Opened in 2010 on decommissioned Port Authority cargo piers, the 85-acre park was built to a Michael Van Valkenburgh master plan using reclaimed soil from World Trade Center construction and wasn't fully completed until 2021.
Cycling is restricted to the marked Greenway path — riders must dismount on the pier promenades and on Squibb Park Bridge — and weekends around Pier 1 and Jane's Carousel draw the heaviest crowds, so weekday or early-morning visits are calmer.
The piers are not old. The New York Dock Company built Piers 1 through 6 between 1956 and 1964 for break-bulk cargo, on a shore that had been warehousing and shipping since the mid-nineteenth century. The Port Authority ran cargo operations here until 1983; after that the sheds emptied out, the last tenant leaving in 1996. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates was hired in 2004 to turn roughly 85 acres of concrete deck and fill into a park, and the build ran until 2021.
The industrial layer is still legible if you look for it. Pier 2 kept the steel skeleton and much of the roof plane of its cargo shed, now partly cut open for light and sheltering basketball, handball and bocce courts. Empire Stores, the brick warehouses put up at the DUMBO end between 1870 and 1885, and the neighboring Tobacco Warehouse are both on the National Register and both back in use. Less visible: about 13,000 timber piles hold the piers over the East River, and a program begun in 2019 encased roughly 11,000 of them in epoxy jackets against marine borers, the shipworms that eat untreated wood below the tide line.
Most of what reads as landscape is engineering. The hills between Piers 2 and 5 rise twenty to thirty feet and exist to put mass between the park and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cutting traffic noise by several decibels. The fill inside them came from demolition and tunneling elsewhere in the city, including World Trade Center reconstruction, the Willis Avenue and Roosevelt Island bridges, and East Side Access. Pier 1 carries a salt marsh; Pier 4 was left as tidal pools and a bird island rather than rebuilt as deck.
Walk northbound from Pier 6 and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges stay ahead of you the whole way. Southbound the harbor opens instead, toward Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty and the container cranes at Red Hook.
Brooklyn, NY 11201 · Official site ↗
Brooklyn Bridge Park is an 85-acre (34 ha) park on the Brooklyn side of the East River in New York City. Designed by landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the park is located on a 1.3-mile (2.1 km) plot of land from Atlantic Avenue in the south, under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and past the Brooklyn Bridge, to Jay Street north of the Manhattan Bridge. From north to south, the park includes the preexisting Empire–Fulton Ferry and Main Street Parks; the historic Fulton Ferry Landing; and Piers 1–6, which contain various playgrounds and residential developments. The park also includes Empire Stores and the Tobacco Warehouse, two 19th-century structures, and is a part of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, a series of parks and bike paths around Brooklyn.
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