Pratt Center for Community Development

Sunset Park

Sunset Park is a community whose predominantly low-income residents live side-by-side with active industry and a working waterfront, as well as with highways, power plants, and other infrastructure that serves the City and the region. These land uses burden Sunset Park with heavy truck traffic, noise, and air pollution, and isolate residents from the waterfront. The United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE) has engaged the Pratt Center to support its effort to create a greenway along the Bush Terminal/Industry City waterfront in Brooklyn. We are conducting a public planning process for a waterfront greenway, under a grant from New York State's Local Waterfront Revitalization Program, sponsored by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

The Sunset Park Greenway poses some design challenges that arise from the neighborhood's realities as an environmental justice community in which manufacturing continues to be an important source of local employment. Only 23% of Sunset Park's residents travel to work by car; the vast majority use public transportation, and 18% walk or bike to their jobs. Thousands more adults and children walk to the area's schools, libraries, shopping areas, and other essential services.

But walking or biking in Sunset Park can be hazardous to your health. Through streets, especially Third and Fourth Avenues, carry high volumes of car and truck traffic. Scores of pedestrians and cyclists are injured crossing these avenues each year.

Recognizing the importance of space for active play in an area that is home to thousands of young people, Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez has secured $8 million for the construction of a new park on Bush Terminal Piers 6-12. Creating safe access to the waterfront for Sunset Park residents quickly surfaced as a priority in the greenway planning process.

Identifying the most important streets to connect the upland residential communities to the waterfront, and redesigning them to be safe routes for people, will be as important as the design of the waterfront route itself.

The Pratt Center's project team mapped important local destinations -- schools, churches and mosques, subway stations, as well as streets and intersections that have been scenes high accident rates. With UPROSE, we conducted workshops at schools and community centers throughout the neighborhood, reaching out to Latino, Chinese, and Middle Eastern youth and adults.

At a design charrette in October 2005, UPROSE led thirty local residents on a van tour of the waterfront, then returned to its headquarters for a presentation of street design strategies from around the world. Our presentation juxtaposed sidewalks, streets, and squares dedicated to walking, biking, relaxing, and socializing, with Sunset Park streets that might be similarly transformed.

The presentation -- conducted with UPROSE youth members translating simultaneously into Spanish and Chinese -- was received with enthusiasm, and participants used dot-voting to identify priority connector streets. Pratt Center staff is now working on alternative street designs incorporating bike paths and lanes, widened sidewalks, plantings, furniture, and other amenities. The designs will not only make the streets safer, but create a green network that will improve air quality and microclimate, help to manage stormwater, and most importantly, expand the space available for community life.

While greenways in some neighborhoods are intended to support (and are made possible by) the transformation of industrial areas to residential use, Sunset Park remains a vital space for manufacturing and maritime uses. UPROSE sees the greenway as a strategy to enable residents and industry to co-exist. Several key waterfront businesses have expressed willingness to provide space for the right-of-way along their properties, where it will be an amenity for their employees. Developing a street design vocabulary for an industrial neighborhood that will strengthen the manufacturing sector, rather than accelerating its displacement, is another special challenge that takes advantage of the Pratt Center's strategic framework and the knowledge of its multidisciplinary staff.