One Man’s Trash, Another’s Fairway

NEW YORK —  Ferry Point Park in the Bronx is one of this city’s last, big pieces of undeveloped land. At 414 acres, it’s half the size of Central Park, with spectacular waterfront views and vistas of the Empire State Building.

Seemingly the perfect spot for a PGA-caliber golf course being billed as the “Pebble Beach of the East.” At least that was what city officials had in mind two years ago, when the parks department awarded developers the rights to construct the course.

But work at Ferry Point stopped in January because the land--a former garbage dump built atop a marsh--is sinking. Today the site resembles a moonscape, stripped of foliage and covered by a layer of gray construction debris.

The developers want to shore up Ferry Point by bringing in an additional 550,000 cubic yards of landfill. But environmental groups are protesting the plan, which they argue threatens to further compact the garbage like a giant whoopie cushion, sending not only potentially explosive methane gas into neighboring homes but also polluting the East River with toxic chemicals.

All sides in the controversy agree the stakes are sizable.

“It is essentially a good and honorable deal for everyone,” said Henry Stern, who was the city’s parks commissioner under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “It was a wasteland for 30 years, and it is making the desert bloom.”

The project has the support of virtually all politicians in the Bronx. Giuliani, an enthusiastic golfer, had lobbied to make the course a stop on the PGA tour.

But Leslie Lowe--former executive director of the New York Environmental Justice Alliance, which filed an unsuccessful suit seeking to cancel the developer’s contract--charged that Ferry Point “has all the landmarks of a wired deal.... The project is undercapitalized. They put all of the potential liability off on the taxpayers.... You don’t play PGA tournaments on a toxic golf course.”

The accusation caused Edward C. Wallace, one of the developer’s principal lawyers, to bristle.

“Nobody would put up tens of millions of dollars to produce a toxic golf course.... I count on my client to do the right thing,” he said.

“You are taking a landfill that was a horrific eyesore.... [The course] will be next to Yankee Stadium and the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo, the fourth jewel of the crown of the Bronx,” Wallace predicted.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the Ferry Point site was a garbage dump where hazardous materials, including lead paint and asbestos, were deposited. Authorized use of the landfill stopped in the 1970s, but illegal dumping of used cars, drums of chemicals and old refrigerators continued.

During the summers, brush fires fed by methane from decomposing waste were so frequent that a fire engine often was stationed next to the park.

“When I moved here in January 1978, Ferry Point Park looked like something out of a science fiction movie,” Lehra Brooks, a longtime neighborhood resident, said in a court affidavit. “There were deep craters and the ground was very uneven. Parts of it sank below street level. For a long time, I didn’t know that it was a park.... This ooze came up between the cracks [in the asphalt].... In the spring and summer, you would see lots of rats, really big rats, and the odors were horrible.”

In May 2000, the parks department awarded the concession to build the golf course on 222 acres to Ferry Point Partners, a consortium consisting of J. Pierre Gagne, a White Plains, N.Y., developer, Jack Nicklaus’ design firm and several New York investors.

The 35-year contract called for Ferry Point Partners to build the course at its own expense and pay the city $60 million in fees over the life of the agreement.

“I think it is one of the most spectacular locations for a golf course in the United States,” Gagne said, praising Nicklaus as the designer. “You have 140,000 cars that pass that property a day. Multiply it by a year, and it is one-third the population. It is surrounded by 13 million people.”

The original 2001 completion date for the course has been pushed back to 2004. The cost has risen from $22 million to more than $40 million, and some estimates are that it could reach $50 million.

One reason is that techniques used these days to prevent the spread of contamination were not employed back when the dump was sealed decades ago. Because of a lack of cover materials over the garbage, it became necessary to bring in debris from construction and demolition sites to build up the ground so the course could be shaped, soil put down and grass planted.

Adding to these problems, methane gas was detected in surrounding communities. Prompted by worries from residents, several environmental groups began investigating.

Lowe charged that the Giuliani administration “made it impossible” to obtain information. When methane readings occurred in the basement of Throggs Neck Houses, a development with more than 3,500 residents next to the site, the New York City Housing Authority was queried. No response. Requests for records of previous fires at the site went unanswered. So did letters to the Department of Sanitation asking for listings of what was dumped back when Ferry Point Park was a landfill.

Former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, a supporter of the project, also had trouble getting information from the Giuliani administration.

“The mayor’s attitude was he wanted to get this done. His term was getting done,” Stern said. “He wanted to get this done beyond the point of no return.”

But completion has proved to be difficult. The project is stalled while the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation considers whether to issue the permit for the additional landfill--and whether remedies for the methane, including a 5,350-foot trench the developer dug at the department’s direction to vent the gas, are sufficient.

Environmental groups see the permit request as a chance to reopen the case.

So it doesn’t look like Tiger Woods will be teeing off at a PGA tournament at Ferry Point anytime soon.