In Sandy's Wake, FEMA Safety Step Impacts Condo

Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal New York and New Jersey last fall, is now roiling the waters of a proposed condominium project on the Sleepy Hollow riverfront.

After years of negotiating village, county and state regulatory hurdles, the developers of River’s Edge appeared close this spring to breaking ground for their 60-unit condo complex at 11 River Street, onetime home of Castle Oil. Instead, they told village trustees Tuesday, a federal agency has asked them to build up the shoreline, making it three feet higher.

That request, in turn, prompted renewed debate on just how high the condo complex should thrust, a discussion ultimately adjourned to next week, at the earliest.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), still doing post-mortems along Sandy’s deadly path, is broadly recommending that waterfront developments move to higher ground—man-made if necessary—to try to avert flooding in a future destructive storm.

Locally, FEMA wants to see those Sleepy Hollow condos resting on a three-foot-higher building site, said Lynne Ward, executive vice president of Natural RE/sources, the Greenwich, Conn.-based builder of River’s Edge. She said FEMA was “making all of us [waterfront developers] do that,” noting that an Edgewater, N.J., project had been elevated 6 feet in Sandy’s wake.

Ward told a regular meeting of the village board Tuesday that FEMA’s changes were “not substantial.” She asked the board, which has already green-lighted the project, simply to note the federally dictated modifications and allow the project to proceed with the necessary village permits. While the board did approve what’s called a “dynamic compaction permit,” allowing some soil preparations to begin, the trustees refused to shrug off FEMA’s recommendation as a minor change.

In a village where picturesque views of the Hudson represent a coveted property right, every inch of altitude in an intervening structure almost certainly impinges on someone’s sightlines. So, future arguments over River’s Edge, whether they occur in village hall or a state court, could turn on the thin difference between the words height and elevation.

The exact height of the River’s Edge building, already approved by both the village and planning boards, appears to be 60 feet. But even before FEMA, differing site plans varied the elevation on which it stood, leading to descriptions of the structure as 67 feet, for example, when measured from a curb elevation of 7 feet.

FEMA’s modification would create a 10-foot curb elevation, pushing the building’s rooftop to a 70-foot elevation. In either case, future arguments likely would contend, the building remains 60-feet high, the same way that a 6-foot person making a speech—whether seated, standing at audience level or elevated on a soapbox—remains someone who is 6 feet tall.

Village officials, led by trustees Susan MacFarlane, who lives in the area, and Barbara Carr as well as Mayor Kenneth Wray zeroed in on the proposed building’s sudden change in elevation. “We’re being asked to look at another 3 feet in height,” Wray said, while Carr noted the impossibility of raising the ground by 3 feet without raising the building by a like amount. MacFarlane asked whether developers could lop 3 feet from the building’s top to make up for its riding 3 feet higher down below.

The mayor, expressing a wish to “move things along,” tentatively scheduled a return appearance for the developers at next week’s work session.

In addition to its 60 residential units, River's Edge would have parking for 122 vehicles and about 2,000 square feet of commercial space. It would sit on 1.63 acres, including 7,161 square feet, or just over 12 percent of the land.

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