Brooklyn, NY

Sunset Park and its adjoining neighborhoods present us with a 21st century oddity – a blue collar neighborhood whose citizens still walk to work at riverfront factories and warehouses.

In the awarded entry to a competition to remove and replace the Gowanus Expressway at Sunset Park, Gans and Company imagined a linear park and trolley line (that has become a City proposal). The team also saw opportunity to enhance that walk to work across that park. Running perpendicularly from the upland residential fabric to the industrial buildings along the shore, the design designated a 43rd Street greenway and a series of pedestrian ways zoned for laundromats and bodegas, day care and shoe repair so residents could socialize, relax and take care of daily needs on their way to and from home.

Project Team:

Gans and Company: Deborah Gans & Matthew Jelacic