Brooklyn Bridge Park: From Piers to Parklands

Speaker 1 0:00 ANNOUNCER. The following is a production of wild idea media. Bill Hodge 0:07 Welcome to the wild idea podcast, where we like to examine the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature. And today we have an amazing story of transformation, the story of taking the disturbed, the unnatured, and returning nature to the industrialized we were talking with folks from the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and of course, joining me for that conversation is my partner in wild, Anders Reynolds, good morning. Anders Reynolds 0:30 Oh, hi, Bill. I hear there's a bit of a reunion in the works for you. Between our recording this podcast and our releasing it, you're going to be reunited with some people who are very, very dear to us. Is that right? Bill Hodge 0:44 Yeah, they are people that you and I both know well, what we refer to as our SAWS, kids. For those of you maybe new to the podcast, Anders and I have a connection to an organization that we were both a part of Southern Appalachian wilderness stewards, or saw us, as everybody calls it, and I had the good fortune of being the founder and the executive director of that organization. Andrew served on the board, including his board chair, but some of the staff that I got to work with for a long time have just remained near and dear in our hearts, and they're coming out to see us here in Montana for sort of a reunion weekend. I'm pretty Anders Reynolds 1:16 excited about it. It makes me happy thinking of you all in one place. I hope you have a really good time, you know, between that reunion and the topic of today's episode, I've been wondering, is there municipal Park from your childhood that you wish you could be reunited with? Bill Hodge 1:33 That's a great question. I there. There was a park very near our home in Newton, North Carolina, where I grew up, that I used to love to ride my bike to, I cannot remember the name. Maybe it was Broy Hill Park, because everything in Newton's name for broil the Broyhill family and the furniture company. But yeah, I think that. And just the, just the sheer joy of getting on a bike and and, you know, being able to just get out and explore doesn't have to be, you know, one of these big, you know, federal land units that you and I talk about a lot. It can be anywhere, and in that case, it was this park just on the edge of of our neighborhood. It's where I used to play baseball and all that sort of stuff. I certainly do miss Anders Reynolds 2:12 that. Our memories are pretty similar on this for me, it's the Malone street Park in Wynn, Arkansas, and I can give you several reasons why they sound similar to yours. First, and critically, it was within bike riding distance in my house. Secondly, it had a large open area surrounded by pine trees and azaleas, which was one of many empty lots, where, as a kid, I earned a reputation for making outstanding shoestring tackles against much larger kids in games of football. And lastly, it had that best city park quality. It looked like the playground equipment would kill you. And in particular, I remember a metal merry go around that would heat to about 8000 degrees in the summer and could be spun so fast by your friends that it would send any riders flying like 15 feet away in any direction. So I'm pretty sure it gave me a concussion. Bill Hodge 3:14 Is it? Is it, if you're if you're of a certain age, you have to have left some skin on one of those metal slides the temperature of the sun, surface of the sun, leaving by, yeah, I mean, but all of those are wonderful memories, right? Like in the I think that's what makes today's story just so exciting for both of us. Brooklyn Bridge Park is celebrating its 15th birthday this year, and it is also an opportunity to celebrate an amazing story of rewilding this 1.3 mile long stretch of urban coastline. We're really excited to be able to have this conversation with Bella and Rasheed, who are going to be joining us here in just a second. But it's a park that I think a lot of people don't know about, and that's why we wanted to bring you this story. More than 5 million people visit this incredibly beautiful green open space there in New York, it's allowed folks to reconnect with the coastline in ways that hadn't happened in a very long time. So it is our honor and privilege to welcome to the show. Rasheed Polson, who is the director of horticulture, and Bella chapetoni, who is the Deputy Director of horticulture for Brooklyn Bridge Park. Welcome to the podcast. Guys. Speaker 2 4:23 Hi. Thank you guys. Thank you Bill. Thank you Anders for having us Unknown Speaker 4:26 hired. Thank you so Anders Reynolds 4:27 much, Rasheed and Bella. We're so happy to have you here today. Brooklyn Bridge Park today is a place with a thriving tree canopy and all kinds of plants and animals. Tell us about the history of this place. How did it come to exist? Was it planned from the start, or did it evolve over time? What was this stretch of Brooklyn's coastline like before Brooklyn Bridge Park opened? Oh, Speaker 2 4:50 absolutely. It's a very interesting story, and I'll spare you all of the legal jargon that may go along with that story, but it's. Essentially, we have turned the tide here, no pun intended, of what this space actually could have been. I think if most people think about our neighboring borough, Manhattan, they think about the city skyline, and there was an era where that could have been the future of what this Brooklyn Bridge Park space could have been. We are a 85 acre, 1.3 mile space situated along the Brooklyn waterfront. We run along the stretch of the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, and it the park passes