More than four years ago, while plumbing the depths of City documents and presentations relating to flood protection in Lower Manhattan, I came across renderings of what the City planned to do for the East River Waterfrontp Esplanade, that highly used asphalt park beneath the FDR Drive that runs between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.
The renderings, somewhat outlandishly, proposed that the esplanade would somehow transform its strip of benches and recreation areas into a flood wall, protecting the neighborhood from a devastating 10-foot storm surge like the one that accompanied Superstorm Sandy and left huge swaths of Lower Manhattan without power for nearly a week.
I texted the renderings to some friends with something like, "They'd be crazy for this one." (I didn't receive many responses, and I've learned to stop sending these kinds of texts.)
Still, even as the city broke ground in 2022 on what they dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience (BMCR) project, I was skeptical that they'd actually commit to the extremely cool flip-up gates that would both allow for an uninterrupted river view from the park, and also maximize space for a thin park already bounded by four lanes of traffic to its west and the river to its east.
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