Gregory C. O’Connell, a former decorated New York City police detective who made millions of dollars as a progressive, community-minded developer by reviving a scruffy Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood and a forsaken upstate village, died on Aug. 2 at his home in Geneseo, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his son Gregory T. O’Connell said.
Even before he retired from the police force in 1981, Mr. O’Connell began a single-minded and almost single-handed, building-by-building redevelopment of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn that would make him the largest private property owner there. At one point, he held some $400 million worth of real estate.
That once-vibrant waterfront community, later defined by abandoned piers and vacant warehouses dating to the Civil War, was described in 2006 by Daniel L. Doctoroff, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development, as the city’s “single most complex land-use issue.”
That complexity derived from its overlapping potential for housing, retail and manufacturing after shippers abandoned the port because it lacked sufficient waterfront space to handle containerization.
Mr. O’Connell’s strategy was to forestall gentrification by luring light manufacturing and import-export businesses to Red Hook, rather than building new housing whose new residents, he presumed, would object to congestion from commercial deliveries.
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The post Gregory C. O’Connell, Developer Who Revived Red Hook, Dies at 83 appeared first on New York Times.
