Tag: parks

City Reneges on Promised Brooklyn Waterfront Parks

06/19/2012 | Comment

Wsj map

Source: Wall Street Journal

I’d been meaning to write a wrap-up post on last week’s City Council hearing on the status of the 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg & Greenpoint waterfront, including the many articles that led up to the hearing. Happily, the Working Harbor Committee has done that for me – written a concise, informed wrap-up of the many articles already written. So I’ll just link to that, put up this very excellent graphic prepared by the Wall Street Journal and pull a particularly good quote from Council Member Steve Levin:

This is about credibility, doing what you say you’re going to do,” said Levin. “You have no concrete plan. When you want to do something, you have a plan.

OK – and I’ll add this: since the 2005 rezoning was based on environmental assessments that assumed that the city would build parkland, at what point does the city’s failure to build that parkland (or even make good faith progress toward doing so) make the EIS a faulty instrument?

City Won’t Promise to Finish Two Long-Stalled North Brooklyn Parks

06/19/2012 | Comment

As the Brooklyn Paper reports, the Bloomberg administration has refused to commit to any goals or deliverables on the acquisition or construction of Bushwick Inlet Park or 65 Commercial Street. (I guess everyone has given up on the expansion of Barge Park?)

Financial mismanagement and planning gaffes have also stood in the way of both planned open spaces.

Bloomberg officials originally valued [the soccer field block] on the southern edge of the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park at about $12 million, but a judge ruled that the area’s residential rezoning meant its value was almost eight times higher.

The city eventually settled with the property owner and bought the parcel for about $93 million, according to court papers and Council testimony…

Money to build a park at Commercial Street dried up too.

In 2007, city budget hawks removed $13 million of the $14 million allocated to the park’s development and spent it on other projects.

Contrary to the headline, I don’t think anyone expects that this administration will finish either of these parks before January, 2014. But the administration can ensure that the parks will be built someday by negotiating contracts to buy all of the Bushwick Inlet properties and by moving the MTA off the Commercial Street lot once and for all.

Neither of those actions will ensure that the parks are completed anytime soon (as I said elsewhere, we are looking at decades), but they will ensure that North Brooklyn has a clear path to getting the parks we were promised seven years ago.

Brooklyn Waits on Promise of a Park

06/14/2012 | Comment

Wsj map

Stuck in Park
Source: WSJ

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy article (and excellent graphic) on the fight to get the Bloomberg administration to follow through on the parks and affordable housing it promised Williamsburg and Greenpoint in the 2005 rezoning.

Often there are community benefit components that make rezonings more acceptable than they otherwise would be,” said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, whose district includes the Williamsburg waterfront. “If those promises don’t mean anything, it’s going to be a lot harder to move forward with similar community-remaking projects


Let Us Drink in the Parks

The Post seems to be confusing private property with public parks:

Last weekend, my family had the pleasure of eating our way through the amazing Smorgasburg food festival in Williamsburg. But, in between bites of fish tacos, sandwiches piled high with smoked meat and the obligatory sweet-and-salty s’mores, something was missing.

Something, perhaps, like a locally crafted beer or a Long Island-produced wine. An adult beverage to complement the farm-to-table offerings would have made the day just perfect.

Yet the city’s made that all but impossible.

Smorgasburg (and the Brooklyn Flea) are on private property at the Edge, not in a park. Plus, they’ve already applied for, and will soon have a liquor license.

Residents, Pols Irked Over Slow Parks Progress

The city promised to build three parks — 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park, Barge Park, and a park on Commercial St. in Greenpoint — as part of a 2005 waterfront rezoning to allow housing towers. Only a 7-acre chunk of Bushwick Inlet Park with a soccer field has opened.

The City Council’s Parks and Waterfront committees will be holding a hearing on the 2005 rezoning and its unkept promises.

The ‘Drastic Miscalculation’ That Stalled the Greening of Greenpoint-Williamsburg

You might have missed it, but last week was the 7th anniversary of the City’s 2005 rezoning:

In 2005, the mayor pushed through a rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, allowing for significantly higher development along the waterfront, and promising a series of parks and open spaces strung like beads along two miles of the neighborhoods’ shorefront…

Certainly, much has changed for the better in Williamsburg, from a waterfront access standpoint. The esplanade in front of the Edge and Northside Piers is well-trafficked and much-loved. Transmitter Park at the end of Kent Avenue, though not yet finished, is in use by Greenpoint residents.

Unfortunately, progress on the development of the waterfront access and open space is not very promising – in fact, recent developments at 65 Commercial Street are a huge step backwards.

The best the City can do at this point is to point to the huge sums of money they have spent to date (“the largest in any Community Board district”) as justification for not actually building much in the way of parks. The problem is, most of the money has been spent acquiring industrial property at residential valuations (that would be the “drastic miscalculation”), leaving very little left over for remediation, let alone construction of actual parks.

Much has changed for the better – McCarren pool is opening soon, as is the waterfront portion of the Bushwick Inlet soccer field site and Transmitter Park (the latter, a promise from the Giuliani era, finally fulfilled by this administration). But despite this progress, we are years away from realizing three-quarters of the promised incremental open space.

From Alaska, Great Concern for Central Park

Legislators in Alaska are trying to make a point:

In the interest of preserving an already-compromised sliver of urban wilderness, state legislators are asking the federal government to take over Central Park.

State legislators in Alaska, that is…

It urges the feds to “declare Central Park to be a wilderness area and to prohibit any further improvement or development of Central Park unless authorized by an act of Congress.”

Since most “East Coast elites”, particularly the deep-pocketed ones who live on Central Park, would probably support development restrictions in the park, that point is probably going to be lost on a lot of us.1

1 Wikipedia must have been down that day, but Alaska legislators might be interested to know that Central Park is a completely man-made construct that is already a locally-designated Scenic Landmark, as well as a National Historic Landmark. No, Congress doesn’t control development in Central Park, but the park is unlikely to see any development until well after every drop of oil is sucked out of ANWR.↩

Did the City Miscalculate Value of Bushwick Inlet Park?

12/19/2011 | Comment

Short answer – yes.

Yolane Almanzar of the fledgling New York World has a very thorough rundown of why Williamsburg and Greenpoint may never see a park at Bushwick Inlet.

The article is mostly about how grossly the city underestimated the value of the properties – by an order of magnitude, as it turns out. But the real issue is that by rushing to rezone without first acquiring (or at least negotiating prices for) the inlet properties, the city in effect raised the value of those properties to unattainable levels.

So now, more than six years after the rezoning became reality, and with thousands of new housing units already added to the area, the city has committed over $200 million to acquire part of a park, and will probably need close to that amount again to acquire the rest. (Putting aside the question of whether they can ever acquire the Monitor Museum site).