From Salvation South
https://www.salvationsouth.com/elvis-saves/
Fortress Or Neighborhood?
RETHINKING BATTERY PARK’S FUTURE
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All residents want to protect Battery Park City from the ravages of climate change. But many also seek a better, less costly, less intrusive design than the Battery Park City Resiliency Project, which would diminish its character and beauty. The next phase is set to begin early 2026.
Editorial by Steve Dougherty
t was one of those magical moonlit nights on the Battery Park City Esplanade. The Hudson was running in smooth swells on an incoming tide that carried the salty scent of ocean air from the Atlantic. The steeple atop the old Central railroad terminal on the opposite shore made the onetime hub of commerce look like a house of worship. The onion domes of Ellis Island loomed ghostly in the shadows and close by the torch in the raised hand of Lady Liberty shone its golden beacon over the waters of New York Harbor. As I savored the scene I was startled by the words of a passing neighbor. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said, her voice tight
with emotion, “we’re going to lose all this.”
Distraught after a Zoom meeting that detailed Battery Park City Resiliency Project plans to grid the neighborhood from threats caused by climate change, she seemed to fear the safeguard more than the danger. “There’s going to be a concrete wall eight feet high all across here, almost to the top of the lamp posts,” she said, waving her arm in a gesture that took in the Esplanade with its Victorian London charm, the residential buildings that hug its raised inner walkway, and The Upper Room, the beguiling public art installation standing like an ancient temple of the sun at the Albany Street entrance to the riverfront promenade. “The Esplanade will be closed all the way from the yacht basin to South Cove. It will be at least five years before we can walk out here again. Trees that have been here for 40 years are going to be cut down to make way for construction equipment. The Upper Room is going to be demolished.”
Every community is a family of neighbors and ours is a family that has suffered — and survived — trauma before. And now, 24 years after the community that thrived in the shadows of the Twin Towers fear they are soon to be tested again. The nearly
$2 billion undertaking to prepare the neighborhood against sea level rise and catastrophic, worst-case storms for the next 150 years, the Battery Park City Resiliency Project completed its first phase in July with the opening of the new Wagner Park at the far south end of the neighborhood. It was built on the site of the cherished original, the 2022 demolition of which left bitter feelings that are welling once again. The project’s next, more ambitious and complex phase, involving major work throughout the heart of the neighborhood, is set to begin in early 2026.
The massive five-year construction project promises to disrupt the lives of Battery Park City’s 16,000 residents into the next decade. It entails the installation of bulky formed-concrete floodwalls in front of the brick and stone residential buildings that line the south end of the Esplanade and similar barriers, some with deployable gates of solid steel throughout the neighborhood. It will require the closure, tearing up and rebuilding of the sections of one of the community’s most treasured features—the Esplanade itself—and permanently obstruct sightlines to the river and harbor that are the source of much of the neighborhood’s beauty.
“I moved here primarily for what we’re about to lose—access to the waterfront,” said retiree Patrick Gill, who has rented in the neighborhood since the 1990s and now
wonders if he and his family should pack up and leave.
“Who doesn’t want to save their home?” said Kelly McGowan, who moved to the neighborhood in the early ‘90s and has been a sharp critic of the project since helping wage the losing battle to preserve Wagner Park. “But residents want a reasonable project with a better design that enhances but doesn’t destroy the beauty and character of the community. Battery Park City was designed to connect the community to the water. Now they’re putting up these Fort Knox walls that block the view. They’re destroying the neighborhood in order to save it.”
Despite widespread misgivings among residents, public opposition, save lone voices like McGowan’s, has been muted. Neighborhood leaders and opinion makers have been generally supportive but hardly boosters of the project. Community Board 1 recently presented its legally mandated response to the project’s Environmental Impact Statement, final approval of which will green light the project and allow construction—and upheaval—to begin. Members pressed project representatives hard, eliciting promises to safeguard the health of residents who continue to suffer ailments related to the 9-11 disaster. They also requested modifications to the plan, including a reasonable suggestion that barrier walls twined with deployable gates be scaled back so that river views can be better enjoyed as long as the gates are not deployed, which all imagine will be most of the time.
Still, little debate is heard at this stage about the cost and extreme scope of the project.. “Scientists tell us that Hurricane Sandy will be remembered as a relatively minor storm,” said Jeff Galloway, the ever gracious Gateway Plaza Tenants Association board member who led the May 29 Zoom meeting that my distraught neighbor on the Esplanade viewed. “We need to plan for Sandy on steroids.”
Yet, there is a discernible sense of dread among residents as the start date for the project looms. In speaking with residents in recent days, I was hard pressed to find anyone who had anything emphatically positive to say about the project. I did speak with one woman who is not a resident but who works in an office in Brookfield Place, who said, “It’s a shame because it’s such a beautiful neighborhood, but it has to be done. The waters will rise and even if we’re not here to see it, we have to think of our children.”
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