Remaking the City
I am standing on the roof of a building overlooking the Brooklyn waterfront. It’s March, and a bitterly cold wind blows off the river, but the sun is shining brightly, and the view of towering Manhattan across the sparkling waters of the East River is splendid. “Each one of these piers covers five acres,” my companion, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, tells me, “that’s the size of Bryant Park.” Van Valkenburgh’s enthusiasm is contagious as he describes the highlights of a public park that will eventually stretch more than a mile along the waterfront, from Atlantic Avenue in the south to beyond the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the north. For now, the area resembles an abandoned parking lot, with cracked paving and piles of debris behind a sagging chain-link fence. Traffic along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway creates a steady drone. Although demolition of the old pier sheds is complete, it’s hard to imagine this place as a park, but Van Valkenburgh assures me that it will be largely complete in four years. The first truckloads of earth will arrive next week.
The four-story building we’re standing on houses Van Valkenburgh’s site office, where he and his partner Matt Urbanski explain the project to me with the aid of a fifty-foot-long model that takes up most of the loftlike space. What the model depicts doesn’t look much like a traditional park. A narrow strip of land along the shore is filled with model trees made out of a green, spongy material, but about a third of the park is located on six cargo-shipping piers, rectangular platforms that stick out into the river like fingers. One of the piers will be used for baseball and soccer fields, three will be covered by lawns and wildflower meadows, one will house courts for basketball, handball, and tennis, and the sixth will be a wildlife sanctuary. Van Valkenburgh and Urbanski describe a rich variety of amenities, not just game-playing areas and jogging trails but also nature paths for hiking, tidal pools for wading (the river here has a four-foot tide), a large calm-water basin for kayaking, beaches for sunbathing, picnic areas, dog runs, a small-boat marina, as well as an outdoor market and a water-taxi landing. All this on only eighty-five acres.
Public parks are a distinctive feature of North American cities. Not the manicured green squares and tame pieces of garden art of Europe, but large expanses of make-believe countryside, with lakes, rivers, meadows, and forests. Most of these parks date from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the individual most responsible for influencing public attitudes at the time and showing how parks should be designed and built was Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted’s parks, especially Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in Manhattan, were immensely popular, and the idea that a large park was an urban necessity quickly spread across the continent—to Buffalo, Montreal, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Louisville, and scores of smaller cities.
A park grows in Brooklyn.
Van Valkenburgh, like all American park builders, is following in Olmsted’s footsteps. But while Central Park was promoted by business leaders, large landowners, and politicians, Brooklyn Bridge Park is the result of a neighborhood initiative. In 1988, residents of Brooklyn Heights, which overlooks the site, founded the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy to oppose a proposal by the Port Authority to develop the waterfront as commercial real estate; the conservancy lobbied for a public park instead. (Despite the presence of Prospect Park, Brooklyn has the least amount of parkland of any major metropolitan area in the country.) A compromise was struck. The city would build a park, but the project would have to finance itself, both parties agreeing that as much as 20 percent of the site could be devoted to revenue-generating nonpark uses such as housing.* The income would go directly to the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation, which would oversee park upkeep—estimated to be about $15 million a year (maintaining piers is expensive). In 1998, during the planning, Van Valkenburgh’s firm was brought in as a consultant, and following a design competition he was named planner and lead designer of the park.1
As we walk around the site, Van Valkenburgh describes the three chief design challenges, which all derive, in one way or another, from the adjacent Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Fifty years ago, when Robert Moses was building the expressway, to mollify Brooklyn Heights residents and reduce noise his engineers covered the two-level elevated highway with a pedestrian deck. The resulting Brooklyn Heights Promenade became a much beloved feature of the neighborhood and has since been designated a historic landmark. This has a major impact on the proposed park, since the designation legally requires that the spectacular view of Manhattan from the promenade be protected by a so-called view plane, into which no new building may protrude. The view plane extends over the entire central portion of the future park, which means that new high-rise construction can only occur at the southern and northern tips of the site. Van Valkenburgh and his team have used this limitation to solve the park’s second big problem: the expressway effectively blocks direct access from Brooklyn Heights along the entire central portion of the park. By concentrating development at the two ends—a hotel and apartment buildings on the north, and apartment buildings (adjacent to a disused furniture factory that has already been converted into condominiums) on the south—the planners not only respect the view plane, but also create what they call “urban junctions,” entrances to the park that they hope will become lively links to the adjacent neighborhoods. At the same time, the limited access means the park has to become a destination, that is, a place with unique attractions of its own. “It’s got to be worth a long subway ride or a trip in the car,” says Van Valkenburgh. Hence the kayaking basin, the extensive waterfront picnicking areas, and the large playing fields, all rare amenities in Brooklyn.
