The reopening of the park was expedited by the park’s maintenance team, as well as the rapid response of the Conservancy, which quickly mobilized and delivered 100 volunteer workers to clean and remove debris from the perimeter of the park and along the sidewalks.
The good news for the BBP Corporation, the Conservancy, and other supporters and users of Brooklyn Bridge Park was how minimal the damage to the park had been. When the floodwaters finally subsided, the shoreline and most of the structures on the piers and the upland area were still intact, and the wide variety of plant life along the waterfront, in the words of park designer Michael Van Valkenburgh, “never missed a beat.”
FIGURE 37
Jane’s Carousel, 2014.
© JULIENNE SCHAER
FIGURE 38
Greenway on Pier 1, 2014.
© JULIENNE SCHAER
“All the while that we were starting to work on Brooklyn Bridge Park,” explains Van Valkenburgh, “we were a year or two further along in a major park on the West Side of Manhattan, Segment 5 of Hudson River Park. We were keenly aware through that project the assured likelihood that there would be a saline inundation and there would be consequences around it. So a year or two earlier, we had kind of moved through all these issues in the Hudson River project.”42
According to Van Valkenburgh, the resilience of the shoreline in the midst of the powerful winds and violent floodwaters was attributable to the original park design, the planning of which had anticipated the inevitability of strong winds and saltwater flooding. “We replaced the existing vertical concrete walls and relieving platforms with riprap,” explains Van Valkenburgh, “which is basically just very large loose rocks, like you might see all along the New England coastline.... The new edges are more porous, they let the seawater pass right through, and they move slightly to absorb impacts, rather than cracking and falling apart, even with unusually high volumes of water” (figure 38).
The resilience of the plant life after prolonged exposure to saltwater, Van Valkenburgh explains, “can be attributed to prior research both in plant studies we conducted and in visits to sites we knew had experienced flooding. In elevated areas we used species that are proven tolerant of salt on their stems and leaves, but, interestingly, saline tolerance on those parts of plants is different than the impacts of saltwater soaking the root zone.”43
DURING THIS INTENSIVE PERIOD of construction and openings throughout Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Conservancy and the BBP Corporation maintained a shared commitment to active programming in the park, sponsoring regular activities and events designed to draw people to the site. With major sections of the park now open to the public, the “interim activities” of the past, which were designed to give visitors a preview of the park before its construction, have been replaced by official activities and events, with the benefit of facilities, displays, continuous walkways, and landscaped open spaces that dramatically enrich the beauty and the accessibility of the park.
In the summer of 2015 alone, the Conservancy, working in partnership with the BBP Corporation and other organizations, facilitated hundreds of individual activities and events, many of them on a weekly basis, in the areas of arts and entertainment, recreation, fitness, and education and environmental awareness, along with regular opportunities for volunteer service. Highlights in the area of entertainment and arts programming included the ongoing outdoor film series (figure 39), the Metropolitan Opera and Jazzmobile concerts, music and dance parties, literary events and book readings, family festivals, theater, and art installations.
FIGURE 39
Thursday-night movies on Pier 1, 2012.
© ETIENNE FROSSARD, NEW YORK, N.Y.
FIGURE 40
Public kayaking at Pier 2, 2014.
© ETIENNE FROSSARD, NEW YORK, N.Y.
FIGURE 41
Pilates at Empire–Fulton Ferry Park, 2012.
© ETIENNE FROSSARD, NEW YORK, N.Y.
FIGURE 42
A popular Conservancy education program: seining in the East River, under the Manhattan Bridge, 2014.
© JULIENNE SCHAER
Recreational and fitness activities included family field days, volleyball leagues and workshops, free public kayaking (figure 40), soccer leagues, a Pop-Up Pool on the uplands of Pier 2, and regular classes in yoga (figure 41), hip-hop aerobics, and senior fitness, along with regular access to the park’s soccer fields, basketball and handball courts, roller rink, children’s playgrounds, and bike paths.
Educational and environmental activities included walking tours and lectures on various aspects of the waterfront’s history (profiles of the original Native American population and early settlers, historical battles, the Underground Railroad, and the Golden Age of Brooklyn), on-site examinations of the flora and fauna on the site (native plants, wildflowers, and pollinators), seining workshops focusing on the marine life of the East River (figure 42), and on-site presentations of the design and construction of the park. The Conservancy’s extensive school-based education program, awarded start-up funding by Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez in 2008, utilizes the park as a living classroom. More than 12,000 students in 2015, two-thirds of them from Title I schools, attended classes for hands-on learning about the park’s design and environment.
