The proposed level of new park . The water-surge level of Hurricane Sandy . Photo-Illustration: Photograph by Victor Llorente for New York Magazine & Graphics by Joe Darrow This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Now the city wanted to tear it all down, cover it in eight feet of dirt, and build a brand-new park on top of that. City officials, led by the Department of Design and Construction, or the DDC, said this was the best way to protect the neighborhood from climate-driven sea-level rise. The project was going to take five years and $1.45 billion to complete; some of the money had already been pledged by the federal government, and the rest was coming from the city.
The thing of it was, said the activists, there had been a much better plan than this one, created by the community, that was less destructive of the park. But the DDC had declared it infeasible, imposed this new plan, and, since then, refused to heed any objections. Before meeting the activists, I read a paper about the situation by an NYU graduate student named Malcolm Araos, who had concluded that, while the city had behaved very poorly in imposing its plan, the city’s opponents, predominantly white and older, were engaging in what is known in other contexts as NIMBYism. They wanted flood protection — just not the kind that was on offer. But my meeting with the activists made me think Araos was wrong.
The largest of the grants, $335 million, went to a project for lower Manhattan called the Big U, developed by the famously imaginative Danish architecture firm the Bjarke Ingels Group . The firm’s plan proposed an integrated system of flood protection that would form a giant U shape along Manhattan’s southern edge. Different areas received different designs depending on the local topography.
By early 2018, the de Blasio administration was ready to finalize the plan and get City Council approval and start construction. Officials told the relevant community boards to get ready for an intense last round of meetings. And then, for six months, those same officials went silent. Chester remembers receiving a call on a Thursday evening from a contact at City Hall. As far as she knew, the undulating berm was still the plan. “At that point in the process,” she said, “I personally was very focused on, like, what kind of benches would be in the park.” Instead, her contact gave her a heads-up that the plan had changed. The next afternoon, the city announced that, instead of building the berm, it was going to bury the park in eight feet of fill and build a new park on top.
keithgessen A Call to Protect People and Nature! Thread to watch/read:
keithgessen And here is what CarlinaRivera told the Community. Maybe ask for explanation?
keithgessen Maybe CarlinaRivera would like to tell the community if NYCDDC lied to her or she lied to community about existence if the Value Engineering Study City is hiding. Here it is
keithgessen Protect the oceans! Thread:
eastriverallies keithgessen For an update on new delays read this.
keithgessen Is the promotion of renewables ecocide? Thread:
keithgessen Yep, fk climate change, don't fix anything, just busy it. Problem solved
keithgessen
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