Brooklyn Greenway Initiative Benefit

10:15 PM EDT on June 20, 2007

A personal note from Aaron Naparstek:

When I first met Brian McCormick, Milton Puryear and Meg Fellerath in the spring of 2002, they were picking up trash and planting tulips alongside a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway off-ramp in Cobble Hill. I asked them what they were up to and they told me that they were working to create a waterfront greenway for Brooklyn – a linear park running from Greenpoint to Red Hook. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that they looked like a gang of juvenile delinquents paying off 40 hours of community service for shop-lifting. Clearly, these people were either insane or visionary.

At the time, Brian, Milton and Meg had no serious funding, no office and no particularly powerful allies or sponsors. They just had a great idea and a ton of persistence. They kept picking up trash, planting flowers, organizing the community and pushing their idea and today the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative is a highly professional non-profit organization with capital funding from the federal government, an office on Columbia Street and all kinds of high-powered allies and sponsors. They may or may not be insane but they are definitely visionary.

BGI is hosting a benefit event on the beach. There will be cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, music. It should be really nice.

Personally, I think that the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative is the most exciting community-driven development project going right now in New York City (take that, Highline). If you are not already involved in the Greenway, this is a great chance to get in on the ground floor of shaping the future of Brooklyn’s waterfront and creating a more livable city. I hope you can attend this event and will consider suppporting BGI.

Aaron Donovan @

Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

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