When a seven-alarm fire ripped through a records-storage warehouse on the Williamsburg waterfront in late January, most New Yorkers saw a conflagration that spewed charred medical reports, court transcripts and other decades-old scraps of paper onto city streets and sidewalks.

Developers, however, saw an opportunity to build something transformative at the 11-acre property on the East River at North 11th Street, while locals saw a park promised to them a decade ago. Those competing visions have already produced conflict over the last major parcel in one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods.

"It's one of the best development sites in the entire city and definitely the best in Brooklyn," said a major landlord who looked at the parcel. "But there are too many unknowns right now for anyone to actually buy it."

The fight over the property containing the warehouses, known as CitiStorage, has its origins in the city's rezoning of the neighborhood in 2005, which laid the seeds for Williamsburg to be recast as a luxury waterfront neighborhood. CitiStorage was envisioned as part of a Bloomberg administration plan to create a 28-acre green space. It's now the last plot needed to complete Bushwick Inlet Park.

But in the ensuing 10 years, much has changed. Most important, the price of land in Williamsburg has skyrocketed. The Bloomberg administration shelled out about $200 million to acquire the first 17 acres and about $26 million more building the first section of the park on a site just south of CitiStorage. That's more than double what the administration originally planned to spend on the entire park.

The owner of the site, Norman Brodsky, believes his land could fetch $500 million on the open market were it already zoned for residential. At the very least, it could sell in the tens of millions as currently zoned for about 600,000 square feet of commercial space. But the renewed interest in the park has complicated matters and put off potential buyers.