The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) will co-host a public meeting tonight (Thursday, November 1) to update residents about the state of planning for the resiliency project that will soon begin in the neighborhood’s southern section, surrounding Wagner Park.
The session will also be co-hosted by two panels of Community Board 1 (CB1): the Battery Park City Committee and the Resiliency Subcommittee. The meeting, which begins at 6:00 pm, will be held at Six River Terrace (opposite the Irish Hunger Memorial and next to Le Pain Quotidien restaurant). Admission is free, and no R.S.V.P. is necessary.
The agenda will focus, in part, on a contentious aspect of the plan to render Battery Park City’s southern border secure against climate change and future extreme-weather events: a proposal to demolish the the current Wagner Park pavilion, and replace it with a multi-story structure that will also have a roof deck.
These enhancements, along with the elimination of the arched passageway that provides a framed view of the Statue of Liberty in the current structure, will enable an expansion from the pavilion’s present size of 7,825 square feet to as much as 17,000 square feet. Under this plan, the restaurant space within the structure, which currently houses Gigino’s, would grow from the current 3,450 square feet to as much as 10,000 square feet. The height and length of the proposed structure would likely eliminate a panoramic vista of New York Harbor that is much prized by area residents.
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Tammy Meltzer: “I’m coming again to request for flexibility and to make sure things aren’t set in stone in the redevelopment. The local stakeholders should have the largest voice.”
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During the public comment section of the September 18 meeting of the BPCA’s board, Tammy Meltzer,who chairs CB1’s Battery Park City Committee, said, “as we’re moving forward, I’m coming again to request for flexibility and to make sure things aren’t set in stone in the redevelopment. There was a very contentious history on the difference in the scope of what is a redevelopment project, and not for the needs of resiliency. We know resiliency is needed. But we don’t want large development, we don’t want docks.” (This was a reference to another aspect of the BPCA’s plan, which would create a floating dock along the Esplanade, where cultural and educational vessels could tie up.)
“The local stakeholders should have the largest voice,” she continued. “We view Wagner Park as our backyard. So when you, as a board, go back home to your backyards tonight, and you sit outside and look at yours, wherever it may be, we ask that you give us the same kind of understanding that we want a voice in what’s happening at Wagner.”
“We definitely want resiliency,” Ms. Meltzer concluded. “But how it’s redeveloped, because this is redevelopment project when you rip the entire place apart, we want to be the larger stakeholder in the decision making.”
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A rendering of the larger structure planned to take the place of the current pavilion, which has inspired spirited opposition among community leaders, who fear that the larger edifice will block the view and mar the landscape of the park.
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This followed an exchange at an earlier BPCA meeting, in July, at which board member Martha Gallo, asked, “is the assumption that this resiliency plan should include the replacement for the pavilion? Is that still up for discussion? Or is that going to be part of this set of optional designs?”
Gwen Dawson, the Authority’s vice president for real property, answered, “we will discuss that. There were certain conclusions drawn during the assessment project. Those will be revisited to an extent. So there will be an opportunity to raise questions and to request additional explanation or clarification as to what is required. Nothing that we have done thus far is set in stone.”
More recently, at an Open Community Meeting hosted by the BPCA in October, Ms. Dawson elaborated, “our intention is to start this process, which is the detailed design and engineering. We have a baseline that we arrived at, at the end of the assessment project that we finished up this past year.”
She continued, “that doesn’t mean that there won’t an openness to changing that. We will be looking at reassessing certain assumptions, reassessing certain ways of doing things. So there will be an open dialogue. There’ll be an opportunity for open discussion about how the pavilion is situated, what the size of it is, and that’ll be open for discussion.”
That open discussion appears poised to begin this evening.