New York City officials and community members recently celebrated the reopening of Queensbridge Baby Park in Long Island City, Queens. The $2.6 million project returned the area to active public use for Queensbridge residents, a first step toward restoring the historic open space to its former use. The park received the prestigious “Excellence in Design” award from the NYC Public Design Commission.
Tucked beneath the Queensboro Bridge and steps from NYCHA’s Queensbridge Houses, Queensbridge Baby Park had been used for years as a staging and storage area by City agencies, as a tangle of subsurface utilities made meaningful development into a public space a challenge for years. NYC Parks, working closely with members of the surrounding community, transformed the site into a fully activated neighborhood space with something to offer everyone who walks through its gates.
At the heart of the renovated park is a central plaza built for gathering, ringed by seating, painted ground games, and inclusive play elements. Flanking it are two activity zones: one with ping-pong tables and another with bistro seating for chess. Open lawn areas offer quieter spots to sit and decompress, while new plantings along the site’s southern and western edges provide a natural screen from the surrounding bridges and roadways. The park’s northern edge connects directly into the Queensbridge Park Greenway, and visitors get an unexpected sightline straight to the Empire State Building framed through the arches of the bridge overhead.
The renovation project helped set the stage for the broader OneLIC Neighborhood Plan, a sweeping rezoning initiative for Long Island City that calls for the creation of approximately four acres of new open space under the Queensboro Bridge, a publicly accessible waterfront connection between Gantry Park and Queensbridge Park, and affordable housing. The restoration of Queensbridge Baby Park is in line with the plan’s central open space commitments to the Queensbridge community and fulfills longstanding requests from community members who have called for the return of the space to public use through community planning hearings, surveys, and public testimony.
Landscape Architect: Frank Varro – NYC Parks.
Image Credit: Courtesy of NYC Parks
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