Daily News from New York, New York • 351

DAILY NEWS NYDailyNews.com Friday, December 1 3, 2009 3 Kayak launching will be possible at four points in the park; the Uplands will block sound from the BQE ows are not currently funded. The city recently proposed $55 million for further work on the park. Selling the potential real-estate development sites will help financially as well, but the poor economy has hurt the value of land for future condominiums and the 200-room hotel Myer, a Park Slope resident who people close to the project call a "force of nature," is committed to completing the park. "My job is to get people together and keep them focused on getting this thing done," she says "Why are we opening in winter'' This park is a long time in the making. Twenty years, for some Brooklyn Heights residents.

We want them to experience it right away. They wailed enough Playgrounds and poetry The main community resistance plaguing early park planning was how much of the park should be used for active and passive recreation. Active means playing fields, courts and playgrounds Passive means walkways, lawns, benches and places to sit and do nothing The Atlantic Ave. entryway and Pier 6, some of which is set to open in April, demonstrate the issues at the core of this battle. At the Atlantic Ave.

entrance to the park is a world-class playground designed by Urbanski with help from consultants from the Natural Learning Initiative at North Carolina State University Swing Valley is a maze-like oval of tire swings, toddler swings and old fashioned swings leading to the water It's covered in a rubbery, almost psychadelic recycled, light blue, soil surlace. Nearby, a mountain of boulders with three slides provides a viewing area for parents A play area will spray jets of water into the air At the end of Pier 6, in an area not yet funded, Van Valkenburgh designed an area that could be the equivalent of the landscape architect going foul line to foul line, dunking a basketball It's poetry in motion. Meadows, where park goers fly kites or picnic, rise and fall amid marshes where birds and other wildlife will nest and spread seeds naturally It would be a loss to all of New York if this work, in the portion of the park closest to the Statue of Liberty and Governors Island, is not funded. The experience ol a wildlife-filled landscape at the edge of a Brooklyn pier is unprecedented It would be a New York first to play in such a meadow on the waterfront "Landscape architecture is responsible, environmental and full of active park programming." says Van Valkenburgh "But it's also the kind of rich experiences you bring into people's lives We tried to do that where we could If ihi tW UMf KM to necting all six piers with the series of landscaped hills that act as grass- and tree-filled bleachers, where park visitors can read, sleep or just gaze at the park and city below. Who's paying for this? Responsibility for funding the project falls to Regina Myer.

President of the city- and state-partnership Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Myer a former Brooklyn planning director during the borough's greatest growth period, from 1996 to 2004 is charged with getting this park built. Working with Parks Commissioner Benepe, she'll put a program in place under which no public expense funds will go the maintenance of the park. Real-estate development on the site will tund all operations. A contribution of $3 million annually from RAL, developer of One Brooklyn Bridge Park, the first condominium on the site, allows for the opening of the first phase. Taxes from that development, and possibly others, will be paid to the park specifically rather than to general city funds.

In total, the park construction will cost the city and state $350 million. More than $223 million has already been committed. Money is in place to complete Pier the Atlantic Ave. entrance, which includes acres of state-of-the-art playgrounds space; and Pier 5, which will house a picnic pavilion and Astroturf soccer fields lit at night. Piers housing a nature reserve, beach, basketball and sports courts and rolling mead can see the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan skyline From an area dubbed the Vale, you "You could not make a better theatrical backdrop to this landscape," says Urbanski.

"That said, transforming a former freight terminal into a park meant it had to be violently changed without being totally destroyed, which would have been way too expensive. It was very important for us to do something authentically Brooklyn here." How do you do that? You leave a lot of what's already there. It meant not ignoring the surrounding elements like the highway, ensure the preservation of those piers and decrease the noise and cold, using walls and hills, to make the park usable year-round. It meant walkways wider than those in any other local park. shining, it felt warm.

In some places, though, around the edge of the waterfront with 30-foot-wide paths for pedestrians, they left it cold. "In the winter it will feel like being out there on a ferryboat on the ocean," says Van Valken-burgh. "Some people will want to feel the power of the harbor in the off-season." To reduce the sound from the BQE, the landscape architects worked with sound engineers to build hills at the east end of the park. Called the Uplands, these hills rise 30 feet, blocking noise from the constant expressway traffic that travels the length of the park. They also continue the curving paths that start at the Old Fulton St.

entrance, con "This site is about the tyranny of the urban condition," Urban-ski says. "The East River, the BQE, the bridge, the harbor, the skyline. These are gigantic pieces of the city and Brooklyn. We had to make a park that belongs in that group. We did nothing that would take away from the industrial, in-your-face experience of being on the edge of massive piers with nothing between you and the water but a metal rail." To counter seasonal weather shifts, Van Valkenburgh's firm created microclimates, areas where it's warmer (think sunlight without wind) or cooler (think shade in the summer), throughout the park.

Even on a 28-degree day, with the sun.