Brooklyn Plan Weaves New Story For Old Waterfront

February 4, 2005

RPA — Regional Plan Association

Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

The story of the waterfront land around our cities usually goes this way: Once upon a time, our waterways were our freeways, and the land on these freeways was lined with factories, rail yards and docks. The waterfront, like the land around the present-day interstates, was not pretty, but it worked, and worked hard.

Then as the country came to depend more on actual highways and planes and less on ships and rail, the waterfront decayed and cities were left with an opportunity to convert brownways to greenways.

This is the classic tale of city waterfronts over the past 20th century. And like a lot of classic tales, the reality is less simple, particularly in Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Initiative and Regional Plan Association are seeking to build 14 miles of parks and bike paths around the waterfront. Their initial plan for this waterfront pathway was released this week.

In Brooklyn, the waterfront is both de-industrializing and re-industrializing, all at once. In areas defined for 200 years by piers and warehouses, the City and State have committed $ 150 million to build the 80-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park – an urban greenspace and entertainment complex. The City Planning Commission will soon rezone a large swath of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront from manufacturing to high rise housing, (which would be better off as dense, low-rise housing that does not wall off the waterfront). These are examples of post-industrial uses for the old waterfront.

But much of the Brooklyn waterfront is still maritime industrial and it will probably stay that way. The city is investing millions of dollars, plus time and energy, to revive the 65th Street Rail Yard in Bay Ridge to fit into the reviving port operations in New York and New Jersey. A recycled materials processing center and car port are planned for Sunset Park. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is thriving. Then there’s the planned new cruise ship terminal in Red Hook. While you could give some of these uses higher marks than others, none of them fit the story of a declining, de-industrial waterfront.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway plan is a good one because it works with this less simple history, rather than against it. The plan as developed would convert some abandoned brownways into greenways, while working around more vital operations. It’s a nuanced plan that recognizes and celebrates the waterfront’s diversity of uses and users. It contrasts with the deservingly popular but very different Hudson River Park greenway project in Manhattan, where sponsors dealt with a single landowner (the State), a single large project (the rebuilding of the West Side Highway), and a single principal neighbor (a regional park). In Brooklyn, the greenway will proceed in smaller chunks – working with multiple property owners, and bite-size allocations of capital. The design of the first seven mile segment now being planned from Williamsburg down to Sunset Park reflects this finer grain.

There are those that would like a more uniform waterfront. And although unity can be appealing, perhaps for the Brooklyn waterfront the best thing is something that is also best for the non-waterfront areas of a city: mixed use.

–Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region