On Wednesday, NYC Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura and Council Member Lincoln Restler are cutting a ribbon on the new “Motiva” section of Bushwick Inlet Park, a $9.8 million stretch of restored tidal wetland with a sand beach and a kayak launch on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront. It is a real and genuinely lovely piece of public space. It is also, by the city’s own timeline, a celebration of something the public has already been using for more than a month.
The Motiva parcel opened to the public on April 30, so the June 3 ceremony is a victory lap, not a first-access moment. And the victory is small. Motiva adds a sliver, reported between 1.66 and 1.8 acres depending on the source, to a park that was supposed to run roughly 28 acres. Only three sections, 86 Kent, 50 Kent and now Motiva, are finished, more than 20 years after the 2005 Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning that promised North Brooklyn a single connected waterfront park.
Restler, to his credit, says the quiet part out loud. “A healthy majority of the site is stuck in a purgatory of uncooperative fossil fuel companies,” Restler said, per Brooklyn Paper. The two big remaining parcels are tangled in liability fights over who cleans up the contamination: National Grid and Exxon are locked in a legal battle over the old CitiStorage site, while Exxon, Chevron and the city argue over another stretch. The land that was promised as a park is, mostly, still fenced off and poisoned.
The price tag is the other part that does not fit on a ribbon. Over the long saga the city has spent about $350 million acquiring the land, including $160 million for the CitiStorage site alone. The Motiva parcel itself, once a shipbuilding site that sat vacant and fenced off since the 1960s, was bought in 2014 from the fossil fuel company Motiva, which is where the name comes from, for around $4.65 million, with the $9.8 million remediation coming on top.
So the honest version of Wednesday’s celebration is that North Brooklyn is roughly nine acres into a 28-acre promise made when today’s toddlers’ parents were in college, and the rest waits on oil companies and courts. The new beach is worth a trip. The promise is still mostly unbuilt.
The new Motiva section sits at North 15th and Franklin Streets, and its hours and amenities are on NYC Parks’ official Bushwick Inlet Park page, which is also where the agency tracks the unfinished parcels for anyone who wants to know when, or whether, the rest of the park promised in 2005 actually arrives.
Featured image: Tdorante10 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
