Brookside Park is a public park in Bloomfield, Essex County, at 90 Bay Avenue. It carries three playgrounds, open lawn with benches, a gazebo, a ball field, a walking path and a small brook running through the grounds, and it is used as a starting point for local parades. Permits and event bookings go through the Bloomfield Recreation Department at 84 Broad Street. It is a township park on a neighborhood scale, so it fills a morning and the parade route is the busiest it gets.
What our technicians can tell you
The brook running through Brookside Park is a drainage channel as much as a feature, and the channels through this township were sized when Bloomfield still had farms in it. A downpour here rarely comes over a bank. It arrives at the base of a foundation wall and pushes back up through a basement floor drain, hours after the rain has stopped. That water has been through the storm system, so it is treated as contaminated and the porous material it reached is removed instead of dried in place. The call on that is made before any equipment goes down, which is the shape of most of the work in Bloomfield.