Community Input Sought on Battery Park City Resiliency Project
On June 20, the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) hosted a design progress update meeting about its North/West Battery Park City Resiliency Project, at Stuyvesant High School.
Doors opened at 5pm for attendees to view fly-through videos of the project, visit tables arrayed with posters and other visual material highlighting individual aspects of the plan, and speak with members of the project team.
Presentations started at 6:30pm, followed by a question and answer session. At 8pm, the topic tables reopened for further dialog about granular details of the seven sections of the plan.
The meeting (the eighth in an ongoing series) reviewed the current status of this resiliency project, which is approaching the milestone of 60 percent of design completion. This initiative aims to create an integrated coastal flood risk management system, consisting largely of flood walls, deployable gates, and new elevation stretching from First Place (near South Cove), running north along the Esplanade, across to the east side of West Street, and terminating at a high point in Tribeca near North Moore and Greenwich Streets.
Among the design priorities now incorporated into the plan are protecting the area it encloses from 2.5 feet of projected sea-level rise (and much higher water during storms); enhancing public space with universal accessibility, improved circulation at pinch points and improved seating; and a 30 percent increase in the planting coverage of landscaped areas. The NWBPCR project is also expected to reduce the cost of home ownership in Battery Park City by making the community eligible for removal from Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps and eliminating the need for homeowners to purchase flood insurance that would otherwise be required for federally-backed mortgages.
The obstacles facing the project include a pair of significant engineering challenges. The first of these is the need for a pumping station with the capacity to remove 60 million gallons of water per day that might otherwise pool behind the new flood barriers. (That’s almost the equivalent of four Olympic-sized swimming pools every hour.) Preliminary plans call for this infrastructure to be located on the east side of Stuyvesant High School. Engineers hope to bury most of this equipment beneath the surface of the plaza near Chambers and West Streets, although a small portion of it is expected to protrude above ground.
A second challenge is the need for resiliency measures in the vicinity of North Cove Marina to rest on new, subsurface bridges, which must be installed over the PATH train tunnels that pass directly beneath this site.
Both of these challenges have resulted in an elongated timeline for the North/West Resiliency Project, which is now expected to take up to five years to complete. Actual construction is not expected to begin until the second half of next year, which pegs the earliest possible completion date for the plan to no sooner than 2030. That noted, the BPCA and its design team are planning to sequence the project in phases, so that parts of the riverfront will remain open to the public at all times.
During this half-decade interval, many of Battery Park City’s signature public spaces will remain open. By the time the North/West Resiliency Project begins construction, Wagner Park and the adjacent section of the Battery (both now closed for buildout of resiliency measures) are slated to have reopened. Rockefeller Park is scheduled to remain open and free of major construction throughout this period. Only the section between North Cove Marina and Brookfield Place appears likely to close for the entire five years.
The flood barriers that the BPCA is planning to install throughout the community will vary in height, depending on the elevation of the surrounding terrain. In one location along River Terrace, between Chambers and Warren Streets, the ground is high enough that no barrier is needed. In others, walls up to ten feet high will be necessary. But in almost all cases, these will be integrated into existing structures (such as the privacy walls that already border some buildings), with the net increase in height limited to less than two feet.