At the time of her hiring, Leventer did her best to temper public expectations regarding the timing of the park’s completion. “Because we’re government, we don’t do anything in under a year,” said Leventer, cautioning that construction could take an additional three to four years after the completion of the stalled environmental-impact study. “We’re thinking that if we’re lucky, there’s not going to be a shovel in the ground until ’08, just because that’s the way the timing goes.”5
FOLLOWING THE PRESENTATION and public discussions of the completed Master Plan in the fall of 2005, the document was modified and expanded into the General Project Plan for the park, which was adopted by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) on December 18, 2006. The General Project Plan included a detailed description of the overall physical design and individual features of Brooklyn Bridge Park, along with specific recommendations for the location, size, and capacity of the revenue-generating commercial developments that the park would need to include to fulfill the mandate for self-sustainability included in the MOU of May 2, 2002.
The General Project Plan featured a vast, sprawling landscape of passive open space and active recreational facilities, including a broad waterfront greenway, floating walkways connecting the piers, and rolling hills and expansive pockets of natural habitat on the upland areas above the piers. Winding pedestrian pathways and bicycle lanes provided visitors with uninterrupted links to the rich variety of recreational features scattered throughout the park, including playgrounds; multipurpose playing fields; open lawns; soccer fields; a pier devoted to court sports, including basketball, volleyball, and handball; twelve acres of calm paddling water; and a beach for launching human-powered boats. Visitors would be able to enter the park through large gateways at Atlantic Avenue, Old Fulton Street, and John Street in Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass); a pedestrian bridge linking Squibb Park to Pier 1; and additional entrances crossing Furman Street at Joralemon, Dock, Main, Washington, Adams, Pearl, and Jay Streets.
The preliminary financial analysis from the Master Plan estimated that the construction costs for the entire park would be approximately $130 million. As the MOU had already prescribed, the cost of the park’s construction would be funded by state and city governments, the Port Authority, and additional private investments.
To honor the mandate for self-sustainability included in the “13 Guiding Principles” and the MOU, the Master Plan stipulated that the cost of the ongoing maintenance and operation of the park would be covered by revenues generated by private development within the project area. Private developments proposed by the General Project Plan included a hotel, a restaurant, a marina, office and retail space, and—the feature of the plan that would generate the most controversy among residents of the neighborhoods adjacent to the site—housing, including 500 residential units in a converted manufacturing facility at 360 Furman Street, 150 to 180 residential units in a mixed-use hotel/residential development to be built on the upland area above Pier 1, up to 430 residential units in two newly constructed buildings on Pier 6, and 130 residential units in a building on John Street in the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.
Anticipating the groundswell of public resistance that would inevitably result from Van Valkenburgh’s proposal for housing on the park property, the Conservancy decided to go on the offensive, immediately announcing that the organization strongly endorsed “the basic elements of the Plan.” “The Plan advances the vision of a great park on the Brooklyn waterfront,” wrote Koval in the Conservancy’s newsletter, “while it accommodates the financial realities of the existing construction budget and incorporates the precondition of self-sustainability in the long-term operations of the park. Importantly, the Plan allows less land than ever contemplated to be committed to commercial development to support the park—only eight acres in exchange for seventy-two acres of dedicated parkland directly on New York Harbor.”6
According to Daniel Doctoroff, former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, the proposal to use housing as a revenue source for the park had been an open part of the park design for a number of years. “One of the things that we did from the start,” remembers Doctoroff, “was to establish that the park was going to pay for itself. I had always pushed for the park to be self-sustaining, using Pier 1 in particular and the proceeds from that to pay for the operating expenses and capital that it would defray. Payments in lieu of taxes would support the park going forward, as well as some of the development rights. I always thought that the alternative between a partial park and no park would be appealing for everyone.”7
“They [the public authorities] could not have been more explicit,” agrees John Alschuler of Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Alschuler, the Manhattan consulting firm in charge of the initial planning for the park. “They said, ‘We’re going to give you the funds you need to build it and then don’t come back. You’re on your own.’ ”8
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the provision in the Master Plan, however. The decision to support the inclusion of housing on the park property, which many local residents viewed as a “Faustian bargain” with the public authorities, was a radical departure from the position of many of the early leaders of the west Brooklyn waterfront movement, who had proposed the creation of a public park as an alternative to the prospect of housing and other commercial developments on the piers. Based on the analysis provided in the Master Plan (which determined that the presence of housing would not result in the privatization of the park) and ongoing negotiations with elected officials, even the more anti-housing members of the Conservancy board had gradually come to believe that the realization of the park was simply not possible without the inclusion of at least some residential housing on the property.
“The mantra that Al Butzel taught me early on, that ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good,’ is right,” explains Koval. “The hard thing is to figure out what the good is.” By the time the Master Plan and General Project Plan were released, Koval and the Conservancy board had begun to regard housing less as a necessary evil than as a potential asset to the overall park experience.
