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The Battery Park City Authority’s plan to overhaul a more than mile-long stretch of Lower Manhattan waterfront is taking shape, with a mix of flood walls, deployable gates and streetscape upgrades to defend an area known for its waterfront access from increasingly severe coastal storms and rising sea level.
New project designs reviewed by Crain’s provide a look at changes proposed by the billion-dollar North/West Battery Park City Resiliency Project, which runs along Manhattan’s western shore from just above The Battery to Tribeca, where it would prevent flood waters from inundating office towers and residential buildings worth an estimated $13.8 billion.
In several places the proposed network of clay-colored walls and gates blend into the design of the esplanade, and are hardly noticeable at just a few feet high; in other areas, particularly the southern section near South End Avenue, walls between eight and a half and 10 feet hug the back of the waterfront plaza with a planned curation of trees and plants to soften the look.
Father north, bordering the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a more than nine foot wall hugs the building along West Street to reduce the visual impact of what was originally proposed to be a wall that towered over pedestrians near the northernmost section of the esplanade.
The project’s design, which is more than halfway complete, speaks to the combined engineering and aesthetic challenges of reinventing a bustling waterfront with functioning flood protections.
“We’re trying to integrate this as much as possible into the natural landscape so that it doesn’t read obviously as a flood barrier, it just becomes part of the overall urbanscape,” said Gwen Dawson, the authority’s senior vice president of design and construction, in an interview.
The Battery Park City Authority’s contractor-design team — led by Manhattan-based Turner Construction and E.E. Cruz & Company in Queens, and Amsterdam-headquartered Arcadis — also plan to take advantage of overhauling the waterfront walkways and plazas to enhance accessibility, add more seating, shade and modernize the area’s overall look.
If the resilience project receives public approvals without a snag, the authority says it expects construction to break ground in 2025 and last about five years. Construction would embark in phases to reduce the time visitors are cut off from accessing certain areas.
To limit risks and costs, the authority is utilizing a unique contracting method known as progressive design-build. The process allows the authority to move through the design phase before determining the project’s final costs. As a result, the project’s budget is in flux and likely to change, but Dawson said the current estimate is for at least $1.5 billion — roughly in line with a previous estimated price tag the authority shared with Crain’s last year.
To finance the project Gov. Kathy Hochul quietly bolstered the authority’s bond power in the April state budget by raising its debt capacity — the second time in as many years — up from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion to help it carry out the flood protections. In its most recent bond sale last year the authority sold roughly $750 million worth of revenue bonds.
Raju Mann, president and chief executive of the authority, said the agency is developing a schedule for future bond sales and aims to be conservative with its spending.
“We have plenty of room in our bonding capacity to go significantly above projections for what we think the cost is going to be,” Mann said in an interview. “But I think the question for us is, how do we get the cost down as much as possible while still delivering the flood protection?”
Seeking to trim costs will also ideally compact the project’s timeline, said Mann.
“Construction is always a pain in the butt in New York,” said Mann, “but at the end of the day, this will be a better waterfront.”
Caroline Spivack , 2024-06-20 21:54:27
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