Domino: The Rezoning Fight That Decided Who Williamsburg's Waterfront Was For

Two rezonings, four years apart, decided what the Domino Sugar site owed Williamsburg. The park arrived first. The affordability floor never moved.

Stand on Kent Avenue at South 3rd Street and the thing that strikes you is the shell. The old Pan, Filter and Finishing House is still there — eleven storeys of brick, arched windows, the yellow sign — but step inside and the building is hollow. The centre was removed and a glass barrel vault was slid into the cavity. The brick does nothing structural any more. It is a face held in place while a different building grew behind it.

That is a fair description of the whole eleven-acre site. In front of the refinery sits a waterfront park that Williamsburg had no access to for a century and a half. Behind and around it, towers are still going up. The park opened in 2018. The last residential buildings will not be finished until the 2030s. The neighbourhood got the best part first, which is genuinely unusual, and it is the part of this story that travels well.

The part that does not travel is the fight that produced it. Two separate rezonings — one approved in 2010, one in 2014 — were argued almost entirely about how much of this site would be affordable housing. Both were described, at the time, as wins for the community. In both, the number that actually binds the land came out the same: about twenty percent of residential floor area.

What it was built to be

The land is two tax lots: Block 2414, Lot 1, roughly ten acres on the waterfront, and Block 2428, Lot 1, about one and a third acres on the upland side of Kent Avenue. Until the rezoning it was all M3-1 — the city's heaviest manufacturing district, the zoning you map onto a working port.

It earned that designation. The Havemeyer family began refining sugar at Kent Avenue and South 3rd Street in 1856, and by 1863 the firm was Havemeyers & Elder. A fire on 8 January 1882 destroyed the buildings between South 3rd and South 4th Streets, with damage estimated at about $1.5 million and somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 jobs lost overnight. The replacement — the structure that still stands — was finished by 1883 at a reported cost of around $7 million. By 1884 it employed a thousand men and turned out 5,000 barrels of sugar a day.

The Havemeyers folded the plant into the Sugar Refineries Company in 1887 and reorganised it as the American Sugar Refining Company in 1891, after the Sherman Antitrust Act made the original trust structure untenable. At its height that combine controlled roughly 98 percent of American sugar refining, and this block was its largest plant. By 1894 the Brooklyn works ran seven buildings, 3,000 workers and about 13,000 barrels a day. Employment peaked near 4,500 around 1919.

That is the scale worth holding onto. This was not a factory in a neighbourhood. It was the reason the neighbourhood existed.

What broke

The ending was slow and then abrupt. Union contracts expired in 1998; roughly 280 workers walked out in June 1999 and stayed out for about twenty months, one of the longest strikes in the city's history, before accepting terms that cut more than a hundred positions. Output fell to about half of capacity. The refinery stopped running in 2004, with more than 220 layoffs in January of that year.

In July 2004 CPC Resources — the for-profit development arm of the non-profit Community Preservation Corporation — bought the eleven acres with the Katan Group for $55.8 million. The following year the city rezoned a long stretch of the Greenpoint–Williamsburg waterfront for housing, and the economics of the block inverted. In September 2007 the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Pan, Filter and Finishing House. The designation covered that one building, not the sign and not the rest of the complex, which is a detail that matters later.

The dirt itself turned out to be unremarkable. The environmental impact statement attributed the contaminants in site soil to ordinary urban fill rather than to the refining process, and concluded they posed no significant adverse impact; storage tanks and soils were handled under a remedial action plan approved by the Department of Environmental Protection in September 2009. For a 150-year-old industrial waterfront, that is a quiet record. The fight here was never about the soil.

The turn

CPC Resources filed in 2010 under the name The Refinery LLC: a map amendment from M3-1 to R8 and C6-2 on the waterfront and R6 on the upland parcel, a text amendment applying the Inclusionary Housing programme, and a Large Scale General Development special permit under Zoning Resolution 74-74 to move floor area across Kent Avenue and waive the normal height and bulk rules. Rafael Viñoly designed up to nine buildings and about 2,200 apartments, 660 of them affordable.

Community Board 1 objected to the density and to the shadow the office tower would throw on Grand Ferry Park. Council Member Stephen Levin called the project too dense for the area's infrastructure and countered with a 1,600-unit scheme that still carried all 660 affordable units. Assembly Member Vito Lopez wanted 800. More than twenty percent of adjacent owners filed a protest petition, which under the City Charter raised the approval threshold to a three-quarters vote of the full Council.

It passed anyway, in July 2010, after the Planning Commission trimmed the office tower and the Council restored it, cut six storeys from the two 40-storey towers and added a shuttle bus to the Marcy Avenue subway. Four months later the Williamsburg Community Preservation Coalition sued, arguing the environmental review had not taken a hard look at traffic, density and open space — and, centrally, that the affordability had been oversold. Thirty percent of the apartments had been promised. The approval required twenty. Their attorney, Jeffrey Baker, put it in one line.

It was sold as one project but approved as another.

The project then collapsed financially. CPC Resources defaulted, the Katan Group sued to block the sale, and in October 2012 Two Trees Management — the Walentas family firm that had built DUMBO — closed on the site for $185 million. Jed Walentas brought in SHoP Architects, under Vishaan Chakrabarti, and refiled: fewer, taller buildings, far more office space, and roughly forty percent more public open space.

