The mayor’s office was in such a rush to showcase the completion of the first phase of its new Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn that it opened it too soon. Construction crews are still installing handrails. Walkways remain unpaved. Only a few early buds are showing on the freshly planted trees.
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A section of Brooklyn Bridge Park underneath the bridge at Fulton Landing. The park, designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, will cover 65 acres and will take years to complete. More Photos »
It takes a serious imaginative effort to picture what the park will look like when its entire 65 acres, stretching from just north of the Brooklyn Bridge south to Atlantic Avenue, are complete — a process that will take years.
But the effect it will have on New York is immeasurable. Much as Central Park embodied Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of American democracy on the eve of the Civil War, Brooklyn Bridge Park, designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, is an attempt to come to terms with the best and worst of our era: on the one hand, concern for the environment and an appreciation for the beauty of urban life and infrastructure; on the other, the relentless encroachment of private interests on the public realm.
Mr. Van Valkenburgh’s design engages all those aspects of contemporary life with a care and balance that make the park one of the most positive statements about our culture we’ve seen in years. It is a key and very promising early step in a larger project that includes the greening of the East River waterfront in Manhattan and a park for Governors Island, and which may well turn out to be Michael R. Bloomberg’s most important legacy as mayor of New York.
To appreciate the scope of the planned Brooklyn park, start at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Only a few years ago this stretch of pavement looked down over huge dilapidated warehouses that covered several waterfront piers extending to the north and south. Today most of the warehouses have been demolished to make room for new lawns and playgrounds; much of the park will be on the piers. The bare steel frame of one warehouse can be seen just to the north; it will eventually be converted to indoor basketball and handball courts. Just past it is the newly opened first phase of the park, on Pier 1: a trapezoidal patch of green near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Mr. Van Valkenburgh conceived each pier as a distinct experience. Pier 6, the furthest to the left, will be covered by patches of wetlands and lawn and volleyball courts. Pier 5 will offer outdoor “active recreation areas,” with soccer and softball fields. Others will be blanketed with grass, a pebble beach, an outdoor event space. The piers will be linked by an informal landscape of rolling lawns and pathways that will eventually stretch 1.2 miles along the waterfront and will link up with the existing Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park on the other side of the bridge, in Dumbo. Two large luxury apartment blocks, one with a hotel, will anchor the park near either end and generate income for its upkeep.
When I first reviewed the project five years ago, the mix of recreational spaces and for-profit development worried me. The high number of playing fields, canoes and kayaks called for in the plan seemed to reflect a body-obsessed culture in a constant search for distractions. The social space imagined in Olmsted’s radical vision was being reduced to a public workout area. Worse, the luxury buildings and hotel — classic examples of government eagerness to trade public space for easy money — would gobble up valuable parkland.
Such concerns began to lessen, however, once I walked into the park. The first thing I noticed was its immensity: even with only 5 of the 65 acres complete, it felt roomy. Pier 1 alone, I realized, is bigger than Bryant Park.
As you move into the park from Old Fulton Street, an asphalt pathway (which will eventually be surfaced in a powdery gray gravel) splits to wrap around a large grass-covered hill before converging again at the waterfront. Another path leads up to the crest of the hill before cascading down a series of big granite stairs on the other side. The stairs, recycled from slabs of stone that once clad the Willis Avenue Bridge over the Harlem River, look out on a postcard view of the densely packed towers of Lower Manhattan. Lush lawns, places to sprawl out and relax, spread out on either side.
The softness of this landscape is played off against a number of small wild gardens peppered with sweet-gum trees and dogwood shrubs. The trees are tightly packed together so they will create what Mr. Van Valkenburgh calls a “phototropic effect,” their trunks splaying outward as they grow. A series of small water pools, salt marshes and tidal coves, framed by piles of granite rocks, give a toughness to the water’s edge as the park extends to the south. The contrast between highly manicured and wildly unruly landscapes is not just decorative. Mr. Van Valkenburgh said it was partly inspired by a 1973 essay on Central Park by the land artist Robert Smithson, which explored the ways civic and pastoral landscapes interweave. It is also a reflection of newer environmental concerns. The soft curves of the hills, for example, are shaped to direct rainwater into an underground drainage system, where it is stored in giant cisterns and used to irrigate the site.
What gives the park a truly contemporary sensibility, however, is the way Mr. Van Valkenburgh connects his design to the surrounding city and its infrastructure. A small playground, set at the park’s northernmost corner and dotted with small stainless-steel climbing domes, offers a view up toward the gently arching underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge. The undulating lawns echo the curving roadways of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, built by Robert Moses, which are carved into the cliff face of Brooklyn Heights just behind the park.
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