The city of New York proposed the construction of a municipal parking lot on a disused dump site located just south of the Independence Plaza apartments in the late 1970s.

[1] In the late 1970s, a federally-funded Community Block Development Grant was obtained from the city and used to design and build the existing park.

Lee Weintraub, then an architect with the city's Housing and Development Administration (HDA),[2] was assigned to design the park.

[1] New York City tore down the nearby, former Washington Market buildings in the 1960s when the wholesale produce industry relocated to Hunts Point in the Bronx.

[1] In 2003, Mayor Michael Bloomberg included Washington Market Park as one of twelve parks in Lower Manhattan which received a combined $25 million in upgrades from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.