Tag: Local

The Price of Resiliency

At an October 2 Open Community Meeting, officials from the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) discussed for the first time the overall budget for the resiliency plan they are formulating for the community. Authority president B.J. Jones said, in response to a question, “the overall resiliency cost for all four phases is about two-thirds of...
This preliminary rendering (now outdated) shows one early version of a plan for creating flood barriers along Battery Park City's Esplanade.

Pile On!

What is currently a “sea of asphalt”, in the words of NY State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Commissioner Rose Harvey, will soon morph into a full-fledged construction site.  In 2020 the Hudson River Park’s first ecology themed pier will open with “something for everyone” – with woodlands, wetlands, and even soccer fields.   Diana...
HRP's Roving River tank carrying an oyster toadfish

The Tale of the Ticker Tape, or How Adversity and Spontaneity Hatched a New York Tradition

   While the festivities in New York Harbor didn’t go as scripted that afternoon, the spontaneous gesture it generated from the brokerage houses lining Broadway famously lives on more than a century later.        On October 28, 1886, Liberty Enlightening the World was to be unveiled to New York City and the world...
By the 1860s, ticker-tape machines had replaced human "runners."

Asking for the Millennium

Community Board 1 (CB1) is pushing the City’s Department of Education (DOE) to lease more space within the historic Financial District skyscraper that houses Millennium High School. Tricia Joyce, who chairs CB1’s Youth & Education Committee, said at the Board’s September 25 meeting, “Millennium High School is the gem of our community. It was started...
Tricia Joyce, chair of Community Board 1's Youth & Education Committee: "Millennium High School is the gem of our community. It is a perfectly diverse school, but also a very crowded school."

More Time to Rebuild the Maritime Building

The decade-long effort to refurbish the historic Battery Maritime Buildingmay soon resume, after years of inaction, thanks to a new investment by Midtown Equities, a real estate firm that is a partner in Larry Silverstein’s 99-year lease on the World Trade Center, and also purchased the nearby landmarked office building, One Broadway, earlier this year....
The long-stalled effort to rehabilitate the historic Battery Maritime Building may soon get new wind in its sails, thanks to a fresh round of financing from a new partner.

‘Egrets, We’ve Had a Few…’

Downtown dweller Patrick Sheldon was the first of several readers to report on Lower Manhattan’s newest celebrity resident: an as-yet-unnamed Great Egret. Spotted for the first time at a paddle-board race at North Cove Marina on September 25, this majestic creature was seen stalking a mouse. (Egrets, like all herons, subsist on fish, frogs, and...
Egret spotted in Gateway Plaza photo: Alison Simko