Gotham Park

Brooklyn has Brooklyn Bridge Park. Why shouldn't the Manhattan side of the famous span have a park too? Now it does. As planned, on completion Gotham Park will be "nine acres of joy, discovery and wonder." Quite a claim.

But Gotham Park is a strange beast. Hiding under the bridge's ramps and not really connected to any particular neighborhood (unless you count the great gated compound of 1 Police Plaza as a neighborhood – technically this is Chinatown, I guess, but you wouldn't know it), the new park is not a creature of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation.

Instead, it's the brainchild of the New York Department of Transportation, Trinity Church, two Community Boards, and a nonprofit, with support from the mayor's office.

At the inland end there's an enclave for passive recreation. This is all part of what was once, and can now be again, known as The Arches.

Crossing to the area jutting towards the East River, you find a long banked wall perfect for skateboarders, and a fairly wide brick plaza adjoining the arches themselves. Those arches, according to the master plan, will house additional facilities for the community, including a library branch and a museum.

The facilities available now include basketball, pickleball, and, for some reason, shuffleboard.

Sometimes a bit of whimsical art is just what you need, especially right beside a great big police headquarters.

I've been to well over 300 parks in the course of writing this blog, and this is certainly one of the weirder ones. Unusual location. Unusual layout (determined by the unusual location). Interesting choice of facilities. And an unusual genesis. It's an oddball all right.

A park from an alternate universe?

Still, any place that gets skaters off the sidewalks is all right by me! Welcome back, Brooklyn Bridge Banks.

Also always welcome: touches of whimsy.

All photos © Oren Hope

Brooklyn Bridge Park South

So much has been added to Brooklyn Bridge Park over the past few years that a fresh visit reveals a whole new park – or really a string of small parks.

For a good view of them from above, see my recent post about the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. For a snapshot of Brooklyn Bridge Park's older, northern section four years ago, take a look back in time. To delve inside the newer stretches, read on.

The park now encompasses Pier 6, Pier 5, Pier 2, and various tracts between. Pier 6 is also where Brooklynites can catch the Governors Island Ferry.

Parts of the park have been landscaped with so much greenery you could forget you're in the city – if not for the waterside and skyline views.

There's a lot for children and families here, and not one, not two, but three soccer fields on Pier 5.

But there's also plenty of green grass and peaceful spots for quieter adult pleasures. And lots more room to breathe than in the DUMBO section of the park, not mention at places like Coney Island.

For good measure, we headed to the northern section to see the park's newest art feature, Anish Kapoor's Descension whirlpool, at Pier 1, where it will remain until 10 September 2017.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Brooklyn Heights Promenade

In all the years I lived in Brooklyn, I never took a walk on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I can't explain why – maybe I'd seen it in enough movies and TV shows (Annie Hall, Moonstruck, Billions).

I also never realized it counted as a park. But the maple leaf logo on the sign at the northern entrance says it does. And you don't argue with the maple leaf.

This will be just a snippet of a post. I hadn't included the promenade in my planned Brooklyn Heights walk, so I'll have to revisit and walk the whole length. For now, here's a representative sample.

To the left in the photo above: a strip of horticulture (the park proper) and a bit of the classy architecture of the neighborhood.

In the center: people enjoying a warm spring day on the promenade itself, atop the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Opened in 1950, the esplanade was built above the highway to shield the neighborhood from the traffic noise. It does a pretty good job. Technically the walkway is owned by the Department of Transportation, but the Parks Department maintains it.

And to the right: the mouth of the East River.

More than anything else, it's the views that draw people here. The Parks Department website reproduces the text of a historic sign which begins, "'There may be finer views than this in the world, but I don't believe it,' said President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, when he exited his carriage on the crest that gives Brooklyn Heights its name."

The armillary sundial at the northern terminus was weirdly vandalized some years ago, its Pisces symbol pried off and stolen – and, as the close-up above shows, never replaced.

If it had happened more recently, I might suspect hungry goats. They like fish, right?

You get a good view of the ever-expanding Brooklyn Bridge Park, too. (That's the Statue of Liberty on the far right.)

Some modest springtime blooms along the inner fringe caught my eye.

Also at the northern end is the Fruit Street Sitting Area, which looks like an extension of the promenade but has its own name with its own official Parks Department sign complete with maple leaf – the leaf with which (as established above) we don't argue.

I'll cover the full length of the promenade another day.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Squibb Park and the Squibb Park Bridge

Squibb Park, a playground in Brooklyn Heights by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, merits mention here because of the Squibb Park Bridge, an unusual walkway from the Heights down to Brooklyn Bridge Park and the waterfront.

Edward Robinson Squibb, a naval surgeon and pharmaceutical chemist, founded Squibb Pharmaceuticals, later known as Bristol-Myers Squibb, in 1858. Known for pushing for higher standards of purity in the pharmaceutical industry, the Brooklyn Heights resident built his first laboratories near the park that bears his name. He lived on Middagh Street, and today if you walk to the western end of Middagh and keep going you'll tumble straight into the park.

It's supposed to be a playground, with, according to the Parks Department website, "the uniform apparatus which characterizes the era of its construction [the 1940s]: swings, jungle gym, sand box, sprinklers, basketball court." But right now Squibb Park is a big blue nothing.

The ingress and egress are what hold interest.

The stairway that leads down into the park zigzags along a handsome wall of stone blocks.

And then there's the Squibb Park Bridge, a modern footbridge of black locust timber, bronze and galvanized steel that opened in 2013 but shut down shortly thereafter because of too much bouncing. After structural modifications, it reopened in April 2017.

Its upper stretch offers a cramped view of lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center.

As you descend into greenery towards Brooklyn Bridge Park, a view of the Brooklyn Bridge itself appears.

This is New York City, so of course there's also a construction site. But somehow the building doesn't look very New York.

I hope they don't snip away the overhanging branches near the bottom of the bridge. On a hot sunny day it feels like a touch of the tropics.

I've read that a case was made against the bridge, that because it wouldn't be the only way down to the waterfront, or even much faster than what already existed, why build it? The surrounding buildings cut off much of the views, too.

That, to me, is an argument for precisely the opposite. We need things that aren't strictly necessary, that are even fanciful. And things that are just plain fun as well as practical. Like the slides that get you down the steep slopes of Valparaiso, Chile.

Because we all need to get down once in a while, don't we?

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Brooklyn Bridge Park

Still a work in progress, Brooklyn Bridge Park has shaped up enormously in the past couple of years. But I was a little apprehensive on my first visit after Sandy. Sure, months had gone by, but would this picturesque project, one of the city's premiere new parks, bear visible ill effects as springtime arrived and with it the crowds?

If so, they weren't readily evident to my perception, which is, granted, far from perfect.

The park occupies several plots along the waterfront, from Dumbo down to just north of Red Hook, but on this occasion I visited the best known, northern section by the namesake bridge.

The view of the Manhattan Bridge is actually more splendid from here than that of its more iconic sibling.

I'm partial to decayed urban structures, like the warehouse that adjoins the park behind a fence and presents images like this one:

But just so you don't get the wrong impression, people typically come to Brooklyn Bridge Park for the waterfront views…

…the waterfront experience…

…and the outdoor amenities, like the grassy area, the boardwalk, and now, wonders of wonders, the marvelously restored carousel.

And yes, spring was arriving. So I'll leave you with this: