Brooklyn Bridge Park has emerged as an internationally recognized attraction. Stretching along a waterfront that faces one of the world's great harbors and a storied skyline, it has utterly ...transformed a strip of moribund structures that formerly served bustling port activity. When the idea was put forward, it did not come from government officials or planners, but from a local community aghast that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey might sell the defunct piers and their upland, situated below the quiet precincts of Brooklyn Heights, for intensive housing development. Neighborhood leaders, looking for less intensive uses of the property, ultimately came to the idea of a park. The Port Authority resisted, seeing a park as a money-losing proposition, as did the once powerful longshoremen's union, which was desperate to hold onto jobs. The battle was waged inconclusively for well over a decade; the Port Authority was prevented from developing the site, but the park did not move forward, either. Then, locally elected officials joined with members of the local communities to form something called a Local Development Corporation (LDC) to explore how the Port Authority might be induced at last to shed its money-losing waterfront piers in favor of a park. The LDC turned to the communities themselves and carried out an open process of public planning, a democratic process that became a model for other public projects but that was unique in its day. That process produced a plan, and that plan ultimately produced a park. In this book, the authors have tried to tell the full story of how Brooklyn Bridge Park came to be, from the inside deliberations as well as the public actions. They have tried to be complete and factual. One of the people interviewed told them that all history is revisionist to some extent, and they do have a point of view on many of the issues discussed, but they have tried to keep each other honest and to reflect all the competing views.
Brooklyn Bridge Park was not created in a vacuum. New York City has more than five hundred miles of shoreline, and every mile presents its own challenge and its own opportunity. The same is true of ...urban waterfronts throughout the country and the world. The designers of the park in Brooklyn drew on their experience with other parks and on the experience of other people, while the solutions they devised in Brooklyn have had a profound effect on other parks and other cities.
As we have seen, the evolution of New York City’s waterfront has been halting, haphazard, and scarcely
ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE Joanne Witty; Henrik Krogius
Brooklyn Bridge Park,
09/2016
Book Chapter
This was not the first time that Brooklyn Heights was threatened by the Port Authority meddling in its front yard. In the spring of 1953, when the Promenade had been open to the public for less than ...three years, the Port Authority wanted to replace the nineteenth-century warehouses along Furman Street with new seventy-foot commercial structures, reaching twenty feet higher than the Promenade. These structures would have completely blocked the magnificent views of the harbor, the skyline, and the Brooklyn Bridge. A public uproar, rare for its day, ensued and succeeded in bringing about changes. A fifty-foot height zone opposite
LEARNING FROM THE SITE Joanne Witty; Henrik Krogius
Brooklyn Bridge Park,
09/2016
Book Chapter
Backhoes were busily scrambling rocks before daybreak as the year 2014 arrived. Almost before anyone knew it, their random-seeming work had produced the park’s true form, including such unexpected ...details as a small island, ringed by a wall of stone, behind the barely surviving railhead at Pier 4, hardly separating it from a small beach that had appeared in equally mysterious fashion. The reality was very much like the master plan of 2000 and at the same time very different. Some of the differences reflected the conditions on the ground—the need to shift heavy loads off the piers, the
By the fall of 2012 about 25 percent of Brooklyn Bridge Park was open to the public, with quite a bit more under construction. Sustainability, whether ecological, structural, or economic, had been ...ingrained in its design and character. Still, no one guessed that the decisions related to the park’s sustainability would be tested so soon and so thoroughly.
On October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy, the conjunction of a slowing hurricane with a powerful nor’easter, hit New York. The surf in New York Harbor reached a record level of thirty-two-foot waves, more than six feet higher than the previous record set
The creation of Brooklyn Bridge Park marked four departures from the norm of American park development: in the park’s physical character, its method of financing, its origin in popular protest, and ...its public planning.
A park of lawns, trees, rocks and flowers, yes, but Brooklyn Bridge Park also incorporated the remains of the waterfront’s commercial history. Pier platforms and parts of their sheds were preserved and turned to use for park activities. Old warehouses on the park’s edge were preserved and converted for modern use. An expanse of piling left sticking out of the water was preserved as a reminder
AT LONG LAST, SHOVELS Joanne Witty; Henrik Krogius
Brooklyn Bridge Park,
09/2016
Book Chapter
Upon the certification of the final environmental impact statement, construction was legally authorized to begin. But a number of practical steps had to be taken before work could happen. The first ...task was acquiring control of the site from the Port Authority. While the agency was only too willing, its tenants were not. By then, all tenants were on month-to-month leases in anticipation of the coming park, and they had plenty of notice that they would have to leave. Strober Brothers, the lumber company occupying Pier 3, promised repeatedly an imminent departure but refused to go, costing the park corporation
At two public planning sessions in February 2000 the Local Development Corporation presented several alternatives for several distinct locations in the park. Each scheme was essentially a kit of ...different parts, and participants were asked to pick and choose which parts of each scheme they preferred. Groups moved from one to another station where professional planners explained the different schemes, their components, and the thinking behind each one. The scene was replete with maps, drawings, and a model that allowed the pieces to be moved. Because there were so many variables, the object was not to pick a single scheme
