A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park

by Nancy Webster

  For leaders of the Piers Committee, these changes represented both a tremendous opportunity and a brand new set of questions and challenges. How was the Piers Committee to move beyond its role as the representative of Brooklyn Heights and accommodate the priorities and concerns of a vastly broadened constituency? What adjustments would need to be made to the committee’s membership and organizational structure? Who should assume the responsibility for leading it? And what were the most effective ways to build the support among the public, the media, and political leaders that would be required to achieve its objective of a public park on Piers 1–6?

  THREE

  THE COALITION

  “Yes, people can make a difference. It may take a very, very long time. And you have to hang in there, and you can’t give up, and you’ve got to be prepared to keep trucking. But you can make things happen.”

  MARIA FAVUZZI

  FOLLOWING THE REJECTION by Community Board 2 (CB2) of the Port Authority’s proposal for the private development of Piers 1–6 and almost unanimous endorsement of the Harbor Park concept proposed by Terry Schnadelbach, the prevailing mood among the members of the Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) Piers Committee and the community they represented had shifted from compromise to confrontation.

  In the minority, Piers Committee chair Scott Hand and vice chair Otis Pearsall struggled in vain to convince their fellow committee members that the public victory over the Port Authority and the Department of City Planning had resulted in “circumstances propitious to try to move toward a compromise deal” with the public authorities.1 Even in the unlikely event that the Port Authority and its partners in city government could somehow persuade the Board of Estimate to ignore the recent hearings and approve their plans for the piers, the humiliating defeat before the community board would inevitably undermine the confidence of potential real-estate investors and weaken the public authorities’ ability to change or bypass local zoning restrictions that limited the commercial viability of the property. Faced with the looming possibility of completely losing control of the dispossession of Piers 1–6, reasoned Hand and Pearsall, the Port Authority would have no alternative but to work with the Piers Committee and other local leaders to agree on a development plan that was both sensitive to the needs of Brooklyn Heights and the surrounding neighborhoods and profitable for the Port Authority and the city.2

  In spite of their diplomatic assessment of the situation, Hand and Pearsall quickly realized that the community’s appetite for negotiation and compromise had passed. After the Port Authority’s sudden abandonment of the Piers Committee in favor of CB2 in the final stages of the development review process and its refusal to include the community’s concerns in its proposals for Piers 1–6, a growing number of people in the BHA and the greater community no longer considered the agency to be a reliable or trustworthy partner.

  Going head to head with the public authorities was a formidable task in New York City, however, and one that would require far more than the local community’s growing enthusiasm for a public park along the Brooklyn waterfront and an increasing appetite for confrontation. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the city had gained notoriety for the frequent indifference of its leaders to the concerns of individual citizens and the exclusion of nonelected public representatives from a city-planning process that was often characterized by corruption and scandal. The popular refrain “You can’t fight city hall” reportedly originated in New York City during the seventy-year reign of Tammany Hall, the powerful political machine whose power was consolidated by the selection of William M. “Boss” Tweed as the chairman of the New York City Democratic General Committee in 1861, and exerted almost continuous control over city government until 1932.3

  On the heels of the Tammany Hall political dynasty, the three-decade tenure of Robert Moses as the city’s powerful Parks and Public Works Commissioner represented an even further decline in the capacity of individual citizens or groups of citizens to have a meaningful impact on development policy. While Moses’s unprecedented transformation of the New York landscape was informed by a genuine commitment to public service and frequently resulted in parks, parkways, and other public projects that were of undeniable benefit to its citizens, the city’s powerful planning czar practiced a top–down, nondemocratic approach to urban development, financially rewarding his supporters and punishing his enemies in business and city government, while habitually ignoring the protests and petitions of residents of the neighborhoods that were adversely affected by his massive development schemes.

