Correction: Due to an editor’s error, an earlier version of the headline for this article described the discs as being made of metal.

“You might want to move or risk getting hit.” 

I was lounging on the grass in the northwest corner of upper Highland Park with my dog one summer day when two men approached me to tell me to move. The park was pretty empty, but I presented an inconvenient obstacle. They had come to the park to play the newly installed disc golf course.

Snaking through this leafy corner of the park, the disc golf course is the first of its kind in New York City. Wandering the park in the late spring, I chanced upon a series of steel baskets with bright chrome chains dotted through the park. I thought at first they might be animal traps or something irrigation-related. They appear somewhat industrial: a four-and-a-half-foot-tall contraption with a steel basket. An eyesore amidst the tall trees. I soon learned that they were part of this new course, sponsored by the Paul McBeth Foundation, which seeks to introduce this sport to communities. 

Apparently, prior to the course’s inauguration, New York was the country’s number one “disc-golf desert.” Devotees of the sport had long agitated for a permanent course in the city after setting up temporary routes through Prospect Park. A new association — the NYCDGA — caters to the community of disc throwers, many of whom are young, white and hail from other parts of Brooklyn.

A California transplant, I was bemused. it harkened back to West-Coast, decidedly white outdoor bro culture — seemingly incongruous within the diverse, multiethnic community that both surrounds and uses the park with great frequency. But soon my bemusement turned to consternation. My experience of being evicted from my small patch was no outlier. 

Friends and neighbors reported similar instances of being asked, or even told, to move out of the way. Because it is a course with ten “holes,” moving from one location often meant you were still potentially in the path of flying objects. Some of these encounters were also hostile. When picnicking park-goers asserted their right to be in the park and occupy space as they saw fit, disc golfers insisted they were in the right; this was, after all, their course. The players have been frustrated to find small children near the baskets picking up the discs to play with them, disrupting the game. In one video a neighbor shot, a long-haired young man is clearly angry trying to play his game while a family picnics by one of the “holes.” He then throws his disc directly at a small child frolicking by the basket. In online reviews of the course, members of the NYCDGA bemoan the fact that the course runs through a public park and is not isolated from other uses.

The issue, however, is not just struggles over who gets to use the space. It is also the danger of having rapidly flying objects hurled at great distances through a park that sees regular use. Indeed people and pets have been hit by a disc in motion in the park, in addition to a number of near misses. The discs are pretty heavy — they are not the flimsy frisbees we toss back and forth at the beach, but rather hefty little objects capable of doing great harm.

When the Colonizers Arrive

The park is overwhelmingly used by locals of color, many of them immigrants, who flock to it on weekends. Straddling the border between Brooklyn and Queens, the park is vast and caters to a wide variety of uses. There are basketball and tennis courts, several baseball diamonds and a large soccer field. The upper park has a series of picnic tables arrayed around barbecue pits. 

On the weekends Central and South-American families gather at the soccer pitch and hold birthday barbecues. The sounds of bachata and reggaeton pulsate from speakers, and people chatter and laugh well into the night. The festivities are so intense it drove out the Carmelite nuns who lived cloistered in Highland Boulevard, the wide avenue that bisects the park. 

Disc golfers, however, are outsiders, often recent-ish transplants to New York City and Brooklyn. A neighbor who has been organizing against the course, and asked to remain anonymous, has spoken with many players who all tell him they come from other parts of the city. At a recent block party on a stretch of quiet road that leads to a back entrance of the park, I chatted with a passing disc golfer who clutched a small spherical platter with his hand. He had made the trek from Greenpoint and admitted to never even having heard of this neighborhood before checking out the course. 

As an urbanist, I find it troubling that a park would allow an activity that completely monopolizes an open area meant for all. Even when it is relatively empty, disc golfers want to claim exclusive use over a fairly extensive space. But part of the purpose — and joy — of a park is that it is open for all to use, regardless of class, race or ethnic origin.

Parks are vital social infrastructure, to use a term popularized by Eric Klinenberg. These sites of social infrastructure, of gathering physically in space, are integral to democracy and social cohesion. They bring people together in non-hierarchical ways. But the addition of disc golf clearly creates a hierarchy, or at least a presumption of hierarchy, privileging certain users over others. It is kind of like overlaying a game of polo in a park already full of people, music, little kids and pets. But instead of horses, we have to contend with flying frisbees that might knock us in the head.

A Park as Social Infrastructure

As New Yorkers face increasing rent burdens and the privatization of much of urban life, a place like Highland Park serves a crucial function. It allows everyday urbanites to gather free of charge, connect with each other, and experience a bit of nature within the proverbial concrete jungle. 

