Waterfront Park

The space you are entering, known today as Brooklyn Bridge Park, occupies a stretch of land that once operated as the world's largest private freight terminal. At the turn of the twentieth century, the New York Dock Company controlled these miles of piers and warehouses, creating a bustling industrial empire that defined the daily rhythm of the Brooklyn shoreline. By the late nineteen seventies, however, the rise of container shipping rendered these piers obsolete, leaving the area abandoned and largely cut off from the residential neighborhoods above it. What you see now is the result of a decades-long transformation that repurposed these derelict industrial docks into a public landscape.