Amy Plitt, Curbed New York on Feb 21, 2018

© Max Touhey

As far as New York City parks go, Brooklyn Bridge Park isn’t one where wide expanses of green space are given precedence over public structures—the park’s refurbished piers hold all manner of activities, from beach volleyball to a carousel.

Even still, the latest addition to the park may seem curious to some; a small metal box is tucked into the landscape, perched atop pile of riprap at Pier 5, near the park’s southern tip. This structure, designed by Architecture Research Office, is the park’s new boathouse, which is due to make its official debut this spring.

© Max Touhey

The boathouse is one of the final remaining pieces of the Brooklyn park, which its president, Eric Landau, estimates is about 80 percent completed at this point. (Another major component, the enormous lawn at Pier 3, will open in the summer.)

When the boathouse opens, it will serve several purposes: storage for the boating organizations that launch from the park, space for those organizations to hold classes or workshops, and to become “a main point of guest interaction,” according to Landau—BBP employees will be stationed there to provide information to parkgoers.

And it comes with another crucial, much-needed amenity: public restrooms. “You can never have enough in the park,” says Landau with a laugh.

When it came to designing the building, ARO knew that they didn’t want the architecture to become too cluttered—especially considering that the building overlooks a postcard-perfect view of lower Manhattan. “We knew we were designing a simple community room with the best view in the world,” explains Stephen Cassell, one of the firm’s principals.

The design also needed to conform to the park’s larger mission of sustainability, while respecting and interacting with the terrain created by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the firm responsible for the park’s landscape. Pier 5’s defining feature is a noise-dampening berm, built to keep out the roar of the nearby BQE, and the boathouse is sized to take full advantage of those muffling qualities.

And then there’s the most obvious challenge: the water itself. The boathouse sits squarely within a flood zone, which could have been a problem for public programs and other events at the boathouse.

© Max Touhey

ARO’s solution: “We realized we could rise the public programs up, and create the boat storage below,” Cassell explains. Now, an open, multifunctional room is perched atop a wide, open expanse below, which is enclosed with gates made from the same aluminum grating as the rest of the building. Those will be open in the summer and when boating groups are taking their vessels (mainly kayaks and other non-motorized craft) in and out of the building, but can be locked for safety at other times.

Head up a flight of stairs next to the building, and you’ll be at the entrance to the boathouse, which is also where those all-important bathrooms are located. The room above is, essentially, a large box that can be transformed as needed, with little ornamentation or clutter.

ARO used simple materials for this space: aluminum grating on the outside of the structure, concrete slabs for foundation, and plywood on the interior to give the whole thing a warmer feel. “There’s a long history of boathouses that have simple plywood sheeting,” notes Cassell. The sparseness of the room ensures the view is the main attraction, and also helped achieve the goal of sustainability. “It’s such a simple building that it didn’t take extreme measures to make it energy efficient,” says Cassell.

When the boathouse opens in just a few months, Landau, the park president, believe that it will fill a need for a “very public, forward-facing building” within the park. “Being on the water and having a connection to the water was a big piece of the park’s original design and intent,” explains Landau. Thanks to the new boathouse, that intent is closer to being fully realized.

By Lisa M. Collins, The New York Times

Adrian Benepe has spent much of his life promoting the outdoors in New York City, from serving as a park ranger in the 1970s to becoming the parks commissioner some 30 years later. Still, he is stunned at what he has seen around town lately.

“I grew up in the parks,” said Mr. Benepe, now the president of Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “There were never red-tailed hawks or Peregrine falcons or bald eagles. You didn’t even see raccoons; there were pigeons and rats and squirrels, that was it. Now there are bald eagles all over the city. This winter they were in places you haven’t seen them in generations, and they were hunting in Prospect Park.”

Raptors are the tip of the iceberg.

There have been bats and endangered butterflies, wild and rare native bees; a coyote in Central Park; beavers, salamanders and leopard frogs in Staten Island; a bobcat, mink and several foxes in the Bronx, along with endangered alewife herring and American eels traversing fish ladders in the Bronx River while hungry osprey and egrets lurk nearby; large wild oysters and tiny sea horses at piers along the Hudson River; baby damselflies, the world’s most endangered sea turtles and a baby seal in Queens; and exotic insects not seen in decades in Brooklyn.

