A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park

by Nancy Webster

  The newsletter’s summer issue provided readers with an extensive list of reasons for opposing the Two Trees plan (overwhelming size, lack of open space and unique views, traffic congestion, incompatibility with other plans for the waterfront, absence of community participation, and inappropriateness of privately developing public land), along with VanderPutten’s arresting images of the view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the west Brooklyn shoreline before and after the implementation of Two Trees Management’s expansive commercial development.22

  In addition to its advocacy for the inclusion of the inter-bridge area in the overall park design, the Coalition used its recently acquired financial resources to hire Ray Gindroz of the Pittsburgh-based urban-design firm Urban Design Associates to propose a park design for the area between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. When the LDC’s mandate eventually expanded to include the inter-bridge area, Gindroz continued to work on the project, leading workshops in public meetings and providing invaluable guidance for the landscaping, use, funding, and public access to the park.23

  Throughout the summer, Whelan and the Coalition were also in full swing promoting the organization’s new message. On June 1, 1999, Whelan and Coalition chair John Watts sent a letter to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, expressing their concern over the Two Trees plan for the inter-bridge property and their competing vision of a grand public park along the west Brooklyn waterfront. “Brooklyn Bridge Park,” the letter explained, “will be the first great new park in the United States in the new millennium. It will be the first destination for Brooklynites, New Yorkers, Americans, and tourists from other countries. It will bring people together in a peaceful and unique waterfront environment to enjoy each other, the open space and world-class views. It is an idea whose time has come—but it needs your help and support.”24

  The letter, which was published in full in the Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News, was cosigned by all the neighborhood associations on or adjacent to the property, as well as an impressive roster of city, state, and national organizations (including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, the Parks Council, the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, and Riverkeeper Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.).

  “Not only did we still exist,” says Gary VanderPutten of the immediate impact of the Coalition’s initial media blitz against David Walentas’s plan, “we still existed with some pretty remarkable talent. People had to pay attention to us. Politicians were paying attention to us.”25

  Local elected officials were eager to support the Coalition’s campaign against the proposed Two Trees development. City Council member Ken Fisher, while clarifying that he was not automatically against any form of commercial development on the property, expressed concerns that the Two Trees proposal was “too much, too soon” and that the large-scale development plan “would overwhelm the neighborhood” if implemented in its present form. Assemblywoman Joan Millman echoed Fisher’s concerns about the scale and design of the Two Trees plan, assuring her constituents that “extensive public review” would be required before the project would be allowed to move forward.26

  In addition to bringing on board elected officials and the media, the Coalition’s high-profile campaign for a park on the inter-bridge property gained the attention—and the ire—of David Walentas, whose ambitions for the inter-bridge area had been repeatedly frustrated by the protests and counterproposals of activists from Brooklyn Heights. Without mentioning Whelan or the Coalition by name, Walentas fired back at the organization in an interview with the New York Times published on April 11, 1999. The individuals currently opposing his development plans for the inter-bridge area, complained Walentas, were “outsiders” and not residents of Dumbo, who were determined to maintain the state park as a “vacant lot” for their own private use, even if it meant an economic loss to the Dumbo community. “We own the whole neighborhood,” Walentas insisted. “Everyone else is from a different neighborhood.”27

  A MORE DIRECT PUBLIC SHOWDOWN with Walentas occurred the following month, when the Dumbo developer announced his decision to hire Jean Nouvel, a celebrated French architect known for his highly modern, technologically innovative designs (including the Arab World Institute, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, and the Galeries Lafayette department store in Berlin) to provide an integrated design for the new commercial development on the property between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

  In a series of interviews and op-ed pieces in the New York Times and the local Brooklyn press, Whelan and Koval provided readers with a multipronged critique of Two Trees Management’s development plan, questioning the appropriateness of both the selection of Nouvel for the project and the private development of what was rightfully public land, while reminding readers of the role that the inter-bridge property could play as part of a vast waterfront park extending from the inter-bridge area to the southern border of Pier 5.

  “The biggest problem is that it completely eviscerates the plan for Brooklyn Bridge Park,” explained Whelan to a reporter from the New York Times,28 before finally providing a dramatic summary of the Coalition’s position in an op-ed piece the following day: “Hiring a famous architect diverts attention from the real issue. That issue is not who designs this commercial complex. The issue is whether a regional shopping and entertainment complex, with large-scale parking garages, should be built on this publicly owned land—the site of what could be a spectacular waterfront park.”29

  The public dispute with Walentas continued throughout the summer of 1999, with no sign of a compromise or resolution when, suddenly and with no public explanation, the administrations of both Rudolph Giuliani and George Pataki turned their backs on the Two Trees plan. “We were just roaring along,” remembers Gary VanderPutten, “and then all of a sudden, the state and the city withdrew their support from Walentas and his proposed development of the inter-bridge sector. Boom! No one knows completely why that happened.”30