The third challenge is noise. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was specifically designed with a curved back wall to reflect the noise of traffic away from Brooklyn Heights and toward the river—precisely into the area that will be the future park. To deaden the noise, the landscape architects have planned an earthen berm along the entire length of the expressway. The lower portion of the berm is gently sloped to allow human use; then it’s steep at the top to make it as tall as possible. The steepest section, built with stabilized earth, will not be accessible to the public. Fencing off a part of the park sounds odd, but Van Valkenburgh reminds me that large portions of traditional parks such as Central Park are not accessible to the public and are there simply to “create a setting.” The main setting of Brooklyn Bridge Park is the harbor, eight hundred acres of water that will make the park seem much larger than it is.
Most of the structures in the park—fences, benches, lighting—will have a rough-and-ready appearance, which Van Valkenburgh describes as contributing to the industrial “authenticity” of the site. Piers capable of supporting heavy loads will be sodded, while others will remain paved; those in poor condition have been demolished. When restoration of the sole surviving nineteenth-century railroad pier, where freight was transferred between ships and railroad cars, proved too costly, it was decided to let soil accumulation and plant establishment continue naturally, turning the collapsed pier into a habitat for nesting birds. In a curious bit of ecological engineering, to prevent rats from decimating the fledglings, the front of the pier will be demolished to make an island. The pier closest to the Brooklyn Bridge was originally built on landfill, so it will be heavily planted with trees, creating a coastal forest. On another pier, the steel framework of a cargo shed has been retained to support a new shading roof over playing courts. Where decrepit retaining walls must be torn down, the water’s edge will be turned into beaches, tidal pools, and boat-launching areas; solid quay walls will support promenades. In the site office, Urbanski shows me a slab of heavy, dense wood—Southern yellow pine—a large quantity of which was recovered during the demolition of one of the industrial sheds. The seasoned, weather-resistant timber will be recycled to construct benches, screen walls, and other park structures. A mock-up of a section of fencing, made of galvanized metal pipe, stretched steel cable, and a metal screen, reminds me of a cargo net.
Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux drew people into Central Park by introducing boating and ice-skating, as well as musical concerts; Van Valkenburgh and his team continue this tradition of active and passive recreation, except that instead of Victorian gazebos and bandstands, there will be basketball courts and giant screens for outdoor movies. The combination of private real estate development and public uses at Brooklyn Bridge Park has struck some critics as anomalous, but it, too, has a precedent in Olmsted, who argued that the fiscal advantage of building public parks was precisely that they raised adjacent property values and increased city revenues. In other areas, modern landscape architects have moved beyond their predecessors. The designs of Central Park, Prospect Park, and others were based, in part, on the re-creation of idealized natural landscapes, some British, some American, hence the Sheep Meadow and the “wild” Ramble of Central Park, and the picturesque man-made lake and the Adirondack-like Ravine of Prospect Park. The landscapes that Van Valkenburgh and his team will create in Brooklyn are a product of their waterfront location and will include a coastal scrubland, freshwater wetlands, and marsh and shallow-water habitats. “We attempted to work closely with site conditions to use these natural zones to jump-start a functioning ecology that will eventually take on a life of its own, with relatively minimal intervention,” Van Valkenburgh explains. Whereas park designers of Olmsted’s generation saw their creations as an antidote to the surrounding industrial city, Van Valkenburgh sees Brooklyn Bridge Park as an integral part of its urban surroundings.
An unexpected urban pastime: kayaking in the East River.
The planning of Brooklyn Bridge Park involves on-the-spot improvisation: reacting to immediate neighborhood concerns, dealing with difficult site conditions, respecting stringent financial constraints, making do with what is at hand. Van Valkenburgh has described the landscape architect’s goal as “a combination of understanding the things that are givens and then setting it up in a way so that the occurrence of the undeterminable is a welcome consequence.”2 Yet his pragmatic approach, no less than Olmsted’s, is guided by ideals—concerning ecology, community, planning, and urbanism. Big ideas and practical schemes: a new chapter in remaking the makeshift American metropolis is unfolding.
Cities don’t grow in a vacuum. Urbanism is conditioned by what came before, not only physically but also intellectually. To better understand the possibilities and constraints for planning, it’s helpful first to examine three key concepts that have shaped the way we think about urbanism and that have helped make our cities what they are today.
*The final master plan devotes only 10 percent of the site to private development.
