What’s the New Greenpoint ‘Beach’ Park Really Like?

On a 90-degree day in May, the people of Greenpoint went to the beach on their lunch breaks, though perhaps “beach” here is a stretch. After many years of delay, the part of Bushwick Inlet Park featuring a patch of sand opened earlier this month on Kent and North 14th Streets. Still, everyone is happy to be there. “It’s the closest waterfront park we have that’s actually water,” says Lane DeVries, who is spending her day off sunbathing on a beach chair plopped down next to the sliver of sand. The only problem, we both agree, is that swimming is not allowed. A Big Gulp cup floats close to shore as DeVries considers the bright side. Given its proximity to former industrial sites, “I thought it might smell bad,” she says. “But it doesn’t.”

This specific 1.8-acre parcel of the park is called Motiva, which sounds like a prescription ADHD medication but is in fact the name of a fossil-fuel company. The city purchased the land, once the site of a shipbuilding operation, from Motiva Enterprises in 2014 for $5 million, and somehow 12 years passed before this teeny park actually got built. The entire 27 acres of Bushwick Inlet Park was supposed to be developed as part of the 2005 neighborhood rezoning, but over two decades later, less than a third of that plan has been completed. Part of the delay: The city spent more than $350 million acquiring the land, and the owner of the last tract played hardball but finally sold it in 2016. Still, that was a decade ago. The park plan was a sweetener for the rezoning deal, and while many of its high-rises have gone up, to get to Motiva you have to walk past two blocks of fenced-off waterfront littered with overturned park benches, bicycle tires, and safety cones.

Photo: Clio Chang

The current holdup, per Hell Gate, is due partially to funding and partially to squabbling between fossil-fuel companies about who is responsible for remediating the land. (At one of the remaining sites, National Grid and ExxonMobil are in litigation over who needs to do the cleanup.) Greg Thornberg, a birder who works as a fabricator nearby, says he has been walking past the site for years, trying to get a glimpse of spotted sandpipers and egrets as he waited for it to open. “I spent most of my time peeking through the fence,” Thornberg says. “There’s little cracks.” He has brought binoculars to Motiva and points out a pair of killdeer at the edge where the finished park meets the unfinished bench-storage lot. Thornberg bird-watches through the fence there as well. “I’m like, Can I just go in there and we plan a little cleanup?” he says. Which is another other funny thing about the park deal: A local group organized under the banner Save the Inlet is currently fighting another proposed development, Monitor Point, which includes a planned 56-story skyscraper. The group argues the tower is basically incompatible with the inlet, which it calls a “rare natural embayment, a migratory-bird stop, and an ecological treasure.”

A “Save the Inlet” sign hangs along with oyster shells on the fence next to the park, where Natalie Siracusa, a self-proclaimed “beach girl” from New Jersey, is relaxing on a bench in front of the water. Motiva now joins a small handful of little beach parks in the city that seem made for brief visits like this. We chat about the heat, which is oppressive for the springtime, and the fact that there is no shade in the park, at least not yet. (The trees were just planted.) But isn’t that just like the actual beach? “No notes,” Siracusa says. “I’m loving it so far.”

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