What Did Brooklyn Bridge Park Get So Right?

Nearly 20 years after we broke ground, it's more impressive than ever.

- JUSTIN DAVIDSON

IMPROBABLY, Brooklyn Bridge Park exists. That's not an outcome I would have bet on a couple of decades ago, when the waterfront below Brooklyn Heights was a DMZ of flat, hard wharves. Even more miraculously, the park is an 85-acre civic masterpiece. It spent the first half of its life as a sketch, even as its various parts revealed themselves. Finally, a long stretch of innumerable plans, trade-offs, objections, and delays-that whole impasto of New York dithering-has been overwhelmed by the vivid, sensual presence of one of the city's great public spaces. On a hot June afternoon, I watched children roll down a grassy incline and marveled at the huge effort of imagination that was needed to look at all that abandoned concrete and in its place conjure hills, dales, bowers, meadows, and wetlands. Credit for summoning them all into being goes largely to MVVA, a team of landscape architects led by Michael Van Valkenburgh.

He takes a proprietary interest in the project, prowling it often with park staff and keeping an active to-do list long after he cashed the final check for his services.

The obsessiveness is shared by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation's staff and made visible in the lack of litter, the working toilets, and the thick profusion of plants.