NEW YORK, NY.- The area under the Brooklyn Bridge in lower Manhattan is a forbidding swath of rubble and construction equipment, cut off from the sky by six lanes of clattering bridge traffic. To most of the world, it communicates a single message: Keep out.

To Rosa Chang, it conveyed something different: New York City’s next great park.

On a walk around the site last month, Chang peered through a chain-link fence at a few pieces of idle heavy machinery and described what she saw. She wore a bright red dress and high-wedge sneakers and the beatific smile of a true believer.

“I see opera,” she said. “I see children playing, I see trees, I see old people sitting down talking to each other. I see skateboarders flying in the air, I see nature, I see one of our most beautiful structures that humanity has ever been able to build anchoring it all.” In the sealed brick vaults under the bridge, which long ago housed a vast wine cellar, she saw a public library and a maker lab and museum. She saw an outdoor swimming pool.

“Go on, tell me the truth,” she said. “Do you think I’m crazy? Or do you think this is common sense?”

For the past three years, Chang has led such walking tours of the site for city officials, community leaders and potential allies, pitching her vision for what she calls Gotham Park, along with her project’s estimated costs: $200 million in public and private money.

“Her strategy is to kill with kindness,” said Mark Levine, Manhattan borough president, who became an early supporter after a walking tour with Chang. “She radiates positivity, but she is relentless. I mean this in the best way, but she always has an ask. You never get out of any conversation without an ask.”

What kind of person looks at a dusty construction site, shoved under a bridge and controlled by a seemingly impregnable bureaucracy, and thinks: This is a perfect space for a park?

Over several weeks in June and July, I asked this question of Chang in as many ways as I could think of. Each time she had a similar answer.

Surely, she said, anyone can see it.

“To me, it was screaming,” she said.

Chang assumed that all she had to do was point out the potential to the proper authorities, and they would make it happen.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I had no clue.”

It took 10 years for the High Line, a wildly popular conversion of an abandoned elevated rail line that nobody wanted, to open just its first section, in 2009. Abolitionist Place, a 1-acre park that opened in Downtown Brooklyn in May, took 20 contentious years to come together.

Chang knew none of this.

In 2020, Chang, a local resident who had never been involved in city politics, joined her community board, figuring that would be enough to make the park happen. “I actually thought that as soon as somebody heard about the idea, they would just move the fence and open it up in two weeks,” she said. “Like, how naive is that?”

With a young child at home, she gave up her work as an architectural consultant, dipped into the family savings and retirement account and threw herself full time — including evenings and weekends — into what had become not just a vision but an obsession. Her salary from her nonprofit, Brooklyn Bridge Manhattan, which she incorporated in 2021, was zero that year; the next, it was $21,000, according to tax records. She listed her average weekly work hours as 65.

“Being naive actually is a superpower,” she said, adding, “Anybody who knew how much was actually involved would not do this.”

Chang, who is in her early 50s — she declined to give her age, citing privacy concerns and a fear of identity theft — can be evangelical on the subject of public space. Born in South Korea and raised outside Toronto, she became interested in the subject during a student year in Paris, and more so during stints in London, Milan, Rome, Tokyo and Helsinki. As an outsider in those cities, she said, she became aware of how public spaces brought together people of different ages, classes and races, all on an equal basis.

“That’s the one time where it’s socially acceptable to sit down and maybe start talking to your next-door neighbor,” she said. “We need to make spaces for that to happen. Because without that space to allow you to meet somebody new that you might not otherwise, your life is very poor in a sense, in experience and understanding.”

She added: “We learn to socialize and become good human beings in our public spaces. We learn to negotiate, we learn to share.”

What her experiences did not teach her was how those public spaces were created.

Through her community board meetings, she met a skateboarder named Steve Rodriguez, who had been trying for years to open a section under the bridge that had been a mecca for skaters until 2010, when the city’s Department of Transportation closed off the area to make bridge repairs.

Chang knew nothing about this history.

Partnering with Rodriguez and the nonprofit Skatepark Project, she focused on the skate area, known as the Brooklyn Banks, as the first piece of her proposed park. Until then, the skaters had created a petition but made little headway with city agencies, said Ben Bashein, the Skatepark Project’s CEO.

Chang changed that.

