Chasing the Dream of a Platform Park Over the BQE in Williamsburg

Gothamist

May 9, 2016

A Williamsburg councilman is looking to revive a grand plan to build a park over a stretch of the sunken Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs through the neighborhood. Councilman Antonio Reynoso wants to bring back the project, dubbed BQ Green, as a part of Council parks committee chairman Mark Levine’s push for the city to commit $200 million dollars to an expanded park capital budget.

“History has shown us that we can do very little when we’re providing new parkland, and the parkland we do provide is never enough,” Reynoso said. “We currently have the resources to do that. We have the economy to do that. So why not use long-term items to build something beneficial to the community?”

BQ Green would create parkland over more than two blocks of the BQE ditch. Robert Moses rammed the expressway ditch through the neighborhood in the 1950s, and Reynoso said the road is to blame for the area’s elevated asthma rates, and serves as a convenient boundary for modern-day gangs.

The BQE has “divided our community for a long time,” he said. “Robert Moses had great vision but it’s like he didn’t know how to plan, though.”…

Read full article.