About UsBrooklyn Greenway Initiative is the 501(c) 3 non-profit organization responsible for conceiving, planning and coordinating the development of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway. When its founders started in 1998, a 14-mile greenway along Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront was inconceivable to New York City officials. Now the greenway is recognized as an essential public health and sustainable transportation resource that will shape the future development of Brooklyn’s waterfront. After ten years of building support, planning, and securing funding, the greenway is poised to become a unified New York City capital project.  Brian McCormick, Meg Fellerath & Milton Puryear
Timeline
1993
The Brooklyn Waterfront Trail is identified as a priority route in the Department of City Planning’s Greenway Plan for New York City, which outlined a vision for a citywide 350-mile network of greenways.
1998
Working as neighborhood volunteers, Brian McCormick, Milton Puryear and Meg Fellerath spearhead the effort to create a Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway.
1998-2004
The team secured broad-based support for the vision from Sunset Park to Greenpoint and secured the initial commitments for greenway right of way from NYC DOT and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
2004
McCormick, Puryear and Fellerath found and incorporate Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI) as a NYS non-profit organization. BGI’s vision is to create a safe, off-street route along Brooklyn’s waterfront, in order to improve healthful recreation, transportation and waterfront access for all New Yorkers.
2004-Today
BGI has used three successive rounds of funding from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund, each sponsored by the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office, to work with its partners to complete the conceptual planning for the entire route, as well as to publish design principles and a stewardship plan.
Additionally, BGI has coordinated the right of way assemblage, public agency coordination, consensus building and initial federal funding for the first 10.5 miles of the Greenway, from Greenpoint through Red Hook. In 2008, NYC Department of Transportation agreed to sponsor the federal funding, coordinate the master plan, and build the Greenway.
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