Downtown Park Plans Include Space For Dogs

A park planned for a vacant one-acre plot downtown would include a 6,000-square foot space for dogs.

The park would also include other distinct spaces, including a small outdoor dining area, an activity lawn that would be perfect for yoga classes or Frisbee tosses and a quarter-acre open lawn with an outer band of pavement where sunbathers could wander over to a popup farmer’s market.

The park, which has informally been referred to as Wolfson Park or Neilson Street Park, would include terraces with stonewall seating in response to the severe slope of the tract.

About 15 people attended Thursday’s meeting at the First Reformed Church on Bayard Street where William Reimer of Florham Park-based Matrix New World Engineering unveiled the park’s first concept plan.

Much of the discussion surrounded the plans for the fenced-in dog park, which would be situated in the southwest corner of the lot, near the Esquina Latina restaurant and Liberty Street.

And although some who attended the meeting questioned if the dogs’ barking will get loud or if their poop would be an issue, former city planner Glenn Patterson applauded the plans to create the space.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years here with these turnouts and this is a good New Brunswick turnout,” he said, looking around the room. “And I think having a dog park is kind of going to help create more community spirit in the town and get people to know each other so that people get more involved in the community. There’s a lot of people that just don’t seem to get involved in New Brunswick and I think that needs to get better.”

He also said the dog park would play a vital role in drawing people to the park.

“The park needs to be activated because if it becomes an area where there aren’t people doing what you want being done in the park, there is going to be people in the park doing things you don’t want them doing in the park,” Patterson said.

The call for a space to be carved out for dogs on this grass-covered lot where the Wolfson Parking Deck once stood goes back to the first public meeting in December 2021, when Reimer and the city’s Director of Planning, Community and Economic Development, Dan Dominguez, began to solicit the public’s input.

Suggestions for everything from an herb garden to a meditation space to a sports field were scrawled on Post-It Notes and affixed to a map of the plot.

The city also received 396 responses to a survey it created to get a better understanding of who would be using the park, when they would be using it and what features and amenities were important to them.

Dominguez said during a Parks and Gardens Commission meeting in January that many of the respondents indicated they wanted a space for their dogs.

Others have voiced their concerns about accessing the park from Neilson Street to the north.

In response, Reimer’s renderings called for two raised crosswalk areas known as speed tables that would slow vehicles and make Neilson Street safer to cross.

Programming was another key term. Reimer said the design unveiled Thursday night tried to maximize the park's flexibility and create a place where there is intimate and large gather spaces, and where multiple events could be occurring simultaneously.

He said more input on the park’s design would be welcomed, and the process would start of asking anchor institutions such as Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers for help funding the park and its management. The project has been conceived as a private-public partnership.

Story & Photo Credit: CHUCK O'DONNELL