Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a park that is blooming under the Brooklyn Bridge. We’ll also find out why the city no longer wants to defend former Mayor Eric Adams in a sexual assault case.
Yesterday, we looked at a park restoration that’s been planned by in-house architects and landscape designers.
Today, we’ll focus on a park that is taking shape in a different way. It didn’t start with blueprints and renderings but with a bottom-up, grass-roots push to transform a gritty, grimy space into something presentable. Enjoyable. Maybe even enviable.
It’s big, as spaces go in a space-squeezed city — nine acres, about the size of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village or Bryant Park in Midtown. But as Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times’s architecture critic, noted in this video, the goal is to bring in shops, restaurants, a public library and other “places that will bring people together” in what is being called Gotham Park, under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.
It’s at the intersection of several neighborhoods. It ties together the Municipal Building and City Hall, as well as Chinatown, Pace University, the South Street Seaport and the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a 12-building public housing complex from the 1950s.
And for years, it was a mess.
But Matthew Thompson, the editor of Headway, an initiative from The Times that reports on possibility and progress, says that it has become “a showcase of what can happen when a group of ordinary people takes notice of what you might call the civic furniture around them and decides to transform the place where they live.” Headway and the nonprofit Citizen University developed something called Power Walk — a simple stroll that can help you explore the possibilities in your neighborhood and assess the power you have of turning those possibilities into realities.
That approach is essentially what led to Gotham Park. The metamorphosis started with one person, Rosa Chang, an architectural consultant who wandered by several years ago and envisioned a future for a space that had been closed off years before, when the bridge needed repairs.
“I see opera,” she said in 2024. “I see children playing, I see trees, I see old people sitting down talking to each other. I see skateboarders flying in the air, I see nature.” And she saw the bridge — “one of our most beautiful structures that humanity has ever been able to build” — anchoring it.
Matthew says that bottom-up change is “incremental rather than instant.” Chang discovered Gotham Park in 2020, left her work as an architectural consultant and plunged in, spending money from savings and her retirement account to get started. She set up a nonprofit in 2021, paying herself nothing that year and a salary of $21,000 the next year. She said her average workweek was 65 hours long. It’s no wonder that she was over-scheduled and sleep-deprived, as my colleague John Leland wrote in 2024.
Chang found a receptive audience at City Hall when Eric Adams was mayor. In his 2023 State of the City address, Adams promised to create more open spaces across the city. Officials said that one of them would be Gotham Park, or Brooklyn Banks, as it had been known to skateboarders who once zipped up and down the brick embankments there. It was a place where skateboarders could be themselves, whether they were newbies or veterans who had turned pro. Tony Hawk, the skateboarding legend, had included it in a video game in the early 2000s. Nike had filmed a commercial there.
A skateboarder named Steve Rodriguez had been trying for years to reopen the area to skateboarding. Hawk and his Skatepark Project — which has helped build more than 660 skate parks around the country — eventually championed the project. And last year City Hall committed $50 million for Gotham Park, $5 million for design work and $45 million for construction in the 2028 fiscal year. It includes a skateboard park.
“Already, you see people occupying Gotham Park,” Michael said. “Cities are organic. They’re made of stone and concrete, but they change all the time. And anyone can bring about change, which simply starts with noticing what’s there.”
Weather
Increasing clouds are expected today with temperatures around 40. Tonight will be partly cloudy with a low around 33.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Eid al-Fitr).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“All things considered, he’s doing pretty well.” — Keith Lovett, a vice president and the director of animal programs at the Bronx Zoo, about a red a fox that was a stowaway on a cargo ship’s 3,600-mile trip to the Port of New York and New Jersey from the Port of Southampton in England.
The latest Metro news
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Suing Trump over federal funding: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its withholding of nearly $60 million in promised funding, which could delay the expansion of the Second Avenue Subway line into East Harlem.
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Mentioning Palestinians on St. Patrick’s Day: At a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast that he hosted and in a video posted on social media, Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke about Irish history and focused on “the solidarity the Irish have shown with the downtrodden and forgotten,” particularly Palestinians.
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Columbia protester released from ICE custody: Leqaa Kordia, a New Jersey woman who took part in the 2024 pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, was released after a year in federal immigration detention. She has not been charged with a crime.
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Judge ejects a federal prosecutor: Judge Zahid Quraishi threw Mark Coyne, a prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, out of his courtroom during a sentencing hearing and ordered the office’s leadership to testify about who had authority over their actions.
City moves to stop defending Adams in a sexual assault case
It was the latest indication that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is breaking the city’s connection to legal entanglements that came to define his predecessor’s time in City Hall: a request from the city’s Law Department to stop representing former Mayor Eric Adams in a sexual assault lawsuit.
The city’s corporation counsel argued that the city should not represent Adams because he was not acting within the scope of his duties at the time that a woman who worked for the Police Department’s transit bureau says Adams sexually assaulted her. The woman, Lorna Beach-Mathura, said that the incident happened in 1993 when she went to Adams for career advice. He was a police officer at the time. She filed suit against Adams in 2024.
The Law Department had earlier determined that it would represent Adams. But the corporation counsel, Steven Banks — chosen by Mamdani, who took office in January — said in a statement that he had decided otherwise “based on my review of new evidence.” He did not say what that evidence was.
A spokesman for Adams, Todd Shapiro, denied the sexual assault allegations and said that the former mayor “remains confident that the facts will ultimately prevail.” After saying that he would not comment on “ongoing litigation,” Shapiro added that “what we can say is that throughout his time in office, Mayor Adams conducted himself with professionalism and a deep commitment to the people of New York City.”
The Mamdani administration’s decision to stop representing Adams came days after it announced similar actions regarding two other former city officials, both Adams allies — Timothy Pearson, a defendant in at least four sexual harassment suits, and Jeffrey Maddrey, a former police official accused of demanding sex from a subordinate in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime.
If a judge allows the corporation counsel to drop out of the case, Adams will have to find new lawyers and a way to pay them. He still has substantial legal debts tied to his 2024 indictment on federal corruption charges. The Justice Department under President Trump moved to have the charges dismissed, arguing that the prosecution would hinder Adams’s ability to help with Trump’s deportation agenda.
METROPOLITAN diary
Junior Year Abroad
Dear Diary:
My first experience with New York City was in 1969. I was taking a ship to France to begin my junior year abroad. A fellow student who had grown up in the city drove me there.
I had a little over $300 in the bank to last me nine months. I had lived frugally through college so far, working for my meals. I knew I could do it.
We stopped at a diner in the heart of the city, and I ordered a bowl of soup. I made the packet of crackers last the whole meal.
I had my eye on a tall glass dish of red Jell-O topped with fruit cocktail and whipped cream. It reminded me of home.
I asked the waitress how much it cost. Whatever she said, it was more than I could afford.
I said, “Oh, OK, thanks,” and looked away.
She turned and gently placed the dish in front of me.
It’s on the house, sweetie, she said.
— Tom Ross
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Citizens’ Vision Inspired a New Park Under the Brooklyn Bridge appeared first on New York Times.