  “Corruption before Moses had been unorganized,” explains Moses’s biographer Robert Caro, “based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses’s genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it a new force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire city government off the democratic bias. He had used the power of money to undermine the democratic processes of the largest city in the world, to plan and build its parks, bridges, highways and housing projects on the basis of his whims alone.”4

  WHILE THE ABILITY OF THE CITY’S RESIDENTS to influence planning decisions affecting their communities remained a long shot at best in the late 1980s, recent decades had witnessed cracks in the armor of New York City’s centralized planning and development process, and disgruntled residents were beginning to find ways to make their voices heard. A major step in the direction of citizen empowerment occurred in the spring of 1956, when Moses encountered unexpected resistance from an unlikely source: a group of Manhattan mothers who staged a public protest over his plans to build a parking lot on the site of a popular playground in Central Park.

  The controversy began on the morning of Thursday, April 9, when a young woman named Roselle Davis, who had been sitting on a bench in the southwestern corner of the park just north of the West Sixty-seventh Street entrance while her son played on the lawn in front of her, noticed a group of men with surveying equipment examining the landscape. As she was leaving the park, Davis discovered a blueprint on one of the benches where she and the other mothers usually sat and was shocked to read the heading, “Detail Map of Parking Lot.”5 Davis, the wife of the celebrated abstract painter Stuart Davis, immediately shared what she had seen with the other mothers from the neighborhood, including the wife of Richard C. Wald, a reporter for the Herald Tribune, and on the morning of Monday, April 13, the readers of the newspaper were treated to a story describing the planned demolition of the playground and the objections of the Central Park mothers and their children.6

  In the weeks that followed, the women and children of the neighborhood staged a number of high-profile protests against the proposed demolition, prompting the city to briefly delay its plans for the property. After two weeks of confusion and delay, Moses had had enough, and on April 24, he instructed the park workers under his charge to fence off and bulldoze the area between the hours of midnight and 4:00 a.m. and with a full police guard. The action backfired, however, as the following morning’s newspapers featured headlines and editorials disparaging Moses and his harsh tactics, along with heart-wrenching photographs of tearful mothers and their children.7 By the time the controversy subsided in mid-July, Moses had agreed to rebuild a playground on the site, and the Tavern on the Green was forced to make do with its existing parking lot.8

  In the years that followed, the Central Park protest would inspire a number of other protests among neighborhood groups throughout the city, including the successful effort in the late 1950s by the BHA and its newly formed Community Conservation and Improvement Council to achieve major concessions in large-scale “slum-clearance projects” that Moses had planned at Cadman Plaza at the intersection of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill and in the tiny Willowtown neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. By the mid-1960s, the movement generated by these initial protests in Brooklyn Heights had achieved major victories in historic preservation and view protection under the capable leadership of BHA members Otis Pearsall and Scott Hand.9

  The Central Park episo
de also reawakened many New Yorkers to the vital importance of public parks and open spaces in the life of the city. For citizens of all social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, the city’s parks, promenades, and playgrounds have traditionally provided a welcome—and, many would argue, indispensable—respite from the daily pressure and stress of life in the metropolis. For residents of Harlem and midtown Manhattan, Central Park exists as a vast, easily accessible oasis of open lawns, reflecting ponds, carousels, and horse-drawn carriages. For Upper West Siders, a leisurely stroll west from Broadway to Riverside Drive opens within minutes onto the flower gardens, shaded paths, and scenic Hudson River views in Riverside Park. And in the Park Slope and Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden attract thousands of visitors each day with the promise of rose gardens, skating rinks, lush lawns, and tranquil ponds.

