A Waterfront Park? Not So Fast
On Tuesday, following a Sag Harbor Village Board meeting last Thursday at which officials resolved to forge ahead with plans for a waterfront park that would require condemning three private properties, a Manhattan-based real estate development company announced that it was teaming up with the owner of the three parcels to develop condominiums there.
“We really feel our boutique luxury aesthetic is beautifully aligned with the intentions of this residential development,” said Jeffrey Simpson, head of Greystone, which according to its website has developed over $1 billion in residential and mixed-use properties.
The parcels in question, owned by East End Ventures, are 1, 3, and 5 Ferry Road, on the Sag Harbor side of the bridge. There have been several plans over the past decade to develop them and demolish the abandoned buildings there, making way for condos.
Village officials have something else in mind. They want to acquire the properties, using money from Southampton Town’s community preservation fund, and combine them, along with another, village-owned parcel, to create an expanded waterfront park that would include direct beach access, a space for recreation, and more parking. The new facility would be named for John Steinbeck, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who was a longtime resident of Sag Harbor.
After the unanimous resolution was passed, Dennis Downes, a Sag Harbor attorney who represents East End Ventures, rose to object. His client’s property, he told the board, “is not for sale,” he said, adding that his client was “going full steam ahead” with a plan, long in the works, to develop. “As far as using the C.P.F. money, that’s not going to happen,” Mr. Downes said.
The lawyer told the board that the village had been offered the three parcels some years ago for $7.5 million, but that the village turned it down. (In fact, officials never took a vote on any such offer, Mayor Sandra Schroeder told Mr. Downes.)
East End Ventures had since spent nearly 10 years developing a plan, said Mr. Downes, much of that time fighting the village, including a few lawsuits. “I think it’s kind of late in the game for you to be asking the owner of the property to sell you the property,” he said. “I think you’re wasting all of your time trying to talk to the town about C.P.F.”
The new waterfront park would expand the Windmill Park area, which spans both sides of Route 114, “helping to frame the entrance to Sag Harbor from North Haven,” according to the resolution, which was read aloud by James Larocca, a new board member who helped spur the initiative. Windmill Park offers one of Sag Harbor’s few publicly accessible waterfront views, an important factor in the village’s longstanding local waterfront revitalization program.
Last year, the village unveiled updated plans for Cove Park, on the south side of the bridge. The park, on village-owned property, was to include a boardwalk that would connect the waterfront from West Water Street under the bridge to the Long Wharf windmill, and around to Marine Park on Bay Street. Ed Hollander, head of Hollander Landscape Architects and a Sag Harbor homeowner, had donated the firm’s time to design the park. The boardwalk expansion, if it happens, would be part of the hoped-for John Steinbeck park.
Fred W. Thiele Jr., the village attorney, told the board that while the village can pursue the purchase of the three contested parcels, it also has an obligation to continue to process the East End Ventures application for development. “The planning board still has the legal duty and the legal responsibility to process that application in due course, and I would fully expect the planning board to do that” said Mr. Thiele.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the properties at 1,3, and 5 Ferry Road were located on the North Haven side of the bridge.