What a Decade of BQE Construction Actually Means for the Promenade, Squibb Park and the Walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park

"A nightmare strip of highway." That's how Kelly Carroll, executive director of the Atlantic Avenue Business Improvement District, described the stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs under the Promenade, back when she first heard Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration was finally going to touch it. She wasn't wrong about the highway. She also wasn't entirely happy with the fix once she read it.

On August 24, Mamdani and NYC DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn announced a $4 billion plan to rehabilitate BQE Central, the 1.5-mile, city-owned stretch of expressway between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street that includes the triple cantilever carrying the highway beneath the Promenade. If you walk that stretch daily, whether you're pushing a stroller past Pierrepont Place, letting a dog off leash at Hillside Dog Park, or cutting down to Brooklyn Bridge Park after work, this is the plan that decides what your next ten years look like on those exact blocks. Some of what you rely on survives largely untouched. One piece of it does not. And the single most dangerous part of the walk isn't part of the plan at all.

The Six-Year Closure That Almost Happened

To understand why this announcement landed with relief instead of dread, it helps to remember what almost happened instead.

In 2018, the de Blasio administration floated a plan to close the Promenade to pedestrians entirely, for as long as six years, and turn it into a temporary six-lane highway while crews rebuilt the cantilever below. The Brooklyn Heights Association fought that plan hard, and it never moved forward. A follow-up engagement process in 2022 produced conceptual designs but stalled again, drawing criticism from Council Member Lincoln Restler at the time for offering residents posters and pins rather than a real channel for feedback.

The plan Mamdani and Flynn unveiled this August is neither of those things. It's a rehabilitation, not a rebuild: DOT will repair the highway deck, walls, joints and structural elements, and upgrade drainage, railings and lighting, but the highway stays two lanes in each direction. It won't be widened. The interchanges won't be redesigned. Flynn was specific about how this differs from the 2018 proposal, describing the new temporary bypass as sitting lower and "tucked out of view" rather than stacked above the existing roadway the way de Blasio's plan would have done it. Construction is set to break ground in 2030 and run about a decade, extending the structure's life by roughly 40 years. The city says the current setup carries about 130,000 vehicles a day, 13,000 of them trucks, on infrastructure that's already 20 years past its design life.

The Brooklyn Heights Association's response has been more measured than it was in 2018. The group that opposed a multi-year Promenade shutdown has signaled that locals are largely willing to accept a period of disruption if something better waits on the other side.

What Actually Stays Open This Time

Here's the part that matters most if you use this corridor every day: DOT's own project materials commit to keeping portions of the Promenade accessible throughout construction, "to the extent feasible," and the same language covers three other specific places most residents already treat as part of their routine.

• The Promenade itself, running from Remsen Street to Orange Street, with entry points at Montague Street, Clark Street and Pineapple Street among others
• Squibb Park, connected to Brooklyn Bridge Park by the Squibb Park Bridge that was rebuilt once already, between 2019 and 2020, after structural issues
• Hillside Dog Park
• Harry Chapin Playground, with one important asterisk covered below

The mechanism that makes this possible is the pair of temporary bypasses DOT plans to build so traffic never has to detour onto local streets. The first is a two-level structure over Furman Street, running from Atlantic Avenue to Columbia Heights, built no higher than the existing Queens-bound lane and designed specifically not to block the Promenade above it. The second carries Queens-bound traffic from Columbia Heights over the existing BQE and the Brooklyn Bridge approach toward the Manhattan Bridge. Both are meant to come down once the real repair work is finished.

The One Playground That Doesn't Stay As Is

Harry Chapin Playground is the exception to the "stays open" list, and it's worth knowing now rather than discovering it when the fencing goes up. DOT's plans call for the playground to be reconstructed in conjunction with the Columbia Heights overpass rehabilitation, meaning this is the one piece of the corridor that isn't just weathering construction nearby. It's being rebuilt as part of it.

That distinction matters for anyone whose kids currently use that specific playground on the north end of the Heights. The Promenade, Squibb Park and Hillside Dog Park are framed as access-preserved-where-possible. Harry Chapin is framed as a rebuild tied directly to the overpass work above it, which is a different kind of disruption than "still open, just noisier."

The Crossing the Plan Doesn't Touch

Carroll's frustration with the plan wasn't really about the highway repair itself. It was about what got left out.

The plan doesn't address the interchanges where vehicles enter and exit the BQE, including what Carroll described as a particularly hazardous exit ramp at Atlantic Avenue, one with on-ramp geometry she noted was designed during the Great Depression. Cars speed down that ramp and onto the avenue regularly, she said, and have more than once crashed into pedestrian infrastructure or ended up on the sidewalk.

"For me, and for our community here, for families who walk the very perilous crossing to Brooklyn Bridge Park every day from Atlantic Avenue under the BQE, not addressing the on-ramps whose geometry was designed during the Great Depression, is a missed opportunity."

The reason it's missing isn't an oversight. Reworking the interchanges would trigger a federal review, and avoiding that review is part of why the city structured this plan the way it did. So if your daily walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park routes you under the highway at Atlantic Avenue, the crossing you already know to be careful around isn't getting safer as a side effect of this project. It stays exactly as it is.

State Senator Andrew Gounardes, Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon and Council Member Lincoln Restler struck a similar note in a joint statement, calling the rehab-not-replace approach encouraging while also flagging concern over what they called an invasive and disruptive construction method, and pushing the administration to explore new connections between the Promenade and the waterfront as the project moves forward.

How to Actually Weigh In

If the 2022 process felt like a dead end, this one has more formal teeth. A CEQR public scoping period opens later this fall, which is the point where the environmental review legally has to account for public comment, and it includes two scheduled public scoping meetings. DOT has also said it will hold Q&A sessions in October alongside pop-up events with project staff and materials, details posted as they firm up on the NYC DOT BQE Central project page.

Commissioner Flynn has been blunt about why the city is moving now instead of waiting for a more ambitious redesign. In a piece he wrote for Streetsblog, he pointed out that every year of inaction costs the city roughly $160 million in escalation costs, on top of the risk that a full structural shutdown would push all 13,000 daily truck trips onto Brooklyn Heights streets not built for them. His framing was that the debate has been governed by politics for years and is now governed by physics, whether anyone likes the timeline or not.

None of this settles the bigger argument over what BQE Central should look like in 2040, and Mamdani's team has said as much. What it does settle, for the next several years, is which parts of your daily walk get protected by design and which ones don't. The Promenade holds. Squibb Park holds. Hillside Dog Park holds. Harry Chapin gets rebuilt. The crossing at Atlantic Avenue stays exactly as risky as it's always been, at least for now.

If you're trying to figure out how a decade of bypass construction near Furman Street or Columbia Heights might play out on your specific block, or you just want a straight answer about what's actually changing near you and what isn't, reach out to Nelson Aybar. He's in this neighborhood, not just covering it, and he'll give you the same direct answer he'd want if he were the one asking.