SWA/BALSLEY and WEISS/MANFREDI
Two hundred years ago, this post-industrial waterfront site was a series of wetlands flanked by the East River and Newtown Creek. After decades as an industrial hub and rail station, all signs of its ecologically rich history were eliminated. What remained was a brownfield with an irregular water’s edge, steep landfill bluffs, and decaying piers juxtaposed against the spectacle of the Manhattan skyline.
The design embraces these diverse historical identities and serves as a new model for waterfront resilience, with a “soft” approach to protecting neighborhoods from floodwaters. The East River’s tidal currents demanded a protective revetment to ensure a successful marsh establishment. A “soft” engineered causeway offers a walk along the river’s edge and protects nearly an acre of newly-established in-water habitat. The design remediates the site’s contaminated landfill and leverages it into sculpted grassland and iconic park features: a shaded promontory green with custom banquette seating; a smaller landfill peninsula reshaped in to an island sanctuary; a footbridge that crosses the wetlands to reveal a site-specific art installation; exercise and picnic terraces framed by precast concrete walls that double as flood barriers; a kayak launch; a collection of intimate “break-out” lounges along the pathways; and a dramatic cantilevered overlook, at once urbane and otherworldly, that brings the city to a precipice suspended thirty feet above the wetlands.
One of New York City’s most ambitious and complex developments in decades, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park aspires to be a transformative project. By focusing on designing a park, streetscape, and infrastructural system that is innovative, flexible, and aspirational, the design weaves together new relationships between landscape, architecture, and engineering to create places of retreat and recreation and offers new connections with nature at the water’s edge.
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