The next big fight over New York City’s streets is actually about its parks, and it launched in north Brooklyn. On May 30, advocates and elected officials kicked off a citywide Car-Free Parks campaign with a block party and rally at McCarren Park, demanding the city draw up a plan to push private vehicles off the roads that still cut through public green space.
To make the point, organizers closed a stretch of Driggs Avenue, the road that slices through McCarren Park, and turned it into the party. The coalition reads like a who’s who of the city’s open-streets movement, New Yorkers for Parks, North Brooklyn Open Streets, the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, Transportation Alternatives and Open Plans, backed by elected officials including Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Council Member Lincoln Restler, Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, State Senator Kristen Gonzalez and Representative Nydia Velazquez.
The pitch is simple: park roads were never meant to be commuter shortcuts, and every car moving through one is space taken from the people the park is supposed to serve. Advocates point to the earlier wins that pushed cars off the main drives in Central Park and Prospect Park as proof it can be done, and the coalition says the campaign builds on Mamdani’s recent plan to re-envision Grand Army Plaza.
Here is the catch that a block party cannot fix. The rally closed Driggs Avenue for a day, but the campaign is only asking the city to commit to a comprehensive plan, and nothing has been decided. Making any park road permanently car-free is the city’s call, not the coalition’s: it runs through the Parks Department and the Department of Transportation, the process that turns a one-day street closure into a long fight with city agencies.
So the campaign is the opening move in a long game, not the finish line. North Brooklyn has been ground zero for the open-streets fights of the last few years, and its advocates have learned how to turn a rally into political pressure, but a permanent car-free park road here means winning a citywide policy fight, not just painting a street.
If you want a car-free park road in your neighborhood, this is a campaign actively looking for residents to show up, and the groups running it, New Yorkers for Parks and the North Brooklyn coalition, are where to plug in. Their organizing pages are where to find the next rally and the specific park roads they are pushing the city to take on first.
Featured image: Jim.henderson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
