The median that separates a heavily traveled roadway beneath the FDR Drive from adjacent paths used by cyclists and pedestrians will soon get a splash of color, thanks to State Senator Daniel Squadron.
Earlier this year, the Senator recruited the Hester Street Collaborative — a non-profit that seeks to empower residents of underserved communities with a direct impact on shaping their built environment — to help conceptualize ways to enliven the newly created South Street Greenway, a quarter-mile stretch of road that serves as the approach to Pier 42 and the gradually coalescing East River Esplanade, nearby.
The Hester Street Collaborative was brought in shortly after U.S. Congress members Jerry Nadler and Nydia Velázquez secured federal funds to create the separate bike and pedestrian lane on South Street, which was completed in March.
The Collaborative has strong ties to the area. Starting in 2013, it developed Paths to Pier 42, a project that is now transforming long-abandoned land along the East River waterfront into an active public park, with a combination of community events, programs and public art. Together, these initiatives helped turn a blighted, forgotten expanse (used in recent years chiefly for location shoots by movies and television shows that featured a scene in which a dead body is pulled from the river) into vibrant public space.
Shortly after the median that created the South Street Greenway was completed, Senator Squadron and the Hester Street Collaborative prevailed upon the City’s Department of Transportation to issue a request for proposals, which noted that, “the medians also act as a venue for artwork and beautification.” Artists were offered a budget of up to $12,000 for their own fee, as well as materials and fabrication costs.
The winning team of artists, Samuel Holleran and Chat Travieso, was announced in early July. Their plan is to create colorful shapes and forms, inspired by local residents’ individual stories of the neighborhood. “The medians and the public art project both contribute to the ongoing improvement of the waterfront that has long been advocated for by community members,” explains Dylan House, Hester Street Collaborative’s community design director. “Through the art installation that Chat and Sam are creating, residents from all over the community will see a bit of their neighborhood story side by side with their neighbors’ stories.”
The South Street Greenway is part of the ongoing renaissance along the East River, which is focused on Pier 42 — a complex of eight acres of abandoned warehouses and public parking located just south of the Williamsburg Bridge. For decades, the dock was a melancholy landmark. Built in 1967 as a newsprint terminal, by 1987 (when it was shut down) the pier was the last working pier for cargo ships in Manhattan, still handling hundreds of thousands of boxes of fruit each month for the Dole Company, along with close to a billion bananas each year. But the structure is also awash in potential: the last piece of the Manhattan waterfront below Houston Street not yet developed as parkland has captivated urban planners and landscape architects almost from the day the last freighter to tie up there weighed anchor.
Community advocates have for years urged that the structure be incorporated into the greenbelt of parks that surrounds Lower Manhattan. That process has taken several significant steps forward recently. In 2014, Senator Squadron and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer announced that they had secured $17 million in funding to begin the process of redeveloping the pier. In 2015, Congresswoman Velazquez allocated another $2.5 million from the Department of Transportation to begin rebuilding the bike and pedestrian path alongside Pier 42. And earlier this year, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation voted to allocate an additional $12 million toward redevelopment Pier 42 as a waterfront park.
Pier 42 itself is part of a still-larger vision, called the East River Blueway, which supporters hope will create an unbroken string of public spaces and recreational facilities stretching along the waterfront from the Battery up to East 38th Street. (This network of public spaces is also slated to incorporate flood protection and resiliency measures.) It is in the context of this emerging mosaic that the public art project now underway for the South Street Greenway can be seen as one additional, small tile.