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.