under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge, connecting us to that Dumbo area, or down under the Manhattan Bridge. And the really cool thing for me and myself, one is this at the park really reconnects not only Brooklynites, but anyone that wants to come visit our park with the Brooklyn waterfront itself. We are established on these really ridiculous old shipping container piers, Piers one through six. I wish I had a graphic I could show, but these piers one through six essentially fell into this use that were once owned by the New York and New Jersey Port Authority. And that was simply because during the shipping container revolution of the 1980s these large shipping container boats were unable to dock at the shallow piers and offload their goods, so we inherited a post industrial site of shipping sheds that were mostly bare and empty, and provided a sort of a great blank canvas for the city to come up with a new idea of what this could chase could be utilized as. And thankfully, the community of Brooklyn Heights and others, which sort of gave birth to the previous Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, where the advocating muscle that really established this to become a public amenity, rather than residential high rises or other things that you might find across the river, the Bill Hodge 6:52 story from the formation of the Brooklyn Bridge Park corporation to the steady drum beat of new investments in The old piers is, to me, it's just fascinating. Can one of you talk about the structure and the staffing of the park that allows you all to layer in so many new green pieces? It seems like every year there's been, you know, as I go back and look at your history, there's been, like, these amazing additions. Can you talk about the structure and staffing of the organization? Speaker 2 7:18 Absolutely. So to start us off, the park opened up in, officially, in 2010 and that very much has been story where there's just about year by year, a section or so opening about the park all the way up into about 2012 I'm sorry, 20 22,022 which brought the park to its full completion. And we have an array of different ecosystems incorporated into this space. In this small area, whether we are talking about West wetlands, freshwater ponds, meadows mimic sort of hedgerows or woodland edges, we have these massive sound attenuating berms, which blocks noise from a local roadway that we have here as well. And an origin the park was in its first couple of years, as it was still a both building and operating space. We had a previous director, my predecessor, Rebecca McMackin, who was essentially running contractors for the first year of the park, keeping lawns maintained, battling out invasives, keeping plants watered. But immediately, in the early years, she came to a very confident determination that we needed committed staff to manage the space. The idea was that you would have a consistent staff that would build an intimacy and understanding with the seasonal changes, progressions of our landscapes, time and time again, and have a stronger ability to manage a lot of the horticultural practice that are beneficial future for the landscapes, rather than having spaces managed by contractors that maybe have a limited familiarity or intimacy built in to the maintenance practices themselves. And pretty quickly that evolved to having a small staff of seasonal gardeners, which is where I started my career, at Brooklyn Bridge Park. But while we were still seasonal gardeners, training each other, managing the space, managing various zones across the limited space we had, at that time, advocacy for full time staff was underway. And I'm very, very excited to say that at this point right now, we are a team of 25 that make up the Horticulture Department here. So there is myself and Bella as the heads of the department. We have two horticultural supervisors that sort of manage the flow of the team. We have a horticulturalist that advises on best practices. And we also have a turf technician, an arborist, over a dozen gardeners. And really exciting for us at this time of the year, we have our three horticulture interns as well, which I'll probably talk some more about. Bill Hodge 9:55 Wow, it's a pretty robust staff, but I bet it. Makes every one of those warm bodies to be able to, you know, sort of keep the place humming. You know, as I read about your your timeline with Brooklyn Bridge Park, Rashid, it's quite a journey. One thing that stood out to me is that even as you sort of took that journey from you came on, if I remember, as a gardener now, now you're, you know, director of the whole horticulture department, that your time invested in actually being out on the ground doesn't seem like it's changed to me, like I know you have probably have a lot of management responsibilities, but I love the fact that it seems like you want to still stay connected to the work on the ground, but and you also seem really connected to the education programs. Can you talk about your commitment to staying invested in the time out in the park and time with the public Speaker 2 10:42 absolutely so to I'll back, I'll back it up and go from there. So you know, my origin is really studying electrical mechanical engineering, and I actually learned pretty quickly that that was not for me. I didn't like being in basements and working on schematics that weren't mine. And was very fortunate after some time as a cashier at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden to get some encouragement to study horticulture, which I can talk more about, but it's been the interaction of mentorship and this horticulturalist stewards, whatever you would love to call them, that have sort of stepped away from me, that I've always had a