In Brooklyn, a Fight Over Paving Parkland for Skateboarding

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out why a group is fighting Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to make Mount Prospect Park in Brooklyn a destination for skateboarders.

The city is proposing to pave over a section of Mount Prospect Park, next to a playground and elevated from Eastern Parkway, to build a large skate park.Credit…Anna Watts for The New York Times

The city has construction plans for Mount Prospect Park, once the site of a lookout station for George Washington’s army. About 40,000 square feet of the 7.79-acre park are to be turned into one of the largest skateboarding spots on the East Coast.

Some nearby residents are fighting the plan. Their gripes are not about the potential influx of skateboarders or the ollies, kick flips and tic-tacs. They say the poured-concrete skateboarding facility would take up precious green space in a city that does not have enough of it.

“Pouring concrete is Stone Age,” said Hayley Gorenberg, a co-chair of Friends of Mount Prospect Park, a group formed less than a month ago, after Mayor Eric Adams referred to the project in his State of the City address.

The new skating spot in Mount Prospect Park, to be called the Brooklyn Skate Garden, would be the largest of four in a $24.8 million project that the mayor mentioned. Another skateboarding area will take shape in Brower Park in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and two more will go up in the Bronx.