A Hunts Point resident and former member of The Point Community Development Corp.’s young activist program, ACTION, has won a prestigious national award for her efforts getting the MTA to provide public transportation to Barretto Point Park in 2009.
The Floating Lady pool, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, has been moored at the park, attracting residents from the neighborhood and eslewhere to escape the summer heat.
Each year, the Earth Island Institute chooses six young people from the U.S. and Canada between ages 13 and 22 and honors their “outstanding activism and achievements in the fields of environmental and social justice advocacy.” The award is named for David R. Brower, who founded the Earth Island Institute.
Walker and her ACTION colleagues circulated petitions in the neighborhood, prompting Hunts Point residents to demand the MTA expand the route to encourage greater use of the pool for the many local residents who don’t own a car. The eight industrially-zoned blocks between the Bx6’s final Halleck Street stop and the park are so desolate and forbidding that they discourage park users from going, Walker and the other activists contended.
The MTA eventually agreed to extend service to the park in the summer of 2009, instituting a shuttle service, but slashed the service this summer, as a result of budget cuts, it said. Four thousand riders used the Barretto Park shuttle in 2009, according to the MTA, but still deemed the shuttle service expendable just a year after implementing it.
Walker graduated from High School in 2009, but says she will continue working with the ACTION group on its campaigns. She says winning the award and ACTION’s temporary success in getting the shuttle have inspired her to continue fighting for public transportation improvements and other neighborhood needs, despite the MTA’s discontinuing the shuttle.
“It doesn’t mean you stop working on it,” she said. “If it can happen once, it can happen again.”