strong drive for education, knowledge, sharing, being a community and a team, and also just never straying away from the hard work. I think that's something I've been able to maintain in myself, that this is hard work and being an outdoor part is such a refreshing lifestyle to live in, comparatively especially as a New Yorker, growing up as a kid, a tree, a shrub on the street, was no different from a light post for me. So having all these sort of like invigorating experiences outdoors in my early 20s, up until now, I just essentially can't let it go. I'm obsessed with finding some way to sneak my way out of an office and get myself into some dirt, or some soil, interact with plants, learn about plants, continue that journey. And I think I also just have a, you know, in my family, genes a workhorse in me. So sitting in a seat sometimes isn't that indicative for my bloodline. So I have to find those ways of getting out there. Hopefully show some examples of like leading by example. Wanting to be outside and involved. I'm not just a manager. I want to be a part of the work itself, but see the experiences. And I probably couldn't put that part of my life away anyway, because I've been here for the last 13 years. At this point, the plants, individual trees, shrubs, perennial herbaceous plants. They're like individuals to meet people to me, or characters. So I'm going out and checking out my friends and interacting with them and seeing how they're doing over this time. Bill Hodge 12:49 I love it, Bella, you have a similar journey to Rasheed, as in that you worked your way up through the organization. I noticed in your history before the park, you actually had time focused on invasives, which is a subject near and dear to my heart, and I'm curious. One, is that still a focus of your work there in the park spaces? And also, I'm curious about your ecology centered public horticulture. Can you describe how that work sort of takes shape? Speaker 3 13:14 Sure. Yes. I, before I go into my history, I'll say that invasive species definitely are still a focus of my work here, just in that they're impossible to get away from, and they're integral part of horticulture, and every week, maybe every day, we are talking about weeding, and many of those weeds are the same species that you will find out in wild areas that are swallowing up habitats. My background, before horticulture was in invasive species management, I go a little bit further back. First that growing up, I wasn't surrounded by nature in a very significant way. I took an interest to watching birds from my kitchen window and making little checklists and convincing my parents to buy a bird feeder. But then from there, I was heavily encouraged in the arts, and when it came time to decide where to go to school, what to do for school, college, I made a decision between the arts and the sciences, and I landed somewhere in the middle in Environmental Studies. And my experience in college was extremely formative. I went to Ithaca College in upstate New York, and the program is amazing, by the way the environmental science department and I found myself in hands on opportunities where I got. Got to take many internships and seasonal jobs in places like the Mississippi Delta in National Wildlife refugees and Watkins Glen State Park, where I got to survey Eastern Hemlock trees for Hemlock holy adelgid. And you know, so while I was in school, I was seeing the tapestry of what happens when human activities start to bleed into the natural environment in this very specific lane of invasive species management. And after college, I got the opportunity to be part of the Northeast exotic plant management team with the National Park Service, and I worked with them for two seasons as their data manager, Data Manager and field technician. And we travel. We had that. We had a wide territory. And during my time there, we went to 16 different national parks, historic sites and recreational areas in the Northeast, and we would help the park staff with some of their most serious, nastiest invasive plant issues. And I got to see firsthand what introductions of non native plants in the horticulture industry can end up doing in wild areas, and how much habitat destruction that they could cause at a certain point. You know, things in life change rapidly. When you're in your mid 20s, and I was contemplating a move, and at the same time contemplating where I was in invasive species management, like if we did, I want to keep following this career path. And, you know, I realized that I was not happy with having to handle herbicides all the time, and that was a major part of how we were carrying out these control measures. And I realized that one of the common threads was that many of these invasive species that I was dealing with, their origins were in horticulture trade. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could work at the root of this issue and learn about the horticulture industry, see if there's a place for myself there. So that time in my life was heading me towards New York City anyway, and I got into the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens horticulture internship program in 2016 and I worked one on one with the native for garden curator. So during my my time as an intern at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I learned hundreds of native plants, some native plants that I had never heard of, and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of native plants in horticulture, and really brought me full circle to around what I was doing in the invasive species management field, of knowing that there were many special things in the environment that I was protecting, but I didn't know their names. I didn't know how to