New Delancey Street Bridge Opens, Along with Two New Ballfields in East River Park

There’s a new ballfield in town! Two of them actually and a new Delancey Street Pedestrian Bridge to take you there. This is indubitably—and indisputably—progress, of a sort, along the dust blown barren wastelands south of the Williamsburg Bridge. The bridge and the ballfields officially opened on Labor Day, Sept. 2.

Whether or not Ballfields 1 and 2, as they are officially known, will represent a true improvement on the East River Park that was there before remains to be seen. This isn’t to damn the facilities with faint praise. The ballfields are much needed, and even at scarcely a week old, they are already much appreciated by locals who had to do without for the past several years.

That said, their welcome presence doesn’t erase memories of the beloved recreational areas that were there previously and are so achingly missed today.

As the claimed merits and faults of the so-called East Side Coast Resiliency Project have been furiously contested elsewhere, there’s little need to rehash them here. Whether the climate doomers—and their partners in ecological crime fighting, the big money capital spenders—or the loquacious and relatively powerless tree lovers prove more correct remains to be seen.

The Mayor’s office, as is its wont, is hailing the project—which began under the De Blasio administration—as a bright sign, on time and on budget, for the future of a “resilient” New York.

Mayor Adams, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, NYC Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue, Department of Design and Construction Commissioner Thomas Foley are all on board. And yet, none of these eminent officials, nor anyone else quoted in the Mayor’s office press release said the word “tree” or “trees.”

Recalling the arboreal past might be as unpleasant as a treeless shoreline is today but headlines like “NYC continues to cut down trees at East River Park despite court order”—which appeared in the December 11, 2021 New York Post—don’t easily fade from memory. After the axing, there were no Cherry Trees on DT’s Cherry Lane.

In one photograph accompanying the article, a woman holds up a protest sign reading “Bulldozer Bill’s Gone Rogue against the State!” In another, a flyer taped to a tree reads “Please don’t let Carlina and Bill [DeBlasio] kill me!”

Carlina of course is to District 2 Council Member Carlina Rivera, a vocal supporter of the project, a position which has earned the term-limited progressive great enmity among pro-trees advocates.

But, as the old saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and, someday, perhaps—the city claims an optimistic completion date of 2026—the East River Park will be made whole again.

Until then, these are the facts.

The new bridge is 215 feet long and ADA compliant. Pre-built, the bridge was hoisted into place in June. At present, it’s only accessible via a ramp at Delancey Street and at Delancey Street and the southern terminus of Baruch Place (formerly Goerck Street but renamed in 1939 for the Polish physician Simon Baruch, also father of Bernard).

Stairway access from the FDR Drive side is still under construction.

Straus News recently ran and walked over the span and, as a bridge, it gets the job done. It is not, as some critics have asserted, a bridge to nowhere. There really are ballfields there (artificial turf, of course) though really it’s one big pitch suitable for both soccer and baseball / softball, or whatever one wants to do there when the field isn’t otherwise in use.

Straus News ran a few laps and watched some school students play frisbee and casual soccer. The plastic grass was clean and springy. Straus News urges readers to follow Parks Department rules and not bring their dogs to urinate and defecate here. No Pets Allowed means just that.

There are no water fountains. Indeed, as one publicly posted flyer notes: “there is no water service on site, so plan accordingly to bring your own supply.”

A park next to a river that has no running water? Only in New York, kiddies, only in New York.

As for improvements to look forward to, as one knowingly cynical commenter on East Village Grieve remarked, “hopefully this ‘world class park’ will be finished before the year 2525.”