Shadows cast by a proposed 14-story tower on Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, twice the allowable height under current zoning, would have a “significant adverse impact” on plants in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, according to a draft environmental impact statement released by the Department of City Planning in May.
Next door to the garden, west of its main entrance on Eastern Parkway, the city plans to build a 40,000-square-foot skate facility in Mount Prospect Park, a recreation area that New York State determined in June is eligible for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
If constructed, both projects could significantly transform the landscape of both popular public green spaces in the heart of Brooklyn.
In June, Community Board 9, an advisory group whose area includes Crown Heights South, adopted resolutions opposing both the Franklin Avenue tower and the choice of Mount Prospect Park for the skate park.
But Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, and Crystal Hudson, the local city councilwoman, share mixed views of the projects. Both stand against the tower, with Mr. Reynoso issuing a report on July 25 recommending that the city reject the “upzoning” that would enable its development. By contrast, the two elected officials are enthusiastic enough about the skate park to have guided capital funding to the project, $2 million from the borough president’s office and $3.3 million from the City Council.
“A lot of what I’ve heard has been a dismissal of the skate community,” Ms. Hudson said. “Especially of young kids who enjoy skating, who don’t always want to be skating — and whose parents don’t want them to be skating — under highways and bridges, which is generally where skate parks have been.”
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Adrian Benepe, president of the botanic garden, said that the shadows created by the proposed tower at 962-972 Franklin Avenue, from the Continuum Company, represented “an existential threat” to the garden’s mission, “which is to grow and curate and propagate and conserve the plants of the world under glass.”
Laid out by the Olmsted Brothers firm on the site of a former ash dump and opened in 1911, the botanic garden sits on 52 acres of city land. In the 1980s, the city, together with the nonprofit organization that operates the garden, invested $25 million in a new conservatory complex, a long wing and three jewel-like octagonal glass pavilions along Washington Avenue. The complex opened in 1988.
Three years later, the city rezoned portions of Crown Heights South, including Franklin Avenue, in part with the aim of protecting the garden’s solar envelope and the lush new greenhouses. These greenhouses, along with outdoor nurseries used to propagate plants for the garden, are now under threat from the Franklin Avenue tower, according to the draft environmental impact statement. The report studied the effects on 23 growing facilities at the garden and concluded that shadows cast by the tower would reach 21 of them for periods ranging from an hour and 12 minutes to nearly three hours a day.
“Plants that normally grow in the Equator or that grow in the deserts need that full day of sunlight, particularly in the wintertime,” Mr. Benepe said. Reducing sunlight, he added, “might make it impossible to grow certain plants in our collections, including rare and endangered plants.”
The 14-story tower would comprise ground-floor retail topped by 475 apartments, including 119 income-restricted units.
“Housing will be built on the site,” said Ian Bruce Eichner, the chairman of Continuum. “The only question is whether it’s housing that contains an affordability component” — as the proposed tower does — “or whether it’s going to be housing that is exclusively nonunion-built, market-rate luxury condos.”
He added: “We’re certainly not going to build affordable housing if we don’t get the rezoning.”
Continuum has also proposed an alternative, “stepped-down” building design that it says would significantly decrease shadow impacts. A zoning text amendment would provide “a legally binding mechanism” to minimize the effect on the garden, Mr. Eichner said.
Mr. Benepe said that the garden’s own analysis of the stepped-down design showed that it would provide no more than 20 minutes of additional daily sunlight than the original 14-story design.
The borough president’s report also noted that an analysis submitted by Continuum on July 23 acknowledged that although the stepped-down design would reduce shadow durations, it “would not eliminate the significant adverse impacts” identified in the draft environmental impact statement because of “the unique nature” of the garden’s resources.
“This is simply the wrong place for this proposed building because of its adjacency to a critical, public, sunlight-sensitive resource,” Mr. Reynoso wrote.
Continuum previously sought rezoning for two 39-story towers on a larger footprint on the same block, but the project was killed by the City Planning Commission in 2021 amid fierce opposition from the community and the garden.
The draft impact statement also said that the original proposed 14-story tower would cause “significant adverse shadow impacts” on the one-acre Jackie Robinson Playground, where shadows would fall on basketball and handball courts, a seating area and a playground area — in some locations, for as much as nearly three and a half hours each afternoon. The borough president wrote that although the newer, stepped-down design would decrease shadow impacts on the playground, it would still cast shadows on “large portions of the park in spring, fall and winter.”
The playground is named for the Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman who in 1947 became the first African-American Major League Baseball player in the modern era. From 1913 to 1957, the Dodgers played at Ebbets Field, across McKeever Place from where the playground now sits.