  For New Yorkers, parks have an emotional and symbolic value that transcends the type of pragmatic, profit-oriented motivations that govern so many other aspects of life in the city. Throughout New York’s history, poets and novelists such as Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, Henry James, and J. D. Salinger have reflected on the significance of parks in defining the city’s character and revitalizing its residents. In 1967, poet Marianne Moore campaigned successfully for the preservation of a severely injured Camperdown elm near the boat basin in Prospect Park. For Moore, a lifelong New York City park enthusiast who would later work to save the horse stables in Central Park, the Camperdown elm was a living symbol of the park itself, both in its fragility and vulnerability to external destruction and in its vital, irreplaceable importance in the lives of those who enjoyed its shade and admired its beauty. “It is still leafing,” Moore observed as the end of the celebrated poem she wrote about the tree,

  still there. Mortal though. We must save it. It is our crowning curio.10

  During the 1980s, with many of the city’s public facilities and services still in decline and disrepair following the recession of the mid-1970s, neighborhood parks and open spaces served as “crowning curios” for millions of New Yorkers. For a growing number of Brooklyn residents and their neighbors, the unprecedented and unrepeatable promise of a grand public space along the waterfront elicited a similarly profound emotional response. The mothers of Central Park were facing a choice between a playground and a parking lot. The residents of Brooklyn Heights and others in the growing waterfront movement were facing a choice between a vast public park along the piers and a collection of high-rise luxury condominiums. The residents in each instance were inspired to forgo traditional pragmatic concerns and to confront seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve their goals.

  HAND AND PEARSALL, both of whom had been through lengthy and contentious negotiations with the public authorities in the past, still believed that the pragmatic interests of the Port Authority and the city and the symbolic aspirations of the community could be harmonized in the disposition of Piers 1–6, and they continued to advise their colleagues on the Piers Committee that a large waterfront park and substantial public housing could be successfully integrated in a hybrid development model like the “illustrative scheme” “Intensive Mixed-Use Development” included in Buckhurst Fish Hutton Katz’s report, The Future of the Piers: Planning and Design Criteria for Brooklyn Piers 1–6 (figures 11 and 12).

  If the residents of Brooklyn Heights and the surrounding waterfront neighborhoods wanted a pure park on Piers 1–6, Hand and Pearsall conceded, then the Piers Committee should redirect its efforts and resources toward that goal. On their departure from the park movement, the two men reiterated their advice to Anthony Manheim, John Watts, and the other “pure park” advocates that achieving this goal would require a complete overhaul of the composition, leadership, and structure of the Piers Committee.

  One problem was the identification of the committee with the BHA and the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. In the past two years, the Port Authority had repeatedly emphasized the Brooklyn Heights connection to discredit the Piers Committee as representing only the needs and priorities of a single community at the expense of the broader public interest. In the CB2 hearings, leaders from other waterfront neighborhoods, such as former Cobble Hill Association president Roy Sloane, had openly questioned the wisdom of the committee’s continuing sponsorship by the BHA. If, as its members consistently maintained, the Piers Committee truly represented the interests and aspirations of all the communities that would be affected by the proposed development, then it should sever its formal ties with the BHA and open both its membership and its leadership to a broader base of citizens in and beyond Brooklyn.11

  FIGURE 11

  Commissioned by the Brooklyn Heights Association in 1987, Buckhurst Fish Hutton Katz’s The Future of the Piers  envisioned four different plans for Piers 1–6. Scheme B, “Major Public Park,” envisioned forty acres of park, a small marina, playing fields, and restaurants.

  COURTESY OF BUCKHURST FISH HUTTON KATZ

  FIGURE 12

  Scheme D, “Intensive Mixed-Use Development,” envisioned twenty acres of park; a hotel and conference center; 50,000 square feet of office space; 40,000 square feet of retail space; and 750 residential units.

  COURTESY OF BUCKHURST FISH HUTTON KATZ

  Informing Manheim that they would no longer be continuing in their role as leaders in the Piers Committee, Hand and Pearsall recommended that the new committee should have three co-chairs, each one representing a different constituency for the Brooklyn waterfront movement.12

  As the Port Authority’s initial contact regarding its plans for Piers 1–6 and the founder of the Piers Committee (and its earlier incarnation, the Waterfront Committee), Manheim was the obvious choice to represent Brooklyn Heights in the new organization.

  To represent the other Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods outside Brooklyn Heights, Pearsall nominated Cobble Hill resident Maria Favuzzi, with whom he had served on the CB2 Piers Subcommittee. A lifelong Brooklyn resident, Favuzzi had been an active voice in the Cobble Hill community since the late 1970s, as a member of both the Cobble Hill Association and Community Board 6 (which included the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, Park Slope, and Gowanus), where she served on the Waterfront and Economic Development Committee. In addition to her connections with Brooklyn communities outside Brooklyn Heights and her knowledge of issues relating to economic development and the waterfront, Favuzzi had also proven herself as a determined, imperturbable advocate of the causes she supported—and as someone who was not easily intimidated by public authorities.

  “I’m the daughter of Italian immigrants,” explains Favuzzi of her lifelong enthusiasm for civic activism and public debate, “and I grew up hearing every so often the phrase, ‘You can’t fight city hall.’ That was the immigrant outlook: ‘You can’t fight city hall.’ Well, somehow that became a challenge to me. And as I became an adult, I began to question more and more, ‘Well, why can’t you fight city hall?’ And I think that may summarize or characterize my view that, ‘Yes, people can make a difference.’ It may take a very, very long time. And you have to hang in there, and you can’t give up, and you’ve got to be prepared to keep trucking. But you can make things happen.”13

  During the subcommittee hearings, Favuzzi had been frustrated by the commercial-development plan put forward by the Port Authority and increasingly committed to the plans for the Harbor Park proposed by the BHA Piers Committee (figure 13). She eagerly accepted Hand and Pearsall’s invitation to serve as a co-chair of the new waterfront organization.

  FIGURE 13

  Praedium’s Economic Viability Study  (1997) of Terry Schnadelbach’s “Harbor Park” (1988) called for 1 million square feet of commercial development (32 percent of the Piers Sector), plus a 300-boat marina and 1,500 parking spaces to provide $4 million in revenue to support the forty-eight-acre park’s projected $3.4 million maintenance budget.

  COURTESY OF R. TERRY SCHNADELBACH, FAAR

  “It was inspirin
g to think of that as being open to the public,” she recalls of her early attraction to the Harbor Park concept. “We New Yorkers lived at a time when you didn’t have access to the waterfront, when the waterfront was virtually walled off from us. This was an incredible opportunity, and people could see that the proposal that the piers be used as a housing property was just so insipid. We saw the potential for something grand, whereas we were being offered something small and uninspiring.”14

  The final co-chair in the new organization was Manhattan resident Tom Fox, the executive director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition and the driving force behind the public’s successful resistance to the Westway development project along the banks of the Hudson River in Manhattan. During the CB2 Piers Subcommittee hearings, Fox had served on the Advisory Committee to the BHA Piers Committee and had testified before the subcommittee regarding the public benefits of having a park on the west Brooklyn waterfront. As leader of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, Fox worked with 123 organizations representing a broad and diverse constituency, from the blue-blooded Municipal Art Society of New York to the insurgent Green Guerillas, for which he had served as vice president. He also had the advantage of being a non-Brooklynite, providing the new organization with an invaluable link to the rest of New York City. “I saw my role in this whole thing as the broker, who didn’t represent Cobble Hill or Brooklyn Heights,” Fox remembers. “I represented that overall idea of the expanding park system, of capturing the waterfront as a place that would be useful to all of these other people because there would be recreational facilities and marinas and open places to relax and skip and hop and jump and look at the stars and the birds.”15

  A Vietnam War veteran and former National Park ranger who had spent his childhood in Brooklyn, Fox was a seasoned and savvy environmental activist who understood the necessity of combining confrontation and compromise in influencing public policy and urban planning: “There are times when you have to be willing to say: ‘This just isn’t going to work,’ ” he explains. “ ‘We’re going to make you look like fools, and we’re going to be proud of it.’ But then you also have to learn to speak in the language of the elected officials, the unions and the real-estate developers. Finding a way to show your adversaries the value in the work is a critical part of any kind of successful advocacy movement. You can’t just say, ‘You can’t do it because I want something else.’ You have to say, ‘You know that other thing that I want to do is really in your interest.’ ”16