商品簡介
Brooklyn Bridge Park has emerged as an internationally recognized attraction. Stretching along a waterfront that faces one of the world's great harbors and a storied skyline, it has utterly transformed a strip of moribund structures that formerly served bustling port activity.
When the idea was put forward, it did not come from government officials or planners, but from a local community aghast that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey might sell the defunct piers and their upland, situated below the quiet precincts of Brooklyn Heights, for intensive housing development. Neighborhood leaders, looking for less intensive uses of the property, ultimately came to the idea of a park. The Port Authority resisted, seeing a park as a money-losing proposition, as did the once powerful longshoremen's union, which was desperate to hold onto jobs.
The battle was waged inconclusively for well over a decade; the Port Authority was prevented from developing the site, but the park did not move forward, either. Then, locally elected officials joined with members of the local communities to form something called a Local Development Corporation (LDC) to explore how the Port Authority might be induced at last to shed its money-losing waterfront piers in favor of a park.
The LDC turned to the communities themselves and carried out an open process of public planning, a democratic process that became a model for other public projects but that was unique in its day. That process produced a plan, and that plan ultimately produced a park.
In this book, the authors have tried to tell the full story of how Brooklyn Bridge Park came to be, from the inside deliberations as well as the public actions. They have tried to be complete and factual. One of the people interviewed told them that all history is revisionist to some extent, and they do have a point of view on many of the issues discussed, but they have tried to keep each other honest and to reflect all the competing views.
作者簡介
Joanne Witty is a lawyer and an environmentalist, and has served in both city and state government. Since 1998, she has been a park leader as president of the Local Development Corporation that created the park's master plan and vice chair of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation that is building and operating the park. Witty is also a founding member and co-chair of the Freshkills Park Alliance, supporting the largest reclamation of a former landfill in the world.
After twenty-seven years as a writer and producer for news programs at NBC, Henrik Krogius was for twenty-two years the editor of the Brooklyn Heights Press and Cobble Hill News, where he closely followed the Brooklyn Bridge Park project from its inception. He is the author of The Brooklyn Heights Promenade and of an extended photographic essay, "New York, You're a Wonderful Town: 50-plus Years of Chronicling Gotham."