 

[A red-tailed hawk and a very nervous squirrel in Central Park last winter. Dave Sanders, The New York Times]

 

It would be easy to surmise that nature blossomed and the creatures came out during New York City’s lockdown last year. But wildlife needs habitat, and the animals’ return, according to Kathryn Heintz, the executive director of the NYC Audubon Society, is because of the city’s 40-year effort to expand and clean up its parks, rivers, forests and wetlands. This has included planting more trees, wildflowers and grasses that are native to the area, banning pesticides in parks and spending billions on converting former landfills and industrial wastelands into nature sanctuaries.

New York is now “the greenest big city on earth,” Ms. Heintz said.

But while parks officials say they are excited by these ecological breakthroughs, many cite concerns about the city’s relatively low parks budget, which they say poses a threat to natural habitats because of deteriorated drainage systems and understaffed maintenance crews.

Funding is more critical than ever, said Ms. Heintz, Mr. Benepe and other officials.

Last month, the remnants of Hurricane Ida overwhelmed parts of the city, killing at least 13 New Yorkers. “Parks should operate as sponges, but instead they are seeing massive flooding,” said Adam Ganser, the executive director of the nonprofit New Yorkers for Parks.

Park funding has remained at 0.6 percent of the total budget for decades, while other cities spend 2 to 4 percent, Mr. Ganser said. Eric Adams, the Democratic mayoral candidate, has said he is committed to raising the budget to 1 percent, while Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa said in a debate earlier this month that he would raise it to 2 percent. Mr. Ganser said such a move would be transformative.

“New York City has done a really good job of reclaiming and building postindustrial habitats, and we have incredibly intact wetlands and grasslands,” said Rebecca McMackin, the director of horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park. “We need to protect them.” Under Ms. McMackin’s direction, the park, built on East River piers, is now home to a growing population of rare bees, moths, pollinating flies, butterflies and birds.

With enclaves such as these, the city now has 77,580 acres of green space, including wetlands, cemeteries, parks and forests, according to the Natural Areas Conservancy, a nonprofit formed under Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s administration in 2012. Some 30,000 acres are managed by the city, said Meghan Lalor, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. (Chicago has just 8,800 acres of green space; San Francisco, 5,810.)

For Sarah Charlop-Powers, the executive director of the conservancy, city wetlands and forests deserve prioritization, as their benefits extend beyond providing wildlife habitat. Wetlands play a crucial role in reducing flooding during major storms, she said, adding that the city has lost 85 percent of its salt marshes and streams, and 99 percent of its freshwater wetlands, since the 1600s.

“The longer we delay investment, the more likely we are to forever lose key areas and species,” she said. “I feel a real sense of urgency.”

 

[A bobcat and a mink were spotted recently along the Bronx River. Zack DeZon, The New York Times]

According to the city parks department, it has restored 148 of New York’s 5,650 acres of wetlands since 1993. But because of sea level rise and erosion, the city loses six acres a year, Ms. Charlop-Powers said. “We need to build marshes to keep up,” she said.

Stronger regulation to protect wetlands is needed, she said. Currently, a group of Staten Island residents is trying to stop an approved commercial development on a large wetland there that helped prevent flooding from Superstorm Sandy. The retail development was approved because the wetlands didn’t qualify for state protection.

Forests are another area of concern. Without more funding, they risk becoming “vinelands of tangled weeds,” Ms. Charlop-Powers said. “We are losing biodiversity, which means a decline in carbon stored, in localized cooling and storm water capture. Those things require active management.”

The city’s large forests are found in the Bronx, in Van Cortlandt Park and Pelham Bay Park — the latter is 2,700 acres including beaches, bike paths, grassland and wetland built partly on a capped landfill — and within the Greenbelt on Staten Island. There are many other stands of forests, though, like the old-growth canopy in Inwood Park in Manhattan, with tulip trees “as tall as skyscrapers,” said Jennifer Greenfeld, the assistant commissioner for forestry, horticulture and natural resources.

Another habitat, one threatened globally, also calls New York City home: grassland. A very large one sits on what used to be the largest landfill in the world, Fresh Kills, on Staten Island. The 2,200-acre preserve is still under construction but already features more than 200 species of birds and a thriving fox population. Once completed, it will be three times the size of Central Park.

“When you are there, it is amazing,” Ms. Heintz said. “You could be in Nebraska.”

