A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park Read online

  Leading the opposition was the powerful Brooklyn Heights Association, a community group that had been formed in 1910 to register the neighborhood’s complaints about its transit facilities to the New York City Public Service Commission. At the time of its formation, the BHA was already feared by public authorities for “the might” and “the wrath” of its illustrious membership.17 The organization had grown even stronger and better organized in the three decades since its formation, and the normally indomitable Moses compromised with the community. After years of negotiations and debate, the city agreed to build the expressway along the far western border of Brooklyn Heights, with two levels of roadway above Furman Street, which runs parallel to the waterfront near the water’s edge, and an expansive esplanade (which would later be known as the Brooklyn Heights Promenade) cantilevered above the traffic.

  ALONG WITH MOSES’S AMBITIOUS PLANS for remaking New York City, Brooklyn Heights and the waterfront would be affected by changes in the global maritime industry, which would transform the west Brooklyn waterfront. In 1956, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey assumed control of the planning and maintenance of the west Brooklyn piers. The twenty-five “five-finger” piers that had lined the waterfront for decades and that had been built to accommodate the tall sailing vessels and small and moderate-size steam ships of the past were demolished to make way for landings large enough to accommodate the huge, slow-moving steam freighters of the modern era (figure 5). In addition to the finger piers, 130 warehouses and storage facilities were also destroyed at the time. Between 1956 and 1964, the New York Dock Company constructed thirteen piers along the 2.5-mile stretch of shoreline between the Brooklyn Bridge to the north and Red Hook to the south (figure 6).18

  On April 25, 1956, the same year that construction began on the new west Brooklyn piers, businessman Malcolm McLean introduced the practice of “containerization” to the worldwide maritime industry, arranging for the transport of fifty-eight rigging containers on a converted World War II tanker from Port Newark, New Jersey, to a shipping facility in Houston, Texas. Prior to McLean’s innovation, commercial shipping had been an exclusively “break-bulk” operation, in which products were transported and stored in individual pieces or small lots. Through “containerization,” vast quantities of products could be packaged snugly together in large containers and loaded directly from and onto semitrailers for highway transport, allowing for more efficient storage, reduced costs, and expedited delivery.19

  FIGURE 5

  The narrow piers and slips of the Brooklyn piers, shown here around 1960, were later reconstructed by the Port Authority.

  GIFT OF B. McTIERNAN. BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK CONSERVANCY COLLECTION

  The shift from break bulk to containerized cargo would soon result in dramatic changes to the look and the economy of the west Brooklyn waterfront, with more and more commercial freighters loading and unloading their containerized cargo at the shipping facilities at Port Newark and nearby Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, leading to the neglect and decline of the once-dominant west Brooklyn piers. By the mid-1970s, most of the piers were completely inactive, and the warehouses and storage sheds that once bustled with activity along the Brooklyn waterfront were either underused or abandoned (figure 7).

  DURING THE SAME PERIOD, Fulton Ferry Landing, the backwater area flanking the Brooklyn Bridge, and the current neighborhood of Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), to the north, had also fallen into disuse and disrepair. The gradual decline of the ferry service, which ceased operation completely in 1924, had precipitated the collapse of the borough’s once-bustling center of storage, shipping, and trade.20 The landing area was further isolated by the opening in 1909 of the Manhattan Bridge, which completely bypassed the area, and the opening in 1951 of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, whose enormous concrete supports formed an imposing barrier between the district and the rest of the borough.21

  FIGURE 6

  Austin J. Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority (far right), explaining to Port Authority commissioners the $85 million project to rebuild the piers along 2.5 miles of the Brooklyn waterfront, 1955.

  GIFT OF B. McTIERNAN. BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK CONSERVANCY COLLECTION

  In 1963, Consolidated Edison purchased a nine-acre parcel at the center of the property, surrounding and including the abandoned and dilapidated Empire Stores, inaugurating what would become a five-decade-long struggle among Brooklyn residents, commercial developers, and public authorities over the appropriate use of the Fulton Ferry area. In 1967, hoping to capitalize on its investment, Con Edison proposed the conversion of the Empire Stores site into a wholesale meat market. The proposal was successfully opposed by the BHA, whose members complained about the proximity of the market to their own neighborhood and worried that the proposed development would threaten the structural integrity of the Empire Stores and other adjacent structures.22 A similar proposal in 1971 to convert the property into a “festival marketplace” was also shelved in response to opposition from the Brooklyn Heights community.23

  ACHIEVING LANDMARK STATUS AND THE BEGINNING OF THE PARK CONCEPT

  In 1974, the BHA, with the active support of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, successfully campaigned to have Fulton Ferry Landing, excluding the property owned by Con Edison, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a status reserved for local property with “limited historical value.” The neighborhood’s campaign to secure landmark status for the area was not without opposition, as both Con Edison and the Board of Estimate expressed concern about the impact of the decision on the commercial potential of the property. In a letter dated December 12, 1975, to Brooklyn Borough President Sebastian Leone, Commissioner E. C. Farber of the New York City Department of Ports and Terminals expressed concern that the action would restrict the “creative re-use” of the Empire Stores and “would hinder if not prevent revitalization of the Fulton Ferry area.”24

