New Brooklyn Vistas, and a Fight Over Plans for Them

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For the first time in decades, visitors to the north side of Brooklyn’s Pier 1 can see something breathtaking.

New Jersey.

For years, all one saw was a huge L-shaped warehouse whose side was emblazoned with the motto “Brooklyn Works.” It was an odd declaration, since the warehouses and piers south of the Brooklyn Bridge had long been shuttered. But two weeks ago, bulldozers and backhoes began peeling away the metal walls that had sealed off sweeping vistas of Upper New York Bay and Lower Manhattan, too.

While the view is still too industrial to be a J. M. W. Turner-meets-Walt Whitman seascape, visitors to the demolition site are already savoring the strange sensation of light and air in a place long off limits. In the coming years, this 85-acre stretch of waterfront will be converted into Brooklyn Bridge Park, with meadows, playing fields, marinas and basketball courts. On one side of the park will be magnificent views of skyscrapers. On the other side will be apartment buildings and a hotel whose residents and guests will pay taxes for the maintenance of the park.

For New Yorkers long accustomed to being shut off from miles of waterfront that were abandoned, underused or cut off by highways, lots of green open space on the water seems like a good idea. To Fred Kent, an urban planner who examines parks and plazas the way a doctor scrutinizes X-rays, it is another missed opportunity for life on the waterfront. Mr. Kent, the founder of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit design and planning group, points to cities like Oslo or Stockholm where waterfronts are the backdrop to markets, museums and a range of commerce and culture.

“Putting a bunch of fields on the waterfront in the middle of a pier is not exactly the thing you should be doing on what is essentially your face to the world,” he said of the Brooklyn plan, which he has opposed along with several local groups. “If Brooklyn wanted to distinguish itself as a great city, apart from Manhattan, it is the waterfront that could do it.”

The park’s advocates think they are doing exactly that — carving out an oasis that gives urbanites room to flex their muscles or relax their eyes. For years, they said, the strip that sits in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was little more than a blurry post-industrial backdrop to speedsters taking a shortcut from Fulton Landing to Atlantic Avenue. Come to think of it, a nifty little park could be financed by the revenue from the speeding tickets that are issued there.

The first two piers should be completed by next year. And two smaller parks just north of the Brooklyn Bridge are already open.

The park’s supporters point to features like sloping shores that lead to the water, protected inlets for kayaking, huge expanses of basketball courts shielded from the sun, and even wetlands perched atop the park’s southernmost pier. They say there will be enough activities, and concessions, to attract thousands of people from Brooklyn and beyond.

“You can over-program a place and turn it into Disneyland,” said Marianna Koval, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy. “We have an obligation to find the right balance in the largest city in the United States between quiet open spaces, recreational spaces and educational and cultural attractions.”

While plans for the area have been batted about since the 1980s, the 2004 announcement of condo developments along the site’s border at the southern and northern edges of the park set off an outcry from some residents who felt they were blindsided. Some of them filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn to block the plan, which they lost and are appealing.

Judi Francis, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, who filed the lawsuit, said the plans to build housing at either end of the park sent a not so subtle message about who is expected to enjoy those lawns and water views. She faulted the plans for not providing enough access to the waterfront from other points like the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks the park.

“Private uses have driven out public uses,” Ms. Francis said in an e-mail message. “That is the real shame of Brooklyn Bridge Park. We have been denied water access for generations because of our industrial past. We will continue this alienation with a wall of luxury housing lining our shores in the future.”

The park’s developers said they were sensitive to this concern, and they hoped that residential development would be kept to a minimum. But they said the realities of shrinking maintenance budgets for city parks left them with few alternatives.

“This was the deal our office was handed by the city and state: ‘We’ll give you the capital costs, you figure out a way to cover the operational costs,’ ” said Michael Van Valkenburgh, the landscape architect who designed the park. “You do not have to be a mathematical genius to see they chose the less expensive route. This is an experiment, but the housing will provide the revenue to pay for operation and maintenance.”

Some critics of the current park invited Mr. Kent to a community meeting recently to help residents come up with alternative ideas about the southernmost pier. While the planning meeting had no official standing, participants, not all of whom were opposed to the park, hoped planners would listen to them.

“Right now it falls short of what the community should have,” said Sandy Balboza, president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association. “Fred got people to think what we should have there,” she said of Mr. Kent. “And I don’t hear anybody saying they want sunbathing, beach volleyball or housing. It should be a place that connects to life in the city. I just don’t think it works.”

Mr. Van Valkenburgh is not persuaded by that argument.

“Fred makes a living being angry about public, open space,” he said. “What he means by destinations on the waterfront is places where people can buy stuff. But this park has an unbelievable array of things you can do.” Like a prophet spurned in his own land, Mr. Kent has turned his attention to other cities that seek his advice. Inside his group’s SoHo offices, one wall is covered with ambitious renderings for a waterfront community overseas that will be more or less built from scratch (he prefers not to name the destination because of client confidentiality). He points to photographs of overdeveloped waterfront neighborhoods in Hong Kong and Vancouver, British Columbia, and shakes his head at the sight of shiny towers hemming in green — and empty — parks.

“This is what the high-rise developers want,” he said. “The people who live in the high rises want the views. They do not want anybody else coming in there. It disturbs their peace.”

A jaunt along the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront bears him out. The metal and wood piers of Gantry Plaza State Park in Long Island City strike Mr. Kent more as a place designed to win awards than attract people. Lots of new towers have been built — and continue to be built — around the park. He takes one look at some seats and chuckles — the seats cannot swivel, and they face away from the water and a view of the United Nations.

Just how the city could best use its waterfront goes beyond any single project or neighborhood, other advocates say. Roland Lewis, the executive director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, a nonprofit group, said he hoped that people would think in broader terms about not just access to the waterfront, but the kinds of activities and attractions that should be there.

“There is a question of equity” Mr. Lewis said. “How do we get there, and what do we do once we are there? Whom are we designing for? There are 723 miles of waterfront in New York and New Jersey; there’s room for a lot of stuff.”

Before he took on his job last year, he biked around the New York and New Jersey waterfronts. He dubbed much of the New Jersey side “Esplanadia,” for its seemingly endless ribbon of parks alongside riverfront condos.

“There were a lot of beautiful, empty parks,” he said, but no people. “There was no reason to be there.”