BROOKLYN STRAND
IMAGINING BROOKLYN’S GRAND GATEWAY
The Brooklyn Strand is a community-driven effort to connect Downtown Brooklyn to its waterfront and create an iconic gateway into Brooklyn.
While at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, our team worked with renowned architecture firm, WXY, to develop a corridor of reimagined public spaces knit together by infrastructure upgrades and paid for by publicly-owned development sites. This framework was the result of a robust community engagement process, which included a series of charrettes with more than 60 stakeholder groups over a two-year period.
The resulting community-driven vision rethinks a mid-20th century urban plan developed for car infrastructure to create a more continuous city fabric that is walkable, bike-friendly, and ultimately connects Downtown Brooklyn to the waterfront and neighborhoods in between.
SELECTED PRESS
"Brooklyn Strand will connect DoBRO to DUMBO and more," Time Out New York, May 11, 2016.
"New Renderings Show Updates to Brooklyn Strand Project," DNAinfo, May 9, 2016.
"New Renderings of Future Brooklyn Strand Put an Elevator on the Brooklyn Bridge," Gothamist, May 7, 2016.
"A New de Blasio Plan Could Save Downtown Brooklyn from Automobiles - If It Ever Gets Built," New York Magazine, May 6, 2016.
"First Renderings of Downtown Brooklyn's Greenway, Revealed!" Curbed, March 18, 2015.
"The New Plan to Connect Downtown Brooklyn to its Waterfront," Streetsblog, March 18, 2015.
"If walking from one place to the other suddenly seemed like a sensible thing to do, companies confined to Dumbo could expand into Downtown Brooklyn, the border between affluent and low-income areas would grow more permeable, and navigating great floods of traffic would become a less necessary evil of Brooklyn life. New York is a city of interlocking property lines and minute jurisdictions, where one department doesn’t always know what another is doing on adjacent squares of asphalt. That’s exactly why we need the rare kind of linked thinking that the Brooklyn Strand represents. In real life, we move in seconds from park bench to sidewalk to skyscraper, and our quality of life depends on them all."
— Justin Davidson, New York Magazine