For more than a century, Pier 1 at St. George has been one of those pieces of New York infrastructure that nobody thinks about until it starts to fall apart. Its inshore section dates to 1912 and its offshore extension to the 1930s and 1940s, and for generations it served the North Shore as an unpretentious place to fish, stroll and watch the ferries come and go from the terminal next door. Now much of it is closed, much of it is rotting, and the city has a plan for what comes next.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation has applied for state and federal permits to demolish the offshore portion of the pier and build something new in its place, according to the application filed with the New York State Department of State for coastal consistency review. The proposal has drawn sustained attention on the North Shore this month, including a series of reports in the Staten Island Advance describing a debate among residents over what the rebuilt pier should be for.
A Pier Past Its Prime
The permit filing is unsentimental about the pier’s condition. The offshore section, it says, is in serious condition, with nearly half of its timber piles deteriorated, and public access to it has been restricted. The adjoining wharf has been closed since Hurricane Sandy, which did to the North Shore waterfront what it did to so much of the city’s edge in 2012.
The plan calls for demolishing roughly 40,000 square feet of the offshore pier along with a stretch of granite wall. In its place, the EDC proposes a new fishing pier, a reconstructed wharf, and an 80-foot gangway leading down to two floating barges, each 120 feet long and 10 feet wide, able to moor two public vessels at once—including, the filing notes, a landing for Dock NYC vessels. The completed facility is described as a “public park and event space,” engineered for a 50-year design life.
If permits are granted, the application anticipates construction from September 2027 to April 2028.
Fishing Pier or Destination?
That phrase, “public park and event space,” is where the argument begins. Pier 1 has long been, above all, a place for anglers—among the more accessible spots in the city to drop a line into the Upper Bay. A floating dock built to receive public vessels and host events suggests something more ambitious: a waterfront attraction meant to draw visitors from beyond the neighborhood, in the manner of the piers that have transformed the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines over the past two decades.
The Advance’s coverage this month has framed the matter in just those terms, with headlines asking whether the site should remain a fishing pier or become a public destination, and reporting resident concern about the prospect of dinner-cruise operations at the new docks. The underlying tension is an old one on the North Shore, which has watched a succession of grand plans for its waterfront—the abandoned New York Wheel chief among them—come and go, and which has learned to greet the word “destination” with a degree of caution.
The permit documents themselves do not settle the question. They describe the facility’s physical form, not its programming, and say little about who would operate the vessel landing or how often. Those decisions, presumably, will be made later, and they will determine whether the new Pier 1 feels like an extension of the neighborhood or an amenity built for someone else.
The Case for Building
There is a straightforward case for the project, and it rests on the filing’s own description of the status quo. A pier with half its piles deteriorated cannot be left indefinitely; it must eventually be either repaired, rebuilt or removed. The EDC’s plan does all three at once, removing the failing offshore section and replacing it with something designed to last half a century. For a borough that often complains, with some justice, of being an afterthought in city capital budgets, a waterfront investment of this kind is not nothing.
And the North Shore’s waterfront has momentum. The ferry terminal draws millions of riders a year, the area around it has seen new residential and retail development, and a functioning public pier with water access would add to that, whatever form its programming ultimately takes.
What to Watch
The permit application now moves through state coastal review and the federal process. The real decisions—who operates the vessel landing, whether event uses are permitted, how much of the new structure is reserved for the anglers who have long claimed it—are likely to be made in the more mundane forums of community board meetings and operating agreements.
That is where North Shore residents who care about the outcome would do well to direct their attention. Pier 1 will be rebuilt; the filing makes that much clear. What remains to be decided is whose pier it will be.
Featured image: The St. George Ferry Terminal, Staten Island. Photo by Giorgio Galeotti via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Leave a Reply