This is the most crowded place on Earth. Or at least that is my thought as I push through the crowds at Fulton Landing, one hot Saturday afternoon in July. A newly wed Uzbek couple poses for photos outside a white stretch limo, the country’s blue and green flag draped across the hood. A few lanky teens, one of them dribbling a basketball, shout jokes at each other. An overheated french girl stomps her feet and refuses to get back on her rented bike. A man eats an entire Julianna’s pizza from his lap.
Fulton Landing is really a plaza, the site of a Manhattan-bound ferry until 1923, and again starting in 2006. It is also the northern gateway to Brooklyn Bridge Park, a sinewy 1.3 mile strip of asphalt and grass that, on a hot July day, hits full capacity right as the sun is at its strongest. On this particular Saturday, the ferries must be backed up, because the line stretches back, away from the river, and tangles with the ice cream line outside Ample Hills Creamery. On hot days the commuter ferry becomes a river cruise for $2.75.
The lines are bad omens, so I know what to expect inside the park, but even so, turning the corner onto the long stretch of the Greenway transports me from the calm, quiet streets of Brooklyn Heights and into another world. Angry locals whizz by on my left, weaving their brakeless fixies through clumps of stalled Citibikes. On the walker’s path, I hear fragments of Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin and Yiddish – all in such rapid succession that, even in New York, I briefly forget where I am. Photographers set up their rigs among the rocks leading down to the water, fathers and sons skate by with hockey sticks, and more lanky teens shout jokes at each other. There is a constant stream of music playing from distant bluetooth speakers. Beautiful dogs are everywhere.
Eventually, as I make my way down the Greenway, I come to the piers. Pier One, misleadingly named, is really a large, circular meadow ringed by evergreens, where people tan and where, one summer, Anne and I sat for an outdoor showing of King Lear. Pier Two is where the courts are: basketball, the rims still taught, handball, and a skating rink, which turns to ice in the winter. Pier Three is another large meadow, and Pier Four is a small beach where brave parents allow children to splash in the river. Pier Five is one giant turf field, sectioned off in colored lines but never clearly assigned to anyone, and Pier Six has volleyball, more grass, and the seasonal outdoor restaurant Fornino.
It can be hard to remember, on busy summer afternoons, that Brooklyn Bridge Park is a creation of the New York City government, and not a Disney outpost or a Saudi mall. The streets have signs, these glossy blue and yellow arrows, and the bike path is marked with bright white, intact little cyclists. Oily dew drops collect on the fresh asphalt after a light rain, and the volleyball nets are drawn tight – spiking is difficult. Even the well-maintained lawns and flowerbeds are cordoned off by crisp, subtle wire fences. Online, the park’s interactive map reads like the checkpoints in a video game: Heath Path, Marina, Roller Rink, Freshwater Gardens, The Vale.
On this Saturday everything is in use. Every park bench is full. A man sits, eyes closed, facing the sun on Pier Five – another beside him tends to his fishing rods. All the tables at the Picnic Peninsula are taken, and the smell of jerk chicken, grilled corn and burnt hot dogs is intoxicating. I squint my eyes to get a better look through the heat of the afternoon, but I can’t figure out if there is one birthday party or twelve – this is no one’s first cookout, and the grills are shared and the families mingle. One girl has brought a paper cutout to frame her birthday pictures, having decided that the glistening towers on Water Street across the river don’t have enough pink. Every shaded side path and nook in the park has been found and consumed by somebody. Parents have lost their kids in the Sandbox Village and Waterlab, and are afraid to go in and look for them.
I admit it – I don’t like this version of the park. I prefer these attractions on weekdays, or a cold Sunday morning, when I am spoiled with empty paths and level-headed cyclists. When I can run from one end to the other, without being held up by three generations of women walking arm in arm. When the park’s ambient noise goes from shouting children to chirping sparrows.
On these mornings, like a church lot after the fair, the park seems to breathe. The crowds are gone, and apart from the rare sunrise photographer, the tourists are not yet awake. At six or seven in the morning, the park feels like the well-tended lawns of a grand estate – and in some ways, with the great brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and glistening apartments of DUMBO as its perimeter, that is exactly what the park is. The website has a page for awards, and since 2009 the park has won roughly eight per year, including Best Playground (NY Magazine), Best Public Space (Travel + Leisure) and even Best Website (Kettle). Once, back from a run, I look up and see a peregrine falcon, not ten feet away. Brooklyn Bridge Park has earned its accolades.
And more is on its way. Future plans – the final ten percent, according to the park website – include a pedestrian plaza beneath Brooklyn Bridge, which promises to “include elements in keeping with the overall park design vocabulary,” and uplands, a medieval sounding term for a grassy hill behind Pier Two. The park is ninety percent complete, but in the context of its entire history it’s closer to ninety-nine percent. The electric ferry docks at the same place where Cornelis Dircksen tied his rowboat in the 18th century, and where merchants boarded Robert Fulton’s steamboat in the 19th. I run laps around repurposed cargo piers and bike in the shadow of Robert Moses’ promenade, a beloved solution in its own right to development that now limits the inland expansion of the park.
It is rare for a civic project like this one to satisfy so many different parties – families from Remsen Street and Utica Ave, photographers and athletes, naturalists and tourists – and my inclination is to be anxious for its future. Somehow they will mess this up. License the Greenway to WeWork and add monthly fees, kombucha taps and yoga. Or refit the Marina for large yachts instead of small sailboats. Cut down trees for more lawn space.
I doubt that will happen. The park is too important, particularly now, when everyone is stuck inside and the 1.3 miles serves as the only backyard for a large swath of Brooklyn. But change is on my mind. I don’t think anyone hands out this award, but the Nicest Place in New York won’t stay that way forever – nowhere does. The basketball rims will start to sag. The picnic tables won’t be refinished as often. The grass will grow long and the turf will start to bald. But the park will still be a park. Crowds will still come to this skinny stretch of paradise in the shadow of Manhattan’s towering skyline.