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Prospect Park has a new role: a giant, climate-fighting sponge. Mayor Eric Adams just unveiled a $68 million plan to curb the flash flooding that has plagued the park and its surrounding neighborhoods and the fix is surprisingly old school: let nature do its job.
The heart of the plan is the borough’s first-ever Bluebelt, a system that uses wetlands, ponds and natural drainage to capture and filter stormwater before it can flood Ditmas Park, Kensington, Prospect Park South and Windsor Terrace. Staten Island has been perfecting this approach for years, but now it’s Brooklyn’s turn to employ the water-management glow-up.
“By using Prospect Park to manage stormwater, we’re turning one of Brooklyn’s most cherished public spaces into a powerful tool for climate resilience,” DEP commissioner Rohit T. Aggarwala said in a release.
As a result of a year-long study, city engineers found that during intense storms, rainwater often sheets across the park rather than flowing into the 60-acre lake. When water does reach the lake, the 150-year-old waterway fills up too fast and can overflow, which ultimately pushes water into nearby streets and strains the sewer system. The Bluebelt’s job is to flip that script.
The plan involves upgrading the lake’s drainage so that water levels can drop in under 36 hours (right now, it can take up to three weeks), along with a lineup of new features designed to catch water before it poses a problem. Along West Drive, the city will install a chain of rain gardens and a new pond to slow storm runoff and redirect it into the lake. Flatbush Avenue will get its own intervention in the form of a restored historic pond north of the zoo, which will shield it from the kind of flash flooding that forced it to close after a brutal storm in 2023.
The project dovetails with Prospect Park Alliance’s ongoing $20 million lakeshore restoration, which includes reimagining the shoreline along Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s original design, adding new plantings, seating, ADA access and improved stormwater infrastructure. When it’s finished, the reworked lakeshore and Bluebelt will work in tandem: one restores the park’s historic landscape and the other equips it for a soggier future.
Design work for the Bluebelt has begun, but construction isn’t expected for at least three years and won’t wrap until 2023. That may feel far away, but for neighbors who have watched water pool in the same troublesome spots storm after storm, a long-term fix—even one arriving on New York City timelines—still counts as very welcome news.