The street grid in Williamsburg just got a little smaller with one block now removed from the city's map altogether. NY1's Jeanine Ramirez filed the following report.
Cars headed west on Union Avenue in Williamsburg are now forced to turn once they hit North 12th Street. That's because the street is closed. Permanently. Demapped. Taken off the street grid. Turned into park space.
"We've come a long way," said Joe Vance, a board member of te nonprofit park advocacy group Open Space Alliance. "This is a pretty momentous step for the community to create park land."
Vance said when the city pushed to rezone the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront in 2005 to allow for tall residential towers, the group wanted some community givebacks.
"One of things that we asked for, and what they agreed to, was to do a traffic study of all the streets that passed through McCarren Park to see if any of them could indeed be demapped and made into park space," Vance said.
It was this block that was singled out. Once separating the McCarren handball courts from a dog run and a community garden, it now connects them. And instead of being overseen by the Department of Transportation, the Parks Department is now in charge.
Plans to demap a street are not so easy, though.
"They have to go through a review by every city agency," Vance said. "Not just Parks and DOT, but Sanitation, the utility companies weigh in, the FDNY, the police."
The Alliance came up with $50,000 to help make it happen, paying for consultants and studies. This new space adds an acre of park land to an underserved community.
Historically, North Brooklyn has one of the lowest ratios of open space in the city, with just about 5 percent park land.
The community demands are far from over. At Buswick Inlet Park, the city promised to turn the site into 28 acres of park land with the rezoning. A decade later, only a fraction has been done. An online petition is part of the campaign to push for the park.
Over at McCarren, residents are taking in the open air.
"I think it's great," said one resident. "A gorgeous little strip of street."
"I think this is cool," said another. "It reminds me a little bit of Europe, where you can walk on the streets."
The Alliance says the next step is a redesign to intergrate the new space seamlessly.