  The city’s sudden rejection of Two Trees Management’s plan may have been the indirect result of the Giuliani administration’s desire to correct a perceived imbalance between the state and the city in the control of the future Brooklyn Bridge Park. “There had been grumblings on the part of the city since the formation of the LDC with funding by the state,” recalls Joshua Laird, who was working as director of planning at the Department of Parks and Recreation at the time. “Toward the end of the Giuliani administration, we began to have discussions of what the city might do to become a major player in the park. That’s when we came up with the idea of the city taking its property at the foot of Main Street under the Brooklyn Bridge, where we already had real estate that we could control, and creating parkland there. By creating something there, we were actually able to get the jump on the state [in the competition to build the park].”31

  THE END OF 1999 was a period of loss as well as triumph for the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition. In October, Tensie Whelan announced publicly that she would be resigning her half-time position as executive director of the Coalition at the end of the year to become the executive director of the Rainforest Alliance, with Deputy Director Marianna Koval assuming the leadership of the organization. Whelan had privately informed Coalition chair John Watts and other board members of her plans several months earlier. “Tensie has played an effective advocacy role in the inter-bridge area of the park,” said Watts when the decision was announced publicly, “expanded the Coalition’s membership to sixty organizations, recruited a board and advisory committee of park and civic leaders who will advocate for the park, and raised substantial funds to implement our programs.”32

  Concurrent with the notification of Whelan’s departure, Watts announced that environmental attorney Albert Butzel had been elected president of the Coalition at the board meeting on October 12. As chair of the Hudson River Park Alliance, Butzel had recently led the effort to jump start the stalled construction plans for Hudson River Park in Manhattan and had been responsible for draft
ing the Environmental Impact Statement for the Forty-second Street Development Project.

  “Tensie actually left the position in August 1999,” explains Koval of the decision to bring Butzel on board, “and she asked me if I wanted to be executive director. I was really nervous and didn’t think that I had the political skills to do it, so I suggested that Al Butzel come on as president and then I would be executive director. Al was already on our board, and he was a very smart land-use lawyer who had worked very hard helping to draft the legislation for Hudson River Park. He understood the legal aspects of creating a self-sustaining park and the importance of making sure that all the land that was supposed to remain parkland be actually titled and transferred to the Parks Department in perpetuity.”33

  “By the end of 1998, we [in the Hudson River Park movement] had gotten the city and the state to commit a couple of hundred million dollars to Hudson River Park and had also enacted legislation to create a public trust to manage the park,” recalls Butzel. “I wanted to be the head of the public trust but was not successful, so I was sitting around continuing to do advocacy on behalf of the park, when [Coalition board members] David Offensend and John Watts invited me to lunch and explained that they’d like me to join the Coalition as its president. They said, ‘You’ll be the president and will handle all the political and financial stuff, and Marianna will be the executive director and do all the community organizing and public events.’ It was one of those times when opportunity and need crossed paths, and I said I’d be happy to do it.”34

  TENSION BETWEEN THE COALITION and the LDC was perhaps inevitable, given the two groups’ conflicting governance structures and organizational mandates, along with the fact that they were competing with each other to establish their legitimacy as the leader in the planning process. The conflicts between them were also exacerbated by negative public and private statements by representatives of each organization about its counterpart in the park movement.

  Since the creation of the LDC in 1997, Coalition members had repeatedly questioned the LDC’s legitimacy on the grounds that the exclusion of the inter-bridge area from its mandate violated Guiding Principle 1.c (which stipulated that “the Plan shall encompass the waterfront area between Manhattan Bridge and Atlantic Avenue including Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park, the Brooklyn Bridge area and the upland of Pier 6”). The Coalition also maintained that the LDC’s limited governance structure violated Guiding Principle 2 (which stated that the Coalition would be involved in the review process for the development of the piers).35

  Still struggling to rally both the local community and the public authorities in charge of the piers behind the planning process for the park, newly elected LDC president Joanne Witty and the other members of the LDC board bristled at the Coalition’s public questioning of the newly formed organization’s authority and legitimacy.

  Witty (who had worked as an attorney for both the city and state governments, as well as with the League of Conservation Voters) was appointed to the LDC board by State Senator Martin Connor, whom she knew from Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, where both had children attending classes. “Marty wanted to appoint someone from the community who had the credentials,” she recalls, “but who was neutral [on the subject of the park].”36

  Connor explained to Witty that the formation of the LDC was “a last-ditch effort to work with the Port Authority to get something done with the piers.” Connor, Howard Golden, and the other elected officials who had formed the LDC had persuaded the Port Authority to postpone its latest plan to distribute a Request for Proposals (RFP) to potential commercial developers for the piers in favor of a Request for Expression of Interest (RFEI), which would allow the agency to take the pulse of the development community without actually committing any of the property for development.

  The LDC’s ultimate goal, as Connor described it to Witty, was to persuade the Port Authority to open the development process to the construction of a public park on the property conforming to the “13 Guiding Principles.” The more immediate and urgent task, however, was to work with the agency to ensure that the current RFEI and the plans for development that it generated did “as little damage” as possible to the local community and its interests.

