Brooklyn heights want to get rid of basketball court due to conflicts at park they want tennis court instead
Brooklyn Bridge Park, the 85-acre park at the edge of Brooklyn Heights, transformed an industrial shoreline into a recreational esplanade that today draws over 125,000 people on summer weekends. It has become the emerald trim of a jewel-box neighborhood of handsome brownstones.
Particularly prized are the park’s tidy basketball courts that draw players from as far as the Bronx and Queens for their million-dollar views of Lower Manhattan and other amenities not often found on more humble home turfs — like actual nets on the hoops. But a spate of courtside fights among rowdy visitors, punctuated by gunfire last year, has prompted the police, at times, to shut down Pier 2, where the courts stand.
The situation has set some residents in the well-off neighborhood, which is mostly white, on edge, some of whom portray the pier as an OK Corral for gangs and complain that their quaint streets have become overrun with teenagers. The players, many of whom are black, say that whatever problems have occurred are relatively limited and believe that they are the victims of stereotyping.
Courtside fisticuffs, they say, are just a result of teenagers being teenagers — and isn’t that what happens in parks?
The conflict between the players and the neighborhood plays out in particular at the southern end of the slim, 1.3-mile-long park, where it pours out onto Joralemon Street.
“Sometimes I try and avoid going on Joralemon,” said Aaliyah Johnson, 17, who is black and travels from Flatbush to play basketball. “It’s like they look at you, move their kids over like you’re going to do something, and clutch on to their purse. Your doing that — it just makes us not feel welcome. We just came here to play basketball.”
That race has become part of the discussion is inescapable, some say, given that the players coming to the park cross through an overwhelmingly white neighborhood — whites make up about 80 percent of residents in Brooklyn Heights, according to the United States census.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/ny...=fb-share&_r=1
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