To make good on his PlaNYC promise of putting every New Yorker within a ten-minute walk of a park, Mayor Bloomberg will need to break out some sledgehammers in Brooklyn. A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey tags the borough as the most paved-over place in the United States. Yup, Brooklyn rocks even more blacktop than Manhattan. It achieves the distinction mostly through its sheer size — 70.6 square miles, only 8 percent of which is parkland. One can see the statistic as yet another wistful reminder that we're islanders living in a finite space — and quickly running out of it. Or, as befits Brooklyn, we can simply shrug: Fuhgeddaboudit, who needs parks, anyway? You can always barbecue on the subway.

Trees? Nah. Blacktop grows in Brooklyn [NYDN]