In Brooklyn: a fight over paving parks for skateboarding

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out why a group is opposing Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to turn Mount Prospect Park in Brooklyn into a destination for skateboarders.

The city has plans to build Mount Prospect Park, once the site of a lookout post for George Washington’s army. About 40,000 square feet of the 7.79-acre park will be transformed into one of the largest skateboarding spots on the East Coast.

Some local residents oppose the plan. Their complaints aren’t about the potential influx of skateboarders or the ollies, kickflips and tic-tacs. They say the concrete skateboard facility would take up valuable green space in a city that doesn’t have enough of it.

“Pouring concrete is the Stone Age,” said Hayley Gorenberg, co-chair of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, a group formed less than a month ago after Mayor Eric Adams referenced the project in his State of the City address.

The new skate spot in Mount Prospect Park, to be called the Brooklyn Skate Garden, would be the largest of four in a $24.8 million project the mayor mentioned. Another skateboard area will take shape at Brower Park in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with two more coming in the Bronx.

The four skate areas will take shape as part of a public-private partnership between the city and the Skatepark Project, a nonprofit organization founded by professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, the first to land a 900, which for his sport is what the four minutes. a mile is running. In a high-profile career, he has broken ribs, survived concussions, lost a handful of teeth and broken a femur (last year, during a 540-degree aerial rotation).

The Skatepark Project has arranged grants for nearly 700 skate parks across the country and would provide design advice and “project management support” for the four New York parks, said Benjamin Anderson Bashein, executive director. The Skatepark Project says design costs will likely exceed $100,000 per park.

The skateboard infrastructure

The Skatepark Project said the four new facilities would be built quickly so they could open in three years and “elevate New York City’s status as the skateboarding capital of the East Coast.”

The opponents said city officials had not publicized the project or sought comment. Gorenberg and Benjamin Lowe, the other co-chair of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, are meeting this afternoon with Crystal Hudson, the city council member whose district includes the park. They wrote to her on February 5 and said other options should be considered, including locating the skateboard facility elsewhere. The letter suggested Grand Army Plaza, which the city’s Department of Transportation is considering redesigning.

Their letter raised questions about safety and stated that skateboarders could try out their moves outside the park, creating hazards on nearby stairs and ramps. The stone steps from the park’s highest point are just one “enticing skating challenge,” the letter said.

The letter stated that the location for the skateboard facility is already highly vulnerable to flooding and that a skate park would only exacerbate that problem.

Bashein noted that “the design hasn’t even happened yet.” He said the Skatepark Project would work with the city to ensure the four skating areas were “well designed and well constructed.”

He said the Mount Prospect Park installation would only cover about 12 percent of the park and the paved area would be only part of that. And Hudson said that “everything the park is currently used for will continue to exist” once the skate park is built.

“There is still access to the green lawn,” she said. “There is a children’s playground. Nothing will happen to that.”

The park was created in the 1940s when the Brooklyn Public Library was built. The Department of Parks and Recreation says Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux intended it to be part of Prospect Park, which they designed in the 1800s. But eventually they redrew the boundaries, leaving Prospect Park on one side of Flatbush Avenue and Mount Prospect Park on the other. The city operated a reservoir there from the 1850s to the 1930s.

As a place to skateboard, says Gorenberg of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, “location is an issue. Paving green space is not acceptable to the community, and it is not the way New York City can look forward to a more resilient future. It’s thinking backwards.”

Weather

Expect a breezy, mostly sunny day with highs around 40 degrees. The evening will be mainly clear, with temperatures around 20 degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until March 24 (Purim).

The latest New York news

Tom Suozzi, the Democrat who won the House of Representatives seat that George Santos held until he was expelled in December, was sworn in on Wednesday. My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that Suozzi used his return to Washington after a closely watched special election to try to push both parties toward the middle.

“Wake up,” said Suozzi, who served three terms in the House of Representatives, from 2017 to 2022. “People are tired of finger-pointing and petty party politics. They want us to work together.”

From inflation to “the chaos at the border,” Suozzi accused both Democrats and Republicans of “letting our base bully us.” He tried to increase pressure on Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass a bipartisan border bill they had called for, but he abandoned it after former President Donald Trump said he opposed it.

Suozzi’s bigger-than-expected victory provided optimism among Democrats in Congress. On Wednesday, he said his approach could be easily copied if Democrats were willing to disregard “the sentiment of the bombers” on the party’s left flank.

“My playbook is to try to meet people where they are,” he said in an interview before taking the oath. “I just say what I think. That’s what I do.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Foggy day

Dear Diary:

On a rainy, foggy day a few years ago, I stopped a cab on 10th Avenue. It pulled up to the curb and skidded to a stop. I climbed in.

The driver weaved into traffic as his wipers whipped away the rain on the windshield.

I started to sit back in my seat, but sat back up when I noticed that the driver had a newspaper spread out over the steering wheel and was reading it.