Resilience Plans for Hudson River Cul de Sacs Include Eight-Foot Walls and Underground Tide Gates
At the joint meeting of Community Board 1’s Environmental Protection and Battery Park City Committees on December 15, the Battery Park City Authority shared details about resiliency designs for several street cul de sacs that meet the Hudson River esplanade.
The western ends of Albany Street, Rector Place, and West Thames Street will be flanked by flood walls that are eight feet high. Gaps in these walls will permit pedestrian access and views of the esplanade and river beyond it. Alongside these openings, sliding sections of wall will be concealed, but ready to be deployed to close the gaps during extreme-weather events.
Each street end will feature precast concrete seating, arranged into “conservation rooms” – open-air spaces designed to welcome gatherings. All three will be linked by a “forest path” that meanders among newly planted trees and shrubs.
The end of Albany Street, the site of the recently demolished public artwork Upper Room, will become the new home of sculptural seating pieces by Scott Burton, each consisting of two short granite staircases flanking a circular element. These pieces were recently moved from the waterfront plaza at North Cove.
Both Albany Street and Rector Place will also be the sites of major underground infrastructure pieces: an 18-inch stormwater pipe and tide gate at the former, and a 96-inch combined sewer outfall and tide gate at the latter. Installation of this infrastructure at Albany Street is happening now and expected to continue through next spring. Similar work on Rector Place is slated to begin next March, with no projected completion date yet announced.
Anyone wishing to obtain more information about these plans or share reactions to them is invited to a Resiliency Drop-In session tomorrow (Wednesday, December 17) at 6 River Terrace (across from the Irish Hunger Memorial), starting at 5:30pm.
Editor’s note: What is a tide gate? Part of the urban underground infrastructure, tide gates prevent river water from flowing into drainage systems and are particularly valuable during storm surges. What is a combined sewer outfall? This is a pipe that ends at a water body and discharges a combined sewer overflow (commonly shortened to CSO) into the water. In New York City, stormwater flows into the same pipes that carry sewage, and can overwhelm the sewage system. When this happens, the excess stormwater and untreated sewage surges to the outfall pipe and is discharged into the river.