Realtor Paul Adler rummaged in a cluttered corner of an office trailer on a brownfield cleanup site on the Yonkers waterfront. Looking pleased, he pulled out two framed movie posters: “Kate and Leopold,” a 2001 movie starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, and the 2004 version of “The Stepford Wives,” whose marketing campaign featured the visage of a very blue-eyed blonde named Nicole Kidman.
Adler got to know those actors as those films were made ”“ right there in “Hollywood-on-the-Hudson,” as he called that postindustrial piece of Yonkers he has managed for a decade. For Adler, who is newly marketing the 15-acre waterfront site for its hedge-fund owner, the catchy name captures what briefly was in Yonkers and what again might be in the vision of a new owner.
“Sydney Pollack used to lay out here and sunbathe,” he said, pointing to a concrete deck beside the Hudson River. Pollack, the Hollywood director, actor and producer who died last year, would have had a fine view across the river of the Palisades.
Pollack”™s 2005 film, “The Interpreter,” was the last movie made at Hudson River Stage, the Yonkers film production venue that Adler, along with better-known industry names such as Robert DeNiro and Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax Films, did much to create a decade ago. The “Blue Cube,” a 10-story, 30,000-square-foot industrial laboratory given a second life as a sound stage, is all that remains of a 19th-century brick factory village that helped draw a wave of film producers to the site.
As managing director at Rand Commercial Services, Adler in 1999 began managing the property for BICC Cables Corp., the cable wire manufacturer that ceased operations at One Point Street in Yonkers in 1996. “The property was an expensive site to mothball,” he said. To cover the owner”™s expenses, Adler considered how it might be adaptively reused. The idea for a modestly equipped film studio on the Hudson was born.
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“We had period buildings that were in place,” he said. And there was the Blue Cube, an idle test lab for cable wire built in 1968 on 300 steel piers sunk into the Hudson and large enough to garage a space shuttle. Unlike the other buildings used in manufacture for a century, the Blue Cube was not contaminated with industrial pollutants.
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At about the same time, DeNiro, Weinstein and other movers in New York City”™s film industry “were looking for a venue, for a location,” said Adler, after their fallout with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani over their use of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a production site. The state Governor”™s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development, working with the Westchester County film office and the mayor”™s film office in Yonkers, steered producers to the conveniently located urban site. The venue got another boost in 2004 when Gov. George E. Pataki included Yonkers in the state”™s newly created film tax credit zones.
In 1999, Hudson River Stage, which Adler served as executive vice president, booked its first movie, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp. The sound stage was converted into a one-acre cornfield through which Ichabod Crane rode on horseback, Adler recalled. The film crew transplanted a field of corn there from a Dutchess County farm.
“We breathed some life back into a building,” Adler said. “We gave it another purpose.”
Other factory buildings were used for set-building, wardrobe housing and catering services. “It became a nice venue,” Adler said. Television commercials and music videos also were made there.
In December 2004, BCCI sold the property for $22 million to Homes for America Holdings Inc., the national development company that relocated its headquarters to Yonkers and planned to redevelop the site as Point Street Landing, a $900 million mixed-use project of office and retail space, high-rise and townhouse residences, marina and public parks. At the northern tip of Alexander Street, Point Street Landing was to be part of the city”™s plan for high-density, mass-transit-oriented redevelopment along the waterfront industrial corridor. The developer”™s plans did not include reopening the Blue Cube as a sound stage.
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With the sale, BCCI and its predecessor on the site, Phelps Dodge International Corp., were financially responsible for cleaning up the contaminated land and water. Adler and a partner, environmental attorney Debra Rothberg, in 2004 created Blackacre Partners Ops L.L.C., a liability transfer company, to operate the cleanup, which began in January 2005.
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Five years later, “We”™re a little less than a year away from being totally done,” Adler said. The cleanup on land, which required razing 22 buildings that totaled 600,000 square feet, has been completed at a cost of $40 million, Adler said. The operator has begun removing contaminated river sediment spread over another 15 acres, work expected to cost another $15 million to $20 million.
With Homes for America in default, the developer”™s lender, a Manhattan hedge fund, took back the property early this year. The developer this year also lost its downtown Station Plaza office and retail building and vacated its headquarters there after defaulting on a reported $10 million mortgage loan from Amalgamated Bank in Manhattan.
The Point Street Landing project apparently will not survive the demise of its proposed developer. Adler said the Point Street property”™s owner instructed him: “Do it again. Repurpose this property.”
Adler said he plans to put out a request for proposals from prospective buyers in the first quarter of 2010. Currently, there is no asking price for the property. Adler hopes a buyer will include the Blue Cube and a modern film and television production facility in the property”™s redevelopment.
“We would like to see a film use included with it,” Adler said. “It would be nice for Yonkers to have a sustainable industry that will stay here.”?In the film industry and in the state”™s film development office, interest in the Yonkers venue still is strong, he said. “We get calls all the time: ”˜Are you back on line? Are you back on line?”™”
Unlike Homes for America”™s position on the sidelines while the brownfield cleanup continued, “Now you”™re not sort of waiting for it to happen,” Adler said. “We”™re first and goal now. The heavy lifting is done.”
“We”™ll see what the vision of the next buyer is,” he said. “Someone can come in and create a vision here.”
