In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 8 UNPLANNED POSTSCRIPT Dogs, Sunsets, Rock Bands, and the Governance of a Waterfront Park in early 2005, I received an unexpected e-mail from Chip Place, the recently hired director of Capital Facilities and Planning for the New York City Regional Office of State Parks. He had inherited the BEDT park project and was interested in my research. Now that the NYU partnership was dead, he wanted to discuss ideas for the design and program of the terminal, particularly those involving interim use. I had been pursuing State Parks for more than three years at that point; my numerous requests for interviews and planning documents were all declined, unanswered, or passed along to another party in the bureaucracy without ultimate satisfaction. Now they were calling me for something— an interesting development. I called Chip back and we chatted. I suggested they could inexpensively craft a park with minimal improvements, leaving the landscape more or less as is. The conversation was pleasant and I forwarded him my 2002 article “Brooklyn’s Vernacular Waterfront.” Knowing that Chip represented an agency that would likely find my ideas unworkable, I did not push hard. Given the state’s relative inaction as owner of the site over the preceding years, I thought it would wait for another partnership to emerge—even if it took several more years—and then launch a new plan that might transform the waterfront into something very different from the sports fields envisioned by NYU. 218 unplanned postscript When I did not hear again from Chip or anyone else at State Parks during the balance of 2005, I just assumed that my ideas had indeed been dismissed. But on a visit to the terminal in May 2006 I found a landscape of freshly contoured soil imprinted with bulldozer tracks. The cobblestone streetbed of what was once North 8th Street had been partially repaired and was now flanked by a row of freshly planted seedlings. Other surfaces had been smoothed, repaired, and/ or cleaned. Attending a meeting of the Friends of BEDT State Park the next month, I formally learned that State Parks had been quietly moving forward with their own plan to open the terminal for interim or possibly longer-term use, without a partner or a grand plan. The Northside’s long wait for a waterfront park was almost over. Upon my arrival at this meeting, held at the NAG office across the street from BEDT, Cathleen Breen greeted me warmly and, as she had done in the past, invoked her own variation on an adage generated from a children’s book about a little train. “I told you,” she said with a smile, “it’s The Little Park That Could.” The five Friends in attendance excitedly discussed who should be invited to the ribbon cutting and how to set up a naming contest for the park. They also talked about commissioning one of the many graphic designers of Greenpoint and Williamsburg to create a logo for the park that would recall the BEDT Railroad diamond logo. Cathleen said they might also be able to bring back a retired BEDT engine that was apparently sitting in a Sunset Park rail yard. While excited, the Friends were also a bit apprehensive, as Chip Place would be by soon to show them the damage to the park’s fledgling plantings caused by the previous week’s storm. The Friends had hoped to have the official opening on Independence Day weekend. Over the years, neighborhood residents had gathered at the water’s edge, in whatever condition it was in and wherever they could find or create access , the night of July 4th to watch the fireworks display over the East River. Instead of attending, Chip phoned in. Cathleen took his call and relayed the message to us: The opening would have to be pushed to late July, to give State Parks a chance to repair the ground cover. The Friends were disappointed but understanding; some of them had been fighting for a waterfront park, in one form or another, for a dozen years, so they could wait another month or so. Ultimately it would be another year before the park would open. Around that time I had all but given up on interviewing a State Parks official. But in 2011, I began again and reached New York City Regional Director Rachel Gordon, who eventually agreed to let me talk to Chip at their office in Manhattan . The day I met Chip for...

Share