That refiling landed in January 2014, three weeks into Bill de Blasio's first term, with an affordable housing mayor holding the permits a 2.9-million-square-foot project could not proceed without. The administration pushed for more, and for larger units. In late February, Walentas called the demands untenable and threatened to walk. The standoff lasted days.

On 3 March 2014 the deal was announced. At least 537,000 square feet — about 700 of roughly 2,300 units — would be permanently affordable and integrated with the market-rate apartments rather than isolated in one building; up to 50,000 square feet of that could serve moderate incomes. The mayor's office described it as 110,000 square feet more than the application had offered. Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen called it a win for all sides. The Planning Commission approved unanimously two days later.

The Council extracted the rest. On 24 April the Land Use Committee voted 19–0 after Zoning and Franchises chair Mark Weprin added a review board with members appointed by local officials, empowered to approve the public programming of the waterfront spaces and to receive annual reports from Two Trees on what maintaining them actually costs. Levin secured a commitment that the lower-income units go to households at or below 70 percent of area median income — about $61,130 for a family of four on the 2013 figures — plus a handful at 125 percent, and as many two- and three-bedroom units as the site could carry.

The resentment in the room was not disguised. Ritchie Torres said he had no problem with the substance but that Walentas had shown contempt for the Council's role. David Greenfield said the Council had been prepared to vote the project down. Inez Barron abstained, on the grounds that Two Trees had not met earlier commitments on parkland acreage. The full Council approved it on 14 May 2014, 47 in favour, none opposed, one abstention.

What the rules allow

The site is not governed by a single zoning district. It is a Large Scale General Development mapped across R6 with a C2-4 commercial overlay on the upland block, R8 with C2-4 on part of the waterfront, and C6-2 over the refinery itself. In New York the density metric is floor area ratio — total built floor area divided by lot area — but the LSGD permit is precisely the instrument that suspends the ordinary district rules. Floor area moves between sites, heights and setbacks are negotiated rather than prescribed, and the binding number is a total: about 2.95 million square feet approved in 2014.

Within that envelope the 2014 approval set aside roughly 20 percent of residential floor area for affordable housing. That is the same share the 2010 approval required, and the same share the 2010 lawsuit was filed over. The 2014 fight raised the headline unit count from 660 to 700 and, more consequentially, made the commitment binding and permanent where the 2010 version had rested on a non-binding memorandum. It did not move the floor.

Four years of public fighting changed who guaranteed the affordable housing, and how long it lasts. It did not change how much of it there is.

The delta between what the ground held and what the rules now allow is the whole project: a single landmarked shell on eleven acres of M3-1, replaced by just under three million square feet across five residential buildings, about 480,000 square feet of office, 110,000 of retail, 143,000 of community facility space, and a 4.8-acre publicly accessible waterfront.

Timeline

What it is now

The park is real and it is good. James Corner Field Operations, the firm behind the High Line, spent six years on roughly five acres and about $50 million of Two Trees' money. Four syrup collection tanks stand along the quarter-mile walk. The old crane tracks have been planted with around a hundred species. An elevated walkway traces the interior volume of a building that no longer exists. It opened in June 2018 — one tower finished, three to go.

It is worth being precise about where that machinery came from. Demolishing every structure on the site except the Refinery was identified in the environmental review as a significant adverse impact on architectural resources. The agreed mitigation included documenting the buildings for the Historic American Engineering Record and salvaging and reusing industrial artefacts where feasible. The syrup tanks in the park are not a gesture of nostalgia. They are the settlement for knocking the rest of it down.

The build-out has gone roughly as approved. 325 Kent Avenue opened in 2017 with 522 apartments; One South First and Ten Grand followed in 2019; One Domino Square, by Selldorf Architects, delivered condominiums and rentals in 2024. The Refinery itself reopened as offices in September 2023 and was still only about a quarter leased more than a year later — the one piece of the plan the market has not yet confirmed.

And the plan is still moving. In 2025 the developer returned to alter the Large Scale General Development again: Site B grows from about 1,026 to roughly 1,262 units, the podium drops from 70 feet to 47, the maximum height rises from 530 to 545 feet, and the skybridge disappears. About 315 of the affordable units would sit on site and roughly 105 would be built elsewhere. Community Board 1 approved unanimously, on the condition that Two Trees keep pursuing a school — which the School Construction Authority has already declined to put here.

So: the waterfront came back, and it came back early, and giving the neighbourhood the park before the towers was a real choice that most developers do not make. It was also the cheapest concession on the table. Five acres of landscaping cost about $50 million against a $1.5 billion project, and it bought a decade of public goodwill during construction. The thing Williamsburg spent two rezonings, one lawsuit and six years fighting over was the share of this site that would be affordable. That share is still about a fifth — and a hundred of those units are now proposed to be built somewhere else.

What's still unknown

Three things would sharpen this. First, how many affordable units have actually been delivered and at what incomes — the per-building counts reported in the press do not reconcile cleanly against the 700-unit commitment, and the Housing Preservation and Development regulatory agreements would settle it. Second, what happened to the 2010 lawsuit; the 2014 approval superseded the plan it challenged, but the disposition is not in the public summaries. Third, the annual reports the Council required Two Trees to file with the waterfront review board on the cost of operating the public spaces. Those were the Council's one durable piece of leverage over a privately owned park, and whether they are being filed — and read — is the question that decides how much that leverage was worth.