OPINION: The self-sustaining park
My former colleague Raanan Geberer seems to have forgotten what he knew about the history of Brooklyn Bridge Park. Back in the 1980s, even before the Giuliani and Pataki administrations, community park advocates recognized that the park would have to find a way to pay for its own upkeep if there was any hope of getting the Port Authority to allow such public use of piers that had become a drain on its resources, now that those piers were inadequate for the demands of giant container ships. The advocates knew that there wasn’t enough money in the city parks budget to pay for the piers’ maintenance, and that there was zero chance of tax hikes to increase that budget.
So the idea of self-sustainability was written into the much-touted 13 Principles that should govern the park’s creation. Most of the park advocates hoped that a hotel, some restaurants and a few other concessions would suffice to cover the park’s annual maintenance. A few of those advocates believed that some housing would also have to be included, but they withdrew their arguments so as not to imperil a united community front for what was at best an uphill fight for a park against resistant government forces.
After a master plan for the park had been developed in 2000, subsequent engineering and financial studies showed that the maintenance costs would be more than triple what the optimistic earlier projections had suggested, and a new master plan was drawn up in 2004, this one incorporating housing at the far ends and the center of the 1.3-mile park. That determination has proved contentious ever since, almost all of the objections concentrated on the southern, Pier 6, end of the park, for which requests for proposals have now gone out for two buildings, one of about 30 stories, the other for 15 stories. In the meantime the sale and conversion of the 1-million-square-foot 360 Furman Street (One Brooklyn Bridge Park) established a de facto presence of housing in the park to help pay toward its maintenance.
