Official website: http://www.bushwickinletpark.org/
Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park is dedicated to realizing, protecting and serving Bushwick Inlet Park.
In 2005, after months of negotiations and overriding the vote against it by Community Board 1, the City rezoned almost the entire Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront, paving the way for the development of residential towers where there had once been low-profile industrial buildings and radically increasing the potential population (and consequent impact on local infrastructure) in the neighborhood. In the 2005 Waterfront Rezoning Agreement the City explicitly provides the community with some remediation for this impact in the form of affordable housing units and park space. Ten years later, with massive development underway and tens of thousands of new residents, neither promise has been delivered.The neighborhoods have long suffered on many health fronts.
A 2006 paper stated that, “The two neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint have the highest concentration of garbage transfer stations in the city but little public access to their waterfronts. In all, Greenpoint and Williamsburg house two small power facilities, 23 waste transfer stations, a sewage treatment plant and Radiac, the city’s only radioactive waste storage facility. Greenpoint also suffers from the city’s highest asthma rates. Moreover, Brooklyn Borough has an Open Space Ratio of 1.47, lowest among the five Boroughs; while the Brooklyn Community District 1, where Williamsburg and Greenpoint reside, has an Open Space ratio of 0.63 that is much lower than the City’s (3.62) and the Borough’s average (1.47).”And yet, we find ourselves here, ten years later, with the City having “no schedule for” finishing the park.
The recent
CitiStorage fire has eliminated the ability to wait. This 11 acre property between N.10th and N.12th Streets, west of Kent is the essential core of the promised 28 acre Bushwick Inlet Park. The property can be sold for private development as of right (M31 commercial zoning) tomorrow. If it is sold and redeveloped, they lose the last possible open space on the Williamsburg waterfront. There will be an almost unbroken wall of towers from the Williamsburg Bridge to the Newtown Creek.Without this park space, the per capita open space for the fast filling community will be amongst the lowest in the entire city. That is not just a number, that is a palpable sense of claustrophobia, a health hazard and an irreversible decline in the quality of life for us and, even more tangibly, for the kids (and dogs!)The fact that the City has failed to deliver on the promises made in the 2005 Waterfront Rezoning is a slap in the face to the earnest good faith community negotiation with the City, and a threat to the health of the children.
