Up-to-Date Details on Interlocking Lower Manhattan Resiliency Construction Projects
At the November 29 presentation (available to view online through February 3), MOCEJ executive director Elijah Hutchinson said, “It’s important to understand the risks that we’re mitigating against. New York City has been reclassified as a humid, subtropical climate. Throughout Lower Manhattan, we will begin to see monthly tidal flooding within 20 years of today and daily tidal flooding by the 2080s. That is not flooding during a storm event. That is regular, sunny day flooding due to high tides.”
“We can’t just protect, we can’t think just about the next Sandy,” he added, in a reference to the 2012 hurricane that devastated Lower Manhattan. “Climate change is complex. It interfaces with our infrastructure.”
Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency [LMCR] is a suite of interlocking projects that begin with Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience (which aims to protect the Two Bridges community along the East River waterfront) and continues through Seaport Coastal Resilience (which seeks to safeguard the area between the Brooklyn Bridge and John Street). That overlaps with the Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan (covering the 0.9-mile stretch between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Battery) and connects to Battery Coastal Resilience (encompassing the shoreline between the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and Pier A). The arc concludes with two Battery Park City phases: the South Project (which shields Wagner Park) and the North-West Project (which girds the Esplanade and stretches into Tribeca).
Jordan Salinger, the senior policy advisor at the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, said, “the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience project started construction last year.” Consisting largely of flip-up gates, rolling gates, and fixed barriers (mostly located beneath the FDR Drive viaduct), it is budgeted at $349 million, and slated for completion in 2026.
Moving south along the East River coast, Seaport Coastal Resilience aims to protect “the lowest-lying and most vulnerable portion of the area,” Mr. Hutchinson explained, saying that this is where flooding can be expected to happen soonest. “This standalone project will raise the water’s edge three to five feet.” No budget or timetable has yet been announced for this phase, although preliminary design work is being funded by a $50 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under its Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities program.
The Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan is the largest and most complicated phase of the LMCR project, with a projected budget of between $5 and $7 billion, none of which has yet been allocated.
Alexis Taylor, EDC’s vice president for climate resilience, said, “the project needs to extend land into the water, up to a full city block at some locations, about 200 feet, and about a half a block or 90 feet in other locations. The design has two levels of flood protection: a lower level that addresses daily tidal flooding and an upper level for coastal storms. To achieve this, we need to raise up this entire waterfront by three to five feet for passive protection against regular tidal flooding. Then we need to create a higher, second line of defense that’s 15 to 18 feet higher than the waterfront is today, which will protect against coastal storms, using a combination of permanent flood walls and some limited deployable gates in select locations.”
The design process for this phase began in 2021, and is expected to continue through 2026, at which point groundbreaking is anticipated to kick off a ten-year construction period. The interval prior to construction will also be devoted to obtaining the myriad of regulatory and environmental approvals needed for such a project.
“New fill will be added largely inland,” Ms. Taylor noted, “with new landscape and community waterfront spaces created by this extension of land. In total, there’ll be about 14 acres of new fill and four acres of new platform structures.” This new space will contain only a handful of one- and two-story buildings, according to EDC, with no office or residential development.
The Battery Coastal Resilience project completed the design process last spring and is expected to break ground shortly, with a budget of $169 million. “In many ways, it will look very similar to what is there today,” Mr. Hutchinson said, noting that a flood barrier near the water’s edge will be “the most significant change with a couple of steps up, and a couple of small stairs that you take down, which gives us roughly five feet of additional elevation.”
Implementation of all Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency projects will require a mix of federal, state, and local funding, and will take up to 15 years to complete. For federal funding, the EDC team is working with the Army Corps of Engineers in several ways: coordinating with the agency’s Civil Works Program for flood defense system funding, as well as participating in the design discussion for the Army Corps’ NY-NJ Harbor & Tributaries Study, which comes with an estimated price tag of $52.7 billion. “This is a huge opportunity for the City,” Ms. Taylor said. “The amount of resources available—50 plus billion dollars—doesn’t come around very often so it’s incumbent on the City to to make sure that we get our fair share.”