In 1962, the ballpark was replaced by the state-subsidized Ebbets Field Apartments. Today, if you climb the stairs from Bedford Avenue where the right-field stands once stood, you see a weatherworn green sign that proclaims, with elegiac irony: “No Ball Playing.” Those words underscore how much those who live in the complex rely on the Jackie Robinson Playground as their backyard.
In 2018-2022, 88 percent of residents in the complex and two adjacent blocks were Black, according to an analysis of census data by Social Explorer.
“Black people tend to have higher rates of asthma, higher rates of depression, things that open space allows you to balance,” said Alicia Boyd, a leader of Movement to Protect the People, an activist group that helped block the previous towers. “Being able to be outside and get sunlight and air is important to us emotionally, psychologically. And now you’re about to take away the resource of sunlight?”
The new tower faces looming shadows of its own. It can be built only if the planning commission and the council approve a narrow rezoning within a single block of Franklin Avenue south of Montgomery Street. The opposition of Ms. Hudson, the councilwoman, represents a major obstacle, as the council generally defers to the position of local council members.
The planning commission will hold a public hearing on the rezoning on Aug. 7 and will take a binding vote within two months thereafter. If approved by the commission, the rezoning application will advance to the council.
Mount Prospect Park
The Parks Department plans to pave some green space in Mount Prospect Park to create an $11 million skate park, the largest element of a $24.8 million city investment to transform New York into what Mayor Eric Adams envisions as the “skate capital of the East Coast.” The planned facility, the Brooklyn Skate Garden, has generated a spirited turf battle between skate advocates and neighborhood activists protective of the park’s current layout and uses.
The mayor’s office said the city chose 7.8-acre Mount Prospect Park for its flagship skate park because of its central, transit-rich location — amid the cultural row of the Brooklyn Museum, the botanic garden and the Brooklyn Public Library — and with the 585-acre Prospect Park right across Flatbush Avenue.
The Brooklyn Skate Garden would be well more than half the size of a football field, making it by far the largest of the four new skate parks the city plans. Two will be built in the Bronx and one in Crown Heights. All are being developed through a public-private partnership between the city and the Skatepark Project, a nonprofit organization founded by the skateboarding celebrity Tony Hawk; the group will design the facilities pro bono.
“New York City is a huge hub of skateboarding, and there’s not nearly enough skate parks for the skaters we have, not to mention the next generations who want to skate,” said Benjamin Anderson Bashein, the chief executive of the Skatepark Project. “Skating has tremendous mental health and psychosocial benefits. It reduces stigma, it reduces prejudice, it builds resilience and it builds community. A skate park is that critical third space between school and home where young people can build relationships and socialize and find themselves.”
But some residents felt blindsided by the choice of their tranquil neighborhood park for such a major skate facility, which the mayor first announced in his state of the city speech in January.
“Rolling out a plan to pave over a significant swath of green space in a public park to create a concrete-centric, destination tourist attraction is atrocious,” said Hayley Gorenberg, the founder of Friends of Mount Prospect Park. “We are living through a galloping climate crisis. We have killer heat in New York City and the neighborhood, and the Brooklyn Public Library next door is a cooling center because of the dangerous heat our neighbors are experiencing.”
Community Board 9, in its June resolution, opposed “construction of a paved skateboarding facility on precious urban green space” and exhorted the city “to seriously consider alternative locations for this ambitious project right here in Prospect Heights and Crown Heights.”
The mayor’s office said that the “skate garden” will include new trees. Martin Maher, Brooklyn Borough Commissioner of the Parks Department, said in a statement that the “skate garden will deliver safe infrastructure for outdoor recreation while enhancing the park with improved way-finding and new grass and native plantings — upgrading the green space so everyone can continue to use it just as they do today, for picnicking, dog-walking, and running.”
The skate facility will be built on an unspecified footprint at the rear of the park, alongside the botanic garden. The Parks Department did not respond to questions about whether that footprint would include any of the currently unpaved central oval, which park-goers prize. But Ms. Hudson, the councilwoman, said that the agency had told her that the skate park “will not encroach on that central oval.” She said she would reconsider her support if that plan changed.
Mount Prospect Park was built by filling in a reservoir constructed in the 1850s to hold water obtained from five brook-fed Long Island ponds. A picturesque man-made lake, the reservoir held 20 million gallons of water — enough, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “to cook the breakfast of the people of Brooklyn for a week.” In 1891, a pink-granite gothic water tower was added.
At the opening of the park in 1939, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called it “our monument to the City of New York.” In June, in designating it eligible for the National Register, the state described the park as “a gently rolling platform of green and play spaces” that formed “part of the necklace of historic scenic and cultural resources at the heart of Brooklyn.”
But the designation did not deter the city from its plans.
“We appreciate the park’s historic significance,” a Parks Department spokesman said. “The skate garden will be sensitively designed, with community input, to limit impacts on the historic features of the park.”
The city plans to release the initial design in the fall and complete construction by 2026.