Tide Gate Upgrade Requires Six Months of Work at Rector Place
The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) has begun a six-month project that has closed the western end of Rector Place and barred access to the esplanade from that location. (The esplanade itself will remain open during this construction project. The Rector Place roadway also will remain open, although parking will be eliminated on the north side, between South End Avenue and the esplanade, to allow for storing construction equipment.)
This initiative will construct an underground chamber around an existing 54-inch sewer pipe to “prevent storm surge… during storm events,” according to the BPCA. The project will include the installation of a tide gate at the end of the sewer pipe (where it vents into the Hudson River) within the new subterranean structure. This system will allow the tide gate to close during extreme weather events, and is intended to prevent water from the Hudson backing into the sewer pipe and flooding nearby streets. The installation of shoring and piles is expected to continue through January 2025, with activity scheduled for 7am through 4pm each weekday.
This undertaking is, somewhat counterintuitively, part of the BPCA’s South Resiliency Project, which is focused on Wagner Park and the Battery, several blocks away — even though this particular section of the esplanade is within the North/West Resiliency Project. (Now in its design phase, the N/W resiliency initiative will rebuild the esplanade in phases between First Place and Stuyvesant High School starting in late 2025, and last about five years.) The reason for the South Resiliency Project to reach as far north as Rector Place, as BPCA documents explain, is that “the existing sewer infrastructure crossing underneath the [South Battery Park Resiliency] Study Area would have to be isolated to preclude the coastal surge from entering the Study Area.” The new tide gate at Rector Place is one of three envisaged by the South Resiliency Project. The others are planned for First Place and for Pier A Plaza.
The BPCA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the South Resiliency Project notes that at two other sites within that zone (near P.S./I.S. 276 and the apartment building at 50 Battery Place), “no traditional pile drivers will be used. Instead, the contractor will use alternative means and measures such as drilled piles or press-in pile drivers to minimize noise and vibration from construction activities.”
But the FEIS does not indicate whether apartment buildings directly adjacent to the Rector Place site will be subjected to noise and vibration from traditional construction equipment or benefit from the same precautions. Instead, this document predicts that “noise from the construction… of the tide gate at Rector Place is expected to be minimal,” because “acoustical curtains applied to perimeter fencing would minimize any temporary noise impacts. Equipment enclosures or shrouds would also be used to eliminate or minimize noise from exposed stationary equipment.” The FEIS adds that “daytime future noise during the construction period would be nine decibels or less above the measured ambient levels.”
Approximately a dozen trees have been cut down at the plaza where Rector Place meets the esplanade to facilitate construction of the tide gate and underground chamber. These will eventually be replanted, but a BPCA source says this may not happen for several years after the six-month duration of this project, to avoid the waste and redundancy of planting new trees that would then have to be cut down again when construction begins on the North/West Resiliency Project, and replanted once more after that initiative is complete.