Rogers Marvel Architects

A rendering of the renovated Pier A, viewed from the Hudson River. The Battery Park City Authority has said the pier could reopen as early as next summer.

The rebirth of Pier A, one of the last vestiges of Lower Manhattan’s working waterfront, is finally at hand.

The Battery Park City Authority board of directors voted March 9 to lease the landmark, 124-year-old structure to Harry and Peter Poulakakos, owners of Harry’s Café and Steak, Bayard’s, Ulysses and other Downtown eateries. The family, which agreed to a $40 million, 25-year lease, plans to open a casual restaurant and an oyster bar, a coffee shop and a visitor center on the 39,000-square-feet ground floor with its developer partner, the Dermot Company. There will be outdoor seating on the plaza and the promenade surrounding the building, which is located between Battery Park and the southern tip of Battery Park City.

A more elegant restaurant and event venue will be on the building’s second floor, and part of the third floor. All of the spaces are being designed by Rogers Marvel Architects.

In a statement released with the board’s vote, Peter Poulakakos said that of all of his family’s many establishments in Lower Manhattan, the prospect of opening in the pier shed was especially exciting to his father because it meant the realization of a long-held wish.

“My father’s longtime dream since his arrival in Lower Manhattan over 50 years ago was to operate a facility in Pier A,” Poulakakos said.

In addition to the base rent, the Poulakakos family will pay the Authority 8 percent of its annual profit from the space above $18 million.

In 2008, the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which owns the pier, allocated $30 million in capital funding to the Authority to renovate and restore the core and shell of the dilapidated building, including replacing much of its crumbling underwater support structure. Last year, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the restoration of the building’s exterior to the way it looked in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Listed on the National Historic Registry, the run-down pier has gone unused for decades. Much of its distinctive Beaux Arts ornamentation was removed during a series of renovations in the 1960s and 70s that favored simple and inexpensive metal cladding. An effort in the 1990s to revive the pier stalled over a disagreement between the city and Wings Point, a small private developer. Wings Point spent $20 million in renovations before the city barred it from the pier for failing to pay rent.

The Battery Park City Authority came close to finalizing a lease for the space in 2006 and again in 2009, when the National Parks Service was considering the pier as a base for its ferry operations to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Eventually, though, the Parks Service backed out of negotiations for good.

“It was determined that it was not the best fit,” Authority spokeswoman Leticia Remauro said Tuesday morning at the agency’s Board of Directors meeting. After that deal fell through, Remauro said, the Authority spent the next several months “soliciting opinion from the community,” including members of Community Board 1.

“They made themselves very vocal about the fact that they wanted to see a use for that space that would include the [Lower Manhattan] community, that would provide service of some sort to them,” Remauro said at the meeting, assuring board chairman William Thompson that CB1’s Battery Park City Committee had been apprised monthly of the Authority’s  progress in identifying a tenant.

Some members of the Community Board, however, bristled at the news the lease agreement with the Poulakakos family, saying that board members had not been given the chance to weigh in on the selection before it was announced. Board chairwoman Julie Menin called her board’s apparent exclusion from the selection process “troubling.”

“My concern is that the space is not being utilized truly for the public use such as a major museum or community utilization,” Menin said. “An operator should not have been selected without a clear and transparent process involving input from the major stakeholders downtown.”

Tom Goodkind, a longtime member of the board’s Battery Park City Committee, said the committee was indeed asked several times by the Authority to suggest uses for the pier building, including “resident-friendly” shopping options like a grocery store. But, with Tuesday’s announcement, Goodkind said it seemed as though their suggestions had fallen on deaf ears.

“After years of being asked for input, I feel that our residential input for this process was ignored,” Goodkind said. “I find it now essential that CB1 revisit this process of [the Authority’s] choice at our next meeting.”

Built in 1886, Pier A began its life as a dock for harbor police and a headquarters for the city Department of Docks and Ferries. The tower at the western end of the building was added in the early 20th century, originally as a watch post for the harbor and, in 1919, outfitted with a clock and rededicated as a memorial to soldiers who died in World War I. The clock has not been maintained for years.

In the 1950s, the city turned the pier into the headquarters of the Department of Marine and Aviation, a predecessor to today's Port Authority. Its next, and last tenant, the Fire Department’s marine division, occupied the building between 1964 and the early 1970s.

When the restaurant complex opens for business—expected to be around the summer of 2012—it will mark the first time in the building’s long history that the pier will be open to the public.