BHB: When you look at the history of community activism that helped to spawn the BBP, how do you view the protest for that People for Green Space and others are mounting against Pier 6?
In that process it’s really about looking at those realities, looking at funding, looking at sustaining maintenance and operations, looking at what the conditions of the piers are and what the infrastructure can support. You start having to make some difficult choices. What you see in the community opposition is some discomfort with some of those choices.
NW: I would say that in my role as Conservancy Executive Director I am working on a book that will be published by Columbia University Press on the history of the park.
For me, the real story of the history of Brooklyn Bridge Park is [one of] very passionate civic engagement to create something wonderful. The energy that you bring to a movement to get the wheels of government started—and make no mistake about it, Brooklyn Bridge Park is a very large, very significant public works project. So the energy that you need to bring from the community standpoint to put something like that in motion is extraordinary. All of us who are sitting here now and are involved with the park—no matter which side of the issue you are on—really owe a debt of gratitude to the folks who 25-years ago had the tenacity and the determination to give over a significant portion of their lives to make Brooklyn Bridge Park happen.
With a civic project of the significance of BBP—and this is one of the great things about living in a democracy, right—there can be difference of opinion as to how a project develops, particularly when you move from a community of visual space and you start having to confront the hard realities of how you make a project like this happen.
In that process it’s really about looking at those realities, looking at funding, looking at sustaining maintenance and operations, looking at what the conditions of the piers are and what the infrastructure can support. You start having to make some difficult choices. What you see in the community opposition is some discomfort with some of those choices.
That being said, the conservancy is a supporter of the park plan and has been ever since 2005, when the park financial model was announced, and we have been supportive of plan and the choices it makes to bring the community vision into reality.
We see when we look at the fact that BBP is self-sustaining for its operation and its maintenance and its capital funding, we look at that through the lens of what happened to public parks in New York City in the ’70s. The city was in a period of severe financial hardship and parks budgets had to be cut drastically. Central Park and Prospect Park, two of our marquee parks, were deteriorating and neglected. So we are very supportive of a financial model that will ensure that will not happen to BBP. Then to move into what has been to some people—and I want to make sure that there has been lots and lots of support for Brooklyn Bridge Park, as opposition always tends to be louder than support.
You have to be careful not to overamplify that. Then to move into the more controversial decision to using housing as a funding mechanism for the park, likewise the conservancy has been supportive of that as well. And that’s from the standpoint that the community’s initial impression with the city had contemplated as much as 20% of the project footprint being devoted to revenue-generating activities to pay for the park but with the inclusion of residential housing as a funding mechanism, that footprint is [actually] under 10%.
In a nutshell we see the park financial plan as giving us the greatest amount of certainty that the park will remain safe and beautiful for generations to come and giving us the greatest amount of park land for the least amount of commercial development.
For the Conservancy, that’s a win.
BHB: The park has done so well. Can we adjust the General Project Plan core tenets to account for this unexpected success?
NW: I think there are a couple of pieces to that. The first is that this is not the first time that this question has been asked. Our colleagues at Brooklyn Bridge Park Corp. studied that in-depth a couple of years ago and worked with a consultant to really look at alternative revenue sources. That had a community and public process piece, and at some point what that report found was that the model that BBP adopted that contained housing essentially was the surest bet to meet the park’s financial obligations.
BBP Corp also updates the park’s financial model on a regular basis. There’s not a model that was conceived in 2005 that no one has taken a look at over the past years.
Not to get into the weeds with the numbers, but their latest presentation is saying that all of the development parcels that the GPP had allowed for are necessary to sustain the park into the future. So I don’t think it’s the case that the park has more money than it needs. I think the really good news is that the park will have the money it will need, and if you think back to 2008, when the bottom fell out of the world economy, certainly it hit us here in the U.S. incredibly hard. We just barely avoided a depression. It hit New York City incredibly hard. The real news is that the model worked. Post 2008, it might not have worked.
It does work, and Brooklyn Bridge Park will be well maintained into our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s future.
