HRPT Aims to Start Estuarium Construction Next Spring, as BPCA Contributes $6 Million
The Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT) is drawing closer to realizing its decades-long ambition to build an Estuarium – a combination laboratory, public exhibit and learning space designed to offer hands-on programs in the urban ecology of New York Harbor and the larger Hudson River ecosystem. This original facility was created in Tribeca in 1986 by the River Project, a highly regarded, Lower Manhattan-based non-profit, and expanded on Pier 26 in the 1990s.
At the HRPT’s June board meeting, staff announced that the Battery Park City Authority would contribute $6 million toward construction of the Estuarium as mitigation to impacts related to the installation of flood walls in and around the southern portion of the park during the Authority’s North West Resiliency project. The cash infusion from the BPCA underwrites almost 15 percent of the Estuarium’s projected budget of $45 million.
At the July 21 meeting of the Waterfront, Parks & Cultural Committee of Community Board 1 (CB1), Kate O’Malley, HRPT’s assistant vice president for design and construction, said, “the design calls for textured wood with a green roof, because we really want the building to feel natural and part of the park.” Inside the Estuarium, she continued, the layout is centered around “an immersive exhibit space, because we really like the idea of the visitor feeling like they’re underwater.”
The Estuarium will be a two-story building of approximately 8,000 square feet, situated on a lot between Pier 26 and West Street, adjacent to the Science Playground and the City Winery restaurant. The facility will include multiple exhibition galleries, a classroom, and laboratory space, along with subsurface intakes that draw water and fish directly from the Hudson into the building, where they will be displayed in the glass tanks of a “wet lab.” The second level will house office space and mechanical equipment.
The original Estuarium was operated as a community facility through 2005, when it was demolished as part of the larger plan by the HRPT to refurbish Pier 26. This move was made amid expectations by community leaders and elected officials that the River Project and the Estuarium would be welcomed back to the dock, once its rebuilding was complete (a milestone achieved in 2020). Both the Estuarium and the River Project were founded by Tribeca resident Cathy Drew almost 40 years ago. Her vision and leadership, among other accomplishments, helped pass legislation that made the Hudson River Park an estuarine sanctuary in 1998. This legal designation was based, in part, on fish ecology data that Ms. Drew and her team compiled through research in the Hudson at the River Project.
Ms. O’Malley added, “we’re looking to finish construction documents sometime in September. So that’s basically wrapping up the design.” She noted that the team still needs to obtain permits, including those from the City’s Department of Buildings, the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Army Corps of Engineers. “The soonest we would potentially be starting construction would be in the spring, but that is obviously contingent upon receiving the regulatory approvals and filling our our funding gap, which at the moment is still somewhere in the $12-million range.”