Push for Task Force to Incubate Consensus on West Side Resiliency
Community Board 1 (CB1) is advocating for the creation of a multi-agency West Side Task Force that will enable an integrated, holistic view of resiliency measures along the Hudson River waterfront. This proposal aims to address the conflicts and contradictions that can emerge when a welter of government agencies are formulating plans in parallel with one another, but no single agency is in overall charge. In the case of the West Side of Manhattan, these agencies include the Battery Park City Authority, the Hudson River Park Trust, the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, the City and State Departments of Transportation, the State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the City Department of Environmental Protection, along with others.
At the March 28 meeting of the Board, CB1 chair Tammy Meltzer began the discussion by observing, “there is so much going on and it’s really hard to understand, because the Army Corps of Engineers does not use the same [flood elevation] level that the City is using and all these projects are on different timelines. More than anything, we need a task force for the West Side.”
“The Battery Park City Authority will set the precedent for what happens on [the southern end of] West Street, which is an issue for the rest of West Street—because whatever you do down here is going to continue northward,” she added. “We really need to have a larger, holistic look. This is a massive change of our landscape. This is happening, and it’s happening now.”
Alice Blank, who chairs CB1’s Environmental Protection Committee, echoed these sentiments, citing the recent historical precedent that, starting in the late 1990s, transformed a chain of decrepit piers and waterside parking lots into the Hudson River Park. Showing photos of the era when what is now the Hudson River Park was an urban wasteland, she said, “this is what happened here not that long ago. We can do this again now that we’re looking at resiliency.”
Ms. Blank cited a series of intertwined priorities, noting that flood protection can be reinforced “by oyster restoration initiatives.”
“The routine discharge of these dozens of sewer outfalls, which dump untreated water into the Hudson, has to be stopped. And this kind of sewage line, in fact, could go under the park and Route 9A, if we were to redesign it,” she said.
An opportunity directly adjacent to the Hudson River Park, Ms. Blank noted, “is the redesign of Route 9A, and the whole idea of how the development has changed and parking has changed and transportation has changed. So we really need to look at this road in a different way. The roadway could be narrowed and the median strip could be removed.”
The additional space thus created “would allow for expanding the park to provide for more creative, shore-based measures than some of what we’ve been seeing, unhappily, from the Army Corps of Engineers,” she said. This was a reference to a preliminary plan from that agency which envisions a 12-foot-high seawall running along Hudson River Park, wedged between the bikeway and the pedestrian promenade. The initial version of this project calls for the structure to begin in Tribeca, where it will link to the Battery Park City Authority’s North/West Resiliency plan and continue uptown at least as far as West 34th Street.
Citing the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which allocates $1.2 billion to civic projects such as roads, ports, waterways, and transportation systems, Ms. Blank said, “we certainly have money to redo that road.”
In terms of next steps, she acknowledged, “only the Governor and the Mayor… can assemble a group like this. We really have to work on them to get all the players in the room and working together.”