Glen Cove shapes its future

Making any downtown hum is tough, especially in a sluggish economy. For the City of Glen Cove, the usual obstacles have been there, like downtown-killing malls and big-box stores. It also has had to clean up a waterfront sullied by industry for decades. Despite all the difficulty, though, it's now at a moment when the complex revitalization puzzle is beginning to fall into place -- and that matters far beyond its city limits.

On Long Island, we desperately need models of vibrant downtowns to keep our young people here. Glen Cove, a city of 27,000, has a chance to demonstrate the right downtown mix of shopping, residential, restaurants and public spaces. It also can lead the way in making better use of the Island's vast underused resource: its great blue ribbon of waters.

Long Beach, the other city in Nassau County, already has that: thriving nightlife, enough rentals for young people to live in, and -- by the way -- the Atlantic Ocean. Glen Cove's water endowment is less bountiful. It has Glen Cove Creek, leading into Hempstead Harbor, out to Long Island Sound. But it has some attractive pieces that can fit in its updated master plan: a new plaza, a big mixed-use development at the creek, a passenger ferry terminal -- and the existing under-used parking garages, which can handle a lot more business. If it all meshes, Glen Cove could be something like what Mayor Ralph Suozzi envisions: a cross between Long Beach and downtown Huntington.

The most visible evidence now of a renaissance is a safety and esthetics improvement in the gateway into the city, Cedar Swamp Road. With help from Nassau County and federal stimulus funds, it's now a better road, with the most up-to-date traffic-calming and pedestrian-friendly intersections and medians.

The rest is still in architect renderings, but it's moving. This Tuesday, the planning board will meet with Michael Puntillo of Jobco Realty and Construction. He proposes to replace a down-at-the heels square across from City Hall, a space that residents already use for a variety of events, with one patterned after great public spaces in Italy. It would have 142 apartments above shops.

It's back to the future. What used to be there was apartments above stores. But they were tenements, and urban renewal knocked them down. Planning doctrine then called for separating retail from residential. But the retail-only square that came next -- built by Puntillo's father, also Michael, when Suozzi's father, Vincent, was mayor -- soon fell victim to the rise of the malls. Now, it's mostly offices. But today's planning doctrine wants people living above and patronizing stores.

On the waterfront, a development by RXR Glen Isle Partners will also be mixed-use: 860 residential units, a hotel, restaurants and shops, and open space. The proposal once included buildings as tall as 16 floors. The updated plan still has towers, two of 12 floors and one of 10, but its overall profile is lower, with four-story buildings between the towers. Times of friction have yielded to an amicable working partnership between Suozzi and the developers: RexCorp Realty, Renaissance Downtowns and Michael Posillico.

As the environmental study for Glen Isle nears completion, the city and its Industrial Development Agency are about a year away from concluding the long cleanup that the mayor's cousin, former Mayor Thomas Suozzi, launched in the 1990s, before he became Nassau County executive. At the same time, work is going forward on a ferry terminal on the creek -- to get workers to Manhattan and provide a link to entertainment venues such as Citi Field and Rye Playland. It's not certain that the ferry will be viable, but it will have a far better chance with 860 units nearby than without.

That's a lot of moving parts to pull together, and there are no guarantees. But the city stands at a turning point. If it succeeds in harmonizing all those parts, it can show us all how to make the Island's future work: by using the dynamism and economic vitality of downtowns to create the revenue to keep the single-family-home lifestyle viable.

That's why the whole region has a stake in the success of Glen Cove's great leap forward. hN