for Historic Preservation put the district on its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2015.

So when Howard Hughes, a publicly traded company that specializes in master-planned communities, proposed a 50-story hotel and condominium on the waterfront several years ago, community members, elected officials and preservationists united to quash the plan.

In the aftermath, the parties formed the Seaport Working Group, an advisory board that Howard Hughes joined. Everyone agreed to guidelines for the district, which included that development “should not adversely impact neighborhood scale and character.”

Community members say any development for the parking lot site that exceeds the 120-foot height limit in the area would adversely impact the neighborhood’s character, and they want a development plan to be in place before the remediation process begins.

The site at “250 Water St. is becoming a hostage situation,” said Grace Lee, a parent and local activist.

Saul Scherl, president of the New York tri-state region for Howard Hughes, thinks some NIMBY-ism is at play. “I believe they have an alternative agenda to maintain it forever as a parking lot,” he said.

Sagalyn, the professor, said that “keeping it as a parking lot is untenable,” adding that Howard Hughes is “trying to do something to reactivate the site and reintroduce New Yorkers to the Seaport.”

But residents feel their wariness is warranted. Many were irked when the developer started calling the South Street Seaport the Seaport District, a name intended to encompass the new restaurants and upscale shops there. When the company revealed plans for a parklike roof atop Pier 17 and instead delivered a thumping concert venue, many saw the move as a betrayal.

“They snowed us,” said Stacey Shub, a resident and parent. “We were promised a beautiful roof with grass, a play area for the kids.”

Scherl acknowledged the criticism of Pier 17. “The reality of it is,” he said, “it’s also a for-profit.” He added that the rooftop has offered ice skating and movie nights in the past, but that the company is still trying to find the right balance between meeting business goals and serving the community. “The concerts bring a sense of energy, a vibe,” Scherl said. “That’s something we need to bring in for the restaurants and retail.”

Last year Pier 17 sold out 18 of 23 shows and welcomed more than 60,000 guests, according to Howard Hughes. Billie Eilish, the young pop singer, will perform there this month in a sold-out show. Pollstar, a publication that covers the concert industry, voted it the “best new concert venue” in the country.

Scherl said he has sought to address noise complaints and has supported local nonprofits. He has also tried to throw a lifeline to the perennially struggling South Street Seaport Museum, which, like the rest of the area, was deluged during Hurricane Sandy.

But the parking lot atop the thermometer factory has become what Kennedy, the retired physical therapist, described as a Pandora’s box for the developer, serving to galvanize frustrated residents, who are demanding that Howard Hughes become more transparent about its plans.

In November, Howard Hughes applied to the state’s brownfield cleanup program, which encourages private-sector remediation in exchange for a release from liability if contamination is later discovered on or seeping from a remediated site. It also offers tax benefits in certain instances, such as the inclusion of affordable housing.

“We have a fiduciary obligation to clean up the site,” Scherl said.

But before any remediation takes place, residents want to know what the developer intends to build at 250 Water St. The neighborhood’s Community Board 1 recently passed a resolution — what amounts to an official recommendation — calling for no activity on the 1-acre parking lot until an approved land-use plan is in place.

Indeed, the community has been asking Howard Hughes about its plans across the entire Seaport, where the developer leases Pier 17, the adjacent Tin Building site and portions of buildings on Beekman, John, South, Fulton, Front and Water streets.

Last week, Howard Hughes announced that it was moving in that direction: It has hired architecture firm Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill to lead a master plan process that would address the Seaport as a whole and the specific sites Howard Hughes controls or has an interest in, including the parking lot.

“The hope is to look at the site comprehensively and come up with a series of programs, architectural language and building masses that build a synergy between all pieces,” said Chris Cooper, an architect and a Skidmore design partner who will help lead the planning process.

So far, the course of action involves holding community workshops and creating and updating a website, Cooper said.

As for the parking lot, based on statements from Howard Hughes — and on the $180 million the company paid for the property — the developer seems interested in erecting a building or buildings on it that could very well exceed the height limit for the site under current zoning, which allows for only 12 stories.

A plan for the parking lot is “exactly what we and Skidmore Owings &amp; Merrill will be figuring out over the next months in close consultation with community stakeholders,” Scherl said.

Howard Hughes has expressed a desire to transfer air rights from other properties to the parking lot site. It has said it could have more than 600,000 square feet available, but the city disputes that amount. Also the lot is not a “receiving” site for air rights. For the transfer to take place, the city would have to make an exception.

But some city officials said they were not interested in more exceptions for the Seaport. “Everything everyone does is tall,” Brewer said. “I want development here to stay at 120 feet.”

Others feel differently. “When you look at a surface parking lot in a prime location in lower Manhattan,” said Pinsky of RXR, “and you think about the tax revenues that are not being generated and the jobs that are not being created, the housing that is not being supported, it’s hard to believe there is not a way to develop the lot that is sensitive to the issues the opponents raise but that puts the property back into more productive use.”

Regarding the mercury issue, Brewer noted that the parking lot is in the flood zone, echoing community members who worry that a storm surge during remediation could wash up contaminants into the neighborhood. “It needs very intensive oversight,” she said.

Brewer and other elected officials recently held a meeting with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which administers the brownfield program and monitors cleanups of sites in the program, so that they could express their concerns.

Elemental mercury can vaporize when exposed to air, and if vapors are inhaled they can cause brain damage, according to Anthony Carpi, an environmental toxicologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Carpi said that exposure to mercury vapors is a particular concern for children, whose nervous systems are still developing. And because the respiratory rates of children are higher than those of adults, he added, they “are likely to take in more of it.”

In the case of the parking lot, air monitoring would have to take into account the fact there are so many students nearby (in addition to Peck Slip, there is also the Blue School and several day care centers).

So far, there has been no comprehensive study of the parking lot area, so no one knows whether “the site is slightly contaminated or grotesquely contaminated or something in between,” Carpi said.

Of the 146 New York City sites approved for the brownfield cleanup program since 2003, none have involved elemental mercury contamination. When such contamination was found in a backyard cottage in Ridgewood, Queens, which had been used by the Weixler Brothers Thermometer Co. to make thermometers for submarines in the first half of the 20th century, the conservation department referred the site to the federal Environmental Protection Agency for remediation. The cottage was demolished as part of the cleanup. The mercury was eliminated.

The conflict over the parking lot has united young parents with longtime locals, such as the members of Save Our Seaport. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou recently joined a community protest of Howard Hughes’ handling of the parking lot.

Residents said they were hiring an environmental consultant to independently monitor work on the site. One parent, Megan Malvern, has borrowed an air-monitoring meter so she can take readings around the site.

Although the future of 250 Water St. is uncertain, for many residents, one thing is for sure. “We’re getting overdeveloped,” said Kennedy, the retired physical therapist. “And we’re drawing the line at the Seaport.

Toxic Threat Beneath South Street Seaport

NEW YORK — In an area as old as the South Street Seaport, a part of lower Manhattan that dates to the 17th century, historic remnants are bound to turn up from time to time. A wooden ship was unearthed on Water Street in 1981. A stoneware jug was discovered on Pearl Street where a boardinghouse stood in the early 1800s.

Toxic threat beneath south street seaport

<h1>Prices for the last piece of real estate that any New Yorker will ever own — a cemetery plot or an aboveground crypt — have also climbed significantly over the years.</h1>

Basic cemetery plots across the five boroughs now generally cost $4,500 to $19,000, not including hefty fees for foundations, interments and maintenance. The best deals can be found on Staten Island, where a grave site can be had for less than $3,000, but an increasingly rare final resting place in Manhattan can go for $1 million.

But wherever you go, you won’t actually own the land. When you buy a burial spot, you’re just acquiring the right to use the space in perpetuity — not unlike the shares you get when you buy in a co-op building and live in an apartment that you don’t technically own.

While cemetery directors long ago warned that the city would soon run out of burial space, they, like their counterparts in other types of real estate development, have found ingenious ways to carve out new space in already crowded environments. In fact, there may be enough cemetery plots left in the city to last for several more decades, even in historic sites like Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

The growing popularity of cremation has helped ease the demand. While consumers have turned to cremation for many reasons, an urn with cremated remains — or cremains, as the funeral industry refers to them — takes up far less space than a coffin. An in-ground plot for cremains at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn is only two square feet and starts at $1,200.

Space, of course, was less of an issue 150 years ago.

When Tammany Hall politician Boss Tweed died in 1878, he and his family had already bought two large plots at Green-Wood that were combined to accommodate one and all. Tweed’s final abode is 600 square feet and enclosed by a low granite wall with a bronze gate. His monument stands at the center, surrounded by other monuments and headstones for his father, his wife and children, and assorted relatives — with plenty of room to spare.

Today, thanks in part to a taste for mobility that often flings us far from our places of birth, a more typical cemetery purchase might be a single plot, chosen and bought by survivors during the grief-racked days after the unexpected death of a loved one.

Perhaps not surprising in a city as dense as New York, the deceased are often not alone in their “single” plots. At many cemeteries, plots accommodate two stacked caskets (a “double-depth” grave, in funeral parlance). At others, a single grave can hold three — perhaps the logical last port of call for a family of three who made do with a one-bedroom apartment.

Plot sizes vary from cemetery to cemetery, and even within cemeteries, but over the years they have been shrinking. At the 156-year-old Woodlawn, a landmark on 400 rolling acres, some older plots are 4 feet wide by 10 feet long; in a new section being laid out, the plots are 40 inches wide by 8 feet 6 inches long. And at Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn, the plots are just 30 inches wide by 7 feet long. Welcome to the studio apartment for the deceased.

Although many cemeteries have plenty of grave sites left, the really choice plots in the oldest, and often loveliest, areas are harder to come by.

In death, as in life, location matters. Woodlawn, for instance, still has 25 acres left to be developed and is completing a master plan mapping them out. But you would be hard-pressed to find a burial spot next to Duke Ellington, one of the jazz greats for whom the place is known. (Literary types, however, should take note: Plots are still available in the vicinity of Herman Melville, with prices starting at $20,000.)

Sometimes there are unused plots in older sections, and cemeteries can reclaim grave sites that were sold long ago but never occupied. And from time to time, people who own plots change their minds about where they want to spend eternity and seek to sell them back. Cemeteries decide, on a case-by-case basis, if buying a plot back makes sense from a resale point of view, or whether it amounts to the equivalent of acquiring an unused bedroom in someone else’s Classic Six.

“It’s not every day someone offers me a space next to Celia Cruz,” said David Ison, the executive director of Woodlawn.

Just as New Yorkers with small apartments have been forced to turn dining rooms into bedrooms and closets into home offices, cemeteries, too, have gotten creative. They have ripped up roadways and paths to make room for more grave sites. They are building mausoleums for aboveground burials — more stacking of caskets, but unlike apartment buildings, where the most desirable units tend to be at the top, in mausoleums the eye-level offerings are the most coveted and expensive, with prices declining as you go higher or lower.

Back in 2010, Green-Wood officials believed the cemetery would have to stop selling plots in about five years. Now Eric Barna, the vice president of operations, thinks the cemetery might still be burying people for decades. “The end might be 25 years away or 50 years away,” he said.

To accommodate the shift toward cremation, many cemeteries are building columbaria, aboveground structures with niches that can hold hundreds or even thousands of urns. Niches with glass fronts have become popular, allowing survivors to display not only an urn but also photos and other mementos.

Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, the 75-acre expanse where Louis Armstrong is buried, is down to its “last acre” of space for burials, said John Helly, the general manager. But the cemetery just built its first mausoleum, which opens this spring.

The structure will contain 168 crypts and 3,400 niches, and take up the same amount of space that might otherwise have been devoted to a few hundred graves. Because many of the niches are “companion niches,” with room for two urns, the mausoleum will be able to hold about 5,000 urns. “It will extend the life of the cemetery,” Helly said.

The one place where it is nearly impossible to be buried? Manhattan.

Trinity Church’s cemetery in Hamilton Heights, which sprawls on either side of Broadway and bills itself as “the only active cemetery and mausoleum” in the borough, no longer accommodates in-ground burials. Mayor Edward I. Koch was buried there in 2013, for what was then an eyebrow-raising price of $20,000. Today, aboveground crypts at Trinity can run as high as $60,000 for a single coffin, while niches for a single urn range from $1,900 to $6,500.

Jane Margolies

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