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Drama Over Missing Greenpoint Parks is Focus of Pop-Up Performance

By Gwynne Hogan | December 1, 2015 4:25pm
 Friends of Bushwick Inlet are hosting a theater performance at the site of a missing park in hopes of pressuring the city to turn the area into a park more quickly.
Friends of Bushwick Inlet are hosting a theater performance at the site of a missing park in hopes of pressuring the city to turn the area into a park more quickly.
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Facebook/Friends of Bushwick Inlet/John Saponara

GREENPOINT — A pop-up theater performance at the site of a plot of land that the city promised to turn into a park a decade ago, will renew the community's call for their much-deserved green space this Saturday, its organizers said.

Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park will host "It's a Wonderful Park," a spin-off of the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas flick "It's a Wonderful Life," this Saturday organized by two CUNY students with performances by local kids and park activists.

"By having children involved and being playful and being creative, that embodies the idea of what our group is doing and what we’re trying to get this city to do," said Steve Chesler, 53, one of the Bushwick Inlet Park's organizers.

During the 2005 rezoning, the community was promised nearly 30-acres of waterfront parkland. A decade later just a small sliver of that land has been turned into a park.

The massive fire at the CitiStorage in February re-ignited community outcry for a park there. 

The storage facility sits on a property is in the middle of the promised parkland but not owned by the city.

While the land was worth just $16 million around the time of the rezoning when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised to buy it, the land's owner Norman Brodsky told Crain's in April that he would accept around $500 million for the waterfront property.

"NYC Parks continues to take substantive steps toward the completion of Bushwick Inlet Park, which will bring more public green space to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront," Maeri Ferguson, a spokesman for the Parks Department said, adding that the department has already forked over $225 million to redevelop the section of the park that has a multi-purpose field.

The department had already budgeted $50 million for buying another portion of the land needed to connect the park, as well as $22 million for demolition there, but would not say anything about plans for Brodsky's land.

And pricey or not, advocates for the Bushwick Inlet Park, say the city should have to stick to what it promised to provide back in 2005.

"We’re fighting for our kids and for everyone to have open space," Chesler said, who's lived in Greenpoint for 14 years. "That's what they committed to do. They created a whole plan, a really elaborate plan. Open space and wetlands and a dog run and a kayak launch. This whole thing that a community and the city could enjoy."

"It's a Wonderful Park" will take place this Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Bushwick Inlet Park building at Kent Avenue and North 9th Street.