Other salvaged artifacts, notably the 36-foot-high rusting syrup tanks, are placed along the esplanade. Twenty-one steel columns from the demolished 1930 Raw Sugar Warehouse and 585 linear feet of crane tracks form an elevated colonnade that stretches from two original teal gantry cranes, docked at the park’s north end, down to the refinery. The design team took measures to root the new park in its past life as one of Brooklyn’s dominant industrial operations (the factory controlled over 90 percent of the country’s sugar production at the turn of the 20th century but was shuttered in 2004, when American Sugar Refining consolidated production elsewhere). The Parks Department can, however, take over maintenance should Two Trees default on their fiscal responsibilities. “The Parks Department reviewed drawings and details, but, ultimately, they’re not responsible, so we were able to use materials for the furnishings that are unfamiliar to them, like reclaimed wood from the warehouse,” Switkin says. According to Lisa Switkin, partner at JCFO, what allowed leeway for the design is the fact that the project is entirely privately financed. The park-its spine a continuous 1,200-foot walkway along the East River, with the Manhattan skyline beyond-features a gradient of active to passive spaces, with semiprivate nooks carved out along the way. ![]() Within the next few years, construction will begin on the 1882 refinery, which will be converted into a flexible-workplace campus by New York–based Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU). The first, a SHoP-designed residential building on nearby Kent Avenue resembling a square doughnut, was completed last summer the final phase-a tower that will loom over the Williamsburg Bridge-is estimated to open in the early 2020s. Contentious from its inception, the new plan eventually won community support in large part because of its affordable-housing and public-space components.ĭomino Park marks the estimated $3 billion development’s second phase. A previous plan by Rafael Viñoly had already undergone public approval, but Two Trees submitted a revised version, with more commercial space and parkland, developed by SHoP and JCFO. Two Trees purchased the 11-acre site for $185 million in 2012 from a developer that ran into financial trouble. For the price of allowing three gargantuan glass towers, which will dwarf the site’s landmarked redbrick refinery building, once the tallest in Brooklyn, the previously inaccessible waterfront has been transformed into a vibrant recreational space, open to the public. The six-acre park, designed by James Corner Field Operations (JCFO), is part of a mixed-use development, led by Two Trees Management, that will eventually bring 2,800 market-rate and 700 affordable housing units, 380,000 square feet of offices, and 200,000 square feet of commercial and retail space to the former Domino Sugar factory parcel. ![]() New Yorkers-as they do-grumble about new development and the gentrification that comes with it, but Domino Park, Brooklyn’s newest waterfront destination, is proof that, with the right deal, they can get something spectacular in return.
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