ID them yet, until I was in this internship program, and I had intended at first to go back into the invasive species management field and continue that work with this new native plant knowledge, this new knowledge about the horticulture industry. But once I saw the possibilities in this emerging field of ecological horticulture, I saw myself in that and found myself at Brooklyn Bridge Park as a seasonal gardener, and worked my way into full time gardener pretty quickly, and I was taking care of the The flower field on Pier six. It's our largest continuous garden in the park, and I was dealing with the same species of weeds in that meadow as I had been out in these wild areas that I was spraying with herbicides, but this time, I had no herbicides, and I was handling them all manually. So it's very challenging work, and I think my background in weed management really helped me to have a sharp eye for ID and be able to efficiently move through those those areas, while also finessing, sort of like the artistic kind of VISTAs that people want to see when they come to a beautiful space like that. So now that I am, you know, fast forward a little bit into now I'm Deputy Director, and I get to, i. I help steer our team. I get to have one on ones with our gardeners. I get to be part of our bi weekly zone walks with them, where we talk about the work. I make sure that I impress the importance upon them to stay on top of these certain species. I'll explain how they're spreading throughout the gardens. And, you know, because I know that not everybody has had the opportunity to see the flip side, you know, like we are all doing the important work of of making these native plants visible to the public eye, but I know that so many people in urban settings, they they don't get to see what's going on in wild spaces. And so as much as I can, you know, I just try to remind people that what we're doing is important Anders Reynolds 20:58 for that facet, speaking of opportunities to see wild places, one of the ideas that we have to challenge on this podcast is the belief that one has to travel hundreds of miles to stand in awe of nature. To our minds, there are places just around the corner from where we all live that are as deserving of a cinematic treatment as the Big Western landscapes you'd see in a Ken Burns documentary. So I guess that makes me want to ask if, if Brooklyn Bridge Park were the subject of a film, what scenes would we see? Can one of you paint a picture for us of what this urban green space looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like? Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2 21:39 So I'll sort of draft the canvas, and Bella will add some colors to it, essentially. But there's a lot of environmental conditions that we are slapped right in the middle of, which sort of are the catalyst that get us to the results of what our park actually is and the makeup of it and how it functions. So I'm just going to go through this sort of like quick laundry list of it, because you also have to imagine along the East River connecting into the Atlantic and around the Hudson, that Brooklyn Bridge Park piers one through six are just these flat canvases of about two acres of land that are maybe in foot and a half thick slabs of concrete supported by pylon piers. Those are sort of our outboards. And then we also have quite amount of upland area. Would actually have fill and structure substrate we can build on lower, greater loading capacity, where you'll have rolling hills, things of that nature. But to build all of this, the things that had to be considered were one the stark reality that our park is situated along a flood line, which leads us to having trees and root balls planted at or above the national, oceanic and atmospheric administrative projective of 100 year storm surge lines. We have the intense prevailing winds. We have scorching sun from pretty much all angles of the park, which also adds an intensity of the view of Manhattan. You just don't want to look at these giant con skyscrapers that all angles every time. And then we are also slapped between not only the East River and these other considerations, but also the BQE or the Brooklyn Queens expressway, which has 130,000 vehicles that transport over it every day. So noise, Sun floods. It's all kind of cataclysmically happening around our space, and you find a magnitude of respite and peace in the park. Surprisingly, even with all of that going around, the park itself, is made with a lot of the initial planting phases of the park, sort of are intended to have this competition at play. So there's a full garden install at the offset. We have everything from trees, over 4000 trees in our collection here, or our specimens, or, you know, individuals in the park, 10s of 1000s of shrubs, even more herbaceous plants, put it and put in and filled in between those gaps. So you do walk into the park day one with some semblance of a field, even though many of those trees, as I mentioned, may be installed at a small whip size caliper, maybe two, two and a half inch caliber of a trunk, so still fairly small, but still creating a feel of immersion as we have these settings go in. And the idea is that mostly the trees themselves, species like London plains, sumacs, locust trees, there'll be quick growers that will sprawl out. They will cast a much needed shade so anyone can even enjoy Brooklyn Bridge Park. But also, as they are growing, they are competing amongst each other, sort of leading towards a long term canopy that is comprised of species like bur oaks and sweet gum trees. But as they are doing this competition, their canopy is. Expanding, which increases the shade profile of the park, which has the domino effect of impacting