NYC’s waterfront is transforming into luxury leisure space, one park and condo tower at a time

The construction fences recently went down around Domino Square, the final public space to be completed in the $2.5 billion transformation of the Domino Sugar Refinery into an 11-acre mixed-use neighborhood. Designed by Field Operations, Domino Square is a striking, oval-shaped plaza in the Brooklyn neighborhood of South Williamsburg that is surrounded by redbud trees, pin oaks, and two types of pines, plus white and lavender flowers that will eventually cascade down Cor-Ten steel planters.  According to Lisa Switkin, the landscape architect who designed the project, the mixture of vegetation nods to a typical Northeastern forest. In some ways, Domino Square reads like a European piazza, which is a welcome addition to a neighborhood where, for decades, the postage-stamp-size Grand Ferry Park was the only officially sanctioned place to hang out by the water. New York City has been steadily changing its postindustrial waterfront into leisure space with new parks built on the skeletons of old shipping piers and along formerly fenced-off shorelines. While this work has been happening in all five boroughs, the change has been particularly noticeable in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where the 2022 median income was $98,750, which is approximately 27% more than the citywide median household income of $77,550. Now instead of boxy factories and low-slung warehouses where the neighborhoods meet the East River, there are towering condos and apartments.  It’s all due to a 2005 rezoning, which opened up the land to new construction. A waterfront open space master plan soon followed to at least bring some public benefit to the redevelopment. The civic proposition involves public access to the waterfront in exchange for new construction. It’s framed as a win for developers and communities. But as more of these spaces come online, the question remains: Who is the waterfront really for?  [Photo: Daniel Levin/Field Operations] From Heavy Industry to a Mixed-Use Neighborhood The quarter-mile stretch of land just north of the Williamsburg Bridge, where the Domino Refinery once was, has seen some of the most dramatic changes of New York City’s waterfront, and has become one of the most visible examples of the waterfront rezoning. There, developer Two Trees, which famously flipped the neighborhood of Dumbo, has spent $2.5 billion renovating the sugar factory into class A offices, high-end residential towers, retail spaces, and a park. “It’s based on our experiences in Dumbo and having a philosophy that a mix of uses is better for neighborhoods,” says David Lombino, managing director of external affairs at Two Trees. “An all-residential neighborhood—like what Battery Park City was before it diversified over the past 10 years—is just a kind of boring place. You don’t get good retail and you don’t get street traffic and it doesn’t feel like New York.”  In many ways, the developers needed the South Williamsburg community—a mixture of newer young professionals and longtime Puerto Rican, Hasidic, and Brazilian residents—in order for the area to feel lively just as much as the community needed a park. The development was thought of as a “seam and bridge” between the various neighborhood enclaves in Williamsburg. “There was an existing thriving neighborhood and it was like, how do we tap that energy?” Lombino says.  Roughly 50% of Domino is open space. The park, which, at about 100 feet wide, is double the requirement for public waterfront access. Meanwhile, the 1-acre Domino Square—which is located at the southern end of the development and extends open space from the waterfront to Kent Avenue—wasn’t required at all, and neither were the new streets that connect to the neighborhood’s existing grid.   The developers, with master plan designers SHoP Architects, thought that concentrating the allowable square footage of construction in fewer, but taller, buildings, and using the freed-up ground for open space might win over their neighbors, who ardently opposed a previous scheme by Rafael Viñoly. It did. As The New York Times reported, there was a sense that there was no stopping the redevelopment and Two Trees’s master plan gave them more than the one that came before. Something is better than nothing. “The community board was shell-shocked from all of the new buildings and construction, and some of the neighborhood infrastructure wasn’t really in place,” Lombardi says. “So adding this park, building it up front, and delivering it when we delivered the first building in 2018, was a major gesture to a community and a neighborhood that had seen unfulfilled promises in terms of park infrastructure and space. It was like water in the desert.” [Photo: Daniel Levin/Field Operations] Private Development, Public Access  While some of the parks along the Brooklyn waterfront are developed and managed by the NYC Parks Department, like Bushwick Inlet Park, much of it is possible