Despite the concerns about funding and maintenance, the city’s web of new and restored parks and proliferation of green roofs work symbiotically to support wildlife, Ms. Charlop-Powers said.

Hudson River Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park are two such examples of parks that also serve as wildlife sanctuaries. Over the past month, their wildflower beds provided stopover spots for hundreds of endangered Monarch butterflies as they traveled from Canada to Mexico.

 

[This fall, monarch butterflies took refuge in the wildflowers of Brooklyn Bridge Park and Hudson River Park while traveling from Canada to Mexico. Park officials have been tagging them. Adrienne Grunwald, The New York Times]

This spring, a rare blueberry digger bee, seen only once in Brooklyn over the last few decades, was discovered on one of the native-to-New York blueberry bushes in Brooklyn Bridge Park; the bees have since multiplied. Ms. McMackin, the horticulture director there, is encouraging residents to plant the bushes on terraces and roofs and in yards in an effort to bring back the blueberry bee (and wild blueberries).

But even this progress, Ms. McMackin said, has been 40 years in the making. She credits the work of the city’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center, which opened in Staten Island in the 1980s to save and propagate hundreds of local seeds and plants, for providing the native flora essential to luring back wildlife. The center’s seeds are currently sprouting in Prospect Park and Central Park, and its native grasses have been used to restore dunes in the Rockaways, which are near nesting grounds for endangered shore birds.

“People see cities as degraded,” Ms. McMackin said. “But cities can provide refuge for animals that can’t survive in rural and suburban areas,” largely because of heavy pesticide use on suburban lawns and rural agricultural fields, she explained.

Mr. Benepe is excited by the animals’ return, but sees it as part of the planet’s evolution. “Wildlife has been forced, by loss of habitat, to adapt,” Mr. Benepe said.

He continued, “It’s as if wildlife has said, ‘You’ve taken away our habitat. OK, we’ll live in yours.’”

By Margaret Roach, The New York Times

photos credit Rebecca McMackin

By Marian Betancourt, New York Lifestyles Magazine

On a snowy December day, ground was broken for the Emily Roebling Plaza. This two-acre site at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge completes the 10-year project reclaiming a 1.3 mile stretch of once dilapidated industrial waterfront along the East River that has been transformed into a landscape of lawns, promenades, playgrounds, sports facilities, and the popular Jane’s Carousel.

“When we went to the community planning board to ask what they thought for the final section, we heard very loudly about the need to pay tribute to Emily,” said Eric Landau, president of Brooklyn Bridge Park Commission. The new plaza is the area Emily Roebling used as her “office” for 11 years, meeting daily with engineers, workers, and supervisors carrying out her husband Washington Roebling’s role as chief engineer. Caisson’s disease had left Washington partially paralyzed, nearly blind, and bedridden. His father, John Roebling, the bridge creator, had died earlier of tetanus because of his foot being crushed between the dock and a ferry boat.

AN EYE TOWARD THE FUTURE
Emily was well educated in science and academics and was quickly able to step into her husband’s role. Two years before completion, she led the trustees across a five-foot-wide plank walkway over the East River. When they reached the Manhattan side, the trustees, several clearly nervous on this “walk,” gave Emily and the bridge a Champagne toast. By the time the bridge was finished in 1883, Emily, now 40, had become the public face of the era’s most massive engineering and construction project to be forever known as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Just before the official celebration, Emily with her teenaged son John, again crossed the bridge, this time in a carriage carrying a live rooster in her lap as a symbol of progress and prosperity. The workers stopped to cheer and lift their hats as she passed by. Most of the people involved in creating the bridge realized that Emily was the one who got it built. Even the press knew but hesitated to state clearly just what her role had been, for it was so far outside of society’s ingrained notions of womanhood. The extent of Emily’s work was never officially recognized except for thanking her for being a loyal helpmate to her ailing husband.

A SUFFRAGETTE
After her accomplishment, Emily did not “settle down” into a conventional married woman’s role at home near the Roebling Iron Works in Trenton, New Jersey. Long active in suffrage, Emily chaired the state committee gathering data on women employed outside the home and worked with New Jersey’s officials planning their exhibition at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In 1899, a 56-year-old Emily graduated from law school at New York University and won the $50 first prize for her essay, A Wife’s Disabilities, which she read to a “stunned” audience. She proposed eliminating laws discriminating against wives and widows. “Married women are the equivalent of idiots and slaves,” she wrote, “and property should belong to both partners equally.” Washington attended the graduation but responded to a reporter inquiring about his wife’s prize-winning essay, “I never heard her essay until tonight, and I do not agree with one word she has said.”

