New York's beloved Wagner Park and its environs will shut down shortly after Labor Day.
Helayne Seidman
Kiss goodbye to the Battery Park Metropolis we all know and love.
The advanced’s widespread Hudson River waterfront faces imminent damage — not from the far-fetched threat of a catastrophic future flood however from state environmental cowboys and their political path canines.
Quickly after Labor Day, the 1.2-mile-long esplanade and its parallel lawns and walkways will start remodeling right into a development nightmare which may final a decade — all within the identify of “defending” it from a future storm surge that exists solely within the fantasies of climate-change zanies.
The precise devastation comes by the hands of the state-controlled Battery Park Metropolis Authority. The injury is to begin with Wagner Park, the three.5-acre, magnificently sculpted and landscaped jewel at Battery Park Metropolis’s southern tip.
Wagner can be closed for at the least two years. New Yorkers ought to howl, scream, and curse over the pointless desecration of a public treasure.
The park boasts spectacular views of the river and the Statue of Liberty. Manicured inexperienced lawns invite sunbathers and sightseers. The grounds are dwelling to the compelling-to-all-faiths Museum of Jewish Heritage in addition to a well-liked restaurant in an elevated pavilion. It has been successful because it opened in 1996 when New York Occasions architectural critic Paul Goldberger aptly referred to as it “one of many best public areas New York has seen in at the least a era.”
Now its future is on the whims of bureaucrats. If and when the park emerges from state-sponsored hell, it will likely be a distinct, grotesquely warped Wagner Park — reconstructed 10 toes above its present top and unrecognizable from its current state.
Its wonderful plantings, timber and lawns can be uprooted for a brand new park filled with “uncovered floodwalls,” “buried floodwalls” and “flip-up deployables.” Photographs of recent landscaping and facilities proven in BPCA supplies are described as “proposals.”
The Jewish museum will stay open all through development however it will likely be fenced and remoted.
The concept is supposedly to guard the park from a future storm surge. However to really imperil Wagner Park would take a flood unseen since Biblical instances — or one created in a Dreamworks special-effects studio.
It’s too late to cease the plan regardless of years of neighborhood unease and outrage. With out divine intervention, it is likely to be probably the most heinous act of civic vandalism for the reason that unique Penn Station was demolished within the Sixties.
Superstorm Sandy in 2012 gave climate-change zealots the worst-case-scenarios they wanted to demand tearing up full of life, viable waterfronts, regardless of the collateral injury to neighborhoods.
One justification for the BPC “resiliency” undertaking was a 2013 FEMA prediction of future storm-surge ranges that have been two toes larger than Metropolis Corridor’s consultants thought potential. Town appealed the findings and, remarkably, FEMA in 2016 yielded to town’s place and lowered its guesswork from 11.3 toes to 9.1 toes. But the BPCA used the discredited 2013 mannequin in defending the necessity for successfully strip-mining Battery Park Metropolis.
The BPCA’s “Resilience Motion Plan” for Wagner Park and a Draft Environmental Assertion are loaded with opaque technical particulars and subjects resembling “inclusive neighborhood” having nothing to do with flood threats. They’re immaterial to the bigger problem of destroying an excellent park as a way to serve a woke environmental agenda.
The BPCA naturally cites Sandy’s influence in components of the 5 boroughs. It didn’t let info get in the best way of propaganda. The Resilience Motion Plan cites, amongst “vital shocks” to Battery Park Metropolis over the course of its existence, “the destruction from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.”
That is wildly deceptive. There was no destruction in Wagner Park. The ocean surge that devastated components of coastal New York did some injury to ballfields and a neighborhood heart to the north.
Most essential, condo buildings got here by means of unscathed. A later New York Journal cowl story about Sandy famously shoed Battery Park Metropolis brightly lit amdist a sea of darkness.
That was as a result of all the, landfill-based advanced — particularly Wagner Park — was designed to face up to nearly any conceivable excessive water.
The $221 million Wagner boondoggle is to be adopted by $631 million re-makes of sure of BPC’s northern sections for a similar spurious causes.
They’re just like town’s $1.45 billion Decrease Manhattan Coastal Resiliency undertaking, which has already gutted the much-loved East River Park alongside the Decrease East Aspect and East Village the place 991 timber are being destroyed in order to bury the park’s 57 acres underneath new landfill.
However the BPC schemes will enrich legions of engineers, architects, consultants and landscapers. Amongst them engineering agency AECOM, which was tapped throughout former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s time period to guide a “multi-disciplinary workforce” to assemble a grasp “resiliency” plan for all the Decrease Manhattan waterfront
AECOM, a favourite in Albany energy circles, additionally consulted for the Empire State Growth Corp. on the Buffalo Payments stadium problem. It really useful constructing a heavily-subsidized new dwelling for the NFL workforce reasonably than renovate and improve its present facility. The soccer scheme pushed by Gov. Hochul is extensively and correctly condemned as an unconscionable giveaway of taxpayer cash.
However when you like Wagner Park the best way it's, carry your digicam telephones now – as a result of it gained’t be there for lengthy.
BPCA spokesman Nick Sbordone mentioned, “The science is evident: storms are getting extra frequent and extreme, and we should act now. We're shifting forward with a plan for Wagner Park to raised shield our neighborhood.”
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