A night at Brooklyn Bridge Park
by David Stevens
Common Ground Ensemble Salon #5/2025
In the run up to the first year of the Common Ground Summit in 2022, I sat with our friend and partner Peleke Flores at Mālama Hulē‘ia, the watershed restoration program where he serves as the Field Operations and Resource Manager. As we were speaking about his important work the conversation turned to our connections with rivers, and I suddenly had a surprising realization: I had grown up next to a river (the Hudson) and never thought of myself as connected to it! In fact, I was born in a hospital by the river (the East), grew up on an Island surrounded by rivers, had relatives who worked on the Brooklyn waterfront, and visited family who lived by the Atlantic Ocean. All this in a city where 4 out of the 5 boroughs are on an island or are islands themselves. And I had never once thought of myself as someone with a connection to the water.
In large part this was due to the fact the New York City waterfront of my youth wasn’t terribly inviting. Disused and dilapidated piers were the central features of a riverfront still reeling from the shift away from the waterborne commerce that has always been central to the communities of this region. And while they were fun places to play, and served as an important refuge for many, you would be hard pressed to call them nice. At the same time, the considerable pollution in the water meant that as children we were more often warned about being near or in the river than encouraged to explore it. I left my conversation with Peleke with a new view and a new motivation to learn about and understand New York’s waterfront as both an ecosystem, and as a place that has nurtured and defined our communities for millennia.
It was with this in mind that we selected Brooklyn Bridge Park as a location for our most recent Ensemble gathering. In the decades since I was a kid hitting baseballs on dirt lots where Battery Park City now stands, New York’s waterfront has undergone a tremendous transformation as the City has sought to turn it into pleasant, green, public spaces. This is not without its downsides as housing costs along many of the rivers have, like elsewhere in the city become increasingly unaffordable for all but the extremely wealthy. Some of the neighborhoods around these parks have not always been welcoming to certain communities. But the parks themselves are a place where different types of people can and do come together, free to the public, to enjoy time by the water and hopefully develop a deeper appreciation for our waterways and the communities that have lived by them than I had as a child. We chose Brooklyn Bridge Park not just because it offers stunning views of downtown Manhattan, but because it’s a place where people from the City’s varied communities come together to sit, cook, and spend time with each other. It’s where one of the grills is tended by a family playing afrobeats, the next bachata, and a third classic rock – one where communities who the news would tell you have no business getting along sit next each other watching the water and making sure they don’t overcook the food.
We chose this setting as a place where we wanted to build community with an eye to the future. To be in a location that in many ways represents the kind of change that can happen when you focus on care for place, putting community first, and making a place for people to find common ground.