How Queensbridge's “Baby Park” Became An Orphan And A Battleground For LIC Rezoning

By Haidee Chu, The City

October 7, 2025

When the Department of City Planning presented its massive Long Island City housing development plan to neighborhood residents last year, it put forward an ambitious vision for the waterfront: To extend an existing mile-long esplanade by roughly another half mile to connect the neighborhood from Hunter’s Point to the south up to Queensbridge Park to the north.

But longtime Queensbridge Houses resident Daniel Taylor, 69, was frustrated to learn that the proposed open space would stop at the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, just short of the public housing complex that has been his home for more than six decades.

The Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing complex in the country, used to have its own signature park, a New Deal project under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia whose playgrounds and ball courts ran for half a mile under the bridge, covering a little more than three acres and connecting the waterfront to the west to what’s called Queens Plaza today to the east.

Known as Baby Park, it closed in the 1980s for lead paint removal on the bridge, and most of it never reopened to the public.

Today, the Department of Parks and Recreation uses swaths of the Baby Park space for trailers used as offices, and for truck parking. Even as development in the neighborhood has boomed and brought new parks to the affluent waterfront and to neighboring Queens Plaza, NYCHA residents have never regained access to most of Baby Park.

“It was just the same old rhetoric as it’s always been,” said Taylor. “We’ve never benefited.”

Longtime locals have fond memories of what Baby Park meant to them. While getting to Queensbridge Park by the water required crossing busy Vernon Boulevard, at Baby Park parents and kids enjoyed playgrounds close by.

“You walk in — it was everything. The sprinkler was huge, the handball court, the playground itself — we had like, two playgrounds! And remember them square metal swings that used to burn the kids’ butts?” Queensbridge resident Kim Alston, 65, recalled at Queensbridge in a late summer afternoon. “That was the worst thing they ever did, was to close that park. These kids don’t know anything about it.”

The Parks Department is currently spending $6 million to reconstruct a half-acre portion of Baby Park, and in 2023 completed reconstruction of handball and basketball half courts. But longtime residents say those efforts cover only a small fraction of what Baby Park once was.

“That little half-acre of land that they’re trying to call the renovation of Baby Park is an insult to me, because nothing in there has anything to do with the Baby Park,” Taylor said.

Workers continue construction at the Queensbridge Baby Park, Aug. 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

While Taylor and other residents have for two decades advocated for Baby Park to be fully restored, their cause has struggled to attract meaningful attention until now.

Penny Lee, who served as a senior planner for Long Island City at the Department of City Planning from 1988 to 2017, reasoned that it’s because Queensbridge had been isolated within a mostly industrial neighborhood until recent years.

“They just never had a big enough constituency, notwithstanding the fact that they are the nation’s largest public housing development,” Lee said. “They didn’t have a surrounding residential neighborhood that they could plug into to help plead their case, and so I think, consequently, it’s just been forgotten about.”

But that appears to be changing as Long Island City has become one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in the city over the last decade. Nearly 850 people have signed on to a petition started this summer to restore Baby Park, while the Hunters Point Parks Conservancy, Court Square Civic Association and Long Island City Partnership have also offered their support.

Most crucially, Councilmember Julie Won (D-Queens), is insisting on a full restoration of Baby Park as a condition for her support for Mayor Eric Adams’ Long Island City rezoning plan, which could bring some 15,000 new apartments to the area under the banner “OneLIC.” The Council must vote by October 29 on whether to let the rezoning proceed.

“Without this, there is no way that the City Council is going to pass this project,” Won said at the Council’s September council hearing on the rezoning.

Councilmember Julie Won (D-Queens) speaks during a City Hall hearing on NYCHA contracts, Sept. 20, 2022. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

She demanded, regarding the Parks Department trailers and parking lots, a timeline, funding and commitments for redevelopment ahead of the Council vote.

“We have an opportunity here to right the historic wrongs in Long Island City,” Won added. She later told THE CITY in a statement: “For decades, Queensbridge residents have decried how the parks underneath the Queensboro bridge were stolen from them by the City Government to create a poverty barrier. Queensbridge residents are cut off from the rest of Long Island City—it’s time to end segregation in Long Island City by connecting Gantry Park to Queensbridge Park and reclaim these park spaces.”

