Cityscapes: What's Not to Like About Brooklyn Bridge Park?

Photo by Flickr user Barry Yanowitz

It’s great to see Michael van Valkenburgh’s quick video tour of the under-construction (finally!) Brooklyn Bridge Park. I fell in love with the park plan when I wrote about it for Metropolis Magazine in 2006, calling it the city’s third great park, after Prospect and Central:

Frederick Law Olmsted would be pleased. Van Valkenburgh and his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), share the old master’s emphasis on the park’s role as a democratic equalizer for the city; they share his technical sophistication and imperative for a sensitive layering of the constructed landscape upon the natural one; and they recognize the need for range, for varied and multitudinous landscapes rather than singular compositions.

Brooklyn Bridge Park is much bigger than many people realize: 76-acres of parkland, stretched along over a mile of the Brooklyn waterfront. But seen from the Brooklyn Heights promenade, the piers that make up much of its area look small and squished. In fact, they’re five acres each—about the size of Bryant Park. Each. Standing at the end of one, as I had the chance to on a cold day a couple winters back, feels like being out in the middle of the harbor—a sensation the park design emphasizes. Seventeen acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park will open by the end of the year, with another section coming online in summer 2010. $100 million of construction contracts have been awarded. $231 million out of the park’s $350 million construction budget is allocated. Even at this moment of pause, Brooklyn Bridge Park is happening. But you wouldn’t know it from following Brooklyn neighborhood politics. Among a small but vocal group in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, the park remains highly controversial (“bad park!”). Despite hundreds of community meetings over two decades soliciting input on the design of the park, despite one of the most respected landscape architects in the country at the helm, despite construction having begun, there are ongoing efforts by a few to change the design. And they remain steadfastly opposed to the plan to finance the ongoing maintenance of the park with fees from condos and a hotel built at its edge. (The park must be economically self-sustaining.) At this point in the long and public gestation of Brooklyn Bridge Park I have trouble seeing this ongoing sideshow as anything but political grandstanding and NIMBYistic concern over the crowds the park will bring. No doubt some quiet streets in Cobble Hill, DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights are going to get loud—loud with the sounds of people on their way to enjoy the park. On a crowded city with a beautiful waterfront that strikes me as cause for celebration, not opposition.