IN THE SIX YEARS since the opening of Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park has continued to expand, with the gradual addition of the remaining waterfront and upland regions stretching for 1.3 miles and including 65 acres along the shore of the East River. In 2015, the park featured expansive lawns, waterfront promenades, a greenway, innovative playgrounds, playing fields, basketball and handball courts, natural habitats, and direct access to the water. In 2015, approximately 150,000 people visited the park each weekend, including visitors from the adjacent neighborhoods, the rest of the borough and the city, and the United States and the world. From 2011 to the present, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the design team of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates have received numerous awards and formal recognitions, including the Municipal Art Society’s MASterworks Award for Best Urban Landscape, the American Planning Association’s National Planning Excellence Award for Urban Design, the American Institute of Architects’ New York State Community Development Award, and the Silver Medal of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence.
The park’s design and use as a source of waterfront recreation are informed by both its past and its future. Plying a route similar to that of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Catherine Ferry, the East River Ferry began service to lower Manhattan from the foot of Old Fulton Street in June 2011. The Empire Stores, long abandoned, are seeing new life as a retail and commercial center. Vestiges of the pier sheds from the 1950s were left intact to define play areas and provide shelter for park visitors. Re-created areas of marshland and coastal forest that informed the landscape of the original Lenape settlers provide a natural habitat for the bird and marine life that flourished in the preindustrial waterfront. And the park’s natural edges allow access to the East River, creating the city’s sixth borough—New York Harbor—and providing a new recreation source for a citizenry beginning to discover and embrace the fact that they live on islands.
Although the park wins accolades from urban-planning and architectural organizations, while also attracting enthusiastic visitors from across the city and country, the main revenue stream for its maintenance and operations—housing—continues to be a source of controversy.
In May 2014, the BBP Corporation released an RFP for the park’s final two residential-development sites at Pier 6. Contrary to anti-housing activists’ hopes that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s successor would be more sympathetic to their point of view and scale back the developments at the southern end of the park, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a longtime park supporter dating from his tenure in the New York City Council, instead announced that not only would the properties go forward, but they would be reworked to include up to one-third of their square footage as affordable housing. “We want neighbo
rhoods that reflect the diversity of this borough and meet the needs of its working people. This is a unique opportunity to see this world-class park built and sustained for decades to come, while at the same time providing opportunities for middle-income workers who increasingly cannot afford to live in Brooklyn. It’s a win–win for the community and the borough,” said Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen.44 The Pier 6 RFP revitalized the debate about the inclusion of housing in the park’s financial model, with a newly formed group, People for Green Space Foundation, arguing that the park was overfunded and filing an Article 78 suit against the project. As part of the suit’s settlement in 2015, the BBP Corporation was required to seek a modification to the park’s General Project Plan from the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to accommodate the affordable housing.45
At Pier 1, another newly formed group, Save the View Now (STVN), filed a lawsuit to halt the construction of the hotel and the residential building at the northern end of the park, with an accompanying affidavit from Otis Pearsall, one of the original vice chairs of the Piers Committee of the Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA), claiming that the two buildings’ heights violated the park’s planning documents. Following the dismissal of the suit, STVN, joined by the BHA, filed a subsequent suit alleging that a portion of the Pier 1 building intrudes into the Brooklyn Heights Promenade’s legally protected Scenic View District and is awaiting final judgment.
In spite of the resistance of some community members to Brooklyn Bridge Park’s financial model, the project’s commitment to self-sustainability is representative of a growing and successful trend among urban parks. Faced with tightened city budgets, an increasing number of parks—including the Presidio in San Francisco, Millennium Park in Chicago, and Hudson River Park and Battery Park City Park in New York—strive to be self-sustaining from revenue derived on the park footprint. Others, notably Central Park and Prospect Park, rely on private philanthropy for their maintenance and operations funding.
With the self-sustaining principle enshrined in the “13 Guiding Principles,” Brooklyn Bridge Park’s limited housing plan will provide the park’s maintenance and operations funding, including the refurbishment of the more than 17,000 wooden piles that support the park’s massive piers. While the Port Authority’s original proposal, from 1988, for the piers included 3 million square feet of housing and commercial development spread across the piers, with only five acres of open space, the park’s current plan calls for only four acres of new construction to support and sustain eighty-five acres of open space, including an estimated $250 million to $300 million in marine infrastructure repair over the next fifty years.
Before leaving office, Mayor Bloomberg increased the city’s capital commitment to Brooklyn Bridge Park by an additional $45 million to fund Pier 3, bringing New York City’s total contribution to the park to $150 million, along with New York State’s initial contribution of $65 million. Currently, uncommitted capital funding to complete the park stands at $31.5 million—$9 million for Brooklyn Bridge Park Plaza (the namesake of the park) and $22.5 million for the innovative floating walkways, which have not yet been approved by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. As a sign of his own commitment to the project, Mayor Bill de Blasio (a longtime park supporter but with different priorities from his predecessor) retained in his first budget the $40 million allocated by Bloomberg for the park.
Brooklyn Bridge Park was formed by a multitude of voices, each creating and responding to different challenges and pressure points along the way. There was the small group of dedicated activists who originally pushed the city government to adapt its vision for the waterfront. There were the government leaders who worked cooperatively with the growing citizens’ movement over time, providing crucial funding and a plan to pay for the park’s maintenance and operations through future years. There were the engineers, architects, and planners who synthesized the hopes of different communities and melded that vision with the physical and financial realities of the park’s waterfront location. And, finally, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation and the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy have worked together in recent years to manage, respectively, the construction, financing, and public programming of the park. Over three decades, the collective contributions of each of different groups have coalesced into a spectacular, beloved, extraordinary public space enjoyed by more than 1 million visitors each year.
ENTERING THE PARK AT JAY STREET, just north of the Manhattan Bridge, visitors stroll by a gently sloping lawn and cross pedestrian bridges over newly created salt-marsh areas on their way to the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage and the Conservancy’s Environmental Education Center, which features an interactive park model and a 250-gallon East River aquarium.
Empire–Fulton Ferry at Water Street, between the towering columns of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, features a graceful lawn and a winding boardwalk along the waterfront that includes the original Fulton Ferry Landing, where Robert Fulton once launched his steam-powered ferry boat. The twenty-six-foot pavilion housing Jane’s Carousel stands just a short walk inland from the waterfront, its almost century-old horses constantly occupied by both children and adults. To the north of the park are the impressive Empire Stores and the Tobacco Warehouse, new home to noted theater company St. Ann’s Warehouse. Near the entrance to the south are an ice cream parlor and a cluster of outdoor eateries, where visitors can sit and enjoy refreshments while taking in the spectacular views of the bridges, New York Harbor, and the Manhattan skyline.
Walking south to the 9.5-acre Pier 1, the largest of the park’s piers, visitors pass beneath the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge and along the section of the park that will eventually be Brooklyn Bridge Plaza, the public courtyard that will connect the southern and northern ends of the park. Pier 1 includes a playground at the northern edge, three spacious lawns, a maze of tree-lined pathways, a water garden beside the walkway, and a salt marsh at its southern border. Just upland from the pier, the Granite Prospect, a staircase built from slabs of granite salvaged from the reconstructed Roosevelt Island Bridge, rises above the shoreline.
Pier 2, one of the main centers of active recreation for the park, features five acres of courts for basketball, bocce, and handball and pulses with young athletes playing pick-up games and enjoying the pier’s inline-skating rink.
A short walk south of the Pier 2 recreational complex, the Pier 3 upland features the sweeping Granite Terrace, with dozens of four- to five-foot granite blocks rising out of a shady cluster of evergreens and flowering trees, and the large “sound-attenuating hill” that runs along the length of the pier area and separates the parkland from the busy traffic of Furman Street and the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, reducing noise levels by up to 75 percent. A great lawn just south of the Granite Terrace provides visitors with direct views of Governor’s Island and the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, while a smaller lawn to the north provides a clear view of the Manhattan skyline.
Gazing toward Pier 3 itself, visitors will notice that the last of the park’s five-acre piers is undergoing construction. Next to the construction barges lining the pier’s northern side, a red-and-white dive flag signals that divers are underwater, conducting the yearlong repair of the pier’s aging wooden piles.
FIGURE 43
Kayaking from the beach on Pier 4, 2014.
© ETIENNE FROSSARD, NEW YORK, N.Y.
Pier 4 is the site of the park’s only sunken pier, the abandoned posts and platforms crumbling into the East River. The upland area has been converted into a sand beach, where visitors can either take a barefoot stroll or launch nonmotorized boats into the East River’s still waters (figure 43). Just to the south, a marina is located in the open water between Piers 4 and 5.
Pier 5, another of the park’s main recreational areas, is devoted to large, multi-purpose playing fields, which can be adapted for soccer, rugby, lacrosse, flag football, and ultimate Frisbee, along with two playground areas for ch
ildren. The pier’s playing fields are flanked by bleachers and benches that are lined by shade sails on the pier’s northern and southern sides, providing a comfortable and relaxing spot for diners, spectators, and visitors in need of a rest from the long stroll along the waterfront (figure 44). In addition to the playing fields, Pier 5 features the Picnic Peninsula, the park’s largest picnic area, with tables made from salvaged wood and shaded by large, weather-resistant umbrellas (figure 45). At the far end of the pier, a thirty-foot-wide promenade offers a panoramic view of the skyline and the river, from New York Harbor to the south to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges to the north.
Looking east, toward the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, visitors will note the construction of Pier 5’s uplands, which will feature a small boathouse, the park’s maintenance and operations building, additional lawns and picnic areas, and the continuation of the park’s sound-attenuating berm.
FIGURE 44
Playing fields on Pier 5, 2013.
© JULIENNE SCHAER
FIGURE 45
Picnic Peninsula on Pier 5, 2014.
© ETIENNE FROSSARD, NEW YORK, N.Y.
At the end of the 1.3-mile stroll along the waterfront, Pier 6 features several large destination playgrounds, beach-volleyball courts (figures 46 and 47), a rooftop café, a dog run, large lawns, a flower field, and a ferry dock with regular service to nearby Governor’s Island.
A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park Page 24