Mega-Nightclub Threatens Bushwick Inlet Park

The Tao Hospitality Group, Has Plans to Open Mega Nightclub With Outdoor Space Adjacent to Bushwick Inlet Park!

• Scale! 1700 Person Capacity! Is Too Big
• Bushwick Inlet Is An Unique Natural Embayment:
  Home To Birds And Birders!
• 2005 Rezoning Broken Promises:
  This Public Park Belongs To The Community
• Safety And Quality Of Life
• We Need To Protect Our Hard Won
  Public Open Space From Global Developers

A nightclub conglomerate aims to destroy a long promised public park and a residential neighborhood in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 

The Tao Group, owners and operators of approximately four dozen venues nationwide, including notoriously exclusive and expensive nightclubs in New York City and Las Vegas, has plans to open a 1700 person capacity club at 11 Franklin Street adjacent to ecological jewel Bushwick Inlet and the namesake park, and abutting residential blocks in Greenpoint. 

The scale and location of this proposed venue crosses a red line and threatens to destroy an ecological sanctuary and long-sought park space even before the park is completed.  

The community has had to fight tooth and nail to get this long-promised park and an understanding of that history is important in seeing how inappropriate the Tao Group proposal is for that location.

The 27 acre Bushwick Inlet Park is what was promised to the community by the Bloomberg administration in return for the impact of the 2005 rezoning of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg waterfront and the construction of a wall of towers and thousands of new residents, including making even worse one of the lowest open space per capita ratios in the City.  

In 2015, not only had the promised park not been delivered, but the land hadn’t even been purchased by the City. That year, a fire destroyed a business on one of the waterfront parcels, and the owner tried to sell it for development. 

This event prompted the local community to mobilize into the “Where’s Our Park?” campaign to save the promised park from private sale. A formidable coalition of organizations, individuals and elected officials led by the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park relentlessly rallied, protested, flash mobbed and hijacked city rezoning hearings for 18 months. This campaign successfully resulted in the City finally acquiring the endangered property thereby securing the entire 27 acres in taxpayer hands.

While this district has added tens of thousands of new residents over the last decade and a half,  barely one-third of the park has been developed and opened to the public.

Locals are excited that the small but very precious Bushwick Inlet section of the park is finally under construction after 19 years! It would be a horrible waste of time and tremendous effort (and taxpayer investment!), to have an environmentally sensitive section of the park open to the public, but be assaulted by noise and drunken crowds from an out-of-scale nightclub adjacent to the park.

Nightclub developers are thwarted by the community.

When it was discovered that the Tao Group would appear before Brooklyn Community Board #1 to seek a positive recommendation from the board to obtain liquor license for 11 Franklin Street in Greenpoint, neighbors and advocacy groups mobilized against this threat to the park, bird populations and and the adjacent residential neighborhood. The McGorlick Bird Club and the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park issued statements opposing the plan, and through a new group that emerged to protect this pristine bird habitat called Inlet Angels, hundreds of letters of opposition were submitted to the board. On June 18th, 2024, after a disingenuous presentation by Tao’s representatives and outrage expressed by neighbors, elected officials and board members,  the board’s SLA Committee and full board both unanimously voted to reject their application.

Tao Group persists in their grossly unpopular endeavour.

Despite enormous collective opposition from the local community, the Tao Group is still considering escalating their application to the State Liquor Authority. This in spite of a recent letter sent to upper management in the company from local elected officials urging them to abandon 11 Franklin Street as their club location. There has also been recent press on the conflict in the NY Post, Hellgate and the Jewish Voice.