The Highland Park disc golf course may be moving a few months after opening, after City Council Member Sandy Nurse seconded complaints from Cypress Hills residents about safety.
Dominique Alexandre, the director of Outreach & Events for the Brooklyn council member, said that the elected is open to relocating the course after community members cited the flying discs as "dangerous" at a Community Board 5 subcommittee meeting on Thursday.
“We are hoping that a compromise can be reached where we can relocate the disc golf in a more appropriate area that doesn’t subject people to being hit and with proper signage,” Alexandre said.
The disc golf course, which debuted in June as a one-year pilot program by the city Department of Parks and Recreation, was financed by a $25,000 grant from the Paul McBeth Foundation, a disc golf advocacy non-profit. The nearly three-acre course, spanning a large area toward the entrance of the park off Highland Boulevard and Bulwer Place, has come under fire from some neighbors who want to see it gone.
The sport is similar to golf, with players instead throwing plastic discs into baskets.
Jessica Almodovar, the president of the Parent Teacher Association at P.S. 89 who said she has lived near the park all her life, said the course is displacing long-time parkgoers and has made going to the park “scary.”
“I’ve got a small dog, if my small dog gets hit with a disc, that’s going to be the end of her,” Almodovar said.
Nearby resident Maria Quinones said she witnessed a young boy nearly struck while she was picnicking in the park with his sister and father. A disc “came straight to his son and [the father] just grabbed it,” Quinones said.
Portia Dyrenforth, the Parks Department Forest and Highland Park Administrator, said the agency has placed new signs that read “Always wait until the hole is clear of all people,” and “Disc golf course watch out for flying discs.”
Dyrenforth also explained that signage would be added in Spanish, and will move two of the holes into a wooded area of the park.
Supporters of the course, including Alex Bender, co-founder of the New York City Disc Golf Association, assured the community that safety was a top priority.
Bender added in a slide show presentation that the course provided a “rotating neighborhood watch,” by introducing more people into the park for the game who could report crime.
This plan appealed to Zelonia Bly, the president of the Bulwer Block Residents Association.
“Where they put the 10 hole is perfect,” Bly said, referencing the side of the park adjacent to many houses on Bulwer Place. “Because there is no eating there, no one ever sat there, except if they were doing something illegal… this was our problem, the space we picked for the disc golf, was to deter all the problems we had.”
“People complain, ‘Oh I almost got hit by a disc,’” but the discs are flimsy, Bly said.
Dyrenforth told BK Reader that the disc golf course was, in part, placed to encourage “park-like behavior” so that it could curb the amount of parties, gatherings and some of the illegal activities happening in the park. Bly and others at the community board meeting said they often witness drug and alcohol use, and illegal fires in the area.
Tami Green, the community liaison for the Jackie Robinson Parkway Block Watch Association, was an early booster of the disc golf course but now feels she was misled after hearing from residents that course might be displacing them from green space.
"I wasn't aware of the amount of real estate [the course takes up]," Green said. "So technically, all these people who come into the park harmoniously... will be displaced [by the disc golfers] over a period of time as the population of disc golfers grows."
The community board will talk about the future of the disc golf course in January.
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