Won’s support for the plan is key, as Councilmembers typically vote with the colleague representing the area where zoning changes are proposed.

“We’re already failing,” Won added, pointing to statistics provided by the Department of City Planning during the hearing that revealed how Long Island City currently offers just 0.9 acres of open space per 1,000 residents — far below the goal of 2.5 acres per 1,000 residents set forth by city guidelines. “That’s pretty abysmal. Even for people who are bad at math, that’s pretty bad.”

‘We Would Not Stop Playing’

When Baby Park opened in 1941, it boasted slides, swings, jungle gyms, sprinklers and a wading pool for children, as well as basketball, handball, volleyball, shuffleboard and bocce ball courts. A marionette theater inside of a Parks Department trailer sometimes stopped there for puppet shows, too.

The space provided “badly needed recreation facilities for persons of all ages,” the Brooklyn Eagle wrote at the time, including for workers in Long Island City’s defense industry, which included the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation aircraft plant which manufactured fighter planes for the World War II effort.
Queensbridge residents included 3,097 white and 52 Black families that year, according to the LaGuardia & Wagner Archives. And when residents Patrick and Abbie Patte recalled their experience moving into Queensbridge in 1939 to the Daily News 25 years later, they listed Baby Park among their favorite features in Queensbridge.

Said Abbie Patten: “This is where we have raised our five wonderful boys, and this is where we have had many gratifying pleasant experiences.” One of those boys grew up to be a priest, while others were a navy lieutenant, a chef and a bank clerk.

Taylor, for his part, has plenty of scars on his knees to prove his days of playing in the sprinklers and monkey bars at Baby Park as a child. On a recent September afternoon at Queensbridge, he recalled how he had learned to ride a bike, putt golf balls, and play basketball with neighbors at Baby Park.

“We would not stop playing,” Taylor recalled. “If I scraped my knee it didn’t matter, I’d get right back up.”

Daniel Taylor leads a tour of the Queensbridge Baby Park renovation, Aug. 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

Alston chimed in: “You see, back then, everybody knew everybody — we were safe in that park. I don’t care what block you came from. You were safe in that park.”

“And that is my main point,” Taylor added. “That was a place our parents took us that they knew they were safe. They didn’t worry about us there.”

The decline of Baby Park started in the mid-70s and 80s, longtime residents say. By the time Jude Shaw, 81, arrived at Queensbridge as a 29-year-old in 1973, Baby Park had already been noticeably downsized, he said, with the playgrounds and sprinklers torn down and the basketball courts lumpy.

Under the Queensboro Bridge, New York, May 1969. Credit: 2025 Arthur Tress Archive LLC courtesy Camp Gallery

“Residents had called it Baby Park, but it really wasn’t no Baby Park — no park, no baby,” Shaw recalled recently as he passed the park on an afternoon walk. “There was nothing there.”

Eager to hear more about Baby Park’s glory days, Shaw turned to Taylor and asked: “How did it look?”

“It was clean, man,” Taylor responded. “Crispy clean.”

These days, there’s little to show that the entire strip is, indeed, still officially mapped as public parkland. Skid steers unload unwanted junk into a parking lot dumpster where the bocce courts once stood, while tall wire fences in a stretch closer to the river cordon off office trailers occupied by Parks Department administrators — in the very spot where some residents still recall playing basketball on full-sized courts.

Skid steer dumping trash by the parking lot that was once a bocce court. Aug. 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

‘A Really Long Time in the Making’

By the time Baby Park’s decline began, the population at Queensbridge had also shifted dramatically. In 1969, Queensbridge’s population was 63% Black, 21% white, and 16% Puerto Rican, according to the LaGuardia & Wagner Archives.

Those residents bore the brunt of the systemic disinvestment that followed, with President Richard Nixon withdrawing new federal funding for public housing in 1973. Meanwhile, New York City was nearing bankruptcy by the mid-1970s.

“They just didn’t want to do nothing over here,” said Daniel’s brother Eddie Taylor.

Eddie Taylor helps lead a tour of the Queensbridge Baby Park, Aug. 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

“The 70s was rough times,” Daniel added. “There was a point where they stopped taking care of it, so people stopped bringing their kids down there for that reason.”

