The Westinghouse Building: Will a Sad Story Turn into “an Incredible Light”?
Frequent commenter Zemin Zhang lives in downtown Newark. He’s been long fighting the battle of taking down the Westinghouse building which blights the Broad Street Station area. Mayor Cory Booker suggested on last week’s Newark Today show on WBGO that this dilapidated warehouse will be torn down during his administration — a ray of hope for Zemin and his James Street Historic District neighborhood. He provided this commentary in an email today. – Ed.
A Rutgers researcher, Josh Mann, observed that the Westinghouse building “is reflective of the past, present, and future of Newark.” At the site of the great American inventor Seth Boydon’s early 1800’s workshop, the Westinghouse facility had been a part of Newark’s manufacturing powerhouse since 1882. In its heyday (1910-1950), 3,000 workers daily at this 4.5-acre complex produced a variety of products, from electric curling irons and watt-hour meters, to loudspeakers for early radios. Finally, like the fate of hundreds of Northeastern manufacturers, the Westinghouse building dimmed its lights in the late 1970’s, leaving this city of mostly unemployed poor minorities.
On December 29, 1983, the New West Urban Renewal Corporation, one of the many names of the family business of Ivor Braka and his two brothers, bought the complex for $2 million, “as is.” In October 1987, the brothers found a buyer, Newark Venture, who ordered an enviromental study from Accutech Environmental Services. After learning about the six areas of concern and an estimated clean-up bill of about $500,000, the buyer cancelled the contract within months. The Braka’s failed to change the buyer’s mind with their own counter-study, which indicated only limited contamination.
In 1992, New West had a more thorough environmental contaminant survey done to evaluate potential development options. Besides an asbestos problem like all old buildings in the past 100 years, former workers had used diesel fuels, solvents, degreasing materials and PCB’s. Also, the underground storage tanks had some leaks. In addition, there were four 55-gallon drums labeled “Waste Benzene” and one drum of sodium cyanide. However, the contamination has always been limited in this “Brown Field” site, different from the Super-Fund site of the Bloomfield Westinghouse facility, which had involved with the “Manhattan Project.”
In 1994, New West filed nine counts of complaints against Viacom, which had purchased Westinghouse’s remaining assets, together with some of its liabilities. The legal battle lasted for eight years until the Braka’s filed a second legal case against the same defendant in 2002. Judge Stephen Orlofsky of U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey granted a partial summary judgement on seven counts for the defendant, based on the statute of limitations. The remaining two complaints were dismissed by the court. Apparently, the Braka’s got nothing from the legal battle, but a seemingly exaggerated reputation for the building’s contamination.
In 2004, a large company headed by the Newark-born Stanley Gale invested to rehabilitate the historic building of 500,000 sq. ft. The new partnership between the Gale Company and the Braka’s United States Realty and Investment planned to develop retail space at the ground level, office space on the next level, and condominiums on the upper floors. The remediation work was scheduled to start in three months. (Obviously, it was feasible to save the building then.) In February 2006, the New Jersey construction heavyweight Mack-Cali solidified its dominant position in a $545 million deal with all statewide holdings of the Gale Corporation, bringing a new partner to the Braka’s at this site. As people can remember, the “ever-lasting” construction boom looked very promissing in Newark in 2005 and 2006. When the lightrail moved to its completion and Broad Street Station became busier by day, the nearby 4.5-acre property increased its value, along with people’s expectations. Obviously, the claim of contamination would be paid off this time by the call for a complete demolition and a plan of a much larger scale. (See a “serious plan” at http://www.aetnarealty.com.)
The brothers also own the building next to the Little Theatre on Broad Street and the Food Court complex across from PSE&G, a large building at the corner of Broadway and 51st in New York City, as well as many not-state-of-art properties from Maryland to Wisconsin to Texas. As the Aethna Realty website said, under the leadership of the highly experienced Ivor Braka, the company has been very successful in investing on strategic properties like the Westinghouse building at the “right moments.” However, any impressive development on these propeties has yet to be seen. In fact, things are not always very smooth. For instance, in the Congress Plaza Hotel of Chicago, which Ivor Braka invested in with a partner, an 80-year-old Syria-born Albert Nasser, a very contentious labor dispute broke out between the management and poor minority workers. (See http://www.congresshotelstrike.info.)
At this very moment, heavy machines are parked in front of the Westinghouse building, waiting for demolition permits. Last October, in its exciting “Newark Vision Plan”, the influencial Regional Plan Association called for “political action” against the owners to move the development ahead. In Mayor Booker’s 100-day report, one of the two development items was to urge the Westinghouse building owners to move forward at this strategic spot of the city. When our mayor attended a ceremony a few weeks ago for the demolition of the Lincoln Motel, he expressed his frustration on the slow-moving development at this extremely valuable corner, “A transit village here will provide hundreds of jobs for retail business. Thousands of Newarkers will live here and go to work in New York and New Jersey towns… We are going to see an incredible new light shine from this spot.” He gazed at the Westinghouse building. Some prominent transportation planners, such as Martin Robins and Jeffrey Zupan, have made impressive calculations on developing office spaces in the area for suburban office workers, who come here by mass transit, instead of cars. A minimum annual gasoline saving of 8 million gallons is only one of the many economic benefits for the city, the state, and the region. An incredible new light, indeed.
With what is happening now on Wall Street and on main streets, however, will the Westinghouse building lead to a happy ending soon? What if the seven-phased demolition results in “temporary” surface parking, which turns into yet another scheme of land-banking? I am sure that the owners’ deep pockets and unique investment strategies will not suffer from the delay. Then, will we become losers for another 24 years, waiting for “an incredible new light,” while our city cannot even take any “politcal action” on a now “legitimate” parking lot for automobile-loving commuters?