Here are the latest stories about East River Park and the East Side Coastal Resiliency Plan. To read news about other resiliency projects, climate change and environmental justice, see our Resiliency News page. To read the 21st Century history of East River Park and links to plans and documents, see our History and Resources page. News about East River Park from 2022 here.
Articles on this page are included if they have to do with East River Park and sustainability in the neighborhood. Partisan news may be included and is not an endorsement of any candidate. To read the complete article of any listed below, use the link on the name of the publication.
News about our efforts to stop ARTIFICIAL TURF in New York is now in our Synthetic Turf News page.
Mayor Adams Opens New East River Park Ballfields, Delancey Street Bridge as Part of East Side Coastal Resiliency
September 10, 2024, website of NYC.gov
ESCR Will Protect 120,000 New Yorkers from Flooding by 2026 Completion Date — On Time and On Budget
Why Are We Still Making Unshaded Playgrounds?
The city’s newest park at Pier 42 is leaving kids scorching in the sun.
By Yessenia Funes, Curbed, August 14, 2024
Given all this, the scorching playground at Pier 42 feels like a missed opportunity in more ways than one. Along the water at Pier 42, tree coverage isn’t dense enough to keep residents cool and healthy, and the communities there are experiencing higher temperatures than others nearby. For residents of public housing at the Vladeck and La Guardia Houses bordering the park, a cooler green space and playground would have offered one of the few options around. While the neighborhood has a greenway along the waterfront, it isn’t that easy to access, especially with the ongoing resiliency-project construction, which also cut down many mature trees in the process.
FDR Reimagined
The Future of the FDR in Manhattan Community Board 6
March 2024 by CB6
Overbuild parks atop segments of the FDR Drive aim
to create elevated green spaces fostering improved exposure and access to the waterfront.These segments, similar to the UN and Carl Schurz overbuilds, offer recreational areas, gardens, and walkways, maximizing urban land use while providing inviting public spaces for community gatherings and enhancing connectivity to the waterfront in urban areas.
After a Decade of Planning, New York City Is Raising Its Shoreline
Inspired by the Dutch model of living with water, New York’s coastal defenses are on the rise. The city — like others around the country — is combining infrastructure like floodwalls with nature-based features, as it moves ahead with the largest resiliency project in the U.S.
BY ANDREW S. LEWIS • DECEMBER 19, 2023 • YALE ENVIRONMENT 360
…Its original design, released in 2014, called for East River Park’s running track, tennis courts, and other sports fields to be preserved, along with its shady groves of mature pin oak and cherry. But in 2018, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio quietly revamped the design: it would be faster and cheaper, the mayor’s team said, to wipe the park clean, elevate the landscape with more than a million tons of fill, then build anew on top….
ERPA NOTE: Now there’s a paragraph–“wipe the park clean.” That’s just what we need, cut down all those pesky trees. And it is not cheaper…it costs twice as much.
Opinion: Congestion pricing would fuel pollution on Lower East Side
BY KATHRYN FREED | DECEMBER 3, 2023, The Village Sun
Congestion pricing is coming. Most people either love it or hate it. Most of us acknowledge the need to reduce traffic and pollution, but are not sure the current proposal does that. This op-ed will examine the plan’s impacts on the Lower East Side, specifically the area next to the F.D.R. Drive from the Brooklyn Bridge to E. 10th Street…
Making the situation worse, we are on track to lose 55 acres of mature parkland and well more than 1,000 trees due to the East Side Coastal Resiliency plan. We’ve already lost half of the park in the project’s phase one. It’s a cruel irony that residents next to this project are also being subjected to additional dust and pollution as that construction occurs.
CM Rivera’s Tree Survey Indicates a Healthy but Vulnerable Canopy
While the survey received praise from Rivera’s colleagues on the City Council, including majority leader Keith Powers, her 2023 primary opponent Allie Ryan has called it a poor cover-up for Rivera’s controversial support of a climate resiliency plan that cut down over 1,000 trees in East River Park in 2022.
NICHOLAS LIU, 13 NOV 2023, OUR TOWN
Walling Up the East Side to Save It
Why the floodgates on the waterfront look the way they do.
By Christopher Bonanos, Oct. 30, 2023, Curbed
…But head up north of the park and the defense against water takes a different and harder approach. A barrier of dikes and gates snakes its way up the coastline, along and under the highway, ending by the Asser Levy recreation center near 25th Street. Every couple of blocks, there’s an enormous steel gate, about the length of a subway car, that will either swing wide to close, like a conventional door, or roll sideways on rails, like a barn door
Sea Change
Carlos Irijalba uses recycled materials from climate resiliency projects for an installation along the East River
By María José Gutiérrez Chávez, October 11, 2023, The Architect’s Newspaper
On Manhattan’s East River the intersection between art and the battle against climate change is alive with a new temporary installation. Joined an Avalanche, Never to be Alone Again by Spanish-born and Brooklyn-based artist Carlos Irijalba reflects on the escalating climate crisis through a three-part installation made of recycled materials situated along the East River’s seawall, just west of the Corlears Hook Park.
See East River Park Action’s reaction and response to the installation, Public Art, or More Construction?
Resilient Manhattan shoreline taking shape on schedule, officials say
by Louis Finley, Sept. 21, 2023, NY1
City officials say the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project is on schedule and on budget, despite concerns the pandemic would hinder the construction of flood protections and the redevelopment of lower Manhattan’s eastern shoreline.
This update on the East Side Coastal Resiliency project has disturbing inaccuracies–the head of the ESCR said that the trees destroyed were “hollowed out” and would need to come down anyway, which is 92% inaccurate, and that the project is taking two extra years because of “community concerns,” which is 100% inaccurate, since the city never heard a word we said.