Three years later, on February 28, 1903, Emily died of stomach cancer. Although Washington never fully recovered from caisson’s disease, he remarried and lived to be 89. Were it not for her son saving her letters, we would not know about Emily’s inner feelings as expressed in this 1898 letter to her son: “I am still feeling well enough to stoutly maintain against all critics (including my only son) that I have more brains, common sense, and know-how generally than any two engineers civil or uncivil that I have ever met, and but for me, the Brooklyn Bridge would never have had the name of Roebling in any way connected with it! It would have been Kingsley’s Bridge if it had ever been built! Your father was for years dead to all interest in that work

Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Emily’s great-great-grandson Kriss Roebling, who lives in the community, spoke at the groundbreaking. Set to open at the end of the year, the new plaza will be furnished with benches, trees, and lawns, offering a beautiful area to enjoy the waterfront and think about what Emily accomplished for us all.

by Brooklyn Public Library on Oct 17, 2019

In partnership with Brooklyn Bridge Park, the BPL Annex is part of the Park’s commitment to providing free public programming

BROOKLYN, NY— Vinegar Hill, DUMBO and Farragut Houses residents will soon have access to a range of library services while they await the opening of the first new BPL library in over thirty years, on Adams Street, Brooklyn Bridge Park and library leadership announced today.

The Annex, located at One John Street, will serve as a temporary outpost for Brooklyn Public Library as the Adams Street Library is built. Once fully operational the 1,600 square-foot Annex will include numerous programs, a laptop-loan program, a small collection of books and a place for patrons to pick up books on hold.

Some of these resources will be phased in gradually: beginning on November 5, 2019, the Annex will provide story time and crafts for young children; and homework help, gaming workshops and teen advisory council meetings for older children and teens. The availability of items for loan will be phased in over the following months. Beginning in the Spring of 2020, the Annex will offer resume and interview help workshops, author talks and adult learning classes.

“We are opening a library annex for our neighbors in DUMBO, Vinegar Hill and the Farragut Houses as construction gets under way on our permanent home in the neighborhood,” said Linda Johnson, President & CEO of Brooklyn Public Library. “Thanks to our partners at Brooklyn Bridge Park for welcoming us to John Street and helping us take a step towards opening the first new library in Brooklyn in over 40 years. We can’t wait to get started.”

“We’re really excited to have another amazing Brooklyn institution partner with us in the Park,” said Eric Landau, Brooklyn Bridge Park President. “Brooklyn Public Library will be providing a great range of educational and cultural programming for kids and adults. I want to thank Linda Johnson and her team and welcome them to Brooklyn Bridge Park.”

Brooklyn Bridge Park owns the space at One John Street, which was most recently occupied by the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Brooklyn Bridge Park will issue an RFP later this year for a long-term tenant to provide free educational and cultural programming in the space.

The Adams Street Library, which is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2020, will represent Brooklyn’s first new neighborhood branch since the early 80s. The branch will be the 60th branch in the Brooklyn Public Library system. BPL is undertaking a comprehensive public input process as it prepares to open the branch.

The Adams Street project was made possible in part through the proceeds of the redevelopment of the Brooklyn Heights library, which itself will bring online nearly 27,000 square feet of public library space as well as 114 affordable housing units in Community Board 2.

For the past several years, Brooklyn Public Library has invested in closing its $300 Million capital needs gap and updating aging infrastructure system-wide. The result of that work is that one third of the libraries in the BPL system have recently been or will be replaced or overhauled. Thirteen libraries are slated to receive full-scale renovations over the next several years, another three libraries, Brooklyn Heights Library, Greenpoint Library and Sunset Park Library, are going to be completely rebuilt, and an additional new satellite facility in the BAM cultural district will bring the system’s total number of locations to 61.

About Brooklyn Public Library

Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is an independent library system for the 2.6 million residents of Brooklyn. It is the fifth largest library system in the United States with 59 neighborhood libraries located throughout the borough. BPL offers free programs and services for all ages and stages of life, including a large selection of books in more than 30 languages, author talks, literacy programs and public computers. BPL’s eResources, such as eBooks and eVideos, catalog information and free homework help, are available to customers of all ages 24 hours a day at our website: www.bklynlibrary.org.

