Press

DNAinfo

October 18, 2016

WILLIAMSBURG — A group of teens is studying air quality along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in an effort to get a new park built on top of the road, according to community organizers.

El Puente, a local non-profit organization with deep roots in Williamsburg’s south side, received a $5,000 grant from the New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center and will start testing air quality next week with youth in its afterschool program.

Its aim is to collect data showing how BQ Green, a proposed park over the BQE trench from South Third to South Fifth between Rodney and Marcy which would link playgrounds on either side, would be a boon to the area by improving air quality….

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Time Out (New York)

May 10, 2016

Among other things, New York is a city of dream projects that never get built. But sometimes they get a second chance, and that appears to be the case with BQ Green, a proposal to turn parts of the BQE between South Third and South Fifth Streets in Williamsburg into a park featuring bike lanes, a pool and a baseball diamond. The brainchild of Councilman Antonio Reynoso, the idea was initially floated in 2010 and priced at $100 million, but was met by then Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decided disinterest. Now, Reynoso wants to try again.
The idea is to build the park on a platform across the BQE ditch that had been rammed through parts of Brooklyn under the aegis of New York’s legendary, if arrogant, building czar, Robert Moses. Besides providing much needed green space, the park would also knit back together a neighborhood torn apart when the expressway originally went through. How feasible is BQ Green? Its designers, dlandstudio, have already built something like it for Dallas, Texas….

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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.”…

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Curbed NY

May 6, 2016

The proposed elevated park, BQ Green, needs elevated hope to become a reality

City councilman Antonio Reynoso is looking to bring green above Williamsburg—literally—in an ambitious way. Realizing the underutilization of a ditch along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Reynoso is hoping to convert what is currently a community divider into an elevated park named BQ Green. (h/t Gothamist)

The proposed park would be situated above the BQE between South Third and Fifth Streets with the objective of converting the concrete platform into parkland that would stretch over two blocks. If approved, BQ Green would feature flower gardens, barbecue areas, a baseball diamond, and even a pool. Reynoso also argues that it would add to the neighborhood in a more health-oriented way: the added greenery could counter pollution from the expressway, and potentially help the neighborhood’s asthma rates.

Along with his predecessor and current Brooklyn deputy borough president, Diana Reyna, Reynoso concocted the project plan for BQ Green back in 2010, but Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t interested, instead focusing on more affluent neighborhoods around the city. But now, with money to spare and an estimated price tag of $100 million, Reynoso is pushing to get the project approved this time around….

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New York Observer

April 26, 2016

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Now that abandoned industrial infrastructure has become the design frontier for park proponents, efforts are underway to transform an abandoned rail line in Queens into a linear park called QueensWay and build a deck over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to be known as BQGreen Park. The Natural Areas Conservancy, a recently formed group operating in collaboration with the parks department, surveys the social benefits and environmental health of the city’s natural areas and engages communities in trail building and forest-restoration projects. Its work is furthered by the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island, which was established by the parks department to germinate seeds and propagate plants for habitat-restoration sites. Additional good news includes the Trust for Public Land’s data-driven advocacy of a 10-minute (or less) walk for every resident of an urban area to a nearby park, playground, or greenway. And let’s not forget that there are 600 community gardens blooming today on former vacant lots throughout the city….

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DNAinfo

August 3, 2015

GREENPOINT — A renovation for a Greenpoint playground is finally fully funded after some three years of fundraising.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’ park funding announcement last week included $850,000 for McGolrick Park, a Greenpoint park south of Nassau Avenue and Russell Street.

The money, which was allocated as part of the 2016 fiscal year budget, brought the McGolrick Park Neighborhood Alliance to its fundraising goal of $2 million to renovate the playground.

“We’re just really elated at the fact that the borough president and the city council completed funding to get it all done,” said Martha Holstein, a member part of the alliance.

Neighbors initially spearheaded the idea of renovating the park during Councilman Steve Levin’s participatory budgeting in 2013, pitching it as one of several ideas to fund…

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Epoch Times

April 18, 2014

Pilot projects in landscape architecture can solve issues of comfort, beauty, and livability

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To address problems like the region’s ecology, dlandstudio added green space and designed it in a way to connect neighborhoods. With the help of local officials, city agencies are trying to secure funding for development of the space.

The effect of these small, pilot projects cities are implementing is potentially endless. The right ones, when implemented a million times, Drake said, “can start to transform our country.” The research Drake has done with grants sometimes snowballs into another grant study, then a bigger project. A feasibility study to cap a trench can turn into a green amenity for residents….

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