Another Bureaucratic Turf War Keeps DUMBO Park Locked Up

By on May 13, 2010 8:06 am in DUMBO, Government, Lame Excuses, News
BHB photo by C. Scales

BHB photo by C. Scales

We earlier reported how obstinate state officials appeared to have delayed the opening of the Pier 1 portion of Brooklyn Bridge Park in a battle over who could claim credit for it. Now, it appears, the heavy hand of Albany may be delaying work on the Empire-Fulton Ferry section of the Park, between the foot of Main Street and the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO.

New York Daily News: Bureaucratic squabbling is holding up construction at a shuttered DUMBO waterfront park, the Daily News has learned.

Empire Fulton Ferry Park closed down at the beginning of the year for a $3.5 million reconstruction project, but no work has been done since then.

A standoff between state and city officials is to blame for the delay, sources said.

According to the Daily News article, the heavy in this story appears to be State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who has refused to allow the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation to proceed with construction work because of a technicality involving contract wording.

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  • David on Middagh

    Incredibly frustrating. It’s such a special park, and every Spring day that it’s closed can’t be gotten back.

  • xochi

    ditto.

  • Monty

    It’s ok since the guy with the banana hammock has relocated to pier 1. A Brooklyn institution is preserved.

  • my2cents

    I wonder if politicians ever stop and consider that their arcane turf battles have such obvious real-world ramifications.

  • Andrew Porter

    I looked through the gates a month or so ago and realized that absolutely nothing had been done there, except mow the lawn. You can sneak in and wander around by climbing on the rocks between the former EFFSP and the NYC park at the foot of Main Street.

    I’m still in touch with one of the park rangers there, and I believe they were all fired, or at the very least reassigned to other NY State parks in the area.

  • zburch

    This sucks, I was just down in DUMBO yesterday. But again, I always thought there was something odd about a park ‘for the people’ with a giant lockable fence around it. I saw lots of those kinds of parks in Myanmar recently. Inside Political wrangling resulting in shutting down a so-called public park. That’s just creepy to me.

  • x

    F the idiots in Albany. I bet they haven’t even seen the park in person.