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.
Last night, at a packed Community Board 8 meeting in the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s 180-seat auditorium with nary a free seat, renderings of the project finally offered a clearer picture. Besides Tony Hawk’s foundation, MNLA (Matthews Nielsen’s landscape firm, which also worked on Little Island) and Arcadis, a design and engineering firm, also contributed to the design, which showed a wide range of street and transition skating elements winding around a landscape of shrubs and trees (the “skate garden” concept in action). For a number of skate-park supporters who came out for the meeting, including a 9-year-old and a tween, the main question was how soon it would be done (the answer: Construction could start as early as the spring of next year and would take about a year).
But other attendees were upset by the proposed location of the skate park, which is more or less in the center of Mount Prospect’s open lawn, the park’s most desirable real estate. Someone asked why the skate park couldn’t go to one side of the lawn instead of in the middle, and Brooklyn parks commissioner Marty Maher explained that the siting was intended to preserve the older trees along the eastern side of the field. An area on the western side would remain a lawn, which Parks promised would be sodded and properly maintained, unlike the existing lawn.
Crucially, Parks says that it reduced the size of the paved portion in the design to 19,500 square feet of concrete hardscape, which would take up roughly 22 percent of the existing lawn. The design does introduce 8,500 square feet of additional landscaping, including 19 trees and some new picnic tables and benches, so the overall footprint will be somewhat larger than 19,500 square feet. The project also includes provisions to redo the existing paved paths in the park — there’s one that rings the lawn — entirely in Belgian block or with bands of it to discourage skateboarding outside the designated area.
Despite these changes, many of those attending the meeting still felt the project posed an existential threat to the park. Supporters have painted these opponents as NIMBYs, arguing that the area is hardly starved for green space: Locals can always go to nearby Prospect Park. But Prospect Park is separated from Prospect Heights by four intersections and nine lanes of traffic and is less convenient for people who live deeper in Crown Heights. The Parks Department has framed the skate park as a win-win for the park and the neighborhood: an $11.16 million investment, with about $154,000 of that coming from the Skatepark Foundation as in-kind design services and the remainder from various city pots. The park was run-down, it argued, and the money would help fix it up, including what the department referred to in renderings as “the worn lawn.” At the meeting, several people asked how Parks would ensure that Mount Prospect was well maintained after the skate park was finished, since it hadn’t been before. Maher said that capital projects created a virtuous cycle, that a properly aerated lawn — something that would be part of the capital improvement plan — would better support grass even with dogs still allowed on it, and that skateboarders would be eager to help with maintenance. A number of audience members were dubious about such rosy predictions. One pointed out that Parks Department funding is stagnant. And the portions of lawn that remain after the skate park is built will no doubt see heavier use, especially with the increased foot traffic that Parks has promised will come with the new skate park.
While many are still clearly upset about the skate park’s location — the neighboring community board, CB 9, which covers part of Crown Heights and Prospect–Lefferts Gardens, has called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stop the project — the chair of Community Board 8 reminded attendees last night that the site itself is not negotiable. The Parks Department selected Mount Prospect Park years before the skate park was announced. The Pablo Ramirez Foundation, the organization that developed the concept, had originally hoped to put it in Prospect Park instead; it saw the bigger, neighboring park as the kind of location where skate parks rightly belong, unlike the out-of-the-way patches under a highway or underpass where most skate parks are located now that expose skaters to air pollution and pigeon poop. “If you go to Prospect Park on a Saturday morning, there are like 600 kids playing baseball and the skateboarders are under the BQE,” says Loren Michelle, the executive director of the foundation, which is named after her son, a professional skateboarder who was killed while skating in San Francisco. But Parks told the foundation that Prospect Park was not an option because it was landmarked. At this point, not only is the Mount Prospect site selection final, but the design itself is also close to final, according to the Skatepark Project, and is not expected to change more than 10 or 20 percent.
The presentation last night was a preliminary one for the Parks Committee, which will be followed by a vote of the full board in April. The Community Board’s vote is also nonbinding; it will then go to the city’s public-design commission for final approval. The Skatepark Project says that the project could potentially be finished as soon as early 2028.