what can actually survive in that original understory planting of species like viburnums or herbaceous plants like lupines and other solid day goes or switch grasses, many of these species sort of fade away over time, which lead us into this sort of natural succession. The idea was that we would place these characters in play, and they would sort of interact and evolve together, building, sort of also dependency amongst each other as like a relationship is being formed in these micro ecosystems. And then these things sort of fade away over time. And I'll let Bella allude to like what those zones are, and what they are made up of, and how we sort of get through transitional spaces. Because we are taking this sort of natural succession theme, which I think is sort of a representative, rather than a mimic, of what we might find in the natural area, and we are shaping that with a sense of longevity for each specimen, that kind of takes this idea of a successional change and move that into a managed succession. But Bella, would you like talk a little bit more about the various ecosystems that we have throughout the park? Speaker 3 26:14 Sure, yeah. So if you were to walk into Brooklyn Bridge Park today, you might enter into pier five or pier six first, and you would be immediately engulfed in tall trees, layers of trees and shrubs. If you go into pier six, you might be walking down a corridor of privet, which is one of our more unique ornamental features the park, is sort of intentionally alternating between active active and passive spaces, where the active spaces are things like playgrounds or soccer field. And the passive areas are far more horticulture heavy, and in those spaces, there are these varieties of ecosystem niches. So depending where you are in the park, you might come across a half acre wildflower meadow that is the flower field on Pier six. You might come across a network of ponds that create the wetlands of Pier One. You might be winding through paths that have mysterious corners where you can't quite see what's coming next, but that's all part of the immersion of the park. And in each of these spaces, you might hear a different kind of bird. You might be able to hear the highway. You might not be able to hear the highway. You might hear helicopters going overhead. You might see a ship passing. So there's a lot of urban visual and audio stimulation around you, and it is really incredible to walk through different sections of the park and realize that you're all at once, surrounded by the city, but you're also surrounded by the ecology of the region, and part of that is because of how the horticulture, how the landscape has been built up here. It's part of how the park was originally designed. It's part of the original plant palettes that Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates put in, and it's also because of how we have guided the landscapes through all the changes through the years, and how with each change, we as a horticulture department, we as a management team, we as a team of Gardeners, we make sure that we uphold those habitat niches, and listen to what the naturalist communities what the Birding communities are telling us that they're seeing out there. We pay attention. We check iNaturalist. We use iNaturalist. We use eBird. We have close relationships with our local birding community to the point where we have even changed or adopted or dropped practices based off of what they have told us they've observed in the park. If they've seen a bird, a specific bird, nesting in a certain area, we might change our we will change our practices so that that bird's habitat is prioritized. And similarly, with migration season, when we know that certain areas are important for shelter, we will bolster that. And I could go on about this topic, but you know, birds are such a huge part of the experience in this park, and I could talk more about that if you'd like. Anders Reynolds 29:59 Like you're describing so many different perspectives, success stories and ecological services. So I it's really exciting to hear all that. Thanks for sharing that I am curious. Standing in the park and looking out. How has the park shaped the culture and identity of the surrounding neighborhoods? How do you build connections between Brooklyn communities and the coastline. You wouldn't necessarily think that Brooklyn is fertile ground to recruit gardeners, but you guys have done it. What have you done to build a workforce for the park? Yeah, Speaker 2 30:33 let me start off even just jumping in with like, my angle of the people piece, just talking about community. This is something that I think is probably one of the more important parts for me, outside of this, like the day in, day out, of like, what our care and horticultural practices look like, you know, the fact that you can walk into the park most any day of the week during the summer months and one see 1000s of people, joggers, athletic fields being totally utilized. You can come across a mock beach and see people practicing saining or chaos or kayaking. Of course, we couldn't talk about the park without talking about all the various sporting fields and the best basketball courts in Brooklyn or in New York, which has the entire five boroughs coming down to this site. But I'd also love to see that those people, same people, are curious about what the horticulture is, operation is doing, and I think that is also a part of our esthetic. It's a very simple notion, but throughout most of the park landscapes, we utilize what's called range, range fence for our fencing needs. You know, wooden Ballard, about six inches thick, and wire running across from bollard to baller to create your fence line. This is a very big contrast for