“In 2005, when the Master Plan came out,” remembers Conservancy board member Gary VanderPutten, “the response from the community was ballistic, particularly among the Cobble Hill group and from some of the people in Brooklyn Heights. People were enraged. The LDC, of course, had no real choice but to support it. At the Conservancy, we carefully examined it and determined that this really might be the only viable way to do this. The whole idea behind this was that if you’re going to have a park, then it has to be self-sustaining, and if it’s going to be self-sustaining, then you have to some level of commercial development to handle the maintenance cost.
“Look at what’s happened to Hudson River Park,” VanderPutten continues. “It’s really in trouble. It needs $37 million just to repair what’s under Chelsea Piers. They don’t have any to money fix it, and that’s because their Guiding Principles say that absolutely no public housing can be built on this park. That’s a killer. In contrast, our Guiding Principles say that housing is allowable but not preferred. It’s not preferred, but it is allowable. And that sentence is the only reason we’re here.”9
THE EARLIER CONTROVERSIES between the leadership of the park movement and a small but highly vocal minority of local residents over the placement of pedestrian corridors for the park were minor skirmishes compared with the firestorm of public debate that erupted once the recommendations from the Master Plan and the General Project Plan were made available to the public.
Local housing opponents Judi Francis, Roy Sloane, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, formed in response to the park plan, were at the head of the opposition, joining the Sierra Club to file a lawsuit against the ESDC, claiming that the development plan for the park violated the state’s “public trust doctrine” by handing over parkland to developers and seeking to block the use of housing as a revenue-generating source for the park. “There’s misc
hief afoot here with developers taking over the shoreline,” insisted Francis, openly questioning the motivations of the authorities in charge of the park’s development.10
“The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy thinks it’s a sad day for the people of Brooklyn who’ve worked twenty years to create a park on the waterfront,” said Koval in response to the announced litigation. “Friends of parks don’t sue to stop them,” insisted Conservancy and LDC board member Hank Gutman. “Litigation cannot possibly cause a park to be built, and litigation cannot improve a park plan. All litigation can accomplish is to delay, or even prevent, the park becoming a reality.”11
The lawsuit to stop housing on the park was dismissed in November 2006 by Judge Lawrence Knipel of the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. He ruled that the “public trust doctrine” did not hold in the current case because the parcels to be sold or leased to developers “are not parkland, have never been parkland, and were never designated to become parkland.”12
“They were taking land that was never a park to begin with,” explains former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, defending the reasoning behind the revenue plan, “and that was in commercial use, income-producing commercial property owned by the state of New York, and they were rededicating it and saying some small portions would be set aside for the development of revenues to support a public park.”13
Judge Knipel’s ruling did little to discourage the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund’s Judi Francis, who announced that she would appeal the decision. “If it acts like a park, and has been talked about as a park,” reasoned Francis, “then it is a park in every sense of the word.”14
The local opposition to the use of housing as an income source for the park also included former Coalition executive director Anthony Manheim, who went public with his long-standing concern over the potential of residential housing to privatize the park. “When you have private, residential uses,” cautioned Manheim, “they’re in direct conflict with the public use.”15
In addition to opposing housing as a revenue-generating source for the park, Francis called for the following for the park’s management and design: enact legislation designating all land within the site as “parkland under the ownership of the city or state parks agencies”; put park management in the hands of “park professionals,” rather than business leaders from the ESDC; conduct “an independent fiscal analysis of the alleged costs and revenues” of the park; replace the existing environmental-impact study with an independent study of the impact of the park on the local environment and the communities around the park; and include swimming pools and other indoor recreational facilities currently lacking in Brooklyn.
Koval worked diligently to diffuse the anger and suspicions of local residents by directly addressing the major concerns of those who opposed the Master Plan through local print media and the Conservancy newsletter, in which she explained the rationale for the selection of sites where housing would be located (view protection, urban access), posted a time line illustrating the reduction in the percentage of property dedicated to housing, and provided information regarding the potential benefits of housing (care, advocacy, security, increased activity) on or adjacent to the park property. The Conservancy also believed that creating and encouraging early patterns of use in the growing park—before any housing was built—would be essential to creating public ownership and countering concerns of privatization.16
“This is where we knew we were going to have a lot of pushback,” recalls Koval, “and I wrote these FAQs. Why is housing included? Will housing privatize the park? What other revenue-generating developments were suggested? I felt that it was something that had to be dealt with directly.”17
As the controversy raged in community meetings and through the local and city media, the Development Corporation, in spite of its public endorsement of the Master Plan and General Project Plan, remained silent regarding the issue of housing. “It was just very bad politics,” insists Koval. “All of this resistance, this opposition, would never have happened if the Development Corporation had had a more open and less secretive approach and had walked people through the process that they walked through to come to those conclusions.
