NYTimes:
[Valenteena] Jones, Lower East Side resident and CB3 Board member: “The way this planning is being done is disempowering. City officials collaborated with us over four years and came up with a detailed design — only to now return with this entirely new design. Do our voices even matter?”
The city’s latest plan to protect from future flooding called for burying the park under eight to 10 feet of landfill, and starting over. This was not the original plan.
Council Woman Carlina Rivera: “The community’s painstaking work over four years is being completely pushed aside. The new plan represents a fundamental departure from anything the City had discussed. The mayor’s office has failed to provide detailed analyses on why the cost increase is necessary. Until those questions are answered, I cannot back the direction the mayor’s office has taken.”
City Council oversight meeting next Tuesday that will address the new park plans.
Rebuild by Design’s Amy Chester: “This renewal project did not come through normal city channels. Its first target was the LES whose low-lying public housing is especially vulnerable. The berm surrounding the park would be the first link in a string of buffers around all Lower Manhattan — known as the Big U — to protect against rising seas – until the city announced in September, with no community consultation, that the plan was being scrapped.”
Now those who live near the park are frustrated that the plan to preserve the ecosystem is being swept aside.
The original plan was budgeted at $760 Million; the city’s revised scheme would cost $1.45 Billion.
HUD will kick in $330 million but the agency required this money be spent by 2022 or be forfeited.
Christine Datz-Romero director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center (the environmental organization headquartered in the park’s fireboat house). “Nearly all these would be buried under the new plan, replaced by saplings that would take decades to mature. The new plan will also create a temporary ecological desert for hundreds of species migrating the Atlantic Flyway.
“We agree we need to protect our community, but ..why .. destroy a park to do so.”
She envisions the park as a floodplain, slowing and absorbing rising waters with salt-tolerant Juniper and sumac trees her volunteers have already planted.
“We have seen no environmental impact statement addressing any of this. Instead, we are told little, our concerns steamrollered,”
“For several years, the Ecology Center (has assisted the Parks Department’s gardener in planting the park: hundreds of echinaceas, a coneflower with medicinal properties; 15,000 bluebells; and milkweed to attract monarch butterflies. Volunteers also cared for the park’s hundreds of lindens, oaks, and London plane trees.”
Commissioner Grillo: A draft impact statement will be issued this March, just before the city certifies the proposed plan.
The city plans to increase tree species from the original 3 to 52 hardier ones; by planting 1,300 trees on fresh, raised soil, the new park will resurrect that canopy. [good idea but the city can do that without razing the park]
Buried, too, will be the running track field house with its sea monster tiles and the track itself (just refurbished for nearly $3 million). The fate of the amphitheater, the original home to Shakespeare in the Park, now home to Summer Stage salsa concerts, remains uncertain.”
… Joan Reinmuth, a retired nurse and 30-year East Village resident: “This park is more than a recreation facility. These kids in NYCHA houses don’t take vacation cruises. They don’t shop at Zabar’s for fish; they fish to eat. Early mornings, men are shaving in the fountains.”
