A local gem just received international recognition.
The Urban Land Institute gave Hunter’s Point South Park a 2025 ULI Americas Award for Excellence last week.
According to ULI’s report, the Western Queens oasis “marks a new paradigm for at-risk waterfronts where landscape, infrastructure, and architecture have been woven into a new resilient public park that has transformed a vulnerable shoreline into a vibrant front yard to over 3,000 new units of housing and their residents. Being adjacent to Gantry Plaza State Park has remade … [the] … East River shoreline into a remarkable urban open space befitting this rapidly growing borough.”
Consider this a serious feather in the cap of the Hunters Point Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit that does everything from planting bulbs to organizing outdoor movie nights.
“We are honored,” stated HPPC Board President Rob Basch. “Our park is hugely important to our community. It is a space where communities can come together, enjoy celebrations and cultural activities and also have space for relaxation.”
The ULI report continues: “Grasslands, tidal marsh habitat, a formal garden, and multimodal trails weave together to form a tapestry that recalls the history of the site from marsh to railyard to iconic urban waterfront. At the core of the park is a multi-use green large enough to host community events of any scale, from soccer practices to summertime festivals. In stormier months, the green doubles as flood mitigation infrastructure as a massive stormwater detention basin. The green is surrounded by diverse amenities: a water taxi dock, a pier, and a bustling café. Families of all sizes (and species) can find facilities from the play grove to the dog run or a walk through the heritage rail garden that reference the site’s former use.”
ULI launched the Awards for Excellence program in 1979 to recognize outstanding development efforts in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. This year, ULI considered 94 submissions with help from a 15-member jury composed of development, finance, planning, urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture experts.
Here’s a list of other winners.
Pearl House – New York City
Trinity Commons – New York City
Crook Horner Lofts – Baltimore, Maryland
Dayton Arcade – Dayton, Ohio
Mercado Urbano Tobalaba – Santiago, Las Condes, Chile
Populus – Denver, Colorado
Sister Lillian Murphy Community – San Francisco, California
Tom Lee Park – Memphis, Tennessee
Waterworks – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Frank Ottomanelli, who operates the multi-purpose eatery/fun space Frank Ottomanelli’s By The Water, added that this award “means a lot to us because the winning was based on community engagement among many other things. Since coming to HPSP, we wanted to be engaged with the community and act as public servants to better the public experience while visiting the park. Through our community mural project, art classes, summertime art performances, among many other activities we host throughout the year, we believe this goal has been achieved.”
Top images: Rob MacKay; bottom image: Courtesy of ULI