This is a project that starts with industrial obsolescence. The shipping container was invented in the 1950s, and by the 1980s it was clear that all of the shipping in the world would switch over to containers. The piers of Brooklyn Bridge Park had been built right after the war, in the early ’50s. They were brand new and unusual in their size, because the logic of the shipping container informed the making of them. These huge piers were really warehouses. That’s why we had those giant 5-acre piers. In the early 1980s, the Port Authority announced that it was abandoning the piers, and a proposal immediately was floated to put thousands of apartment buildings down there. Brooklyn Heights became alarmed.

It’s a little sweeter than that initially. There was a small group of people in the 1980s who started to say, “What about a park down there?” They commissioned some simple—but very important—early plans, and momentum began to grow. Then people got organized in the 1990s and raised money for an economic plan to prove that the park was not only doable, but defensible from a financial perspective. That’s when we got involved.

It was a public private partnership, a so-called LDC, an entity that was able to raise funds and hire people to do an economic master plan, which was done by a New York firm headed by John Alschuler, at the time called HR&A. The urban designers involved hired us, so we were really the caboose on this train.

1999. It was a two-year economic master plan, and the economics of what they were trying to prove was interesting. So, unique for New York City and New York State at the time, there was a Republican mayor [Guiliani] and a Republican governor [Pataki], and they somehow got together and agreed that there should be a park. The city and state would both contribute, but the park couldn’t draw any future money from the city or state for its maintenance. So the economic master plan said, Okay, we’ll create a project where at the margins of the park, housing and other income generating entities will be created, and the taxes that those people would pay to the city and state will be directed to a fund the park corporation, which is responsible for maintenance, upkeep, and capital improvements when necessary. A year later, there was another search process for park designers, and we went through a public selection process and prevailed as the designers in 2002. 

Hell, no. I’m one of half a dozen people in my firm; Matt Urbanski, Paul Seck, Gullivar Shepard, and others worked on this as long and as hard as I did. I don’t remember anybody saying, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!” Nobody really gets hired in 1999 and gets to work on a park until 2022. You usually fall out with somebody, or administrations change. Olmsted was fired and rehired three times in Central Park. But we kept our noses clean and our relationships good, and we did the whole thing. And you’re right. It’s a century-defining park for New York City and a life-defining park for those of us in my firm. You’re lucky to have one of those just once in your life.

I live nearby. When I’m home, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t find my way down there.

The challenges came in waves. I’ll tell you what wasn’t a challenge; we worked for one miraculous park president after another: Wendy Leventer, Regina Myer, and now Eric Landau. In the beginning, we were also lucky to have Adrian Benepe as parks commissioner in the early 2000s. And the extra good luck of Bloomberg, who goes down in history as the Parks Mayor. Look at all the parks he created in his 12 years in office.

Absolutely. Please run for mayor again, Mr. Bloomberg! As for challenges … well, in the beginning there was a lot of opposition.

You pretty much summed it in one sentence. Many people liked the isolated nature of the neighborhood. Look, lots of people in the heights wanted the park. But lots didn’t. So we had the opposition in general, then we had people who could not fucking wrap themselves around the quid pro quo of the housing and the hotel, and what you got back from that. That to me was just one of the stupidest moments imaginable. 

In a perfect magical world it would be different. But that was the same time by the way that lots of people thought George W. Bush wasn’t a good president either. And we’d all love to have him back right now. [laughs] Maybe not …

So, yes, there was opposition to the economic planning, but it went away. And then the challenge became building a park on the water’s edge. The capacity of the East River can be a difficult edge, with the way the water is there. Because it’s not really a river.

Exactly. That was hard.

I have been building parks nonstop since 1989. We’ve done parks in cities all across America now. Public engagement is such a critical foundation for a park’s success. Not just getting people informed and excited, but understanding how people react to preliminary ideas. I would say in Brooklyn Bridge Park, we probably had somewhere between 200 and 250 meetings across the 22-plus years that we worked on it. 

Well, you know, the question you asked a couple minutes ago about did we know that this was gonna be a legacy project? We moved to Brooklyn because our lease was up, and there was a tax incentive to leave Manhattan and go to Brooklyn. We didn’t miss that we were looking at an office that was a 12-minute walk down to the park. But I don’t think we understood how easy it would be during construction to be down there, making refinements. And we’re still involved on an unofficial basis. The horticulture people will call us and say, “We’re about to do this. Can one of you guys shoot down here and react to it?” They don’t pay us to do that. The pay is the respect and the honor of being able to have a voice in the evolution of the park. And if a park is anything, it’s something that’s constantly changing. It has growing plants and is very dynamic.

