Bicycling

Brooklyn Greenway Initiative Benefit This Thursday

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 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 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.

By Aaron Naparstek

4:15 PM EDT on June 25, 2007

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 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 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. Today the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative is a 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.

Personally, I find the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative to be one of the most inspired and exciting community-driven development projects in all of New York City (take that, High Line). This Thursday evening, BGI is hosting a benefit event on the beach at East River State Park. There will be cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and music. 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, in the process, creating a more livable city.

Thursday, June 28th, at 6:30 pm
East River State Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
RVSP: Buy tickets online
View the invitation (pdf)

Photo: ambienttraffic/Flickr

Aaron Naparstek

Aaron Naparstek is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparstek's journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. He was also one of the original cast members of the "War on Cars" podcast. You can find more of his work on his website.

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