Greenpoint’s skyline has been growing taller for years — but some residents worry that a developer is cutting corners in their scramble for more apartments at a toxic, long-shuttered industrial site.
The former home of NuHart Plastic Manufacturing on Dupont Street has drawn sharp scrutiny after the builder and state environmental regulators abandoned plans to remove the contaminated soil because it’s sunk too deep.
“The developers are desperate to finish the remediation and get the site built,” Stephen Chesler, a Greenpoint resident who serves as the environmental protection committee chair for Brooklyn Community Board 1, told The Post.
“It makes everyone very nervous that the developer is going at such a breakneck speed to decontaminate the site,” he continued, pointing out that a playground and a senior center sit across the street.
The state Superfund site — perched in north Brooklyn near the confluence of the East River and Newtown Creek — will soon be home to a gleaming, eight-story apartment complex dubbed “NuHart West,” a company spokesperson said.
The development will include 471 rental units — with 143 designated for affordable housing, the spokesperson said.
But that won’t happen until the developer mixes the toxic soil beneat with concrete to create blocks that will stay buried about 25 feet below the building’s foundation, according to Gothamist.
The news didn’t sit well with some Greenpointers, who worried that leaving chemicals from the plant’s heyday of manufacturing plastic and vinyl products could be dangerous to everyone in the neighborhood.
“There are known carcinogens there, which could do serious damage and can be lethal in high doses,” Chesler said. “We’re worried the concrete could be compromised, and contaminated water could seep out.”
That contaminated water is rife with chemical phthalates, which make plastic more durable and are used in tons of household products like vinyl flooring, plastic packaging, garden hoses and medical tubing, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Also present is trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing substance known as TCE that’s often used to make refrigerants, a state Superfund fact sheet said.
The chemicals worked their way into the soil and groundwater after worming out of leaky underground storage tanks, Gothamist said.
The plan to mix the dirt with concrete came after site developer Madison Realty Capital discovered in January that the pollution had seeped much further down than originally thought.
Digging too deep might leave the building with structural damage, the Superfund sheet said. So cubing the contaminants and covering them up became the next-best thing.
A Madison Realty spokesperson told The Post last week that the company always knew it might have to employ such a plan, which has been used at other NYC Superfund sites and would finally wrap up the company’s year-long cleanup.
“Madison Realty Capital has worked closely with the North Brooklyn community, local elected officials, DEC, environmental consultants, other city and state agencies and its construction team to ensure the safe and timely cleanup and redevelopment of the Nuhart site,” Zach Kadden, managing director of development at the firm, said in a statement.
“Over the course of the last 2.5 years, Madison Realty Capital has held eight public meetings, attended the first Greenpoint Construction Task Force meeting, and sent weekly updates to 500 members of the community to update the public throughout every phase of the process.”
Crews started to pour the foundation earlier this month. It should be done by May, and the whole complex is slated for completion in 2025.
Laura Hoffman, a 65-year-old Greenpoint resident who has lived in the neighborhood her entire life, told The Post that her six kids — and their kids — have suffered from the area’s toxic legacy, which she claimed appears in her family as birth defects, brain diseases and autoimmune disorders.
“There’s no other explanation other than environment, because all of our conditions are all over the place,” she said. “We got exposed to a whole bunch of stuff … a lot of people got sick, my family got sick, and we’re still dealing with different medical issues.”
Her oldest son and his wife had two sets of twins, she said. Both times, one of the twins died in utero from a rare birth defect called Trisomy 18, or Edward’s syndrome.
“The doctors said one twin from each set dying from that defect was rarer than getting hit by lightning twice,” Hofmann said.
“To deliberately leave something as bad as phthalates in the soil, particularly knowing the toxic legacy of the neighborhood — I think it’s disgusting,” she said of the developer, who she believes is simply trying to beat a tax-break deadline for firms that build affordable housing.
“The rush is all about money,” she said.
“As much as I want to see affordable housing, I don’t want to see people getting sick in the future because they don’t know about something that’s here in the soil,” she continued. “That’s basically what happened to generations of people that lived here.”
Indeed, Madison Realty is on track to meet the June 2026 deadline for that tax break, according to Gothamist. Although the remediation plan may change if new information surfaces during the public comment period — further delaying construction.
Jane O’Connell, the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s remediation manager for the site, told the outlet that the state is watching “very carefully” to make sure the job’s done right.
“If they didn’t do it right, they’ve got to go back and do it again,” she said.
That sounded odd to Hofmann.
“The agencies say if [the remediation] isn’t good, they’ll have to go back and fix it,” she said. “That sounds kind of crazy to me. I mean, they’re already building on parts of the property there.”
