Carving Out Havens and Facing Down the Skeptics

Enforcement officers from the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation sat in two cars and guarded the locked gates of Hunts Point Riverside Park in the South Bronx last Wednesday.

“When is the park opening?” they were asked.

“Who are you?” came the reply, delivered without even a glance at the questioner.

“A reporter,” they were told.

“No comment.”


Who would have imagined the hours of a public park would be given on a need-to-know basis? Yet that was the question people in Hunts Point had been asking ever since work on this hidden gem was finished — more or less — last September.

It finally opened this weekend, after hundreds of calls to the city from eager schoolchildren, parents and community organizers who felt slighted that the park’s twisty paths, new benches, grills and boat ramp lay within their sight but out of their reach.

Officially, the lack of a traffic light along the busy street — where tractor-trailers speed to and from the sprawling regional produce market — accounted for part of the delay. The other reason was that even after crossing the intersection, park visitors have to cross an active railroad track that is used by a slow-moving freight train that serves the market. These were hardly unknown problems, yet it still took eight months before the city installed traffic lights and crosswalk lines at the intersection and stationed a flagman by the tracks.

“The city moves in geologic time,” said Adam Green, the executive director of Rocking the Boat, an educational and environmental group that was given special permission to launch hand-built boats from the park last fall. “It moves even slower than that freight train.”

Hunts Point Riverside, also known as Lafayette Avenue Park, is one of two new waterfront parks on the mostly industrial peninsula, which has been enjoying a rebirth in recent years. The other oasis, Barretto Point Park, was carved out of what had once been the site of a paint factory and, later, a squatter’s village of Caribbean-style wooden shacks where not too long ago only free-ranging Bronx chickens and a few hardy souls could enjoy sweeping vistas of the East River. While Barretto Point Park has been open to the public since September, its hours and staffing have been erratic, residents and advocates said, with the park closed sometimes as early as midafternoon in recent months.

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