There is little to indicate that the misshapen expanse of concrete, bounded by a chain-link fence and at times dusted with crumbling pieces of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs alongside it is, in fact, a city park. A few thousand feet west is one of New York’s glossiest green esplanades, the sprawling Brooklyn Bridge Park, alongside the East River in the same Dumbo neighborhood. But here, the only clue that the lot is not a car park or a stalled construction site is the green parks department sign proclaiming Bridge Park 2.

How the park and two contiguous other parks came to be is a fairly straightforward story, involving the highway overhead that defined their irregular shapes. But how the park has remained in such sorry shape, bucking for over a decade the glittering gentrification all around, is murkier. Depending on whom you ask, it is the fault of flawed zoning, communication breakdowns or, most pointedly, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of the area’s biggest landowners and an insular, tax-exempt religious organization, who had promised to fix the parks but never did.

Now, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare to move from the area, having put their headquarters and other land on the market last month for what could end up being $1 billion, the concrete patches have been remembered.

But criticism of the religious group seems as much a part of the debate as getting new playground equipment and play areas. The parks controversy seems to have exposed a long-simmering resentment of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, also known as the Watchtower, for planning to leave a city that has enriched the religious group exponentially, community leaders say, yet to which it has given little in return.