There is now about as much park as can be wrested from the upland strip between Atlantic Avenue and the Brooklyn Bridge. Any fair-minded observer of the modifications to the Brooklyn Bridge Park plan will have to grant that, both in terms of traditional landscape (as in Prospect Park) and in the innovative treatment of the piers and the water around them, a very attractive prospect looms. Much has also been added in the way of playing fields and recreational opportunities - even places to relax and take the sun in the lee of the wind.

The improvements in the plan are largely due to the constructive input of those who have looked for ways to make it better rather than simply to oppose it, and the planners have been responsive to almost all the points reasonably made. No doubt some further refinements are possible, but the process is working, and an extraordinary park stands ready to be created.
At the park's three main entry points more space has been opened up and pedestrian avenues laid down to make the sense of park more immediate and inviting. At the especially problematic Atlantic Avenue/Pier 6 entrance, at best awkward because of the way the BQE overpass slants across it, the proposed second new building has been set back 50 feet, the Furman Street exit point has been narrowed, and a wide tree-lined path leads to a re-landscaped Pier 6, where a small one-story building has been retained for a visitors' center. Also, the harborside BQE embankment will have trees and other plantings. People coming down Atlantic Avenue will now experience park on arrival.

True, they will also see buildings. But, as an option the 30-story tower will be reduced to 20 stories and the bulky lower building will become more slender while also rising to 20 stories. To compensate for loss in the over-all number of residential units, the existing smaller 334 Furman Street building immediately north of 360 Furman would be converted to residential use, with a story added. Since there is no way of getting away from the one-million-square-foot 360 Furman colossus, the decision to concentrate most of the housing in this section, where its added visual impact will be the least, still makes the best sense

At Fulton Ferry Landing, the north end of the proposed hotel has been sliced away diagonally for a wider park opening, and again walkways (as well as a bike path) now invite you in. At John Street on the DUMBO end, the footprint of the proposed residential building has been reduced to widen the park approach, and the Department of Environmental Protection building will very likely be torn down. And the aerial walkway from Squibb Playground to a new hill at Pier 1 may become the new version of Brooklyn Heights' beloved Penny Bridge of yore.

The challenge of damping noise from the BQE has been responded to by creating a pair of undulating earth ridges, 30 feet (the one closer to the BQE) and 20 feet in height, with a wind-sheltered path in the valley between them. The hard bulkhead at the water's edge has in various places been replaced by a beach and rip-rap for a less linear and rigid feel. A host of other touches, as well as an increase in playing fields (active recreation area said to be double that of the 2000 master plan), have enriched the plan.

The Obstructionists

Deprived of any reasonable claim that the plan lacks park, the determined opposition is left with such complaints as that the housing element will "privatize" the park, or that the cost of pier maintenance has been overestimated (of all things), or that the park should be entirely financed through public funds (from tax revenues), or that the 13 Guiding Principles of 1992 have been violated, or - casting about for new kinds of objections - that the walking distances in the park are too long, or that the park will be underused in winter (cross-country skiing, anyone?) or that BQE noise should be solved by transportation departments through federal sound abatement funds. Although park advocates long ago recognized that tax funds alone could not be expected to finance the park, and that it would need to be self-sustaining, some of them now refuse to acknowledge that their cost projections were woefully inadequate, and that their expectation of what could be built on the pier platforms was unrealistic. The new plan was developed after engineering reports revealed the structural limitations of the pier structures, and financial study showed that the earlier proposed concessions would not produce enough income.

There is a tendency to see the whole plan as a plot to benefit Joseph Levine, the developer who bought 360 Furman Street from Jehovah's Witnesses in order to convert it. This paranoid view denies real considerations and overlooks that the 13 principles - whose spirit the plan observes - do not rule out housing as a revenue source. As we have seen, constructive input has led to a prospectively wonderful park. Obstructionism will only lead to no park.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2005