One of New York City\u2019s longest-running turf wars festers in the shadows of municipal Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
The battlefield in question seems utterly unremarkable. Its asphalt is cracked. Pigeons meander among the weeds that surround it. And yet, to the Brooklyn judges who preside in the neighboring courthouse, it is a sanctuary as inviolate as the law they are elected to adjudicate, and woe unto those who threaten it.<\/p>\n
For more than 60 years, the judges have used this patch of land as a parking lot. And for roughly half that time, a broad swath of Brooklyn society \u2014 public officials, neighborhood gadflies and parents alike \u2014 have argued that the lot should be converted into a park.<\/p>\n
Their argument is based on more than a stubborn desire for more green space: The land is parkland.<\/p>\n
Two Democrats from Brooklyn are leading the renewed fight to get the judges booted, and part of their battle strategy is to draw the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to their side.<\/p>\n
There are few issues more divisive than parking among dwellers in this space-constrained, archipelago city. For those who have cars, there is never enough of it. For their opponents, cars are anti-urbanist forces that destroy the environment and take up precious street space that might otherwise go toward cycling or walking.<\/p>\n
To New Yorkers like those, the judges\u2019 perpetual squatting on mapped parkland is nothing short of an abomination. Over decades, their simmering sense of injustice has fueled intermittent political efforts to evict the cars. Literally and figuratively, the judges have remained unmoved.<\/p>\n
Two decades ago, Abraham Gerges, then an administrative judge for State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, was one of the parking lot\u2019s staunchest defenders. Now retired, he expressed shock in a recent interview that this debate remained unsettled, and maintained that parking near the courts was necessary because judges face threats.<\/p>\n
As he made his case, his wife interceded.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone from jail threatened your life!\u201d she said. (The threat, according to a memorable 2002 article<\/a> in The New York Post, involved a convict who \u201ctried to find a witch doctor to place a deadly voodoo hex\u201d on the judge. Mr. Gerges was given round-the-clock protection.)<\/p>\n Death threats, Mr. Gerges said, \u201care not unusual things.\u201d<\/p>\n If anything, they have become more prevalent. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security alerted law enforcement agencies of a spike in the harassment of judges. The New York Times recently reported that it had independently identified<\/a> thousands of threats against state judges spanning just the last three years.<\/p>\n The justices say having a safe and close place to park three dozen cars seems like a reasonable request, even at the expense of parkland.<\/p>\n But to those who want to see the judges evicted, this festering dispute is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the Democratic political machine that controls Brooklyn, from the judges it helps select to their extrajudicial power over acreage that rightly belongs to the public.<\/p>\n \u201cAnywhere else in this city, this wouldn\u2019t even be a discussion; it wouldn\u2019t even be a conversation,\u201d said Antonio Reynoso, the borough president whose offices in Borough Hall bookend the parking lot. \u201cIt\u2019s park space.\u201d<\/p>\n On a wintry afternoon, Mr. Reynoso took a reporter to the maps room on the top floor of Borough Hall, Brooklyn\u2019s oldest<\/a> public building. He asked an aide to show him the book of maps containing the parking lot.<\/p>\n An office manager, Jessica Kallo, pulled out a topographical, cloth-paged book from 1945 and opened it to a hand-drawn map showing the lot within the confines of Columbus Park, a green space that the Brooklyn officials say sprawls across 7.9 acres and encompasses Borough Hall.<\/p>\n Then Mr. Reynoso headed to his conference room to show his vision<\/a> for a redesigned park, replacing the judges\u2019 parking lot with a lawn, a kiosk, a public restroom and plantings, with a path winding among them.<\/p>\n Fixing a \u2018supreme bungle\u2019<\/p>\n The judges say history is on their side.<\/p>\n Archival newspaper records indicate that parking for the courthouse \u2014 which one critic likened<\/a> to a \u201c beached limestone whale\u201d \u2014 has, on and off, been a \u201csore point\u201d for the Downtown Brooklyn community for 68 years. But in the 1950s, the issue was not the existence of judicial parking, but rather the lack of it.<\/p>\n A Daily News article from 1958 entitled, \u201cWhoops! A Supreme Bungle,\u201d criticized the government for building a courthouse without adequate parking spots.<\/p>\n Even Robert Moses, then the city\u2019s parks commissioner, was flummoxed.<\/p>\n \u201cWe suggested having parking in the basement of the building, but we got nowhere with the idea,\u201d a parks spokesman told the newspaper.<\/p>\n By the following year, the city had decided to allow the judges to store their cars in a section of Columbus Park.<\/p>\n In the most recent court battle over the lot, the judges cited a 1959 news article from a long-defunct newspaper, The New York World-Telegram, which described the site as \u201cexclusively for the use of the 18 justices of the court and high administrative officials.\u201d This was evidence, the 21st-century judges argued, that the parking lot had always been intended as theirs.<\/p>\n Newspaper archives suggest that the debate remained relatively dormant for decades. But quietly, over time, the tenor changed. <\/p>\n In 1999, when the state was seeking community support to build a new courthouse on nearby Jay Street, the administrative judge promised to move cars from the park to the courthouse\u2019s new garage, The Daily News reported. That didn\u2019t happen. Instead, the judges gave up 16 parking spots in a strip of land that used to be part of Fulton Street, and borders the existing parking lot.<\/p>\n The lot is accessible via a curb cut from Joralemon Street, the location of Brooklyn Law School, and the Brooklyn Municipal Building, home to a hodgepodge of city agencies.<\/p>\n The signage adjoining the parking lot is as confusing as its status. One sign reads, \u201cauthorized vehicles only.\u201d A bit to the right, another sign attached to a wrought-iron fence reads \u201cColumbus Park\u201d above the Parks Department emblem \u2014 the silhouette of a leaf that Parks Department experts believe might belong to a London plane. Behind the sign is an actual London plane tree. Behind the tree is the parking lot.<\/p>\n On a Tuesday in April, the lot was populated by a white Volvo, two black Lexuses, a gray Mercedes SUV, a black BMW, a gray Acura, a black Subaru and a black Tesla. There were also eight empty spaces and a black Honda whose license plate \u2014 \u201cSupreme Court 76\u201d \u2014 Mr. Reynoso finds ironic, given the judges\u2019 stated concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cIf safety was paramount, maybe they have inconspicuous plates versus plates like this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Calling in the big guns<\/p>\n The area around the courthouse has long suffered for park space, but a 2004 rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn probably made it worse. The goal was to attract new office tower development, but a forest of residential towers sprouted instead.<\/p>\n Still, for the 50 or so State Supreme Court judges who now work in the courthouse on Adams Street, just south of the federal courthouse on Cadman Plaza East, it is not as though parking spaces are nonexistent.<\/p>\n The streets immediately surrounding the courthouse have as many as 46 on-street parking spots available to court employees, according to an April 2025 email from the Brooklyn transportation commissioner to Mr. Reynoso and Lincoln Restler, a city councilman. Casting the net wider would hike that number to 160 authorized on-street spots.<\/p>\n Other options have been floated.<\/p>\n