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| Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City takes a deep dive into the development of Industry City (Anne-Katrin Titze seen here at the location) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn Photo: Ed Bahlman |
In the second instalment with Kelly Anderson (Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY) on Emergent City (a highlight in the Spotlight Documentary programme of the 23rd Tribeca Festival), co-directed with Jay Arthur Sterrenberg (co-founder of the Meerkat Media Collective), we discuss green re-industrialisation, Uprose and the fight for the industrial waterfront, the filmmakers’ relationship with former Councilmember Carlos Menchaca and Andrew Kimball, the former CEO of Industry City, the thrill of community board meetings and balancing development with the neighbourhood residents’ desires.
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| Kelly Anderson: “It’s a problem of development everywhere and balancing that with community desires …” |
Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is New York’s largest privately owned industrial property and its story over the last decade turned out to be a perfect mirror to many of the developments going on around the US and worldwide.
Rezoning, the process of democracy, community building and destruction, gentrification and green energy, city council work, endless town hall meetings, real estate speculation, luxury hotel threats, green jobs, small business interests, and Goldilockian compromises - Shakespearean in dimension, this deeply urban cautionary tale of a film (as was Kelly Anderson’s Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square co-directed with Kathryn Barnier and Ryan Joseph in 2022) has it all.
From Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Emergent City before the Tribeca Festival world premiere.
Anne-Katrin Titze: The idea of green re-industrialisation is important. And the Sunset Park waterfront is at the forefront in the country?
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| Ed Bahlman shopping at Sunrise Mart, Japan Village, Industry City Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
Kelly Anderson: There’s this site called the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which is not part of Industry City, but right next to it and it’s where there’s going to be this wind turbine assembly to support the wind farms off Long Island. Industry City is involved in it, so is Uprose and all these different people who’ve been fighting for this industrial waterfront since way before Industry City got here. It is a complex reality.
AKT: You seem very immersed in the community. Did you and/or your co-director attend most of the community meetings?
KA: Yeah, we went to a lot. A lot of those are open meetings and I live in Sunset Park so it wasn’t that hard for me to be there, though we did need to bring crew and so on. We did have a very nice relationship with Councilmember Carlos Menchaca who invited us to film his working groups and that’s also how we ended up having access to those meetings between Menchaca and the developer, which I think make the film work, because it’s an access that people don’t usually have.
Meetings that they usually don’t get to see. It was a combination, the story was unfolding and there wasn’t really media covering, maybe WNYC a little bit. So it became important for us just to document it even before we knew that there was going to be a film in there. I mean, it took a long time for it to gel as a story.
AKT: A very heated meeting takes place in a big auditorium, where was that?
KA: Was that when Councilmember Menchaca was presenting to the community?
AKT: Yes.
KA: That is at Sunset Park High School on 4th Avenue in the 30s.
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| Industry City 3/4 courtyard Japan Village Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: I remember in Rabble Rousers it was pointed out how every meeting should have some food and there’s dancing. In this film, the meetings are quite heated and people are happy when the windows are opened. There is a lot of stress involved in community work!
KA: A lot of the people who do the organising in the neighbourhood always do have food, I’ll just say. That’s just a way to do good organising. Those meetings, yeah, those public spaces that was what we were really interested in, is how on this public stage - you know, people think a community board meeting is boring, but it’s anything but. If you have enough information to know what the agendas are and who’s who.
We were hoping to capture or represent some of that real drama. People really care and they’re coming because they care about the community and feel and think that what they’re advocating for is the best thing. And they’re up against other people who feel the same way about their position. It’s incredibly dramatic and being able to distill that from hundreds, probably thousands of hours of footage of meetings was tough.
But Jay and I are both real committed to local democracy with a small d and that sort of engagement. We’re impressed by that. That people put in that time and that work and be there till three in the morning night after night, it’s tough.
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| Ed Bahlman, Industry City 4/5 courtyard, Sahadi's A Brooklyn Tradition Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: You show in the film that the effort is worth it. Andrew Kimball has been CEO of Industry City almost the whole time span covered and in the end there comes a surprise that we are not giving away here. How was your relationship to him, as he is one of the through lines?
KA: I mean a lot of that material with Kimball is from public meetings, but we did have access to Kimball and also Jim Somoza who is the other person from Industry City who appears in the film. It was my co-director Jay who had that relationship with them and filmed that material with them. They were open and wanted to show what they were doing; they were proud of their project, they believe in the mission of this adaptive re-use of old buildings.
Andrew’s a smart person, he came from the Brooklyn Navy Yard where he did amazing work. I think some of the issues that come up in Industry City are not really related to Andrew Kimball as much as it’s about how can you do a private project that supports a mission that pays less? Manufacturing pays a lot less than other uses and I think he was trying to balance that with this project and bring in other things like hotels and retail to be able to make the equation work.
And to this community it just looks like, wait, you come in and you want to change everything and make it not industrial anymore? We don’t want that. It’s a problem of private property and a sense of public ownership over the waterfront. Even if the public doesn’t own literally every square foot of land, they are still very invested in shaping the future of their community, as they should. That’s really the rub there.
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| Industry City interior corridors Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
I hope that Andrew Kimball and Jim Somoza engage with the film. We’ve invited them to Tribeca, it would be wonderful if they would participate. My sense is not that they’re evil people, it’s just that it’s hard when you’re working for a company that has an agenda of delivering a profit to shareholders, which is very different than the agenda of people living in a community.
It’s a bigger problem than Industry City and than New York. It’s a problem of development everywhere and balancing that with community desires to stay where they live and invest in where they live and shape the future in a way that works for a broader set of people.
AKT: The luxury hotels were stopped, which is something that could have happened so easily, if there hadn’t been all of that community effort. It’s one of the big what-ifs of the film, we as viewers can imagine how this could be a completely different place.
KA: Yes, and also if the people who wanted to negotiate with Industry City and do the Community Benefits Agreement had been able to do what they wanted to do. Maybe it would look completely different as well. That’s part of where we end with the film, is that we don’t know and we can’t know, but what we do know is that a community was able to assert a tremendous amount of will and political influence over a major land use decision. And that is something that I think has to be respected.
Read what Kelly Anderson had to say in the first instalment on Emergent City.
Emergent City opens in New York on Friday, April 25 at the DCTV Firehouse Cinema with multiple post-screening Q&As throughout the weekend.
