They want a beautiful waterfront park — they just don’t want outsiders traipsing through their neighborhood to get there.
Community leaders in Brooklyn Heights are prepared to look a $40 million gift horse in the mouth, fearing some quiet cobblestone streets will be overrun by hordes of pedestrians and vehicles heading to a new year-round sports facility planned for Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The 115,000-square-foot ”Fieldhouse” — which Manhattan philanthropist Joshua Rechnitz last month announced he plans to pay for — would include an inclined bike track, playing areas for others sports and seating for 2,500 people attending competitive events. It would also include on-site parking.
While Brooklyn Heights civic leaders say they’re grateful for the gift, many attending a park planning meeting Tuesday night questioned whether building the facility at the edge of Joralemon Street near Pier 5 would put too much burden on the neighborhood — particularly its cobblestone-lined southwest section known as “Willowtown.”
“This would be devastating to the southern Heights,” said Mary Goodman, who lives a few blocks away and is on Community Board 2’s parks committee.
“[Joralemon Street] would become the secret way to get there faster, and in a street full of babies, dogs and people, it would be disastrous.”
Both Brooklyn Heights Association President Jane McGroarty and Linda DeRosa, vice president of the Willowtown Association, also raised concerns about the influx of park-goers the field house would bring.
Their groups plan to lobby the city to fence off Joralemon Street at the corner of Furman Street, preventing direct park access from the steep-inclined street.
“It’s a very exciting project,” McGroarty told The Post. “But if [the field house is] going to have 2,500 people, where are they going to come from?”
Addressing the concerns, Kate Collingnan, a representative for a nonprofit group overseeing the fieldhouse plan, said “certainly access and traffic will be things we look at” in the coming months during the city’s environmental review process.
But Judi Francis, who’s led the fight to keep more high-rise condos out of the park, said the fieldhouse plan should be hailed — not criticized — because it “finally fills the park’s biggest void,” a lack of year-round recreation.
“The focus should be how fantastic this will be for all New Yorkers,” she said.
Collingnan said that some large cycling competitions would be necessary to generate revenue to keep the fieldhouse “self sustaining” but that the site would be open to the general public most of the time.
Rechnitz, who’s also a competitive amateur cyclist, has also agreed to underwrite any future operating revenue shortfalls during the first 10 years of a proposed 20-year city lease agreement.