The city has stepped up to the challenge and will join NY State as a co-defendent in the lawsuit to stop the redevelopment of Brooklyn Bridge Park. Last month, a bunch of civic groups banded together to sue the state, which is overseeing the project, because there are now 1,200 condos in the mix. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, which filed suit, told the NY Sun, "There will be Fresh Direct trucks delivering groceries. When a child decides to kick a ball, it will bounce off of someone's house." more ›

Today's NY Times article about the current shaping of Hudson River Park and how it was inspired by the failed Westway project. Westway would have meant a landfill extension into the Hudson along the West Side Highway much like Battery Park City (and with its mix of residential and commercial space) - and the highway would have been built underground, as the highway was crumbling. New York Voices has a good site explaining it, and opposition grew because some people thought it might be the Lower Manhattan Expressway - the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs - on the West Side. An Talk of the Town piece from 2004 revisited the project:

[Craig] Whitaker [a Westway planner] talked about some of the places where the city has had the wisdom to run highways under riverfront esplanades—the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Carl Schurz Park. “We thought New Yorkers would never accept sixty-five thousand cars passing daily between them and the waterfront,” he said. He nodded toward the six lanes of hurtling cars and trucks just outside the Pier 40 lobby. “But that’s what we’ve got out here. It was a tragedy for the city."

Brooklyn community groups descended on City Hall yesterday, to protest the rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and it seems that the City Council is on board, as it "threatened...to scuttle" the Bloomberg plan. The sticking points are that the Bloomberg plan includes a lot of development with a lot of tall buildings, and possibly not enough park space or low income housing. The Bloomberg administration counters that the plan has to be attractive enough for developers to want to develop the "polluted, underused" space. more ›

And if you're interested in NYC waterfront development, read Waterfront by Philip Lopate, which discusses the past, present, and future of the NYC waterfront. more ›

, at the New York Film Festival, it also opens theatrically this weekend. more ›

Revel in our new sports coverage from tien! And Gothamist captured the Elephant Walk Wednesday night. Plus, the week in full. more ›

Newsday has a great article about Lopate and in it, he suggests some ideas for future waterfront development:

You have this strange phenomenon of all this underused land in the most intensely built- up real estate market in the world. So what are you going to do with it? The identity of New York resides in the answer. Because we've become so environmentally aware, there's come to be this equation of open space with park space. Greening the edges [with parks] is a good idea in places. But you don't need a chlorophyll cordon sanitaire around the edge. Why can't you have newspaper kiosks overlooking the water or movie theaters? Why not a post office, so that people would be brought there by their daily functions?