The city has construction plans for Mount Prospect Park, once the site of a lookout station for George Washington’s army. About 40,000 square feet of the 7.79-acre park are to be turned into one of the largest skateboarding spots on the East Coast.
Some nearby residents are fighting the plan. Their gripes are not about the potential influx of skateboarders or the ollies, kick flips and tic-tacs. They say the poured-concrete skateboarding facility would take up precious green space in a city that does not have enough of it.
“Pouring concrete is Stone Age,” said Hayley Gorenberg, a co-chair of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, a group formed less than a month ago, after Mayor Eric Adams referred to the project in his State of the City address.
The new skating spot in Mount Prospect Park, to be called the Brooklyn Skate Garden, would be the largest of four in a $24.8 million project that the mayor mentioned. Another skateboarding area will take shape in Brower Park in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and two more will go up in the Bronx.
The four skating areas will take shape under a public-private partnership between the city and the Skatepark Project, a nonprofit foundation started by the professional skateboarding star Tony Hawk, the first to land a 900, which is to his sport what the four-minute mile is to running. In a high-profile career, he has cracked ribs, survived concussions, lost a handful of teeth and broken a femur (last year, on a 540-degree aerial rotation).
The Skatepark Project has arranged grants for nearly 700 skate parks across the country and would contribute design consultation and “project management support” for the four parks in New York, said Benjamin Anderson Bashein, its executive director. The Skatepark Project says the design costs will probably amount to more than $100,000 per park.
The skateboarding infrastructure
The Skatepark Project said the four new facilities would be fast-tracked so they could open in three years and would “elevate New York City ’s status as the East Coast skateboarding capital.”
The opponents said that city officials had not publicized the project or sought comments. Gorenberg and Benjamin Lowe, the other co-chair of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, are to meet with Crystal Hudson, the City Council member whose district includes the park, this afternoon. They wrote to her on Feb. 5, saying other options needed to be considered, including putting the skateboarding facility somewhere else. The letter suggested Grand Army Plaza, which the city’s Department of Transportation is looking into redesigning.
Their letter raised questions about safety, saying that skateboarders could try their moves outside the park, creating hazards on nearby steps and access ramps. The stone steps from the highest point in the park are only one “tempting skate challenge,” the letter said.
The letter said that the site for the skateboarding facility is already highly vulnerable to flooding and that a skate park would only make that problem worse.
Bashein noted that “the design hasn’t even happened yet.” He said the Skatepark Project would work with the city to see that the four skating areas were “well designed and well constructed.”
He said the installation in Mount Prospect Park would cover only about 12 percent of the park and that the paved area would be only a part of that. And Hudson said that “everything the park is currently used for will remain” once the skate park is built.
“There’s still access to the green lawn,” she said. “There’s a children’s playground. Nothing will happen to that.”
The park was created in the 1940s as the Brooklyn Public Library was being built. The Department of Parks and Recreation says that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux intended it to be a part of Prospect Park, which they designed in the 19th century. But they eventually redrew the borders, leaving Prospect Park on one side of Flatbush Avenue and Mount Prospect Park on the other. The city operated a reservoir there from the 1850s until the 1930s.
As a place for skateboarding, said Gorenberg, of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, “The site is a problem. Paving green space isn’t acceptable to the community, and it’s not the way for New York City to look forward to a more resilient future. It’s backwards thinking.”
Weather
Expect a breezy, mostly sunny day with a high around 40. The evening will be mostly clear, with temperatures in the high 20s.
It’s Representative Suozzi now
Tom Suozzi, the Democrat who won the House seat George Santos held until he was expelled in December, was sworn in on Wednesday. My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that Suozzi used his return to Washington after a closely watched special election to try to nudge both parties toward the middle.
“Wake up,” said Suozzi, who served in the House for three terms, from 2017 to 2022. “The people are sick and tired of finger-pointing and petty partisan politics. They want us to work together.”
From inflation to “the chaos at the border,” Suozzi accused Democrats and Republicans alike of “letting ourselves be bullied by our base.” He attempted to step up pressure on House Republicans to take up a bipartisan border bill that they had demanded, only to abandon it after former President Donald Trump said he was against it.
Suozzi’s larger-than-expected victory gave congressional Democrats a shot of optimism. On Wednesday he said that his approach could be easily replicated if Democrats were willing to tune out “the sentiment of the bomb throwers” on the party’s left flank.
“My playbook is to try to meet the people where they are,” he said in an interview before his swearing-in. “I just say what I think. That’s what I do.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Misty day
Dear Diary:
On a rainy, misty day a few years ago, I flagged down a cab on 10th Avenue. It veered to the curb and skidded to a halt. I climbed in.
The driver lurched out into traffic as his wipers slapped away the rain hitting the windshield.
I began to ease back in my seat but sat back up when I noticed that the driver had a newspaper spread across the steering wheel and was reading it.