us in comparison to what you might see in the old olmsteadian style Parks Department s garden development, where or community park where there is the lawn, and there's the people, and then there's the cast iron fence, and then the garden is behind the other side of that fence. We also encourage an idea that pretty much anyone should be able to walk through any park space here, side by side to people and not have to brush against a plant, but that gives us room for plants to excessively flop and fold over the edge lines, and really bring you right up to the front line of what's happening in the garden. And this is where I love this kind of stuff. I'm more so like, I'm no I can have a similar obsession to plants as the gardening staff here, but I get really caught up on the people piece, where I think that certain cues like that encourage you to have an interaction with the wild other the spaces in the park, but not in a way that you are disruptive to what is happening there. You don't have to jump into a garden bed to get that photo of a monarch. It's kind of happening right in front of your space as you go along throughout the park. And those expressions of how the installation was completed. Really do lean into that immersive experience where you're constantly guided through the park in these tight corridors that feel super intimate. There are unique pops of color and interactions, both flora and faunaly happening, and then you are sort of brought out into these grand views, whether that be of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, or the harbor itself. So it's kind of like you have to earn your your experience for the grander views here by cascading yourself through the horticulture one way or another to like psychologically people are are building these cues, and I'm gonna pass the ball here to begin to work for us. But one story I always love to share, and I'll try to do the expedited version, is we have a small garden called the exploratory Marsh on Pier six upland, which is a part of a large, much larger web of children's playgrounds. The exploratory Marsh has this sort of bog with Equisetum and sort of other plants running through. But it's scaled down to be pruned for like a child type, essentially. And years ago, when it was even smaller and more or less pruned, I remember a young girl taking her family into that space, and I guess she had maybe come to the park with a school group or something. I could pick that up based on how she was talking. And as she's walking her family into that corridor. She says, Wait, you guys, it's like a forest in there. And my heart sung at that moment. I said, Okay, this is what it's about. This is this urban girl's experience with Nathan nature. This is her place for picking up rocks and throwing sticks and overturning other bugs and seeing what is actually happening around her that is not centralized around people, but there's still very much an important people piece in that, where the gardeners themselves are sort of the front line of engagement. When you see a gardener in waders in the wetland, you know, pulling cat tail, you're down kind of drawn to the eye of what that is, what is happening in that experience, what. Why are people doing this type of work? So we kind of constantly are at question from the public about what we are doing, and it's great ways to encourage them to be involved, whether through volunteership, citizen science, like Bella mentioned, utilizing apps like iNaturalist, or just getting out into the park and volunteering. One thing I love to be proud about is that we actually have two people on our staff, both a supervisor and a gardener on our team that were once zoned volunteers with us and didn't really know this was the path they wanted to be on, but found a home and a career in our space here. So it's really exciting to see that the park can be a part of that invigorating experience. Bill Hodge 35:38 So I'm sold. I am so just enthralled by picturing all of this. And you guys have done just such an amazing job of of painting this, this picture of the park. I'm curious. As someone that's never been to Brooklyn Bridge Park, been to the city, but not been to the park. And if I'm planning a trip to New York City, and I want to experience the wonders of the park, and maybe both of you could answer this question, where would you each individually suggest that I start Speaker 3 36:07 I'm a little biased towards my old zone, but I would say that if you really want a to really experience this juxtaposition of the urban environment and a thriving ecosystem, you should go to Pier One. You should spend time around wetlands. You should climb up the stairs, spend time with the trees, which are some of the most mature trees we have in the park. We are a young Park. And bring a pair of binoculars. Sit, listen, watch, and you're going to find so much life around you. Bill Hodge 36:44 And Rasheed, where would you say I should start? I Speaker 2 36:46 would say that you should find the middle entrance to the park, which comes through in a Parks Department previous Parks Department land called Squibb park that was donated to us. You have to also imagine that we are this long, linear space. You really have about like two main entrances on one and then and then the other. So we have this squib park in the middle, which has a bridge that brings you down into the park. So you'll leave an old Parks Department style garden and cascade yourself down this wooden bridge in through two residential buildings that are a hotel in a residential space. And you'll be like, Okay, what is going on here? And then I will lead you into this grand view of a beautiful lead design, internally designed landscape called squib landing. And that will