Campo - The accidental playground : Brooklyn waterfront narratives of the undesigned and unplanned

THE ACCIDENTAL PLAYGROUND

BROOKLYN WATERFRONT NARRATIVES OF THE UNDESIGNED AND UNPLANNED

DANIEL CAMPO

Copyright 2013 Daniel Campo

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All photos by Daniel Campo unless indicated otherwise.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Campo, Daniel.

The accidental playground : Brooklyn waterfront narratives of the undesigned and unplanned / Daniel Campo.

pages cm

Summary: With its detail, depth, compassion and vision Campos work makes an invaluable contribution to the growing literature on the unplanned and the undesigned spaces and activities in cities today. Highly illustrated and artfully researched, the book will draw readers into a unique space in one of New York Citys most popular boroughsProvided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5186-5 (pbk.)

1. RecreationNew York (State)Brooklyn. 2. CommunitiesNew York (State)Brooklyn. 3. Waste landsNew York (State)BrooklynRecreational use. 4. WaterfrontsNew York (State)BrooklynRecreational use. 5. Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal. I. Title.

HT281.C36 2013

307.0974723dc23

2013016262

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

In loving memory of my mother, Seena Campo,
and for my father, Vincent Campo

Color photographs follow

Greenpoint and Williamsburg. (Map by Megan Griffith and Daniel Campo, 2013.)

THE ACCIDENTAL PLAYGROUND

The former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal and Northside waterfront. (Graphic by Megan Griffith using Google Earth satellite images.)

ON JUNE 13, 2000, New York Governor George Pataki announced that the state had agreed to purchase seven acres of waterfront property in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where it would build New Yorks 160th state park. With its stunning views of midtown Manhattan, the property was part of a vacant waterfront railroad yard on Williams-burgs Northside known as the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal or BEDT. Closed in 1983, the yard was for more than a century where freight cars were pulled off of and pushed onto barges, connecting Williamsburg factories, refineries, and warehouses with similar terminals on the New Jersey side of the harbor. With its tracks pulled up, freight houses demolished, and finger piers falling rapidly into the river, the decaying terminal was ripe for reclaiming. By converting this underused site into a recreational opportunity for the community, the governor proclaimed, we are taking one more step toward re-connecting residents and visitors with one of New York States most important waterfront resources.

BEDT was long thought of as an ideal site for a park in a neighborhood starved for parks and waterfront access. Two years earlier, at the urging of Brooklyn State Assemblyman Joseph Lentol and a coalition of local advocacy groups, the governor had placed the terminal on the property acquisition list of the states Open Space Conservation Plan, which would make it eligible for purchase using the Environmental Protection Fund, a bond referendum approved by the voters of New York state in 1996. The governor had allocated $10 million from the fund for the terminals redevelopment, but purchase alone would cost $8.3 million, setting a record for a state parks land purchase on a per-acre basis and leaving little money for the planning, design, and construction of the park itself. But the governor had a solution. Behind the scenes, the Trust for Public Land, a national land conservancy group, had been working for two years with officials from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and Williamsburg advocates to identify a partner who could serve to defray the development costs and act as co-steward of the site. The Trust had connected these parties with New York University, which desperately sought a place to build practice and competition sports fields for its NCAA athletic teams. The north edge of the institutions sprawling Manhattan campus was just three stops and a short walk to the waterfront via the L train subway, which ran underneath the edge of the future park en route to its first stop in Brooklyn at Bedford Avenue. NYU would pay for most of the development costs and maintain and staff the park in exchange for sharing the planned sports facilities with local community groups.

For the long-aggrieved residents of Williamsburg and adjacent Greenpoint, the announcement of the purchase was, in spite of the compromise of their having to share the future park with the university, a momentous occasion. For more than a decade, residents in these neighborhoods had fought to reclaim their waterfront from a variety of interests, including industrial landowners, speculators, and city agencies. Bordered by water on three sides, Community District #1 (comprising Williamsburg and Greenpoint) had only one official waterfront park, which was less than an acre in size. And while most public streets terminated at the waterfront, the ends of these rights-of-way had been mostly appropriated by adjacent property owners and businesses, denying residents of all but a glimpse of the water, often from hundreds of feet inland.

The irony of being denied access to the water was downright cruel. The decline of shipping and waterfront industries beginning in the midtwentieth century had robbed these working-class neighborhoods of jobs and wealth. But even after industry had left, residents found that their waterfront was often less accessible than before, with port properties being gobbled up by waste transfer stations, recycling and scrap yards, truck terminals and warehouses, parking lots and equipment storage yards, gas-powered electric generating stations, and speculators who sat on several large vacant and lightly used properties. These uses added to the waterfronts existing petroleum, gas, and chemical terminals, a massive sewage treatment plant, a multi-block lumber yard, and the waterfronts sole remaining large-scale manufacturing facility, the Amstar (or Domino) Sugar Refinery, about one-half mile south of the planned park site. (Greenpoints Newtown Creek waterfront was also the site of a 17-million-gallon underground oil spill, discovered in 1978, more than eight million gallons of which were still believed to be underground by 2007.

Williamsburg residents had long dreamed of a waterfront park at the terminal. Many had participated over the preceding decade in planning meetings and workshops dedicated to reimagining the waters edge and establishing a larger vision that would guide its eventual redevelopment. Those exercises informed several plans, including a 1990 New York City Parks Council report, the 1995 Hunter College planning studio report (to which I was one of several contributors), and the neighborhoods 1998 community-based waterfront plan, written by local advocates with technical assistance from the citys Department of City Planning (approved by the City Planning Commission in 2001). While the plans all envisioned waterfront parks for part or all of the terminal site (and at other points along the districts waterfront), implementation of these recommendations remained unrealized. At the same time that residents and advocacy groups were working on plans to reclaim the waters edge, more powerful actors were advancing a very different vision for this same waterfront. In 1987, New Jerseybased Nekboh Recycling began operating a waste transfer station on the southernmost block of the sprawling twenty-two-acre BEDT property. Seemingly immune to the growing neighborhood opposition, the company applied for additional permits and expanded its operation across a larger portion of the terminal.