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We weren’t at last night’s public meeting about Brooklyn Bridge Park, but by all accounts–and there are several–it was not a happy scene. There was shouting. There was finger pointing. There were “I told you so’s.” There was also an admission of the obvious: for now, only Pier One and Pier Six of the vast park will be built and they will be connectect by a path running through what could be a wasteland. Also: revenue generated by One Brookyn Bridge Park can only sustain maintenance through 2012. After that, public money will be needed. The Brooklyn Paper’s Mike McGlaughin offered a rundown of the park’s monstrous $350 milliion cost, a significant portion of which is unfunded:

• So-called “base costs” would gobble up $194.3 million for things like installing utilities, bulkhead repairs, demolition of existing structures from the bygone shipping era, legal fees and architects’ contracts.

• “Core costs” — building the lawns, ball courts and playgrounds — $121.6 million.

• “Unique costs,” like wave attenuators, other landscaping such as sound-proofing berms, and a wetland require about $32.9 million.

Still, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benape called the park “a bargain” compared to many city-built open spaces.

As we’ve joked in the past, we’ll be dead and our ashes scattered in the Gowanus Canal before this park is ever finished unless there is a serious cost-cutting effort and a public commitment to maintain the park with public money with serious citizen oversight. (A 32-page presentation of the full mess is available by clicking here—WARNING: PDF.) There is also coverage of the meeting over the Brooklyn Heights Blog.

GL ANALYSIS
While Brooklyn Bridge Park would be a world class amenity for our borough and open up a vast portion of waterfront for the public to enjoy, it is another textbook example of how top-down planning that ignores citizen input and depends on private-funding can turn into an utter disaster. From the early reports of out-of-control expenses to the insistence that the only way to build this park was to put up luxe condos, Brookyn Bridge Park was doomed. Now, the worm has turned. There is a recession bordering on a a depression and anything depending on private funding is, to use an inelegant phrase, screwed. Once upon a time, public amenities were built with public funds. In the Bloomberg Era, public amenities became excuses to allow developers to build bloated projects sustained by sleazy financing. The logic has been, put up this 40-story building and you get a waterfront promenade rather than the public deserves this waterfront access as a basic right, not as a privilege granted by a developer. We don’t know when this era will end. Had this been the mindset of the 1930s-1960s, much of what we enjoy today, including public university systems, would never have happened. This is why, every day, we pray that Barack Obama manages a paradigm shift in public thinking. That he once again establishes a mindset that it is government’s responsibility to look after the public good and not to allow unregulated private enterprise to do things for us. Brooklyn Bridge Park could have been a Crown Jewel in a different era (even Robert Moses liked building parks…well, actually in this location he liked building highways). Today, it is a disaster and will likely remain a reminder of how derailed our priorities became. There is nothing wrong with private groups looking after parks as per Central Park and Prospect Park. They have done magnificent work in many cases. But to count on a hotel and condos to fund one’s park is a travesty. Our Crown Jewel is turning into a Royal Turd right before our eyes.