Brooklyn sees green in bridge replacement project

Brooklyn, N.Y. — If local residents have their way, the Sunset Park area, which actually has very little safe recreational space, will be living up to its name. A plan prepared for the area’s community board by locally based Gandhi Engineering would involve creation of a pair of block-long “mini-parks,” — 1.66 acres in all — built on platforms over the 39th Street freight tracks between 3rd and 5th avenues.

The plan is an outgrowth of a bridge replacement project currently being finalized. “At the time the bridge project was getting started, we asked the engineers if they could help us meet [the need for more recreational space,]” says board chairperson Beatrice DeSapio. “When they came back to us with the park proposal, we saw that it also offers a very natural way to help reintegrate the northern and southern parts of the Sunset Park community, which is one of our important long-term goals.”

The plan could eventually solve two problems, DeSapio says. First, it would create a substantial amount of extra parking space that is urgently needed for the New York State Department of Transportation’s area projects.

Second, once those projects are finished, the space could be converted to new green space for a neighborhood that is experiencing a local baby boom.

The area, once a vibrant working class neighborhood, has been in a decades-long decline. The Gowanus Expressway divided the waterfront from the upland areas, and the freight tracks restricted access within the neighborhood itself.

Very few trains use the tracks, and the 80-foot-deep railway cut has become a debris-littered gulch.

The engineering company has completed designs for a $3.3 million, 120-foot-wide, six-lane bridge to carry 4th Avenue over the tracks.

Construction will begin soon. The plan calls for creation of parks in two areas flanking the bridge, with access gates at the bridge’s pedestrian walkway.

One park would be 500 feet long and 75 feet wide and the other 347-by-100 feet.

A feasibility study completed by the company at no cost to the community estimates that the total cost of both parks, including landscaping, would be slightly over $8 million.