Of all the promises made to North Brooklyn in 2005, when the Bloomberg administration rezoned the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront and opened the shoreline to the glass towers that now line it, the parks were supposed to be the easy part. The towers arrived on schedule. The parks, it turned out, required patience of a geological order.
On Oct. 1, the city announced that construction had at last begun on Box Street Park, a 2.5-acre waterfront park on a former Metropolitan Transportation Authority lot at the mouth of Newtown Creek. The project carries a $40 million price tag and, according to the Mayor’s Office, is expected to be finished by the end of summer 2028—roughly twenty-three years after it was first pledged.
“Today, we are finally making good on a promise that Greenpoint families have been waiting decades to see fulfilled: turning a parking lot into a park,” said Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who added that the project was “proof of what becomes possible when communities organize and government delivers.”
What Gets Built
The plans, a collaboration between NYC Parks and the city’s Economic Development Corporation, call for an elevated esplanade along the creek, accessible pathways, terraced granite seating, gardens, a lawn, a basketball court, a picnic area, separate runs for large and small dogs, and a public restroom. The planting list reads like a native-species seminar: blackgum and Eastern redbud trees, purple love grass and little bluestem, Virginia rose and seaside goldenrod, chosen, the city says, to cool the air, absorb weather and give local wildlife somewhere to live.
The elevated esplanade is itself a small diplomatic artifact. An earlier design for the site drew objections from Community Board 1 over a tall sea wall that would have kept visitors from the water’s edge, as Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park recorded at the time. The current scheme lifts the public above the creek rather than walling it off.
The Lot Nobody Could Move
The real story of Box Street Park, as Brooklyn Paper’s Kirstyn Brendlen has chronicled, is less about landscape architecture than about the stubbornness of a transit agency’s parking needs. The MTA long used the site, at 65 Commercial Street, to store Access-A-Ride vehicles and cars for its Emergency Response Unit. A plan to move the Access-A-Ride fleet to the Bronx was approved in 2015, a full decade after the rezoning. The Emergency Response Unit stayed put.
For a time the city was prepared to build around it, breaking ground on roughly 85 percent of the site and leaving the MTA’s corner fenced off. Then came a second complication: the lot, sitting on the edge of one of the most famously polluted waterways in America, turned out to need more environmental remediation than planned, adding about $2 million to the bill, according to testimony from Council Member Lincoln Restler cited by Brooklyn Paper.
Both knots were untied this year. As part of the Monitor Point rezoning approved in July, developers agreed to relocate MTA facilities, including the Emergency Response Unit lot; the MTA formally authorized the redevelopment on Sept. 30. The Mayor’s Office put an additional $2 million into the project through its September capital commitment plan. The completed park will now include the corner the MTA once held.
There is a tidy irony here that Greenpointers will not miss: the park promised as compensation for one rezoning was rescued by the concessions of another. That is how open space tends to get made in this city now—not as a line item, but as a bargaining chip traded across the table from a developer.
The Councilman’s Victory Lap
Mr. Restler, whose district includes the site and who has made Box Street something of a signature cause, did not undersell the moment. “More than 20 years ago, Greenpointers were promised a new park on Commercial Street as part of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront upzoning,” he said in the city’s announcement. “While we’ve built tens of thousands of new homes in our community in the intervening years, Box Street Park remained a broken promise.”
The Parks commissioner, Tricia Shimamura, struck a gentler note. “This community never gave up on this park – and neither did we,” she said, describing the project as part of a broader push “up and down the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront.”
Katie Denny Horowitz, executive director of the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, told Brooklyn Paper that the park “has been part of the vision for a continuous Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront for more than twenty years,” and hinted at “major investments along Commercial Street still to come.”
The Other Unfinished Promise
Box Street is not the only debt outstanding from 2005. A mile south, Bushwick Inlet Park remains incomplete, with two large parcels still undeveloped between the finished sections, even though the city bought the last of the needed land in 2016. Those parcels, Brooklyn Paper notes, require significant remediation, and Mr. Restler has said the mayor is committed to finishing that park, too.
For now, North Brooklyn will settle for the sight of construction equipment on Commercial Street, which, after two decades of renderings, counts as a kind of progress. If the 2028 date holds, a child born the year of the rezoning will be old enough to rent one of the apartments it made possible by the time she can walk her dog along the creek.
Featured image: Newtown Creek from the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge. Photo by Antigng via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Leave a Reply