About Brooklyn Bridge Park

Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, known as Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP), is the not-for-profit entity responsible for the planning, construction, maintenance and operation of Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 85-acre sustainable waterfront park spanning 1.3 miles along Brooklyn’s East River shoreline. As steward of the park, BBP has transformed this previously deteriorated stretch of waterfront into a world-class park where the public can gather, play, relax and enjoy sweeping views of New York Harbor. The self-sustaining park was designed by the award-winning firm of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. and features expansive lawns, rolling hills, waterfront promenades, innovative playgrounds, a greenway, sports facilities and the popular Jane’s Carousel. BBP serves thousands of people on any given seasonal day, who come to picnic, walk their dog, play soccer, jog, bike or roller skate. Brooklyn Bridge Park is a signature public investment for the 21st Century and will be an enduring legacy for the communities, elected officials and public servants who made it happen.

by Jen Carlson, Gothamist on June 7, 2018

© BBP

Brooklyn Bridge Park will be creeping further up into Brooklyn Heights with its newest addition: a public pool in Squibb Park, which sits between Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Bridge Park (behind that large hotel/condo development). Squibb Park is not widely used—it’s a large concrete area furnished with just a few benches and a public bathroom; it’s mostly accessed to get to the pedestrian bridge.

© Jen Carlson / Gothamist

While Squibb Park isn’t technically part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, we’re told that “subject to necessary approvals, NYC Parks intends to enter into an agreement with BBP for the development, operation, and maintenance of a pool and optional related amenities at Squibb Park.”

This morning BBP will publicly announce plans to build a permanent swimming pool in Squibb Park, though not all details have been ironed out yet. Here’s what we do know:

• Like all NYC Parks pools, this pool will be free and open to the public.
• There will be community planning sessions for the purpose of gathering feedback from the public. This input will inform the design of the pool, including size and capacity.
• Will there be an other amenities? “We want the community to help us determine a number of things during the public planning sessions,” a rep for BBP told us, including what type of non-swimming activities should be included, and if there should there be a concession.
• The timeline on construction and opening is unclear, first there will be a fundraising campaign and those aforementioned community planning sessions.
• The current pop-up pool at Pier 2 will close down after this season. This is because Brooklyn Bridge Park will break ground on the Pier 2 Uplands project this fall.
• The new pool’s hours will likely operate under the pop-up pool hours: between 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

Construction of the pool is estimated to cost between $10-$15 million. One-third of that will be funded by BBP; Midtown Equities and Alloy Development with Monadnock Construction, and DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners have also dedicated funds toward the project; and the remainder will be raised publicly and privately in partnership with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy.

Eric Landau, Brooklyn Bridge Park President, said, “We are always striving to provide the best amenities and activities for park visitors. The temporary pop-up pool has been a much-loved summer attraction and now we are thrilled to announce plans to bring a permanent pool to Brooklyn Bridge Park.”

At the official announcement later this morning, Landau will be joined by Deputy Mayor and BBP Board Chair Alicia Glen, NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver, AND Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. We will update if any more information becomes available at the press conference.

Update: The pool will likely not open until 2020; community planning sessions will begin later this year.

This is not the first time Squibb Park has gotten a pool; in the 1940s (before it was named Squibb Park) there was a wading pool in the area.

© BBP

Tanay Warekar, Curbed New York, Oct 4, 2017

One of the final pieces of Brooklyn Bridge Park is coming together. In September next year, work will finally get underway on the Pier 2 Uplands, a 3.4 acre addition to the existing parkland. It’s location is already familiar to most—the uplands currently host the Park’s wildly-popular pop-up pool each summer.

Next summer will be the last season for the pool, which was originally scheduled to end in 2016, but was continued on popular demand. Construction on the Uplands will begin right after the pop-up pool season closes.

But water lovers don’t need to fret because the new Uplands will come with a “water garden,” which will serve to complement the Water Lab at Pier 6. The garden will feature pieces of the pier deck cut away from Pier 3, where work is currently underway to add more parkland to the overall Brooklyn Bridge Park. Water from the Pier 2 garden will also be used to irrigate the Uplands as well.