At the time, what it meant to me, what I thought she was saying was, “Well, you’re going to want to do a bunch of things and people are gonna want something else, and you’re just going to have to do it in a way that pleases you in the end.” Today, what that has grown to mean, across the arc of designing parks for a long time, is a simple truth: a park maker has anticipate that she or he is turning this park over to someone else. There’s a point in time when you’re done, and it belongs to the public and to the people that are taking care of it. If the analogy is a sailboat maker, then the sailboat maker had better make a boat. And they better make something that people can easily take care of. You have to think ahead about all the things that you can possibly think of—everything that’s going to require change or be a surprise. The design had better be set up in a way that those changes can happen, and that they can happen in a multivalent collection of ways through the intelligence and eyes of the people who are charged with taking care of it.

We learned that everybody can be accommodated. We learned that nobody should be excluded. Teenage boys need to feel like there’s a place in the park for them. You need quiet areas with ecologies that support bird habitats. You need challenging play so that not just little guys have things to do, but there are places where kids that are pushing up to the preteen years have things that they want to do. You don’t need fancy to make people happy. In fact, maybe you need it not to be fancy, to make it feel appealing. It needs to feel everyday. A kid drops an ice cream cone on a blacktop sidewalk, somebody sweeps it up, dumps a pail of water on it, and it’s over and done with. It also needs to be accommodating to people with mobility limitations and great for running. In Brooklyn, we tried to avoid branding the park with furniture. We chose furniture that was nice looking and functional, and, by the way, can survive tidal inundation, like what happened in Superstorm Sandy, when the park had five feet of saltwater in all of the non-elevated areas. Everyday is a friendly component of a democratic park. It’s like casual Friday, people look a particular way when they’re dressed in a relaxed way, and the park should have a similar kind of look about it.  

We call it “water in/water out,” which is what you have to design for. We had learned quite a bit about tidal surge and salt water intrusion in designing a part of Hudson River Park above Chelsea Piers. We had to take a lot of precautions there. About plant materials: we tried to put every root ball above the 100-year storm event.

Sandy was quite a bit more than a hundred year event. But we had already gone around the city and looked at parks that we knew had inundated with saltwater and looked at the choices made about species. We designed benches that could withstand floating debris. We took a lot of precautions at Brooklyn Bridge Park. And then we had the good fortune of an amazing director of horticulture who got her crew in the next day, and they got to work putting freshwater washes on the root balls of the young trees. And we lost 2% or 3% of the trees from that event due to the saltwater.

It was amazing. My wife and I were standing on the promenade the day of the storm, watching it come in, and when the water started flowing over Piers 2 and 3, they disappeared in front of me, I said to her, “Let’s go inside now and come out when this is over and see what’s happened.” Because you know how it is in life. You make plans for catastrophic events, and then if you were careful and successful and a little bit lucky, your plans actually turn out to work. It was pretty much all there the next day.

There has been significant engagement, but we’re learning how to better involve many different communities to represent the diversity of New Orleans. Our strategies have evolved since our first series of public meetings, which is not unusual for any engagement effort. There have been some learning moments for us, and we are using the summer to keep people more involved in the decision-making process. The people that run that park are insanely committed to the public process and to the people that it’s for.

They are not moving the fields. It’s one of those things I can’t really give you a full answer on because I am not as involved in the day-to-day. Two of my other partners are running the project, and over the past few months have established a good working relationship with Grow Dat and other park partners to figure out what’s best for the master plan.

My grandkids will tell me I’m not supposed to say this, but I’ll tell you what goes through my mind: “Oh, my God. Look at how diverse the people using this park are!” This is truly a cross-section of Brooklyn, with its 80 languages spoken in public schools. I’m telling you, man, I’m tearing up telling you this. I burst with pride when I go to Brooklyn Bridge Park and see who’s there. 

We had amazing photographers. Early on, we knew we had to get people down there and photograph those piers because when they’re gone, nobody is going to remember what they were like. And now, 20 years later, we’re like, “[W]e should dig out those photographs and shoot these before-and-after photographs from the same position.” And what’s crazy about them is you kind of do a double-take and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, this really is the same view. It’s just unbelievably changed.”

Featured image: Photo by Etienne Frossard.