This week's episode of the Hell Gate Podcast arrives tomorrow. Make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2005, as part of his proposal to rezone Williamsburg and Greenpoint, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised neighborhood residents that in exchange for all those luxury high-rise towers, they would get a 28-acre park along the formerly industrial stretch of waterfront.
One problem with that plan? That waterfront land, from North Ninth Street up to the Bushwick Inlet, wasn't owned by the City. In the two decades since, the development of Bushwick Inlet Park has proceeded in fits and starts, thanks to costly battles with the various owners of the parcels, as well as the need to remediate the heavily polluted land. Today, less than a third of the planned park is open to the public, the rest fenced off and in various states of undevelopment and disrepair, even as the City has spent hundreds of millions to both acquire and develop the land.
Bushwick Inlet Park has been an expensive headache for every mayor since Bloomberg. In 2016, under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, the City finally was able to purchase the last parcel of park land, the CitiStorage site, from its owner, Norman Brodsky—for a whopping $160 million. Under Mayor Eric Adams, who as Brooklyn borough president had led a campout in the rain to push the City to complete the park, the only significant progress made was the demolition of the warehouse on the former CitiStorage site and work to develop a sliver of land north of the inlet, which had already begun under his predecessor.