That park was gradually repurposed for non-recreational uses. The Parks Department issued a permit to NYCHA in 1976 to turn what had been a bocce ball court into a parking lot that the Housing Authority still uses as one, though the permit allowing that change has long since expired. By the 1980s, the Parks Department closed down most of Baby Park to remove lead paint off of the Queensboro Bridge, with the lots littered with contractor cars and tools.

“Baby Park never recovered,” said Lee.

Lee recalled walking over the Queensboro Bridge from her Upper East Side apartment to her office in Queens Plaza on her first day as a city planner in 1988: “And then I landed in Queens Plaza, and thought, ‘This is Queens’ front door?’”

“There were no trees, or there were medians with lots of scrappy trees and plastic bags in them. It was just gross,” Lee said. “I just thought: Something different has to be here. We have to clean up this space.”

Lee’s interest in Queens Plaza also extended to Baby Park. Queensbridge residents, she said, deserved better. It was, moreover, an opportunity to provide a linear connection between the plaza and the waterfront.

The possibility of rebuilding Baby Park has had several false starts, including in 2001, when a Queens Plaza improvement plan supported in part by federal funding called for a new Baby Park design along with other improvements along the bridge.

But the Parks Department had other plans. Over City Planning and the local community board’s objections, it sought to move its operations to support urban community gardens, along with an outdoor storage yard for heavy equipment, to what had been Baby Park, in 2005 — while designs for the Queens Plaza plan were well underway.

The city said at the time that this would only take up about one-fifth of the 3.12 acre space in an undesirable area directly under the bridge, and that the relocation would “actually speed the redevelopment of the park by placing a full-time Parks employee on site.” But that was never fully brought to bear.

The Department of City Planning proceeded with a park design anyway because the scope of the Queens Plaza project had called for it. A final schematic unveiled in 2006 showed native trees and shrubs framing the entrance of the park, with a new game area where the NYCHA parking lot now sits, complemented by an overlook garden, children’s play area and water play area.

But the Department of City Planning was never able to reach an agreement with Parks to revitalize the space, Lee recalled, because Parks was concerned about the safety of a public open space underneath an elevated bridge — even though active park spaces are also currently in use under bridges at Brooklyn Bridge Park, as well as the newly revamped John V. Lindsay East River Park under the Williamsburg Bridge.

The Parks Department declined to comment and instead referred THE CITY’s inquiry to the mayor’s office.

“We agree with Long Island City residents on the importance of open space, which is why we’re unifying the waterfront from Gantry Plaza State Park to Queensbridge Park as a large, vibrant public space,” said mayoral spokesperson William Fowler, who stressed the rezoning “will result in nearly 15,000 new homes and over 14,000 jobs” in the neighborhood. “Queensbridge Baby Park is at the forefront of our minds as we continue productive conversations with the councilmember.”

Lee, for her part, sees the Parks Department’s reconstruction of the half-acre space in the northwest corner of Baby Park as a promising sign.

“It’s good to know that there’s been a change in the mindset. When you work in city government, you’ve got to be really patient and willing to accept incrementalism,” Lee told THE CITY. “And so, to me, the fact that they’re doing that section at Vernon Boulevard is a huge victory. I applaud them for that because it has been a really long time in the making to get there.”

Won is also now negotiating with the Department of Transportation to convert several of its lots under the Queensboro Bridge into open space, which, together with Baby Park, would make up 8.5 acres.

The Parks Department and the Department of Transportation said at the September council hearing that the spaces are currently supporting “geographically sensitive operations,” such as bridge maintenance, and in response to an inquiry from THE CITY declined to say whether they support converting the lots back to public open space.

Both agencies, however, said in the hearing that they are committed to exploring options to relocating and consolidating their operations.

Nick Molinari, chief of planning and neighborhood development for the Parks Department, acknowledged Long Island City falls short of City Planning standards for park space access and said the department is also exploring options to expand open space.

Taylor, for his part, said he is willing to support the rezoning even without the full restoration of Baby Park because of the job opportunities and housing it promises.

“I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water,” Taylor said.

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.