Gotham Park, the nine acre public space Rosa Chang and her team are creating beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan, began the way many ambitious projects do—with everyone else saying no.

Chang first assumed the government would take on the task of creating public space from land beneath the bridge that had sat closed for more than a decade.

“But when nobody would, and every single agency said no, I decided to step up,” she told the audience at Urbanity-26, The Urban Developer’s flagship conference held last month on the Gold Coast.