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

With the opening of a new waterfront park, the transformation of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is almost complete.

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? 

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,” Lombino 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.”

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 only through some type of public-private partnership. At Brooklyn Bridge Park, development of condos, hotels, and commercial space on 10% of the 85-acre site pays for the construction and maintenance of the parkland, which is managed by a conservancy. Domino Park, on the other hand, is a private endeavor.

I first visited Domino Park in 2018 when it opened. I was skeptical about the space at first—namely because there is a menu of prescribed, permissible behaviors in the space, each with their designated zones. It’s a highly programmed area, as the ropes blocking off patches of grass where it might be nice to have a picnic or lie down with a book remind us. The park is technically open space, but it’s not very open to interpretation. I sometimes got the nagging sense that I was trespassing on someone’s front lawn.

And of course, it is the front yard for all the new condos going up in the area. One Domino Square, the Selldorf towers clad in iridescent porcelain right next to the square, were recently completed; one-bedroom units in the building all start at more than $1 million. All the available rentals in the building have been leased, with a few more coming online soon; a studio can be yours for $5,000 per month.

Over time, as the park grew in and more people started coming to it, my feelings softened. It’s a draw for families, runners, tourists, and anyone who wants to check out one of the best views of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Domino Park gets crowded—a testament to the fact that it’s quickly become a beloved, well-used space, even if most of the people who visit probably can’t afford to live in the housing that’s on-site. The energy is there, and then some. Domino Square will offer some much-needed overflow space.

Bringing More Open Space to a Popular Destination

While the 1-acre parcel where Domino Square currently sits was always earmarked for open space, Switkin and her team didn’t begin designing it until three years ago. They let the first phase of the park settle in and then used the post-occupancy findings, such as how the community was using the park, to inform their plan. One need that was abundantly clear? More room for people to gather. To wit: A popular salsa dancing night gets crunched into the south end of the park. And every time I’ve come through the park—day or night—most, if not all, of the benches are full.

“I don’t think we knew exactly how much it would be a magnet for everyone, but we knew it would be a highly used space,” Switkin says. The designers didn’t want the space to feel crowded, and so many of the seating areas feel semiprivate, nestled into greenery and distanced apart.

The park can still get congested; Domino Square is intended to help alleviate the crowds and give everyone more breathing room. The plaza is surrounded by stadium seating, much of which is ADA accessible, that blends into a retail building by Studio Cadena. During the warmer months, the center of the square will be furnished with movable tables and chairs, and in winter it will become an ice-skating rink. “This was conceived of as a civic room, or sort of theater-in-the-round,” Switkin says.

Two Trees is still figuring out what the additional programming will be, which it plans to develop with community groups. But for now, the salsa dancing night will move to the square. Lombino imagines that movie nights, performances, and small concerts might be in the mix. “We’re not going to have U2 play here, it’s not the Sphere,” he jokes. “But it fits roughly 1,000 people.”

The desire to keep the square busy at all hours feels very developer-y—not a single square foot that’s “unused.” Even when there isn’t programming, Two Trees sees it as an amenity for its tenants. “Part of the vision of the Square was to be a place of congregation for the small businesses that are going to open in the Refinery,” Lombino says. They, in turn, will likely be customers for the new Stretch Pizza and Gotham dispensary that are opening in the retail spaces bordering the north end of the square.

Along the new waterfront, the most expensive real estate, it seems, is room to breathe.