Locals really threw this plan for a loop.
Neighbors of Brooklyn Bridge Park railed against the park’s plan to close part of the “loop road” that runs through the Pier 6 portion of the green space at a meeting last Wednesday night, arguing the change will create fume-spewing congestion on the rest of the cyclist-filled street and they’ll only get a piddling bit of extra parkland and a new stretch of bike lane in exchange.
“There’s a lot of downsides to this for a sliver of park space and a bike path we already have,” said Steve Houck, who lives in the One Brooklyn Bridge Park condominium building at the center of the loop. “It doesn’t seem like there was a lot of rationale.”
Park honchos want to close an “elbow” on the road that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority uses as a bus bay at the end of the B63 route, and move the waystation right next to the condo building. Bus drivers use the elbow to turn around and head straight back out onto Atlantic Avenue, but the change will mean they have to drive through the full half-mile loop to Furman and Joralemon streets.
An engineer who helped devise the redesign insisted to the skeptical crowd that eliminating the elbow would be a boon for locals because it will close a gap in the Brooklyn Greenway — an in-the-works network of bike and walking paths running from Bay Ridge to Greenpoint — and create more green space for park-goers.
“The benefit of this outweighs the small negative of outsetting a small bit of additional traffic,” said Dan Schack of Sam Schwartz Engineering, which the park hired to do a 2015 traffic study on the loop road.
The change will also allow developers building controversial new towers at Pier 6 to elevate the land there so the high rises are above the floodplain, rather than using ramps and stairs to bring the buildings into code, the park’s real-estate czar David Lowin said.
But the locals weren’t sold. They said the loop road is already congested enough due to drivers double parking and the buses will just make things worse, and one said the park should move the bus stop out of the meadow altogether.
“Buses don’t belong near residents like this and they don’t belong in the borders of the park because it takes away the park experiences,” said Judi Francis, president the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, a group that fights private development in the park.
Lowin eventually became exasperated with the residents’ stubborn objections, saying they were making a mountain out of his plan to build a flood-protected molehill and ignoring all the benefits.
“You guys are over emphasizing what you think the impact of closing the elbow is and not appreciating the positives of it,” he said.
The city-appointed park honchos say they don’t need any more government and community approval to make the change, and they plan to plow ahead with it next year as construction on the Pier 6 towers gets underway.
During that time, workers will use the space as a construction site, and once the development is done, it will be closed for good, according to Lowin.