  As to how the newly formed LDC was to reach an agreement with the Port Authority, when all past attempts had failed, Witty and her fourteen fellow board members were left to their own devices. “We were starting at ground zero,” she explains, “with no rules or directions as to how we were supposed to do this.” In this context, Witty and her fellow board members naturally viewed the Coalition’s recent challenges to the LDC’s legitimacy as a serious threat to its already fragile relationship with the Port Authority and its ability to ensure the development of a park on the piers. “It seemed at the time,” recalls Witty, “that their [the Coalition’s] allegiance was to the Coalition—and nothing else.”37

  ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE CONFLICT, Whelan and the other Coalition board members were understandably sensitive to public and private statements by Witty that the Coalition “was desperate to reinvent itself” and had “taken the park as far as it could,” as well as the LDC president’s criticism of the Coalition’s advocacy on behalf of the inter-bridge area. “The Coalition has been very successful,” Witty acknowledged before questioning the necessity of the organization’s existence now that the LDC had been formed. “They kept the idea of the park alive, but the LDC can take it to the next level.”38

  “We were told [by the LDC], ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ ” Koval recalls of the Coalition’s early conflicts with the LDC over planning for the inter-bridge area. “ ‘We already have a deal to develop the piers. Go away. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”39

  Witty also questioned the Coalition’s call for the inclusion of the inter-bridge area in the park plan, which she warned could inadvertently result in disagreements among community residents, weakening the public consensus for a park along the piers, alienating officials at the Port Authority, and causing further delays in (if not the complete disruption of) the development process.40

  THE CONFLICTS AND CONTROVERSIES faced by newly elected LDC president Joanne Witty were not limited to an occasional run-in with the Coalition. With a membership that included representatives of Community Boards 2 and 6, the Brooklyn business community, and each of the neighborhood associations, the LDC was faced with the daunting task of developing a consensual plan for the park through a process that included groups with differing, at times competing, interests and priorities for the proposed park. “The biggest challenge,” recalls Witty of her early days at the LDC, “was to figure out how you pull together many, many disparate community groups who didn’t want development here but wanted a park, but what that meant to everybody was very different.

  “There were fifteen of us [on the LDC board],” she continues. “We didn’t know each other. We weren’t sure what it was we were supposed to do. There were some of us who clearly didn’t want to be there at all. We met regularly in a small conference room at Borough Hall, and we talked and talked and talked. Everybody raised their fears about all the ways that this could go wrong and how we could be manipulated by the Port Authority, which in the end could just go off and do its own thing. The question was: How could we operate in this space in a constructive way that would be acceptable to the Port Authority and would also be true to the community’s goals for the park?”41

  “There are a few things I’m known for arguing for,” remembers original LDC board member Franklin Stone of the organization’s early discussions about the park. “One is for year-round uses for the park, because I didn’t want it to be desolate in the winter months. Two, I wanted a place to have a drink on the waterfront, because there was no place for us to have drinks. And three, I wanted a place that we wouldn’t be snaking our way up to [the recreational complex at] Chelsea Piers. I wanted something that would let our kids play right here.”42

  One of the Witty’
s first and most important decisions was to hire the Manhattan consulting firm Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Alschuler (HR&A) to assist the LDC with the planning, political, real-estate, and economic-development skills needed to negotiate with the Port Authority and oversee the planning of the park. In the months and years that followed, Witty would work closely with HR&A chairman John Alschuler and team members Josh Sirefman and Candace Damon on every aspect of the planning and negotiations for the park.

  “Essentially, the LDC at that point was an organization without a staff, and we became the staff,” remembers Sirefman. “There were three people who were most involved in the project from HR&A: John Alschuler, Candace Damon, and myself. At that time I was relatively junior, so I literally became the staff of the LDC, managing outreach, relationships with the board, and keeping them organized, doing the financial analysis for the park.

  “Since then I’ve been involved in many, many projects of scale that have included all kinds of public outreach,” says Sirefman, “but my work with the LDC remains the most extraordinary public process I’ve ever been a part of. There were fifteen people on the board, and they literally had fifteen different opinions. It wasn’t like you’d go out and interact with the world and then decide if you’re going to listen or not listen. It was like the debate with the world just continued within the board itself. That really gave the process a dimension that I don’t think you see very often.”43

  IN THE MIDST OF THE ONGOING CONFLICTS within Brooklyn Heights and the adjacent communities, as well as within the LDC itself, the official planning and negotiations for the park continued to progress behind the scenes. In spite of her initial worries about the capacity of the LDC to negotiate effectively with the public authorities, Witty and her partners at HR&A were eventually able, with the assistance and support of Lillian C. Borrone, director of the Port Commerce Department at the Port Authority, to reach a “standstill agreement” with the agency in charge of the piers. As a result of the negotiations, the Port Authority agreed to suspend the disposition process for three years while the LDC worked on a Master Plan for the creation of a public park on the site. The Master Plan, if approved by the Port Authority, would then be used to guide a renewed RFP process that would devote as much of the property as possible for development as public parkland.