  In 1976, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation purchased the nine-acre parcel for $750,000 as part of a land-swap agreement with Con Edison, clearing the way for the inclusion of the Empire Stores as part of the designated property. On June 28, 1977, through the active support of the BHA, the Fulton Ferry Landing area (including the Empire Stores and Tobacco Warehouse) was officially designated as the Fulton Ferry Historic District, a status reserved for sites or structures with “an outstanding degree of historical significance,” by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The creation of the new historic district required the Landmarks Preservation Commission to review and issue permits for any future construction or renovation within the site.25

  In June 1977, restaurateur Michael “Buzzy” O’Keefe opened the River Café on a platform barge on the East River just under the Brooklyn Bridge. Despite the warnings of local business leaders and government officials that the floating restaurant was doomed to failure, the River Café soon enjoyed both commercial and critical success, winning the Parks Council Award in 1978 and the Municipal Art Society Award in 1979 and being selected for induction into the Restaurant Hall of Fame in 1980.26

  FIGURE 7

  By the mid-1970s, with the majority of container shipping having moved to Port Newark and Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Brooklyn Heights waterfront was no longer an active shipping site.

  COURTESY OF TOM FOX

  FIGURE 8

  Main Street parking lot, ca. 1998.

  COURTESY OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK CONSERVANCY

  FIGURE 9

  Main Street Park, 2008.

  © ETIENNE FROSSARD, NEW YORK, N.Y.

  The same year, the west Brooklyn waterfront also became the home of Bargemusic, a classical music hall located on a converted coffee barge moored on the East River shoreline near the Brooklyn Bridge near the River Café. Founder Olga Bloom had discovered the 102-foot barge that housed the venue harbored near the Statue of Liberty and had it towed to its present site. Like the nearby River Café, Bargemusic quickly gained a devo
ted following, drawing capacity crowds of 130 to 140 people to its Thursday evening, Friday evening, and Sunday afternoon classical-music performances.27

  In 1979, the Department of Ports and Terminals created the first public park on the abandoned west Brooklyn waterfront. The modest public space, known as Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park, was built on the site of a 4.5-acre parking lot near Fulton Street just under the Brooklyn Bridge (figure 8). The parking lot had been used by local longshoremen working on the nearby Port Authority piers, who had agreed to relocate the parking lot based on assurances by the city that a new job-creating container port would soon be created at another site along the waterfront. As mentioned, the floating restaurant known as the River Café was built on a platform barge adjacent to the landing. The Department of Ports and Terminals contributed landfills, bulkhead repairs, and landscaping for the park project.28

  As the 1980s began, the idea of a park along the piers immediately south of Fulton Ferry had not yet captured the imagination of local residents, and the public authorities in charge of the waterfront were only beginning to consider the financial benefits that could be reaped from the dispossession and commercial development of the property. However, with the decline of the piers, the acquisition of the Fulton Ferry district by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and the creation of Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park, the stage had been set for the negotiations, the controversies, and, ultimately, the achievements of the decades to follow (figure 9). Over the next few years, competing ambitions for the public use versus the commercial development of the piers would become important priorities for their respective champions, and the conflict over the appropriate use of the west Brooklyn waterfront would emerge as a major theme for both the borough of Brooklyn and the city at large.

  ONE

  WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE PIERS?

  “The waterfront is there, lying fallow as it has for so many years. It cries out for development.”

  LARRY A. SILVERSTEIN

  BY THE END OF THE 1970S, the private and public development of abandoned and underused waterfronts had become a major emphasis for city governments and urban planners across the United States. Inspired by a number of recent high-profile development projects—including Harbor Place in Baltimore, Fanueil Hall in Boston, and Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco—city governments were increasingly looking to water front conversion as a viable way to create jobs, provide housing, attract investors, and restore the visual appeal of urban areas that had been ravaged by the impact of the global recession of 1973 to 1975 on state and municipal economies nationwide.1

  From the earliest days of his tenure, Mayor Edward Koch, elected in 1977, made the transformation of New York City’s vast waterfront from traditional maritime operations to private uses a priority of his administration, devoting $4 million in capital funds to develop South Street Sea port, resuscitating stalled waterfront construction projects at Battery Park in lower Manhattan and Westway on the Hudson River, and soliciting proposals for a number of office and residential projects along the East River in Manhattan and Brooklyn.2

