In the nearly 30 years since Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park opened in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City, a 3.5-acre green oasis built for leisure, the park has become a treasured backyard for residents and many It has become a destination for people. Uninterrupted views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty.
Now an ugly battle has broken out over its fate.
Wagner Park will be demolished and rebuilt on higher ground by the state-owned utility, Battery Park City Authority, as part of a more than $221 million restoration plan to protect the neighborhood’s southern tip and lower Manhattan. From flooding, as climate change brings more intense and frequent storms and rising sea levels.
However, the plan has drawn angry protests from some residents of the high-rise towers surrounding the park. They say demolishing the park has gone too far. They want less radical approaches like improving existing parks to achieve the same resilience goals.
“It’s like, ‘To save a park, we have to destroy it,'” said Kelly McGowan, 59, a finance executive who has lived in Battery Park City since 1989. I’m trying to inject some rationality into this. ”
Now they are mobilized to save Wagner Park. They held meetings, consulted resilience experts, and asked OLIN and Machado Silvetti, the design firm that helped create Wagner Park in 1996, to come up with alternatives.
Officials have repeatedly addressed such concerns in dozens of public meetings since 2016 and are already incorporating community feedback into their plans. They said there would be huge delays, slowing resilience efforts.
BJ Jones, the agency’s president and chief executive officer, said: “That’s why it’s really important to move forward.”
The fight over Wagner Park offers a glimpse of the challenges ahead as New York City tries to protect its coastline from flooding. City officials, scientists and environmental experts are increasingly warning that cities are not doing enough, despite increasingly dire predictions of climate change.
“We need to act urgently because the next catastrophe could happen at any moment,” said Manhattan Mayor Mark Levine, who supports the agency’s Wagner Parks plan.
But for many New Yorkers, the road ahead has been uncertain, confusing, and bitter. Restoration plans that cut down hundreds of trees at East He River Park this year and last year have been heavily criticized by residents. (48 trees will be cut down in Wagner Park and 139 trees will be planted in the rebuilt park).
Such neighborhood conflicts are likely to become more common as resilience plans are implemented by various cities, states, and federal agencies. These agencies take different approaches and do not always work closely with each other or communicate effectively with the population.
“What government lacks is a unified approach and a single entity that holds responsibility for answering all questions,” says Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit committed to making infrastructure more resilient. Managing Director Amy Chester said.
Flooding is a particular threat to Battery Park City, a 92-acre planned community in lower Manhattan built on a landfill of construction waste from the former World Trade Center.
Still, Wagner Park is relatively high, between 10 and 11.5 feet above sea level, so it wasn’t flooded during Hurricane Sandy. Officials stressed that they are preparing for future storms that are predicted to make the floods even worse.
In their plan, the park will be rebuilt about 10 feet higher (about 20 feet above sea level) and the flood wall will be buried under the lawn over the next two years. The pavilion housing the small restaurant will be replaced with a pavilion occupying a slightly smaller footprint above ground level, but with additional space below for park and restaurant operations.
“Through an extensive process of dialogue and analysis, we believe we have arrived at the best possible and only truly viable option,” said Gwen Dawson, the agency’s vice president. says so.
However, the neighborhood association does not approve of it. Residents sought out her OLIN CEO, Lucinda Sanders, who was her manager at the original Wagner Parks lead project. Sanders, who has not been paid, suggested another option. Maintain existing parks and build permanent walls behind lawns and gardens.
Sanders said the walls have openings that can be manually closed during a storm. The back edge of the park already rises about 11.5 feet above sea level, so the wall would only need to rise to about 7 feet and could potentially be integrated with the back wall of the pavilion.
“Our current plan is one solution to this problem,” Sanders said. As we know it today, there may be other ways to do this in order to maintain the overall integrity of the park. ”
Officials who have not seen Sanders’ plans said they had previously considered the option of installing a flip-up fence behind the park but rejected it.Residents announce alternative plans Virtual Public Meeting October 27.
Tensions have risen in recent months as officials refused to postpone the plans. The neighborhood association called on Democratic Gov. Kathy Ho-Chol to intervene. Ho-Chol has not responded, but her Republican challenger Lee Zeldin opposes the authorities’ plan. It even appeared at a recent rally against it.
Chris Ward, former city environmental commissioner and chairman of the nonprofit Waterfront Alliance, said the agency’s plans shouldn’t be put off by residents who don’t want to see the park demolished. “After all the community meetings, process and science, it is inconceivable to allow these parochial self-interests,” he said. “New York’s future as a port city It will be seriously threatened.”
Neighborhood associations said officials’ plans were pushed forward during the pandemic, when many people were distracted or lived elsewhere, and residents were unaware of key details about the redesign of Wagner Park until earlier this year. . Residents protested this summer After realizing that the lawn space would be greatly reduced from the existing park.
In response, officials said they had cut down gardens and paths increase lawn spaceThat said, it’s still 10% less than existing parks. The change cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Jones said he has been transparent in developing the plan, including posting information online. “It wasn’t a big announcement in May about what the design was going to be. It was a process that everyone got a chance to be part of,” he said.
Not all residents are against the demolition and reconstruction of the park. Litigation finance consultant Jeff Galloway, 68, said raising the park’s height was the best option “out of a lot of bad options” that would be more destructive for the community. If we can keep it that way, that’s great,” he said. “If we accept the predictions of climate change, it does not seem physically possible.”
But neighborhood association member Britoni Erez, 40, said Wagner Park was too important to families like hers to tear down without carefully weighing all possible options. . When her husband, a doctor, was based in a Brooklyn hospital at the peak of the pandemic, the family reconnected at a neighborhood park.
“I should have dug deeper into alternatives,” she said. “We’re not denying climate change. We’re not saying ‘do nothing.’ We want better resilience projects.”