City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Bronx Council Member Amanda Farías, newly announced at the body’s majority leader, announced $11.4 million in new funding to renovate and expand Harding Park in the Southeast Bronx on Wednesday evening.
“All of our families here and especially our Bronx kids deserve more,” Farias told a few dozen attendees at a meeting at the Harding Park Homeowners Association to announce the new money, including $6.5 million from Council capital funds, and discuss what would be done with it.
“I grew up in this community, actually hanging out in Harding Park with my friends, maybe even making my way to ‘Makeout Point,’” she said, describing a hot spot in nearby Clason Point Park on the Westchester Creek waterfront. “Don’t tell my parents.”
Adams, who represents a district in southeast Queens, told the Bronx residents: “Under this Council, we have prioritized equitable investments for communities that have gone too far, for too long, with too little.”
Harding Park opened in 1993 after a campaign led by the Homeowners Association, which had been created a decade earlier to govern the cooperatively owned low- and moderate- income community.
Harding Park, taking up part of a block of Bolton Avenue in Clason Point, has a basketball court, playground, picnic area, swings, fitness equipment, spray showers, as well as game tables beneath a pergola, all on what’s now a lot of 0.86 acres.
The funds will be used in part to nearly double the size of the park by expanding it into what’s now a vacant 0.7 acre parcel of land controlled by the Parks Department and presently filled with parked cars and tall grass.
Soundview Park, just northwest of Harding Park, is in the design phase of an ambitious project to restore the coastal wetland and nearby land, while constructing a park entry, pedestrian pathway and plaza area at Bolton Point intended “to restore valuable coastal habitat in an ecologically important location while creating public access to the waterfront,” according to the Department of Parks and Recreation website.
On Wednesday afternoon, a group of teens played basketball at Harding Park after school despite half of the full court being underwater after Tuesday’s storm.
Whenever the ball bounced sharply off the rim following a missed shot, the players dashed to stop the rock from being soaked at the wet half of the court. They didn’t always make the save.
Carlos Nuñez, 17, told THE CITY in Spanish that the court floods whenever it rains.
“Looking at the park; that’s what they need to fix,” he said.
At Wednesday night’s meeting, residents suggested improvements the new funds could pay for, including better nighttime lighting, timely park closures, a dog run, separate entrances to areas for kids and adults, bike trails and racks, bottle refill stations, a running track and even a pickleball court.
“There’s nowhere in this area to play, and Pickleball is a game that older people can play because it’s not as strenuous [as tennis],” said resident Wanda Lucena, 74, who has lived in the neighborhood with her husband for 40 years.
The new funding for Harding Park begins what Department of Parks and Recreation officials say will be an estimated three- to four-year process to complete the project.