Aside from that, the Uplands will also feature a 6,300-square-foot lawn, which will fit up to 315 people. The seating in this area will be created from granite from the Brooklyn Bridge. Work on the Uplands is set to get underway in September 2018, and will conclude by June 2020.

The only other section of the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park that remains (aside from Piers 2 & 3), is the Brooklyn Bridge Plaza, which will be located directly under the bridge. Here now is a rendering for the Pier 2 Uplands.

Click here to read this story on Curbed’s website.

by Jake Offenhartz, Gothamist on Sep 13, 2017

© Etienne Frossard

Brooklyn Bridge Park maintains a unique position in the pantheon of city parks. Since the first pier opened in 2010, the 1.3 mile waterfront park has grown steadily, welcoming over 4 million people last year. Its current popularity was the result of decades of work from a group known as the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition, and their effort is widely seen as a model for city and community cooperation in revitalizing an otherwise decrepit post-industrial space.

But the park is also among the most controversial plots of land in New York — a flashpoint for debates on private development and public authority, with a carousel of impassioned opinions from affordable housing advocates, preservationists, and the neighborhood’s NIMBY contingent. Those frustrations have manifested in multiple legal battles, including an ongoing lawsuit brought against the park by the Brooklyn Heights Association, a group that doesn’t want two new towers on Pier 6, which would provide some affordable housing and allegedly block their views of the harbor.

Inheriting this situation is Eric Landau, new president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, the nonprofit responsible for the park. A former deputy commissioner in the city’s environmental protection agency, Landau was tapped to lead the expansion of the park by Mayor Bill de Blasio, and took over the position this past April. Last week, we met Landau at his offices atop the park to discuss his plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park, and what he learned during his first summer.

You’ve been in this position for four months now. Before that you were with the DEP and before that you served as Vice President of the Prospect Park Alliance. Can you talk a bit about your general philosophy to managing the city’s green spaces, and how that might apply to BBP specifically?

We’re now at a place where 80 percent of the park is built and open to the public. 10 percent of the park is in construction, namely in Pier 3, which is going to open next summer, and then 10 percent — the Pier 2 Uplands and the Brooklyn Bridge Plaza — are in design now. We’re at the point where the park is pretty much built and open to the public, and so I believe that my time here is really about helping the park figure out its identity in the community.

I’m a big believer that parks serve a variety of uses for a variety of audiences, and so I think that parks should be places for relaxation and respite, whether that’s just wanting to get away with a blanket and a book to meeting up with a group of friends to more formal programming. Parks should provide that total respite from the everyday life, and they should be great places for recreation, for amazing programming and hubs of community development.

What I think makes Brooklyn Bridge Park so unique is that it has all of those things in a really unbelievably beautiful and well-designed way on what were once working, commercial, waterfront piers. But the challenge is in terms of where, within those various uses, specific user groups feel the priority should be. They all have their own perspective, which may not necessarily mesh with somebody else’s perspective on it, so that’s the challenge. While the specific issues might be slightly different, the larger question about park management and how a community feels about a park is similar to any other park in the city.

The other big thing that makes BBP unique is how it’s financed. Unlike other parks, BBP is entirely funded through private real estate development within the project’s footprint.

That’s true. Certainly the development projects here in the park are very different than, say, that of Prospect Park. I’m not aware of another city park that has the same model as us.

© James Baigrie

So they have very different challenges than I have. Yes, I’ve got people complaining about the buildings, but at the same time I also have these buildings, which provide financial resource that allows us to be completely self-sustaining. I don’t get any money from the parks department or from the city to operate the park annually, which allows the city and the parks department to put those finite resources that they have into other parks all around the city, in neighborhoods that need it, and allows us to take care of this park and make this an unbelievable resource for the borough and beyond.

The past few years have brought a luxury hotel and luxury condominiums to the park, and now there’s this lawsuit from the Brooklyn Heights Association over the two new towers at Pier 6. But beyond the specific BHA complaints, there does seem to be this perception among some park-users that the space is becoming overdeveloped. Do you understand where that complaint comes from?

What I would say is that 90 percent of the space is parkland, 10 percent is development, and that 10 percent allows the other 90 percent to be there. That, for me, is the big selling point.