sort of one provide you the perch of seeing all the vastness of what is happening from sort of north to south of the piers, but then you also still get the breathtakingness of that. This is still in New York City. This is right along the waterfront edge, like all the sort of contexts come into play there. And if I was to point you in a direction after that, I'd say the fact that you can sit on just about any set of stones or beach throughout the park and have this experience that was missing 15 years ago from the Brooklyn waterfront outside of going to know somewhere in the south, the southern ends of the park, you would absolutely probably spend hours just sort of pondering your own thoughts and observing all the different interactions from people, wildlife and just the waterfront itself. Wow. Bill Hodge 38:18 I The great thing is, I'll make sure I'll leave time to do both of your recommendations and do the whole park. You guys are just such amazing ambassadors for Brooklyn Bridge Park. It's just been a privilege to having you guys on here. There's a lot of other ground I'm sure we could cover, but we want to leave space for folks to go discover the park for themselves. We have been talking with Rasheed Paulson, who is the director of horticulture, and Bella chapetoni, who is the Deputy Director of horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, just seems to me like an amazing example of the Wild is what is out your back door, and it doesn't matter where your back door is. And I just want to thank both of you so much for taking the time to come on the wild idea podcast. It's been real honor having both of you here. Anders Reynolds 39:00 Rasheed, Bella, thank you so much for today. I have personally, really been looking forward to this conversation, and y'all did not disappoint. Inevitably, I'll find myself in the city this fall, and I can promise that trip will include exploring Brooklyn Bridge Park. Before we wrap, I want to give you guys the last word if someone wants to get more involved with Brooklyn Bridge Park, or maybe seek out an internship? How would they do that? Fantastic. Speaker 2 39:25 Great questions to end first before I even get there. Thank you both. This has been so fun, and now you have two partners you can really rely on for a tour when you come down, what is the best ways to get involved with the park? Like I mentioned, there is anything from volunteership. We have two types of volunteer programs, zone volunteer ship, which happens with a minimum, I believe, four hour commitment every week. You have a more intimate one on one experience with a full time gardener here in their designated area, where you are going into leaps and bounds. On deeper levels of care than more of our broader volunteer core groups may have, getting directly into the beds, understanding the how and why and educational background of what we are doing in our processes. But then also, if you just want to show up, get out into the park, pull some weeds on a lawn, or mulch a tree pit. You can also come out to our green team events. We have many, many, many public programs that this provides you the opportunity to visit the park for fun, whether it has movies on a view some of the staining and other science driven soil observations led by our education conservancy team. We have a Education Center, which is also a part of our programming here, which is really wonderful to see school groups coming out and participating in our space that way. And then we are really excited for this internship. We are on our fourth year of the horticulture internship. We have our fourth cohort every year from Summer, summer months into early spring or early fall. We take three intern candidates that are trying to make their breakthrough into the horticulture realm, hopefully ideally within the public realm as well, to really get the next generations of stewards out there. And is essentially an 11 week, two days a week, Crash Course, a paid internship, mind you, that really tries to build not only the hard but soft skills communication and just like job readiness, skills that we think are needed in our field, and hopefully will land people that shot they have they need a first time seasonal job, full time job, even within the city. And of course, opportunities with us, we are actually very thankful that we have two full time gardeners that are previous interns from two cohorts ago, and on the most exciting front of that next year, we will be expanding our internship program from 11 weeks to 19 weeks, getting ourselves through the summer, I mean, the spring and the fall as part of the programming. So it's going to continue to grow and continue to get better. And I have to thank the horticulture staff and the track leaders of our program for the internship that are super, super dedicated to not making sure, making sure you don't just get hard skills, but you get a lot of education and workshop involved from this program. Bill Hodge 42:11 Amazing ways to get involved. It sounds great. Bella, I want to thank you for coming on, sharing your story, and our shared passion for invasives and making sure we keep those managed just thank you so much. And Rasheed, what a great way to outline ways that folks can get engaged with the park. We hope you guys have enjoyed our conversation today with Rasheed and Bella from Brooklyn Bridge Park, and we look forward to seeing everybody on down the trail. Speaker 1 42:35 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds, production and editing by Bren Russell at pod lab. Digital support by Holly Wielkoszewski at daypack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skeehan. Our executive producer and ringleader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai