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High Tide 4:04am
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Low Tide 10:37am
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High Tide 4:47pm
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Low Tide 10:55pm*
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This is Delmonico's, the historic restaurant in
the heart of Lower Manhattan. Look closely
to see what a team of architects and engineers have imagined to mitigate future flooding:
old streets turned into greenways that absorb rainwater and a new system of pipes below the surface that would react to tides and storm surges. See the story below for more on the compelling new exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art
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Join Our List
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 Events on the Waterfront
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Panel: Seizing Opportunities: Waterfront Works in Progress
4/7, Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, 47 E. 65th St. 5:30p
Meeting: Comprehensive Waterfront Plan
4/8, Murry Bergtraum High School, 411 Pearl St., 6p
Presentations: Bronx Speaks Up
4/10, Lehman College, Bronx, 11:30a-5p
Tour: DecoDence
4/10 and 4/11, South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton St., 1p and 3p
Performance: A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick
Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd St., 2p
Presentation: History of the Harbor Unit
4/12, South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton St., 7:30p
Conference: RPA's General Assembly: Innovation and the American Metropolis
4/16, Waldorf Astoria, 8a
Exhibition: DecoDence
4/16, South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton St., 5p-8p
EarthFair: Indoors & Outdoors
4/19-24, Grand Central Terminal, 10a-8p
Beach Clean-Up
4/24, Beach 26th Street, Rockaway, 11a-1p
Performance: A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things
4/23-5/9, Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge, Red Hook, 7p
Panel: Reviving the Estuary: Science, Politics, and Education
4/28, Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, 47 E. 65th St. 5:30p
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| CONTENTS: April 7, 2010
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What's Your Big Idea for the City's Waterfront?
The City wants to know! Give your input at an important meeting on April 8
Pier 1 of Brooklyn Bridge Park Opens
Waterfront promenade, salt marsh, boat ramp and more
Compelling Exhibition on View at the Museum of Modern Art
Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront
Ocean Racers Ready to Sprint from New York to Barcelona
State-of-the-art boats at North Cove await an advantageous wind
Learn to Row in NYC
You're not too old.
Welcome to the Waterfront: New Alliance Partners
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WHAT'S YOUR BIG IDEA FOR THE CITY'S WATERFRONT?
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AS NEW YORK BEGINS SERIOUS PLANNING FOR A 21ST CENTURY SHORELINE, ALL ARE INVITED TO GIVE INPUT This Thursday, April 8, is a critical meeting to begin the updating of NYC's Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. All waterfront enthusiasts and stakeholders are urged to attend the meeting. When the planning process is completed at the end of the year, the new Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, known as Vision 2020, will have the potential to transform more than 500 miles of New York City's waterfront. View of the NYC skyline from Jamaica Bay.  | The Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance urges you to contribute to the dialogue. The April 8 meeting takes place at Murry Bergtraum High School, 411 Pearl Street, Manhattan ( click here for a map) from 6pm to 8:30pm. In May and June the Department of City Planning will conduct public workshops in each borough to identify site-specific opportunities at the waterfront. Details about these workshops will be available at the April 8 meeting. Then, another large public meeting will be held in the early fall to offer draft recommendations and solicit feedback. The new Comprehensive Waterfront Plan will be issued in December. Civic leaders, elected officials and waterfront advocates from all over are hailing the process. "Bringing together all those interested in putting the waterfront at
the heart of the city's future is more than commendable," said Rick Bell, executive director of the American Institute of Architects New York chapter. "It is a
necessary first step to assure that a balance of recreation, new uses
and jobs finds space and funding. Mr. Bell and other leaders -- including commissioners from the Departments of
Parks, Housing and Environmental Protection, officials from the
Economic Development Corp. and Empire State Development Corporation,
heads of agencies such as the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, and heads of civic organizations -- gathered at the invitation
of NYC Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber on March 17 to plan the formation of the
Waterfront Management Advisory Board. An official announcement about the Board is expected soon from City Hall.  Vision 2020 builds on the 1992 Comprehensive Waterfront
Subscribe to the Vision 2020 newsletter here. Send your ideas and comments about the City's shoreline to the DCP here. See you at the April 8 meeting! (back to top)
This is the Mary Whalen, a retired oil tanker in Red Hook.
Top photo courtesy of the DEP. Middle two photos by Bernard Ente.
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MWA Blue Bulletin Board
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The 3rd Annual City of Water Day Festival is July 24, 2010To Volunteer for City of Water Day, please contact Louis Kleinman ( lkleinman [at] waterfrontalliance.org) We've moved! Come see us at
241 Water Street, 3rd FloorNew York, NY 10038. Email Address Update:Our waterwire.net email addresses are no longer in service. All MWA emails end in waterfrontalliance.org.
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| FIRST SEGMENT OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK OPENS
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PIER 1 IS RECLAIMED FOR PUBLIC USE
"The park (is)...one of the most positive statements about our
culture we've seen in years. It is a key and very promising early
step in a larger project that includes the greening of the East River
waterfront in Manhattan and a park for Governors Island, and may well turn
out to be Michael R. Bloomberg's most important legacy as mayor of
New York [...] The construction of Brooklyn Bridge Park will be an enormous
achievement. And assuming that the other harbor parks go forward, the
project as a whole will radically alter the character of the city, not only
by making it greener but also by reorienting it toward the life of the
harbor. It is as optimistic an undertaking as any the city has undertaken
since Robert Moses's monumental postwar highway projects-and
better for our lungs."
Click on this map and zoom to an interactive version on the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy website.  | The dream of a park alongside the miles of New York City's vast waterfront took another big step toward reality on March 22 when Governor Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, and twelve local officials opened the first section of Brooklyn Bridge Park at Pier 1. Pier 1 is the first of six Brooklyn piers being reconfigured to convert the once-busy maritime and industrial waterfront to a world-class park. In the case of Pier 1, which is the largest of the park piers, the dramatic result of the transformation is anything but pier-like, being instead a whole new topography of nine and a half acres with a hill at the center. Open to the public but not yet complete, Pier 1 will eventually include two large lawns and a waterfront promenade, the "Granite Prospect" -- a set of steps fashioned from granite salvaged from the Roosevelt Island Bridge reconstruction -- and hundreds of trees. Later this summer, a salt marsh with native plants, water gardens
crossed by small bridges, and a boat ramp for non-motorized watercraft
will open at Pier 1. Among the speakers on March 22 were Regina Myer, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation, who will take the reins as president of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park Operating Entity and Nancy Webster, executive director of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy. Ms. Myer made special note of the effect the new park will have on the lives of the Brooklyn community that has advocated for it for so many years. Twenty-five years, in fact, said Ms. Webster, as she named the many constituencies and agencies that came together so successfully to turn a largely abandoned industrial area into a park benefiting Brooklyn's residents and visitors. Brooklyn Bridge Park has been designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. In addition to Piers 1 through 6, the park-in-progress will ultimately encompass Empire Fulton Ferry Park and the existing Main Street Park. The next sections of Brooklyn Bridge Park scheduled to open in 2010 are
Pier 6 and the Spiral Pool at Pier 2. Learn more about the future phases of
Brooklyn Bridge Park here. "The opening of part of Pier 1 is an important milestone," said
Mayor Bloomberg at the opening celebration, "but it's just the
beginning of the development of what will be one of the world's great
waterfront parks." (back to top) |
| FIRST TRANSOCEANIC RACE TO BARCELONA ABOUT TO BEGIN FROM NEW YORK CITY
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LIGHT AND SLEEK, TWO YACHTS BOB IN NORTH COVE, AWAITING SUITABLE WEATHER
Bobbing in Battery Park City's North Cove, two racing boats await the right conditions to begin a race to Barcelona.  | In
the ultra-rarefied world of ocean racing, the Open 60 boats of the
International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA) are themselves a
breed apart. Two of these, Estrella Damm and W Hotels,
have been tied up in Battery Park City's North Cove since arriving from
Baltimore on March 23. If images of the sleek yachts competing for the
America's Cup first come to mind, the IMOCA Open 60s are very different
indeed, being light, broad of beam, and, in the case of Estrella Damm,
jazzily painted. They are also very fast, and are about to compete
against each other in the first transatlantic race from New York to Barcelona. The two boats are virtual sisters, so the competition will be "a true test between
equals," as Sailing World website puts it. Upon welcoming the Spanish sailors to Gotham, NYC & Company's Michael Hopper said that the New York-Barcelona Transoceanic
Record, as the race has been named, "will further bond two great cities
that have found the sea to be a source of commerce, competition and
pride." The three-man crews (two
Spaniards and one American on each) are keeping track of weather conditions and expect to set sail toward the end of this week. On April 4, the NY-BCN web site read, "forecasters suggest that in two or three days the high will move east and a corridor will open to allow the duel to commence." The boats will race 3,750 nautical miles. The winners could claim victory in as little as 12 days.
The
race will establish the first official record time between an Atlantic
and a Mediterranean port city, but its sponsors hope it will do more
than that. Associated cultural and educational programs aim to strengthen
ties between New York and Barcelona and encourage a new generation of sailors on both sides of the Atlantic. Two exhibitions -- at the World Financial Center Winter Garden and the South Street Seaport Museum -- show ocean racing at its finest. What's more, students at the
New York Harbor School have met
the Spanish sailors and expect to video-conference with the teams during
the race. (back to top)
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RISING CURRENTS: PROJECTS FOR NYC'S WATERFRONT
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MOMA UNVEILS COMPELLING EXHIBIT 
An archipelago of manmade islands in New York Harbor connected by inflatable storm barriers.
