It’s been a little more than two years since Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would be partnering with Tony Hawk’s Skatepark Project to build a 40,000-square-foot skate park in Brooklyn’s Mount Prospect Park. It was one of four skate parks being created or revamped as part of a city initiative, and the only one that proposed building an entirely new space rather than replacing an existing skate park or asphalt rink. Intended as the city’s flagship, it was also by far the largest, in the city and regionally, tied with the Lynch Family Skatepark in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the largest skate park on the East Coast.
The city’s skateboarding community was understandably thrilled about the prospect of a huge new destination skate park. But many people who live nearby were upset about the scale of the project and the loss of green space that would result from paving over part of an existing park — and not a large one at that. Mount Prospect Park, tucked up on one of the highest points in Brooklyn, is just 7.8 acres wedged between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Its hilly terrain and a playground already limit what open green space there is, primarily a central lawn used by off-leash dogs, picnickers, and soccer players that makes up just under a third of the park’s acreage. Parks Department officials insisted the skate park, which they called a “skate garden,” with trees and landscaping built into the design, wouldn’t take up more than 10 percent of the park or interfere with those other uses. But that claim seemed irreconcilable with the project’s scale within a park that already had such limited open space. Still, without the details of where the new park would go or how it would be laid out, it was hard to say for sure.
