Brooklyn Bridge Park Tetherball Plan Wins Over Skeptic

The Brooklyn Paper has frequently questioned the Brooklyn Bridge Park plan, but it looks like a planned amenity has won over a skeptic. Editor Gersh Kuntzman devotes his Brooklyn Angle column this week to the ability to play tetherball in the future on the Brooklyn waterfront. Specifically:

This paper has taken a very principled stand against the waterfront condo-and-open-space development known as Brooklyn Bridge Park, but the time has come for the Brooklyn Angle to break from The Brooklyn Paper and support Brooklyn Bridge Park for one reason and one reason only: tetherball.

The other day, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy sent out a glossy mailing highlighting all the recreational offerings their new park would have — and tetherball was right there on Pier 2 (see rendering).

Yes, tetherball — the true city game — is coming back to Brooklyn, the borough that, arguably, nurtured the greatest talents that the sport has ever produced (true, Leroy “Tight Serve” Johnson was from Fresno, but he’s nothing compared to Kareem Abdul Fishman — Midwood High School ’45! — and Ollie “Loop-de-loop” Carradine, the pride of Westinghouse High).

Indeed, all these legends have been forgotten — but only because the city’s Parks Department, the Board of Education and Robert Moses’s long-powerful Office of Tetherball Services dropped (or, more accurately, severed) the ball and eliminated hundreds, if not dozens, of tetherball courts citywide.

Tetherball!