The city cut a ribbon on June 3 for the newest piece of Bushwick Inlet Park: the “Motiva” parcel, a small slice of restored shoreline on the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront with a sandy beach, a kayak launch, and tidal wetlands on the long-vacant Motiva parcel, a former shipbuilding site. It is genuinely lovely, and if you live in North Brooklyn you should go. It is also a parcel that quietly opened to the public on April 30, more than a month before anyone showed up with scissors, and it brings the park to exactly half-built, 21 years after the city promised the whole thing.
The Motiva parcel is a roughly 1.7-acre addition built out of a $9.8 million remediation and reconstruction project, NYC Parks said when it announced the June 3 opening. There is a waterfront esplanade with seating, an accessible “get-down” that steps you onto the sand, a launch where you can put a kayak straight into the inlet, native plantings for shade and habitat, an osprey stand built as a perch for the raptors, and mounted accessible binoculars so you can scan for them. There are also 16 oyster cages seeded in the inlet and grassy flood-control berms, per Brownstoner. NYC Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura, who joined Council Member Lincoln Restler and neighbors at the opening, called it a place “to take in the majesty of the Manhattan skyline while enjoying the serenity of a thriving green waterfront.”
Before the city owned it, this ground belonged to Motiva Enterprises, an oil-refining company, and the city bought the parcel in 2014, then spent more than a decade cleaning and rebuilding it before a single kayak could touch the water. It is the pattern across this whole shoreline: the East River edge of Greenpoint and Williamsburg spent more than a century as a shipbuilding and industrial zone, the marshes filled in to push the land outward, and turning it back into something you can walk barefoot on costs years and millions per acre.
Bushwick Inlet Park was the deal. When the Bloomberg administration rezoned the North Brooklyn waterfront in 2005 and opened it to the wall of apartment towers you now see from the J train, the roughly 28-acre park was the centerpiece sweetener it promised the neighborhood in return. Gothamist put the trade plainly this January: the area “has produced more housing than any other over the past 15 years, while they are still waiting for a park promised two decades ago.” The towers came fast. The park did not.
It came down to money. Bloomberg estimated it would cost between $60 million and $90 million to acquire all the land, Gothamist reported. By June 2015 the city had spent $225 million for nine acres, and in March 2016 it paid another $53 million for the seven-acre former Bayside Fuel Oil Depot. Then in late 2016 it closed the biggest one: a $160 million deal for the CitiStorage site, the last piece, per Crain’s, after one of the warehouses there burned in a seven-alarm fire in 2015. The city blew through its own high-end estimate by multiples just to buy the land, before spending more to make any of it usable.
With this opening, the city has finished three of the park’s six parcels: 86 Kent, 50 Kent, and now Motiva. The three that remain, the Bayside site and the CitiStorage North and South sites, all sit to the south and all still need work before the park hits its roughly 28-acre full size. Half done, two decades in.
Restler, who represents the district, did not pretend otherwise on opening day. “A healthy majority of the site is stuck in a purgatory of uncooperative fossil fuel companies,” he told Brooklyn Paper, saying he is “more focused than ever on trying to get the rest of this park on a pathway toward remediation, design and construction.” The same toxic-cleanup math that made Motiva take 12 years from purchase to beach is still holding the other half. The parks department built a nice beach. The holdup is the contaminated industrial land and the slow, expensive job of cleaning it, on a promise now old enough to vote.
None of that should stop you from using what your tax dollars finally bought. The beach, the kayak launch, and the osprey binoculars are open now at the north end of the park off Quay Street. If you want the other half of what was promised in 2005 to move faster than 11 years a parcel, Restler is the official whose office is pushing the remediation timeline, and the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park have run the “Where’s Our Park” campaign on exactly this question for years. The park you can already walk is the easy part. The half still stuck in “purgatory” is the part that needs the calls.
Featured image: Tdorante10 / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
