Wagner Park in Battery Park Metropolis is slated to be closed for two years beginning this month for storm safety upgrades.
Helayne Seidman
Two cheers for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin’s belated opposition to the approaching destruction of Battery Park Metropolis’s beloved Wagner Park.
The state-driven “resiliency” scheme to shut and tear up the park for 2 years as a way to change it with an unrecognizably warped panorama is a stroke of civic desecration seeking a legit goal.
The Battery Park Metropolis Authority, a creature of the Democratic-dominated state authorities, plans to start chopping up the three.5-acre Hudson River leisure oasis and uproot its magnificent landscaping inside days. The concept is to guard it from a monster future storm that exists solely within the desires of environmental extremists.
Sadly, Zeldin’s welcome outrage is simply too late, too little. He stated, “Residents have identified that Wagner Park didn’t expertise extreme flooding throughout Superstorm Sandy.” Identified? It’s an indisputable fact. No “extreme flooding?” It didn’t expertise any.
He and different officers wanted to howl greater than a 12 months in the past when the $221 million (ha!) boondoggle was introduced. It will elevate the park 10 toes and inflict “uncovered floodwalls,” “buried floodwalls” and “flip-up deployables” (no matter they are) on what are actually a few of Manhattan’s most satisfying lawns and vantage factors for sunbathing and sightseeing.
The explanation: to guard the location from a wholly theoretical, “mannequin”-based prediction of a “100-year storm” by 2050.
Positive, local weather change is actual. However it isn’t occurring with the velocity and depth that “specialists” would have us consider. It’s simple to cherry-pick snapshots of environmental harm. However an extended view acknowledges that there are extra polar bears at present than within the Sixties.
Cheap concern about local weather change shouldn’t authorize authorities to destroy completely sound and beloved public amenities within the title of “saving” them from a theoretical future calamity that may by no means happen.
The BPCA’s assertion that it prioritizes “science” is as specious as early-pandemic claims that “science” justified shutting down the world. In reality, authorities bureaucrats prioritize voodoo environmentalism that may, if left unchecked, construct a dome over Manhattan to guard skyscrapers from falling asteroids.
If there ever was hope to dam or stall the Wagner scheme, our legislative leaders wanted to throw their our bodies in its method years in the past when the BPCA, egged on by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, declared its intentions.
Battery Park Metropolis Neighborhood Affiliation board member Britni Erez praised Zeldin, saying, “Gov. Kathy Hochul ought to notice this can be a large election problem for folks throughout Decrease Manhattan.”
Drawback is, their elected representatives, all Democrats, are completely on board with the scheme. Amongst them: Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, state Sen. Brian Kavanagh (whose district contains Battery Park Metropolis!), Meeting Members Charles D. