Aaron Short covers the City’s abandonment of Bushwick Inlet Park.
City Too Poor to Build Promised Bushwick Inlet Park
Reversal on Plans for Williamsburg Park
The Daily News reports today that the City is reneging on one of the key components of the 2005 Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning – the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park. The park – which would straddle Greenpoint and Williamsburg – was the centerpiece of the City’s open space plan under the rezoning.
In the six years since the rezoning, the City has acquired less than a third of the property that was to make up the park. In a letter to one of the property owners on the site, the Parks Department is now saying that it has “no schedule for the acquisition of the site” (a position which was apparently reiterated by other City officials in a meeting with the Community Advisory Board last week).
In the 2005 rezoning, the City promised that it would add roughly 38 acres to North Brooklyn. Six years – and thousands of new housing units – later, less than 3 acres of that is actual, usable open space. The rest is 35 acres of broken promises and, ultimately, a ruined rezoning.
Free WiFi Coming to McCarren
Bushwick Inlet Park Update
Bushwick Inlet Park – Someday.
Curbed has a post today headlined “Long-Delayed Bushwick Inlet Park Now Planning for 2012“. What they mean is that the big pile of dirt on Kent Avenue between North 9th and North 10th Streets will become the headquarters for North Brooklyn’s Parks operations will open in “winter 2012”.
Curbed mistakenly says that the “original plan, when the first phase of park construction kicked off back in 2009 after several delays, was for the whole 28-acre project to be done this summer”. Actually, the plan was only to have this little building completed by this summer. But even that is not going to happen.
So this seems like a good time to check in on the status of Bushwick Inlet “Park”. You might remember that it was the major open space concession in the 2005 rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg – a 28-acre waterfront park for two neighborhoods that historically ranked near the bottom in terms of open space. Bushwick Inlet Park represents over three-quarters of the new park space promised under the 2005 rezoning. That rezoning passed six years ago this month. Hundreds of new apartments have been constructed on the waterfront at the Edge and Northside Piers. Thousands of new apartments have been constructed on sites inland from the waterfront.
So how is this jewel of the North Brooklyn waterfront coming along?
We have a soccer field. It’s a very nice soccer field, but it is not a 28-acre soccer field.
There is a big pile of dirt where the Parks headquarters will someday be, and that project is actively under construction. Of course that headquarters was supposed to “be” this summer. Instead, it is now “on schedule” for completion in winter 2012. In other words, it is about a year and a half behind schedule.
Someday, that soccer field will look out on a waterfront esplanade, a restaurant and a pier-like structure. But right now it looks out on a chain link fence, and the esplanade is but a promise.
That’s the parcel between North 9th and North 10th Streets, which accounts for about 15% (4.1 acres) of the promised park.
There is less progress on the other 24 acres. To start with, the City doesn’t own most of that land – all they’ve managed to acquire is the 1.9-acre former Sanitation lot on Kent between North 11th and North 12th. The CitiStorage site (6.8 acres between North 10th and North 12th), the Bayside Fuel Oil site (7.3 acres between North 12th and North 14th) and the Motiva site (2.4 acres along Quay Street) are still privately owned.* Even if they were acquired today, it would take the City many years and many millions of dollars to clean them up and turn them into a park.
Yes, times are tough and the budgets are tight. But the 2005 rezoning did come with an explicit promise – the private sector would build a lot of apartments, and the City would build some parks and open space. The private sector has kept up its end of the bargain – according to the US Census, about 2,200 people were added to the census tracts covered by the rezoning area between 2000 and 2010 (and many more units have come online in the last year). The City has not kept up its end of the bargain – having turned only 3.1 acres of Bushwick Inlet Park into actual, usable parkland.
*If you’re doing the math, all that only adds up to 22.5 acres. There is an additional 5.5 acres or so taken up by the streets between these various lots. Presumably they are City-owned, but they aren’t park either. The East River State Park, between North 7th and North 9th, is another 6 acres or so, but is not included in these numbers.
2011 McCarren Park Summerscreen Announced
The L Magazine and EPIX, co-sponsors of the 6th annual Summerscreen movie series in McCarren Park have announced their 2011 line up. The shows, which run Wednesday evenings from July 6 through August include Wayne’s World, Ghost World, Ferris Bueller and Clueless.
CB1 Supports OSA Concerts
CB1 voted tonight to partially overturn the recommendation of the Parks Committee and not recommend a reduction in the number of OSA concerts or the number of concert attendees.
This came after OSA Secretary Adam Perlmutter made the case for OSA and it’s concert series. Perlmutter pointed out that last year’s promoter was out and that OSA would be running quieter and shorter shows this year. Long before the community spoke out on the issue, OSA had already decided to cut the number of shows from 22 to 15, the number of attendees from 7,500 to 6,500 and the number of bands per show from 5 to 2. And of the 15 shows, two will be children’s concerts, one will be a comedy show and one will be a philharmonic show, so there will be only 11 rock concerts (the Parks Committee recommended 10).
These changes seemed to be acceptable to some of the park’s neighbors, and since they brought the concerts more in line with what the committee had recommended anyhow, it was agreed to drop the numerical requirements and give OSA a chance to run a more neighborhood-friendly concert series.
Williamsburg Community Board Approves Parks Concert Series
The waterfront concerts were not the only concert series on the agenda of last nights CB1 Parks Committee meeting. I hear that at the end of the meeting the committee recommended that the full board support the L Magazine’s Northside Festival concerts in McCarren Park (I think on the asphalt baseball fields across from the Turkey’s Nest). The concerts (which will, in part, benefit OSA, and which will have a capacity of 5,000, but I guess the similarities end there) include Beirut on June 17th and the Wavves opening for Guided by Voices on the 18th.
(The rest of the Northside Fesitival lineup feature The Hold Steady, Titus, the Fiery Furnaces and a whole bunch more in a series of venues spread around the neighborhood.
The Day the Music Was Turned Down (But Not Really)
Apparently last night’s CB1 Parks Committee was a bit of a doozy (Aaron Short went so I didn’t have to!). In an advisory vote, the committee recommended that the number of concerts be cut by a third and that attendance at each concert be cut by about 25% (from 6,500 to 5,000 people). Since the Open Space Alliance has already booked 15 shows for the summer, and since the concerts are held on State park land (which the local CB1 has no jurisdiction over), this vote won’t change anything. It may be a symbolic gesture, but it’s pretty clear that some people are not too happy with the concerts or with OSA.
Transmitter Park Before It Was a Park
WNYC Transmitter, 1937
Painting by Alan Gordon Lorimer
Source: WNYC
Once upon a time, there was an actual transmitter at Transmitter Park (the park to be at the base of Greenpoint Avenue). The transmitter was for WNYC, which was then a City-owned radio station. The station still exists (AM 820, FM 93.9 and online), though it is no longer owned by the City and it no longer uses the Greenpoint transmitter site.
WNYC’s Archives & Preservation project has a post about the Greenpoint transmitter, including two paintings by artist and architect A.G. Lorimer (no mention of whether or not he was related to the Lorimers of Greenpoint). The image above shows Lorimer’s gorgeous map of the transmitter site, complete with distances to five local airfields (all of which, with the exception of North Beach (aka LaGuardia Airport), are now closed). The second painting, a view of transmitter building and towers, can be seen on WNYC’s site.
Let There Be Music
Brooklyn Vegan has a statement from OSA on the summer concert park series, basically saying that the show will go on. (Not that there was really any doubt about that – the concerts are popular, profitable and well beyond the jurisdiction of the local community board.) And Brooklyn365 has a similar statement from Assemblyman Joe Lentol, with similar sentiments. Like everyone else (myself included), Lentol is unclear as to exactly what the board said last night, but this is his interpretation:
I believe that there were complaints about the noise and drunkenness of some concert goers afterwards on the neighborhood streets. There were also some requests for information about how much money has been raised and where those funds go.
That last bit is pretty important. Four (?) years in, and the community isn’t seeing the benefits of these concerts. Not that they aren’t there – OSA does tremendous work on behalf of the community. But clearly they can do a better job of publicizing that work.