Address
Marginal St. &, 43rd St, Brooklyn, NY 11232
About
Opened in 2017, Bush Terminal Piers Park is 24 acres of modern green space built on the shores of Bay Ridge Channel in Sunset Park in a space previously used as a seaport. It features two tidal ponds and the synthetic baseball and soccer fields are surrounded by trees. While controlling the ball, you can catch a view of New York Harbor in the distance.
The park is named after industrialist Irving T Bush, founder of the Bush Terminal Company. His father had sold the land to Standard Oil, which was using it as a dumping ground for ash. Irving bought it back to make it a seaport, using the ash as landfill. The company took advantage of the low supply of ports due to congestion in Manhattan ports. It worked: eventually the port was handling 10% of steamship arriving in New York. That all ended in 1974 after Newark became a more scalable option for large container ships. The land went unused for decades due to pollution that had to be cleaned up. The need for more parks in Sunset Park eventually created the pressure needed to build a soccer field here.
