A storm is brewing on the Hudson River over the city’s push to create a recycling center on a pier that state law has set aside for parkland.
City officials are pressing the Assembly and Gov. Spitzer to back a bill allowing the Sanitation Department to operate a massive recycling facility at the Gansevoort peninsula, where an old garbage incinerator is slated to make way for parkland. The state Senate has backed the bill. Under the law – and a court settlement with the city – the peninsula south of 14th Street is slated to become a six-acre meadow, one of the two largest tracts of open space in the 5-mile-long park.
“We’re talking about a Sheep Meadow or a Great Lawn [as in Central Park]. If you put a recycling-transfer station there, it will block it all off,” said Al Butzel, founder of Friends of Hudson River Park.
Park advocates and several elected officials from the West Side are backing another plan, which would move the recycling facility from Gansevoort and another commercial waste station from Pier 99 at 59th Street to a single site on Pier 76, behind the Javits Center.
The group spent $60,000 on an engineering study that found the massive Pier 76 is strong enough and large enough to accommodate both sanitation facilities, along with hosting the city’s auto-tow pound, which is already there.
City officials, however, say a recycling facility at Gansevoort is a key part of the long-range solid-waste management plan that would end the practice of carting Manhattan waste to the outer boroughs. And they say the Pier 76 alternative is too expensive – $438 million, compared with $100 million for Gansevoort.