An oyster nursery in the Gowanus Canal that seeds a new oyster reef in the Bay Ridge Flats (see art at right).
Lower Manhattan repaved with rainwater-absorbing greenways and a
substructure that can receive tides and storm surges without damage to
streets and buildings (see art of Delmonico's restaurant at top of newsletter and map below).
Could this be the future of New York City?
These and other proposals are featured in Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront, a compelling new exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art offering imaginative scenarios for the much-discussed effect of sea level rise on the New York and New Jersey coastline. Using impressive models, both physical and digital, the show depicts possibilities for adapting to rising ocean levels in five vulnerable areas: Lower Manhattan; Liberty State Park and Jersey City; Bayonne and the Kill van Kull; the Bay Ridge and Sunset Park neighborhoods in Brooklyn together with the east side of Staten Island directly across the Narrows; and the parts of Brooklyn encompassing Red Hook and the Gowanus Canal. The scenarios, developed by five different architectural teams in collaboration with MoMA and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, go a long way toward visualizing Chief Curator of Architecture and Design Barry Bergdoll's assertion that "climate change is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be seized."
 Most people do tend to think of rising sea levels in apocalyptic terms, of course, imagining Canal Street reverting to namesake status, flooded subways, and ever-rising sea walls blocking cherished views of the harbor. Rising Currents, on the other hand, depicts a new relationship between the city and its coastline, a reversion to the naturally marshy or beach-lined, "soft-edged" waterfront of the l7th century, before the construction of sea walls and piers transformed it into today's so-called hard-edged waterfront. The effect of the visionary ideas presented in this exhibition is a blurring of metropolitan boundaries between land and water and a forward thrust to occupy the widening edges of the harbor rather than persisting in futile efforts to wall it off. In one example, Brooklyn's Sunset Park is recast by the designers as an aquatic neighborhood married to the bay with new housing suspended over the water.
The threat of rising sea levels is real, to be sure, even if we don't all agree on what is causing the climate change prompting the rise. Rising Currents helps push the debate to a more productive level. Perhaps the greatest value of the collaborative effort that went into producing the show, and its profusely illustrated companion book, is to expose us to a wide variety of imaginative and, for the most part, practical approaches to the challenges faced by New York and all other coastal cities. A video on the MoMA website showcases each of the five interdisciplinary groups that were invited, to quote from the website introduction, "to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive 'soft' infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology."
Click here for a video about the exhibition. Click here for an interactive look at the show. (back to top)
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LEARN TO ROW IN NEW YORK CITY
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ROW NEW YORK IS OFFERING CLASSES FOR ADULTS THIS SPRING AND SUMMER
 Even if you made it through school without ever setting foot in a racing shell, it's not to late to learn to row. Row New York, a nonprofit organization that empowers NYC public school students through rowing instruction and competition, is offering rowing classes for adults. Experienced coaches will teach you the basic rowing stroke on indoor rowing machines and on a training barge, and eventually you'll graduate to competitive racing shells. Classes start next month and are scheduled for Saturday mornings and weeknights. Six classes will run you $200. Learn more and register at www.rownewyork.org. |
| MWA PARTNER SPOTLIGHT
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More than 400 Partners strong, and expanding every week, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance is more than a coalition; it's a force. We are
ferry captains, shipping executives, park directors, scientists,
sailors, paddlers, swimmers, teachers, urban planners, architects and
more. Together, we advocate for the best possible waterfront in the
best possible city, a waterfront that is clean and accessible to all,
with a robust maritime workforce and efficient, affordable waterborne
transportation. Join us! Contact Louis Kleinman at lkleinman@waterfrontalliance.orgMeet some MWA Partners!  |
| WATERFRONT NEWSLINKS
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Lone voice prods agencies to move to save marshesDaily News, April 6, 2010 A New Dawn in Sunset Park?Huffington Post, April 2, 2010 New York Regulators Deny Water Permit for Nuclear PlantWall Street Journal, April 3, 2010 Toxic Goo (and Romance) in the Waters of the GowanusThe New York Times, April 1, 20 Hudson River Dredging Project Ought to be Redesigned?Dredging Today, April 1, 2010 Water: A Special IssueNational Geographic Magazine, April 2010 Could an Urban "Jobs Surge" Boost Storm Surge Protection for Coastal Cities?Environmental Defense Fund, March 29, 2010 The Story of Bottled Water: Fear, Manufactured Demand and a $10,000 SandwichHuffington Post, March 22, 2010 (back to top)
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