“I’d say, ‘We should pick off the people who are persuaded by the opposition but who might be willing to listen to us and focus on them, so we can isolate the ones who aren’t willing to listen or compromise, no matter what we say.’ It’s all basic stuff. If you sit down and treat people seriously and listen to what they have to say, you’ll have a much better chance of being effective. But they seemed to have the idea that, ‘We’re the government. Get out of our way.’ ”18
An outgrowth of this initiative to find common ground among local residents was the Park Community Council, which included representatives of various neighborhood groups as well as local boating and biking groups. “We started the Park Community Council in 2006,” recalls longtime park advocate and Conservancy board member Nancy Bowe, “after the General Project Plan had been announced. It was composed of the neighborhood groups that generally supported the park plan—not that we supported everything, but we were trying to form a counterbalance to what we called the ‘anti-park movement.’ There was such an anti-housing movement at the time that the neighborhood groups that supported the park felt that it was important to band together, even though we weren’t all uniformly happy with everything, in support of the basic tenets of the plan, including housing.”19
While the reluctance of Development Corporation president Wendy Leventer to respond to the public’s concerns about housing generated mistrust and suspicion among some local residents, her single-minded focus on pushing the project through, regardless of public dissent, may ultimately have played a vital role in the park’s realization.
“Wendy Leventer never wavered from doing what she believed was right for the park,” insists Josh Sirefman, chief of staff to the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development in the Bloomberg administration. “Frankly at that moment of time, I think it would have been really, really difficult to move [the project] along if there was somebody in that role who was easily pulled this way or that by the different constituencies. I’m not saying it wasn’t painful, and I’m not saying there weren’t other issues to consider. I get that. But I also think in the grand scheme of things, if we didn’t at that moment have somebody who just put their head down and just pushed forward, I’m not sure we would have ended up where we did.”20
At the time, however, the editorial writers of the New York Times echoed Koval’s assessment of the continuing controversy between local residents and the Development Corporation. “The Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation needs to make a more intense effort to show these plans around and explain them, listen to questions and respond to both praise and complaints,” they wrote, shortly after the release of the Master Plan. “This park has been too many decades on the drawing boards. The last thing it needs is another full stall, which it risks if its planners fail to solicit and hear the voice of Brooklyn’s army of activists.”21
WHILE THE PUBLIC DEBATE OVER HOUSING in the park continued, the Conservancy intensified its emphasis on interim uses and programmed activities for the park, all with the goal of increasing the use of and the stakeholders’ support for the park. Working through a license with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the Conservancy’s program schedule for the summer of 2006 included, in addition to the popular film series and annual fund-raising event, a bike tour, culinary events, drama and dance productions, outdoor presentations of ballet and modern dance in the Tobacco Warehouse, a puppet theater, a sculpture exhibit, and a harbor camp program for children.
In the summer of 2007, the Conservancy teamed up with New York City waterfront historian Ann Buttenwieser and the Neptune Foundation to organize the most popular—and most challenging—event of the park’s preconstruction era: a massive floating pool anchored in the East River. Designed by Buttenwieser, the “Floating Pool Lad
y” was an 80- by 260-foot cargo barge converted into a seven-lane, 25-meter swimming pool (figure 25). The “pool,” which had been temporarily anchored on Pier 2, was moved to the area between Piers 4 and 5, where it attracted more than 71,000 visitors from July 4 to September 3, 2007. The lively crowds that came to swim and lounge represented the first time in more than 200 years that the public had access to the waterfront in that section of the property.22
More than 10,000 visitors were transported to the pool by a free shuttle bus that ran every ten minutes between the pool area and the Borough Hall and High Street subway stations. The LDC, under the leadership of Henry Gutman, provided the bus. The funding for the shuttle service was part of $1 million grant secured from the Department of Transportation by Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez the previous year to identify ways of accessing the park that would reduce reliance on vehicular traffic.23
“The floating pool was so incredibly important for letting people see how we could get tens of thousands of people to this site,” recalls Koval. “And it also was amazing to see kids, Latinos, African Americans, walking down in their bathing suits, and church ladies coming for the water-exercise classes.”24
“The floating pool,” says Conservancy board member David Kramer, “was the first moment in ‘If you build it, they will come.’ If we weren’t going to have a park yet, we were at least going to have something. We could at least have this pool. We had tremendous crowds, and it didn’t affect the quality of life of people in the neighborhood at all. And it was a hugely diverse constituency. And there were so many people of color who came, all these people from Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York to be at this park. And it wasn’t just for Brooklyn Heights, or just for rich people, or even just for Brooklyn. It was truly going to a regional park that drew people from all over.”25
A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park Page 20