Reconnecting a City Divided: Rosa Chang’s Generational Vision for NYC’s Gotham Park

Gotham Park, the nine acre public space Rosa Chang and her team are creating beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan, began the way many ambitious projects do—with everyone else saying no. Chang first assumed the government would take on the task of creating public space from land beneath the bridge that had sat closed for more than a decade. “But when nobody would, and every single agency said no, I decided to step up,” she told the audience at Urbanity-26, The Urban Developer’s flagship conference held last month on the Gold Coast. In 2021, Chang co-founded Gotham Park, the non-profit created to transform the site that stretches from City Hall to the East River into open public space. Four of the site’s nine acres (3.6ha) are open and under the organisation’s management. Once complete, the project is projected to generate $150 million in annual economic activity for the surrounding community, with space for art, culture, recreation and business. The Brooklyn Bridge was opened on May 24, 1883, after 14 years of construction, and was built to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn. Its vaults once held champagne shops, restaurants and businesses, with streets running alongside and beneath the structure, before the land beneath it was closed off for repairs, construction staging and government agency parking. The bridge then became a barrier as much as a connection, cutting off the neighbourhoods around it. Chang wanted to change that. “How can you look through a peephole in a wall of construction board and not dream?” she said. ▲ Looking through the hoarding into the vaults beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, before redevelopment. Her vision was to “build something that we are proud of, that matters, and that creates opportunity for joy, discovery and wonder”. “Instead of dividing our community, it could and should bring us together,” she said. Reclaiming the site has meant working across three tiers of government on land owned by the city’s Department of Transportation, next to City Hall and New York Police Department headquarters. Chang described myriad layers of planning complexity, before saying that the project falls between two separate community boards. ▲ A concept rendering of Gotham Park’s vision for the site, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. Image: Snøhetta And despite the site also being a “terrorism target”, bureaucracy is Gotham Park’s biggest obstacle because, according to Chang, “it’s a lot easier to say no than to say yes”. But, with a “can-do culture that solves complex problems and is willing to pilot solutions to those problems with speed”, the Gotham Park team pushed ahead. The finished site is planned across seven distinct outdoor areas, according to the Gotham Park masterplan. The vaulted spaces inside the bridge’s Manhattan anchorage are proposed for conversion into a community hub, a New York Public Library branch and a Brooklyn Bridge Museum, alongside a connected maker space. In June of 2025, then-mayor Eric Adams announced $50 million in city funding to further revitalise The Arches, the section of the site nearest City Hall, with the money to be split between design and construction, according to the New York City Mayor’s Office. ▲ The Brooklyn Bridge was opened on May 24, 1883, after 14 years of construction, to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn. The commitment came after years of privately funded advocacy reopened the first sections of the site to the public. According to Chang, projects like Gotham Park are “not a unicorn”. “These opportunities exist all around us, in every urban environment, in your neighbourhoods and communities,” she said. More than 47,000 residents living within 800m of the site will benefit most, as will the generations who inherit what gets built there. “Humans build cities, but once constructed, cities build future generations of us,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be constantly striving to build better, so that we can be better?” It’s a question Chang is answering at Gotham Park, one acre at a time.

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Leon Della Bosca
Tue 04 Aug 26

Reconnecting a City Divided: Rosa Chang’s Generational Vision for NYC’s Gotham Park