Amid the hubbub of dozens of newly announced projects for Lower Manhattan, one vacant property known as site 5C has a particularly long history of on-again, off-again development proposals that predates the World Trade Center attacks.

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg held a ceremonial groundbreaking at that property, 200 Chambers St., where a 30-story tower is planned.

Site 5C,along with an adjacent parcel known as 5B, boasts unobstructed views of the Hudson River and for years had been considered a valuable downtown land asset of city government.

After years of false starts with different developers, the city put out a request for bids in 1999, and early this year, it sold the land, which is slightly more than three-fourths of an acre, to the developer Resnick and Sons for $40.5 million. The blueprint includes condominiums and retail space, along with a community center the firm agreed to build and a 10,000-square-foot annex for the nearby elementary school, P.S. 234, which is bursting with students.

While members of Community Board 1 expressed satisfaction with the final deal, the original development proposal at 5C was met with fierce opposition. At several raucous public hearings, residents criticized the height of the building, the shadows it would cast on nearby Washington Market Park, and the lack of existing infrastructure for the expected influx of new residents.

Most of the concerns have been tempered by concessions the developers made. In addition to reducing the height slightly, Resnick agreed to expand the size of the planned community center by more than 50%, to 27,600 square feet, and to build the annex, which will be leased to the city.

And to make the project more palatable to the community, the city agreed to build another public school on Beekman Street with federal money it received after the 2001 terrorist attacks. That was viewed as a significant victory for the neighborhood.

A former chairwoman of Board 1 and a current member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Madelyn Wils, said the proposals for 5B and 5C have come in “all shapes and sizes” since she came aboard in the 1980s.

“These sites have always been an issue for me,” she said yesterday. “They were the pinnacle of how the neighborhood would ultimately transform.”

“It’s always easy to Monday-morning quarterback,” she said of the Chambers Street project, “but I think we really got the best deal we could have.”

Mr. Bloomberg, Council Member Alan Gerson, and others have touted it as a solid achievement. And though it was announced in the same week as a number of other Lower Manhattan projects, which the mayor’s political opponents derided as an election-year ploy, the project has been the topic of conversation in community circles for years.

Over the past few decades, the TriBeCa community has seen proposals for the properties come and go. At points in the 1980s and 1990s, the now-defunct Drexel Burnham Lambert financial firm and the Mercantile Exchange proposed building on 5B, located on the western side of Greenwich Street between Warren and Murray streets.

Those plans hit brick walls – as the Resnick project nearly did. It was originally going to be 135 feet tall, but in 2002, the Washington Street Urban Renewal Plan, which was put in place in 1962 to rebuild that area of the city, expired, clearing the way for a taller structure. Much to the community’s dismay, the developer more than doubled the height of the planned tower.

Meanwhile, a famed British architect who had agreed to design the building, Norman Foster, backed out along the way. And the September 11, 2001, attacks suppressed demand in the area.

A spokeswoman for the city’s Economic Development Corp., Janel Patterson, said yesterday that about 12 developers submitted bids for 5C six years ago. The names of the other developers and the amounts they bid were not immediately available, she said. The selection process was not an auction, she said, and a variety of factors, including the amounts bid, were considered. When the height restriction expired, the city did not issue a new solicitation for bids.

A senior managing director at Colliers ABR, Craig Evans, said the price the city got for the 34,000-square-foot parcel seemed reasonable.

It was unclear yesterday whether the site would be eligible for 401A tax abatements. A Bloomberg administration spokesman, Jordan Barowitz, said that the $40.5 million the city is collecting will go into the federal Community Development Block Grant for future projects and the property taxes collected would go into the city’s general fund.

The plans for the 5B site, which still need final approval, call for a 35-story building with 420 residential units, two levels of below-ground parking, retail space, and a Whole Foods supermarket. The community had long been fighting for more markets to meet the demands of the growing number of residents. Yesterday, Ms. Wils, who said she shops at a Whole Foods uptown whenever she’s nearby, said of the community’s acceptance of the project: “We didn’t do it for the produce, but that is sort of the extra bonus.”