NY Post's Cuozzo: lease signed for Chelsea Piers, call for environmental review "mostly meant simply to obstruct"

New York Post REALTY CHECK columnist Steve Cuozzo, on 3/16/20 published New Chelsea Piers field house, fitness club coming to Pacific Park, which isn't really news, other than the incremental information that developer TF Cornerstone signed a lease with Chelsea Piers.

Cuozzo, typically not-so-informed, wrote:

It’s a done deal for a giant new field house and fitness club run by Chelsea Piers at TF Cornerstone’s 595 Dean St. at Brooklyn’s Pacific Park.
The developer and the Piers signed a lease this week for a combined 103,000- square-foot fitness and health club at the base of the new residential tower to stand 26 floors.

That may be the official address of the facilities but, as anyone following the project should know, they will stretch below both 595 Dean and its sibling 615 Dean, as shown in the pink sections of the screenshot below, published 11/22/19.

Snark regarding the switch

Writes Cuozzo:

The plan required approval by the Empire State Development Corp., which oversees Pacific Park (formerly known as Atlantic Yards).
But nothing in New York is simple. The Chelsea Piers deal was opposed by local activists, and some pols who wanted it to undergo an interminable environmental review.
Why would a gym need an environmental review? The demand was mostly meant simply to obstruct it because opponents regarded it as a big windfall for TF Cornerstone without including additional affordable housing.
But 595 Dean St.’s 800 apartments are already to include some affordable units. And with TF Cornerstone’s other planned building at Pacific Park, 615 Dean St., it will include 72,600 square feet of public open space.

That, of course, is a vast simplification of the controversy, in which the new space provided to Chelsea Piers was outside the limits of the guiding General Project Plan--not commercial space, not retail space, but interpreted newly as "recreational space," a new category, and justified as a swap for parking space (which was never expressed in square footage). 

As I wrote, fitness centers were once considered retail space, and the Chelsea Piers space was initially presented as commercial space.

What's the timing?

Cuozzo ends the column with "Ground is to be broken this year." 

That general statement is true, but, as I wrote earlier this month, the timing seems to have been nudged back, with Scott Solish of Greenland USA, the dominant player in joint-venture Greenland Forest City Partners, estimating June or July, while he two months earlier had estimated "April-May, or May-June."

Why now?

Cuozzo is the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park developer's go-to vessel to float positive news, as in the article 9/30/19 claiming that the project was moving to the "fast track," given an announced plan to start the platform this year.

That seemed timed to pre-empt a public meeting organized by BrooklynSpeaks that would make new demands on the project.

Master developer Greenland Forest City knew of my coming article in The Real Deal about the snag regarding eminent domain for Site 5. So it's a not unreasonable bet they wanted some positive news, and involved TF Cornerstone, which bought development rights to B12 and B13.