The Bridge Rockaway

The Bridge Rockaway mixed-use project in Brooklyn was an 8-year exercise of bravery, hope and ambition. A journey through the maze of Byzantine text known as the NYC Zoning Resolution, an immutable 1,000 page document, that was in fact mutated through a years’ long process and resulted in a rare Text Amendment, allowing a combination of uses never seen in New York before - a large, 39,000 sq ft light manufacturing center with two residential buildings above accommodating 174 affordable and supportive apartments. This idea was generated not only to address a severe scarcity of affordable housing but also to address very high unemployment in Brownsville, one of the City's poorest neighborhoods.

Three groups joined forces to make this unlikely project come to life - The Bridge, a venerable mental health and housing non-profit, Mega Development, specializing in affordable housing, and GMDC, whose mission centers around creating low-cost space as incubators for local makers, and with the higher wages that brings, lifting the economic bar in Brownsville. The program also includes supportive social services offices for The Bridge, a street level rental space for local non-profits and a generous 14,000 sq ft garden between the two residences. Two years of intense negotiations with various city agencies, concerned about safety issues between the manufacturing and residents, resulted in approval. Six years later the ribbon has been cut.

Beyond the necessary technical safeguards for the residents, we began our design approach from a place of humanism, taking delight in the diversity of the program and resident populations and in the implicit opportunities to bring everyone into a common shared community. What's now considered the social heart of the 180,000 sq ft project is a wide glass link connecting the two buildings with a series of shared amenity spaces, each focusing to the central garden. This transparent connecting device encourages people from both wings to socially interact, within a compelling indoor/outdoor experience. Laundry is drying as kids are playing outside in clear sight. That connectivity became a central notion informing the collective resident experience.

When asked their favorite thing, new residents often refer to their bright kitchens, or the oversized windows looking out to the garden. But most refer to the act of entering a double height lobby, ascending up a wide open stair to the 2nd floor amenity "podium", looking through the glass link and entering the garden to meet their new friends. By standards of low income housing this sequence seems impossibly grand, dignified, even hopeful. To us, the hope is this new home will inspire a transformative new force in their lives.