Skip to main content

De Blasio Reveals New Plans for Lower Manhattan Waterfront – One Step Forward, Two Steps Back for the Community

(The East River Park Amphitheater, built in 1941, which will be destroyed when the city moves forward with its new "Preferred Alternative Plan" for the ESCR)


      With little fanfare this past Thursday, March 14th, the De Blasio administration announced that they would be pursuing new plans for the East River Park and Lower Manhattan shoreline; not only presenting additional designs for extending Lower Manhattan up to two blocks into the river, but implementing a new phased-construction plan for the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (known as ESCR). In September, the city revealed that they would be abandoning previous designs for the ESCR, in favor of a new plan which "involves completely destroying East River park, 'elevating' it with 8 feet of landfill, and rebuilding a new park on top." That disastrous proposal was met with a predictably disastrous response from local residents, politicians, and community advocacy groups. Organized in the wake of the city's new design for the ESCR, the East River Alliance emerged as a leading voice in local resistance to the lack of transparency and community oversight in the city's new plans. 
      Over the course of the last six months, the ERA has been in contact formally and informally with the city government, been present at every community meeting related to the project, and worked alongside other organizations and politicians like Carlina Rivera, to pressure the city towards more inclusive environmental and urban planning procedures for the ESCR area. Speaking to ERA steering committee member Emily Curtis-Murphy via-email, she expressed gratitude that the "mayor heard us and now plans to the implement the plan in stages", though insisting that there is much needed to be done immediately to fortify the neighborhood against flooding. The ERA asks that "the City offer the same emergency flood protecting measures (tiger dams, HESCO barriers) described in the new Seaport Distric Plan, for immediate protection of our vulnerable ESCR area, by hurricane season this year", and will be putting out a press release on the matter soon.
     While Curtis-Murphy writes that the city's new plan to stage the demolition and re-building of the East River Park in parts, "gives us renewed hope that the city may return to a collaborative, transparent, and inclusive process that reflects the diverse needs of our community in creating a resilient waterfront that will protect us," it is also certainly a small concession in the face of the city's plans for astronomical re-development of the Lower Manhattan waterfront. 
      One overwhelming question that remains in the face of De Blasio's announcements on Thursday is what the materialization of new land on the East River will mean for ongoing struggles over land-use, affordable housing, and residential re-zoning. While various public resources like parks and schools are on the table for these new blocks, so is essentially everything else –– the city demonstrating with the Amazon HQ2 proposal flop or the Two Bridges Towers construction, their complete willingness to circumnavigate community or political organizations in speculative development deals. 





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paper Bag Players Sign Disappears From 185 East Broadway

            After almost forty years, the simple block letter sign reading "Paper Bag Players" was taken out of the window at 185 East Broadway, almost a year after the building sold for 6.1 million dollars. Founded in 1958 (four years after the start of Joe Papp's "New York Shakespeare Festival", later Shakespeare in the Park, which first held productions at the nearby East River Amphitheater) the Paper Bag Players are a non-profit children's theater group which in many respects attempted to meld aspects of alternative theater with programming for children's education, arriving at 185 East Broadway around 1981. I called and spoke to somebody at Paper Bag Players a week ago and was told they had relocated uptown, having permanently left their space at 185 East Broadway after the building was sold.       I wish to speak briefly on the history of 185 East Broadway, but in doing so must include 183 and 187 East Broadway as well (to the ri...
2 comments
Read more

NYCHA's "NextGen Neighborhood" Towers & the Fate of the "White House"

      In a previous post  I discussed the city's plan to demolish the LaGuardia Bathhouse building, one of the oldest public baths in NYC, an attempt in-part to save face in the wake of the recently unveiled plans to raise the East River Park. I anticipate similar news for the "White House", the former Rivington Street Public Baths, which sits squatly in the middle of the Baruch Houses, maybe a 15 minute walk from the LaGuardia Bathhouse building.        A short history: At 118 years old, the Baruch Bathhouse building is not only the oldest public bathhouse in the city, but also the first of its kind to be opened in New York. It's namesake, Dr. Simon Baruch, was an Eastern European Jew who moved to South Carolina in 1855 (at 15 years old) to live with, and work for, a wealthy German-Jewish family. After receiving his medical degree in 1862, Baruch served as a surgeon in the f*cking Confederate army (even treating soldiers for weeks after...
3 comments
Read more

Union of Orthodox Rabbis Building Bought and Emptied –– Artifacts Remain

      Wednesday afternoon, a childhood friend of mine –– whose family has been at their apartment on East Broadway since 1956 –– got in touch with me about what sounded like people clearing out the buildings next to his at 237 and 235 East Broadway (Sharis Adath Israel and the former home of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis respectively). When I arrived on the scene that same afternoon, the doors to 235 East Broadway were being shut and two Junklugger trucks were just pulling away from the curb, stacked with what looked like large amounts of furniture. East Broadway was littered with papers that had blown off the back of these trucks, and as I started to pick them up I saw that many of these documents represented records of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, correspondence in Hebrew and Yiddish, newspaper clippings, pages from religious books, all of which dating back decades. I called Junkluggers and asked if they would be able to intercept any of these documents before they...
2 comments
Read more