“She’d just talk to everyone and anyone who would listen, from council members to assembly members, state senators, City Hall, other nonprofits and stakeholders in the area,” Bashein said.

Chang said simply: “I am slightly obsessive as a human being.”

“I just keep asking super persistently,” she said. “I don’t want to be like a stalker, but I don’t know where the line is, either.”

The strategy worked. Last May, she joined Mayor Eric Adams and others in cutting the ribbon to open the first half of the Banks: 1 acre of public space reclaimed for the community — and a victory for Chang.

The Transportation Department, which administers the bridge and the area below it, has committed to opening another section by the end of the year, said Ed Pincar, the agency’s Manhattan borough commissioner, and has agreed to make Chang’s group the “plaza partner” responsible for operating and maintaining the space.

On a digital tablet, Chang showed off slick renderings for the entire 9 acres, which she hoped would be completed in three stages over 10 years. It is a vision of utopia in one of the city’s most densely populated areas.

There are only two hurdles standing in the way: real estate and money.

Pincar said he appreciated Chang’s enthusiasm. But beyond the initial two sections of land, the department has not committed to opening up the space, much of which it uses for parking, which no New Yorker gives up without a fight.

“I have probably worked with Rosa for hundreds of hours over the last two years,” Pincar said. “Her passion is infectious. But as borough commissioner, I have to be the reality check on a lot of people all of the time.”

The city, similarly, has yet to commit a budget line for the park, though Adams mentioned the area in announcing a $375 million program to create new public spaces.

One prominent supporter in Chang’s corner is Dan Doctoroff, who as deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg was instrumental in creating no fewer than seven parks around the city, including the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Chang said she “stalked” Doctoroff at a public event, and that he has since become a mentor, or “consigliere.”

Doctoroff said in an interview that he was impressed by Chang’s drive, and by an economic study she commissioned, which found that her proposal would bring $290 million per year in business to local merchants.

In an era of budget shortfalls, he said, investing in the park makes fiscal sense. “Ultimately,” he said, “the entire thing needs to be done.”

But it will only work, he added, “if somebody at the city drives it.”

That somebody, so far, is Meera Joshi, deputy mayor for operations, who joined Chang on a walking tour of the area and immediately saw its appeal, in part because of the lack of park space in the surrounding neighborhoods. Joshi, in turn, brought Adams to see it.

“There are lots of ideas out there,” she said. “I think you have to pick one or two that, as an administration, you’re going to focus on. We saw that with the High Line, Hudson River Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park. And this is that place for the Adams administration.”

But before allocating a budget, she said, the city has to solicit input from other community members who might have different plans for the space, then make its own design.

Chang is operating on faith that the money and the space will swing her way. For now, she relies on volunteers to keep the skate park clean and a $200,000 grant from Trinity Church Wall Street to run yoga classes and other programs there.

She has spent the past three years building alliances with many local groups — in Chinatown, the South Street Seaport, the 21-acre Alfred E. Smith public houses and the financial district, as well as those in neighboring schools and community boards — to better push for the space’s opening.

“Rosa has done a really good job of putting everybody together at the table for the same cause,” said Aixa Torres, president of the Alfred E. Smith Resident Association, who pointed out that the different communities were often cut off from one another. “I think that it’s brought people together that never would have — rich, poor, Black, Latino, Asian.”

The park, she said, “gives you hope.”

Chang remains adamant that the park is going to happen, all 9 acres of it, maybe even with a retractable movie screen for summer evenings. And if it doesn’t? If part of the remaining space opens, will she be satisfied?

“No, I will not slow down,” she said. “I will not stop. I might give myself an ulcer and a heart attack, but it’s the right thing to do.” She added: “We’re not doing it for the city. We’re doing it for our community.”

And so she is sleep-deprived and over-scheduled, committed to making something beautiful out of a dark, unpromising space. She now gets a living salary, but worries there is not enough money for the rest of the year.

“I feel like sometimes I’m literally taking life off the back end to use it now to push forward on this,” she said. “But how many times do you actually have an opportunity in your life to build something that could improve people’s lives? And if you see that opportunity, no matter the cost, can you walk away?”

Besides, she said, the cost of quitting was even greater than that of carrying on.

“In 50 years, people are going to look at this and say, Why isn’t this a public space?” she said, adding a profanity. “I couldn’t accept that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.