Friday, May 27, 2011
News Long-Promised Bushwick Inlet Park Still Years Away from Completion
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 2:22 PM
Bushwick Inlet Park, you may or may not recall, is that stretch of the North Brooklyn waterfront between North 9th Street and Meserole Avenue (or between East River State Park and the House of Vans, if you prefer), the rehabilitation and parkification of which was one of the major bargaining chips in the 2005 rezoning of Greenburg that paved the way for the massive waterfront towers just to the south and other projects of that ilk. Condos have risen and are now inhabited, but what about the park the city promised?
This week both Curbed and Brooklyn 11211 filed conflicting status updates on the 28-acre site, but the whole project is evidently years behind schedule.
Aside from the long-finished and much-loved soccer field, the only action at the site is slow-going construction on a building at North 9th Street and Kent Avenue that will serve as the Parks Department's base of operations for all of North Brooklyn. That building was originally scheduled to be finished this summer, and is now expected to become operational a year and a half late, in Winter of 2012.
The remaining 85 percent of the park, meanwhile, is nowhere near being begun because the city still doesn't own the land on which it will be built. Brooklyn 11211 explains:
the City doesn’t own most of that land—all they’ve managed to acquire is the 1.9-acre former Sanitation lot on Kent between North 11th and North 12th. The CitiStorage site (6.8 acres between North 10th and North 12th), the Bayside Fuel Oil site (7.3 acres between North 12th and North 14th) and the Motiva site (2.4 acres along Quay Street) are still privately owned. Even if they were acquired today, it would take the City many years and many millions of dollars to clean them up and turn them into a park.
So there's basically no telling when (if ever) Bushwick Inlet Park will actually begin to resemble the park planned in ambitious renderings like the one below, but surely a few more 30-story condo towers will sprout nearby in the meantime.
(Photo: Flickr; Rendering: Bushwick Inlet Park)
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