![]() Instead of tearing down the pier infrastructure, MVVA found ways to reuse both the stronger and weaker parts of it, arranging park uses on the surface based on the piers’ structural capacity. The park itself is a model of urban reuse. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates / Elizabeth Felicella Brooklyn Bridge Park: A Twenty Year Transformation. ![]() ASLA 2018 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. The park should also feel friendly and accessible - “a space for everyday life, a place to relax.” Brooklyn Bridge Park / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Brooklyn Bridge Park / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associatesīrooklynites also wanted more than just views they wanted to feel immersed in a restored natural environment along the East River – “to step into the water, smell the breeze, and feel surrounded by the landscape.” To bring those benefits to multiple surrounding neighborhoods, MVVA created a plan that “stretched both ends of the park” beyond its originally conceived boundaries. Over the course of more than 400 public meetings while planning and designing the project, MVVA heard a few key messages: the park should “feel democratic,” and in order to accomplish that, should offer “many programs within its whole,” including desperately-needed space for recreation. More than a decade of advocacy by local community groups finally convinced elected leaders to stop the Port Authority’s plans to transform the defunct terminal into a profit-generating mixed-use development and instead created a city and state-financed public park. MVVA explains that the original “idea for the park came from Brooklynites, who live in the NYC borough with the least amount of park space.” Communities around the site couldn’t access the waterfront when it was a shipping terminal owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A video with Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, from 2009, as construction begins, offers a sense of his enduring passion for this transformative, two-decade-long project: In just a few months, the final segment - Emily Warren Roebling Plaza - will open. The first public meeting for the master plan of the park was way back in 1998. Brooklyn Bridge Park sound berm / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates A new berm reduced noise from the nearby Brooklyn Queens Expressway, an elevated highway that once produced a deafening “roar,” so much so that it was difficult to talk. Five flat, concrete piers were re-imagined as sports fields, gardens, and playgrounds, all connected through interwoven green spaces and paths. Designed over twenty years by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), a New York-based landscape architecture firm, the project has “transformed an industrial site of abandoned warehouses, obsolete piers, and decaying bulkheads into a vibrant public space,” the prize jury said.īrooklyn Bridge Park, which pre-Covid boasted 5 million visitors a year, was the first major park to be created in Brooklyn since Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Prospect Park in the late 19th century. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates / Alex Macleanīrooklyn Bridge Park, which spans 85 acres and 1.3 miles along the East River waterfront in Brooklyn, New York, beat out 10 other projects around the world to win the 2021 Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize at the 11th International Landscape Architecture Biennial in Barcelona, Spain. Here Susan rants about anything that misinforms or discourages gardeners – from old-school quacks to mistaken do-gooders to local laws that mandate conformity – and reports on news from the world of gardening.Ĭontact Susan via email or by leaving a comment on one of her articles.ASLA 2018 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. ![]() – Founding two resource websites: Good Gardening Videos that recommends science-based gardening videos on YouTube and DC Gardens, the nonprofit campaign to promote the public gardens of the Washington, D.C. – Video-blogging about hoop dancing on her channel Susan’s Hoop Dance Journey, which launched in 2023. She’s also on the Board of Greenbelt Access TV. – Creating and editing the nonprofit website Greenbelt Online to serve her adopted town of Greenbelt, Maryland (a “New Deal Utopia” founded in 1937) and managing the Greenbelt, Maryland YouTube Channel. Susan co-founded GardenRant and also wrote for national gardening magazines and independent garden centers before retiring in 2014.
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