The other thing I would say is that if you look at it, we’ve got the John Street property, Empire Stores, the hotel and the PierHouse, One Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the Pier 6 development. And so of those five, four are historic — they predated the park being here. The hotel is a new structure, but that’s where the old cold storage warehouse was, and One Brooklyn Bridge Park used to be the watchtower building. So these buildings predated the park. The only new buildings that are part of what I would call the development projects are John Street and the coming Pier 6, pending victory in the lawsuit. Everything else was here previously, and so again, the 10 percent provides for the 90 percent, but at the same time, so much of that 10 percent is historic.

Some people might say that even if the structures are historic, they’re intended to attract a new type of visitor — wealthy New Yorkers or tourists, mostly.

I would argue that a huge part of parks, I believe, is to be hubs of community development. Brooklyn Bridge Park is not a one or two neighborhood park, nor should it be. I believe, like Prospect Park, it should be a borough-wide facility. Brooklyn Bridge Park also does serve as a tourist destination, but what’s so important to the vitality of New York City is that we have attractions that people come from all over to see.

Any bad feelings, and as you indicated, there are some people that have bad feelings about the park, it’s about figuring out what those are and what, if anything, can be done to turn the corner, or rectify it. It’s about figuring out how the park is being used, should be used, can be used. We look at spaces — on Pier 2 we had shuffleboard, but nobody played shuffleboard. I think shuffleboard is a great game, but nobody played it, and so we said look, that’s not working, and let’s put something in that space that people will try. So we’ve removed the shuffleboard and we’ve put in these great ping pong tables, and we’re gonna see how that works.

Now that the park has been built, it’s figuring out what the park’s place is in the context of the immediate community and the broader community that uses it, the borough itself, and beyond.

That’s probably a good segue into the Pier 2 basketball courts, which are hugely popular, and also reportedly the cause of “trauma” for some park neighbors. In the past, the pier has been shut down, sometimes because of “disorderly” high schoolers, other times for no other reason than a bunch of people are using it. Are you happy with the way these issues have been handled in the past?

© Scott Heins / Gothamist

Certainly there were some moments in time where there were security problems. I don’t think that there were as many as some have implied, but we certainly we had some issues. We had an issue actually the week before I started, during spring break, where there were some fights that broke out on Pier 2. It was during spring break. The reality of that was we had an 80 degree day during spring break, schools are closed, and unlike the summertime, the beaches and the pools aren’t open, and so we become a main focal point for people. The reality of Pier 2 is that, like all of our piers, for that matter, they have a capacity to them. Only so many people can be on them at one time, and I think we had a situation on Pier 2 where, as I understand it, the space reached capacity and the police department, in consultation with the park staff, made a determination to, for lack of a better term, freeze Pier Two. I understand there are people that were not happy about that.

Some neighbors have called for the courts to be removed, with language that seems like thinly-veiled racism — block associations calling demanding the courts be replaced with something that doesn’t attract a certain demographic, for example.

Can you believe that that’s the conversation? It’s surreal. There are those in the community that have suggested that the basketball courts be removed so that there could be tennis, or I was asked in a meeting for mini-golf instead of basketball courts. You know, it is really unfortunate that in today’s day and age there is that type of overt racism. Because I think that that’s what it has been, and I think that’s really unfortunate. That is not to say that tennis in this park couldn’t be a great thing. It could be a great thing, but our basketball courts are hugely popular, hugely successful, and provide a great resource to lots of different people from lots of different neighborhoods, and lots of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and that is what parks are there to provide.

Will you commit to not closing the basketball courts?

I’m not gonna close these basketball courts. I think the basketball courts are an amazing facility in the park, and I’m not gonna make any change. Again, I’ve been here four months. It’s not my style to make any change in such a short tenure. My approach with anything, whether it was the basketball courts or something else, my approach is to see how the specific activity works, how the community uses it, whether or not it provides the resource that we think is needed.

In my experience, in parks, and this was true at Prospect as well, is that something like the basketball courts, the fact that they are so popular only highlights the fact that they are so needed. These basketball courts are hugely popular because there is a need to have really well run, well maintained basketball courts.

Pier 2 is an unbelievably democratic space, if not the most democratic space in the park, and that’s what parks should provide. I would say that an equally democratic space is the picnic peninsula, where you have people from every neighborhood, every culture, every ethnicity, that are coming here to barbecue, first come, first serve. It’s what parks should be, all across the city, and I’m really, really proud of the fact that we provide that here. It’s unfortunate that not everyone sees it that way.

The spate of hurricanes across the country has caused a lot of New Yorkers to think back to Sandy. According to disaster planners, New York is near the top of the list of cities most susceptible to a catastrophic hurricane. How does that impact your job, when trying to think about the long term sustainability of the park?

The park was built with an eye toward resiliency and protecting against climate change, and we had a very early test of that with Hurricane Sandy. I mean there are photos where it looks like the carousel is floating away. And so I actually think that such a great story of Brooklyn Bridge Park is that Hurricane Sandy came in, came in hard, did devastation all over the city, and Brooklyn Bridge Park is still here. We survived it.

But look, Hurricane Sandy was a massive, massive storm, and hopefully one that New York doesn’t have to deal with for a very long time. But at the same time, the park’s design really took that type of storm in mind, because if you’re building directly on the waterfront you sort of have to. A lot of the plant life, for example, was specifically selected because it was known to withstand salt water in that type of event.

What does that look like in terms of planning? How far ahead are you thinking?

One of the things that we are hypersensitive to is the integrity of the piles under the piers themselves. The way that we’re doing it now is we sort of go pier by pier. We’re doing a type of maintenance that takes a lot longer and is a lot more expensive. [Now we have] a new approach that we refer to as preventative maintenance, which allows us to sort of do all of it together, and over the next 30 to 50 years, if we do the preventative maintenance, will save us about $85 million in costs. So you’re talking about a real, real expense. Again, it’s a nine-figure price tag — it’s over $100 million — but it’s a nine-figure price tag that will save us significant resources down the road.

And the water in New York City is cleaner than it’s ever been, so it makes it that much easier for marine life to actually get to the wood piles and bore holes in them. So we spend a tremendous amount of resources preserving and protecting those piles. One of the reasons the Pier 6 development is so, so important — the significant revenue that comes directly to the park will allow us to do the needed maintenance on those piles to protect the harbor. These projects pay direct revenue to the park, and that is how we fund, not only the annual park maintenance, but also our building budget that will allows us to protect and preserve the piers, and thus preserve the park for generations and generations to come.

And finally, you took this job just in time for the reopening of Squibb Bridge, the most important and controversial pedestrian bridge of our time. How’s things with Squibb?

Squibb is great. It’s back, and wildly popular. There are people on it all day long ever since we reopened it in April. We’re really happy that it’s back. It creates another great entry and exit to and from the park. It’s not as bouncy as it previously was, but it’s totally structurally sound.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Read this article on Gothamist’s website.

Media Coverage Susan De Vries, Brownstoner on Sep 6, 2017

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Peaceful lounging space in Brooklyn Bridge Park just increased with the unveiling on Thursday of the Pier 5 Uplands, bringing 3.4 more acres of public space to the park.

The green space, located just east of the Picnic Peninsula, is designed to be a restful oasis — with lawns for lounging, views to ogle, meandering walkways to stroll and scattered seating areas on which to perch. With its opening, the park inches ever closer to completion.

“With the opening of the Pier 5 Uplands today we can now celebrate that 80 percent of the park is complete and open to the public,” said Brooklyn Bridge Park President Eric Landau at the opening ceremony.

Despite the smattering of rain, there were still some park-goers already wandering the paths curving along the grass-covered berm that is a major feature of the new space. Stretching from one end of the Uplands to the other, the 35 foot-long sound dampening berm is designed to counter noise from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

The project, like the rest of Brooklyn Bridge Park, was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. The wooden benches and salvaged granite seen elsewhere in the park are continued in the Uplands.

Noting the impact of the park on the borough, Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams commented during the ceremony that “more than a tree grows in Brooklyn, a great park has grown in Brooklyn and we are part of it.”

While the pathways and lawns are open, the full Uplands area is not yet complete. It was announced that the new boathouse — which will provide programming space and public restrooms — will open in the fall.

Work on the building has progressed since May, with cladding now up on a large percentage of the structure.

The new maintenance and operations facility, located at the southern end of the Uplands, is also slated to be completed later this year.

The Pier 5 Uplands is not the only new green space that has been under construction in Brooklyn Bridge Park — work started on Pier 3 in October. Slated to open in summer 2018, the completed Pier 3 will bring an additional 4.6 acres to the park.

Read this article on Brownstoner’s website.