I research immigrant housing struggles for my day job. In interviews people tell me about crowded basement apartments where they have to follow a litany of rules dictated by the landlord or master leaseholder. They pay up to $1,600 in rent for incredibly cramped quarters — and certainly no legal protections. People like Edwin, a migrant from Ecuador who scrapes by selling bottled water on Conduit Boulevard, unduly bear the burdens and inequities of our housing system. For him, an afternoon in a park playing fútbol is a brief respite from the demands of work and home. These are the people who gather in places like Highland Park, which offers a singular way to socialize with family and friends outside of the tyranny of commodification. To curtail community members’ use of the park while potentially also putting them in harm’s way is to me antithetical to a park’s purpose.

The addition of disc golf in the park seems like an almost comical harbinger of gentrification. It privileges the wants and leisurely pursuits of an outside, whiter, more affluent community over the needs of locals. 

Highland Park/Cypress Hills remains a working-class community of color in the face of Brooklyn’s rapacious gentrification. Once a Jewish immigrant neighborhood, it faced divestment and abandonment. More recently it has become home to a sizable Black and Latino population. According to recent data, more than 60% of the population is Hispanic or Latino. Almost 50% of the population is foreign-born. 

At the same time, Cypress Hills is in transition. As Brooklyn gentrifies, urban transformation has followed existing subway lines. Cypress Hills is connected to Manhattan via the J train, which has already brought changes to neighboring Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The neighborhood is quite literally next on the map as people find themselves priced out of northern Brooklyn. 

This process of transformation is further abetted by recent changes to zoning and land use, as the de Blasio administration pursued an aggressive plan to rezone large swathes of East New York, the district in which Cypress Hills is located. Rezoning has brought about new high-rise apartment buildings along major corridors with the promise of more development to come. One wonders if the inclusion of disc golf, which thus far seems enthusiastically supported by NYC Parks, is another form of state-led gentrification, meant to attract younger, whiter money to the area. As Sylvie Tissot recounts in her now classic Good Neighbors about the gentrification of Boston’s South End, parks and their use are often hotly debated — and the takeover of open space by people viewed as outsiders can ignite tensions. 

Highland Park also serves as a frontier of sorts between the white, middle-class Queens of Glendale and Middle Village and the working-class Black and Latinx neighborhoods of East New York. The differences between those communities are playing out in the political struggle over disc golf. The course is currently a 12-month pilot project that has to be reviewed next year by the Parks Department. Both State Senator Julia Salazar and City Councilmember Sandy Nurse have criticized the placement of the disc golf course in the park. However, Queens controls the upper portion in which the course is located. Even though the Jackie Robinson Parkway and several cemeteries actually separate urban fabric from the park along its northern border, the local Queens community and electeds are apparently in favor of the course. In light of the stark demographic differences between north and south, support for the park reads as an attempt to claim space that has long been enjoyed by people of color. 

A Neighborhood on the Cusp of Gentrification

As a recent transplant to the area, I am cognizant that I am part of ongoing urban churn backed by real material interests. My husband and I wound up here in part because what we could afford was much nicer and more spacious than in nearby Bushwick or Bed-Stuy. The real-estate agents who sold us our house have now sold two other houses on our short block over the span of a year and a half. When the house next to us was up for sale — having been purchased in a dilapidated state from those same brokers, only to be spiffed up and then flipped — the brokers assured us we would get “great neighbors.” One day I returned home to find a small bevy of people coming out of the house after an inspection. A young-ish white man had a baby strapped to his chest. One of the brokers waved in his direction and said to me, “See! I told you I was going to get you good neighbors!” On a block in which only two out of the fourteen houses were occupied by white families (us included), the implications seemed clear: more nice white folks.

For a neighborhood that features this jewel of a park, the inclusion of disc golf appears to be another strategy of transformation. Thus far Cypress Hills has not been largely gentrified, in part due to organizing via local collectives such as the East New York Community Land Trust (of which I am a member), and in part because the gentrification train simply has not arrived yet. We do not really have hipster coffee shops or bars offering muddled and mottled cocktails. The main drag, Fulton Street, remains lined with auto shops and small businesses. What we have in the way of restaurants are modest Hispanic joints and bodegas. But the houses are large, some of them quite stately with turrets and wrap-around porches. And Highland Park, with its nine tennis courts and verdant paths, its quiet reservoir and old stone bridge, is a priceless urban amenity.

That’s just what it is. Priceless. It should not be a part of the commodification of land, nor the City’s endless gentrification of neighborhoods. It is a public park, and therefore a commons. Does the “disc-golf desert” trump the needs of everyday park users? I am not partial to the view that cities should be preserved in amber, but changes to the existing fabric should not so blatantly displace locals nor commandeer shared resources for a select few. This is our park. This is a community.

Sophie L. Gonick is an assistant professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a scholar of urban planning and history, poverty, race and gender. 

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