Property over people? New York City’s $52bn plan to save itself from the sea
A decade after Hurricane Sandy, critics of a federal plan that allocates billions to protect the region from rising waters are calling it a ‘failure of imagination’
by Edward Helmore in Rockaway Beach, Sept. 19, 2023, The Guardian
…Meanwhile, a city programme to build a barrier wall along the east side of Manhattan led to a dispute over storm protection designs for the historic East River Park, pitting community activists against political representatives whose areas encompassed public housing. …
“The government’s plan is a blunt instrument for a very complex situation,” says Savitri Durkee, an activist with the Church of Stop Shopping, an environmental justice-aligned performance group… “There is a failure of imagination using 19th-century models for a 21st-century problem. The solutions lie in real community resilience, a bottom-up approach to resiliency, and whatever that is, it has to happen within communities, on the ground, and allowing the community to participate in the planning.”
FRESH HELL
Reopenings of Closed East River Park Sections Pushed Back, But City Insists Project Is Still on Time
Will the contentious project actually hit its 2026 deadline? The city says yes, and is already reopening some areas,
By Max Rivlin-Nadler, May 31, 2023, Hellgate
Residents maybe had reason to worry—in a presentation to a community advisory board right before Memorial Day weekend, the DDC pushed back its estimated completion dates for parts of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, its name for the park demolition and reconstruction, as well as its surrounding floodwater management plan. Overall, however, DDC insisted that an end of 2026 deadline was still in sight.
Workers demolish the south ramp to East River Park at Houston Street
May 17, 2023, EVGrieve
The demolition/reconstruction of East River Park continues its northern march. Most recently workers have demolished the south ramp at the Houston Street overpass…
NYC completes work on East Side Coastal Resiliency project’s first phase, Stuyvesant Cove Park in Manhattan
By Josh Niland Jun 2, ’23, Archinect
This Wednesday marked the long-awaited opening of BIG’s planned Stuyvesant Cove Park in Manhattan, marking an end to what was for some a contentious process that drew ire from various community groups on the two-year path towards its eventual completion.
New York City Begins Its Climate Change Reckoning on the Lower East Side, the Hard Way
By Delaney Dryfoos, March 13, 2023, Inside Climate News
The city redesigned much of a $1.5 billion floodwall project along the East River without any community input, shattering trust. Now, New York is pursuing similar climate resiliency projects in Manhattan that Mayor Eric Adams calls “complex, novel and unparalleled compared to any other American city.”
…The first phase, now called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, was described by city and federal officials in 2014 as a “nature as buffer” approach that would allow the beloved East River Park, built by Robert Moses in the 1930s, to flood during climate-amplified extreme weather events. Officials said that phase would cost $770 million and be finished in as little as four years.
None of that turned out to be true.
The story provides a pretty good assessment of the project, but there are inaccuracies. 1) East River Park activists did not delay the project for months and years—the city’s own ineptitude including with the bidding process was to blame. At most we were responsible for a 30-day delay due to a lawsuit. 2) The writer says trees could not withstand the saltwater inundation, but most trees did survive, including oaks, London planes, elms and more. When there would be further inundations, ailing trees could be replaced with salt water resistant varieties. 3) It is true that artificial turf fields are ruined by flooding. However, natural turf fields recover quickly. There are many reasons not to install artificial turf. NYC should stop putting in these type playing fields altogether, and certainly not by waterfronts where harmful chemicals from the fields drain into our waterways, as evidenced by the new field at Pier 42. See our post about the new field at Pier 42, installed as mitigation for the loss of East River Park.
Stop clear-cutting New York City
BY ERIC UHLFELDER, March 2, 2023, New York Daily News
…In cities, mature trees are very efficient at carbon capture. But government policy, especially in New York, shows officials are not particularly concerned about this matter. It will take decades before tree replanting makes up for the carbon capture loss caused by cutting mature trees. Officials need to better balance essential improvements and climate issues.
This is evident in the destruction of the 53-acre East River Park. Nearly 1,000 fully grown trees are being cut down in the belief that doing so along with land improvements will make the area more resilient to rising tides — itself the product of climate change. The park hosts the equivalent of several acres of forest. According to the U.S. Forest Service, one acre of forest stores 75 tons of CO2.
Environmental Justice Atlas
East River Park, NY, USA, compiled by Howard Brandstein, EJ Atlas
Manhattan’s Lower East Side community rejects the destruction of East River Park. “At a time when our community is faced with multiple threats unfolding daily from the climate emergency, it is delusional to believe that building a wall will save us.”
How Bjarke Ingels, Architect, Spends His Sundays
by Paige Darrah, February 26, 2023, New York Times
His firm is also involved in the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, an initiative to protect part of Manhattan, including East River Park on the Lower East Side, from rising waters because of climate change. The preliminary phase has involved razing what is there now, including beloved trees and fields, which has produced some tensions in the community. “The more people you touch, the more opinions you solicit,” Mr. Ingels said of the divisive and long-term undertaking. “But I think most of the residents who experienced Hurricane Sandy would probably prefer to remain dry.”
Smug, dismissive and inaccurate.
East River Greenway now closed along the Con Ed power plant
February 16, 2023, EV Grieve
Multiple EVG readers shared the news that, as of Monday, the East River Greenway is closed for “construction activities” between 20th Street and 14th Street, including the narrow passage along the FDR and Con Edison power plant.
Mathilde, cherished 83-year-old tree, is felled in ongoing East River Park demolition
BY CHARLOTTE MORLIE, JANUARY 18, 2023, THE VILLAGE SUN
On Wednesday evening, Jan. 11, the tree was still standing, both beautiful and weird looking, with its slight bend and leafless winter branches. By 8 o’clock on Thursday morning, all that was left to see was a desolate trunk standing behind construction fences covered with black fabric.