Published on Jan 15th, 2025.
I went for a walk along the waterfront of Greenpoint today and made an unexpected discovery. It started with a relatively innocuous looking entryway to a luxury high-rise:
I noticed this sign along the entryway to the sidewalk:
For those of you who don’t spend their free time scouring through NYC zoning initiatives1, POPS (privately-owned public spaces) is a program that allows developers to add extra floors onto new buildings in exchange for building and maintaining a public plaza on its premises. You can get all of the juicy details about the program here, but most relevant to our story is this nugget:
As of early 2022, all POPS must display public space signage with the POPS logo and other required information such as opening hours and contact information. Owners of POPS missing the correct signage must submit an application for new signage to DCP.
The shoddiness of this sign smelled of a real estate developer reluctant to have the public snooping around a POPS designed for its luxury tenants. Needless to say, I started walking down this relatively unappealing pathway to find this at the end:
Interesting… There’s more? It sure doesn’t look like there’s more… I followed the sign to find this next segment of road leading to what looks like an undeveloped waterfront.
Undeterred, I continued down the street to find my treasure at the end:
The promised land! A waterfront POPS complete with park benches, trees, gardens (all dead from winter, but you can imagine), and a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline.
The entrance I came in through was the only way in, aside from coming out of the luxury building. The other side of the park awkwardly ended with a fence separating the park from a void on the waterfront:
I was the only person in the plaza the entire time, though I’m willing to chalk that up to it being both extremely cold and a workday. It’s a remarkable little park to be hidden away so well. I’ll give the developers the benefit of the doubt in that they’re clearly still developing the lots around it, therefore its obscurity could be a temporary fluke while there’s another construction site next door.
Either way, it was a fun discovery for a spontaneous walk on a cold January day.