  Koch’s commitment to the private development of the city’s abandoned piers included the proposed reconfiguration of the bureaucracy responsible for the maintenance of the city’s waterfront. In 1980, he privately encouraged and publicly endorsed the initial efforts of Susan M. Heilbron, the Commissioner of Ports and Terminals, to dissolve the agency, which had traditionally been entrusted with construction, lease management, and security on the city’s ports and piers, and place the waterfront property under the Office of Economic Development, the powerful agency responsible for facilitating the sale and lease of public property in New York City. “Everything done by Ports and Terminals could be done more rapidly and efficiently by the Office of Economic Development or the Department of General Services [which handled land transactions],” Heilbron explained at the time, echoing Koch’s attitude toward the piers and their appropriate role in the life and economy of the city.3

  Immediately encountering serious and highly vocal opposition from local political leaders in Brooklyn (including Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden and City Council Majority Leader Thomas J. Cuite), Congressmen Leo C. Zeferetti and Frederick W. Richmond, and the International Longshoremen’s Association, Koch temporarily altered his plans for the Department of Ports and Terminals, calling instead for the modification, not the abolishment, of the agency and its responsibilities. Speaking on behalf of the administration in 1981, Deputy Mayor Robert F. Wagner maintained that the routine responsibilities of Ports and Terminals (“the maintenance tasks, including the markets, lease management and dock building”) should be consolidated and transferred to other available agencies, transforming Ports and Terminals into “a traditional water development agency.”4 Under the revised plan, Ports and Terminals would assume the responsibility of incrementally disposing of the very properties it had been created to maintain and service. Predictably, the opponents of the mayor’s plans to eliminate Ports and Terminals were equally unimpressed with his alternative proposal to convert the maritime agency into a makeshift real-estate agency, and, at least for the time being, Ports and Terminals continued in its traditional responsibilities for New York City’s waterfront.

  In addition to the opposition of local politicians in Brooklyn, congressional leaders, and the International Longshoremen’s Association, Koch’s plans for the private development of the city’s piers encountered resistance from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the independent, state-funded corporation that actually owned and controlled much of the available waterfront property along the Hudson and East Rivers and New York Harbor.

  Formed in 1921 through a joint action of the governments of New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority was created to function as an independent corporation, free from the red tape, partisanship, and potential corruption of government bureaucracies, with the states’ citizens as its sole stakeholders. In this capacity, it occasionally found itself at cross purposes with state and metropolitan officials over the most effective strategies for constructing, maintaining, and financing major bridges, tunnels, airports, and port operations in the region. Decisions regarding the dispossession of public properties represented particular points of contention between the Port Authority and state and municipal governments, for which the prospects of short-term windfalls from the sale or lease of public properties held the potential to override longer-term public interests.

  In 1982, Linda W. Searle, the newly appointed Commissioner of Ports and Terminals, the Port Authority department responsible for the oversight of waterfront and maritime properties, announced the agency’s commitment to preserving the city’s piers for traditional shipping and storage purposes. “We are helping to support and strengthen maritime in New York City,” she explained in a statement to the New York Times, “because it is still important to the city’s economic base.”5

  In the same New York Times article, the Port Authority’s executive director, Peter C. Goldmark, reaffirmed Searle’s commitment to traditional maritime uses for the city’s waterfront, describing the agency’s failure to convert the Brooklyn waterfront to containerization during the previous two decades as “the real missed opportunity.” “What was needed,” Goldmark maintained, “was not the abandonment of the waterfront, but the creative transformation of waterfront facilities to appropriate and productive maritime uses, converting existing piers to containerization wherever possible and consolidating and, if containerization was not a possibility, adapting abandoned or under-used waterfront property to address other maritime needs.”6

  In addition to its mandated responsibility for protecting the long-term interests of its citizen stakeholders, the Port Authority’s reluctance to dispose of the Brooklyn piers was fueled by recent charges by local politicians and community leaders of favoritism on its part toward the New Jersey waterfront. Since the early 1960s, when the neighboring New Jersey ports of Newark and
Elizabeth were originally equipped for containerization, the prominence of the New Jersey piers had steadily risen while the volume, work hours, efficiency, and profitability of maritime activities along the Brooklyn shoreline (which had once boasted some of the world’s most active piers) had steadily declined.

  By the early 1980s, the Newark–Elizabeth ports were known as “America’s Container Capital,”7 ranking as the world’s busiest containerization facility by the middle of the decade,8 while the majority of the Brooklyn piers were either underused or abandoned and deteriorating along the shore.

  In response to the growing disparity in volume, profitability, and job creation between the New York and New Jersey piers, the Port Authority was desperately looking for innovative ways to revitalize the once-proud Brooklyn waterfront and reverse the recent decline of the borough’s piers. By 1983, the construction of a large containerization facility was already under way at the abandoned Erie Basin Terminal in Red Hook, along with plans for a massive fish-processing center to be constructed nearby.9 Although both of these projects failed, throughout the early years of the decade, the Port Authority publicly entertained the hope that some type of profitable maritime use could still be found for all the borough’s remaining piers along the East River and that some level of equity could be reestablished between the New York and New Jersey waterfronts.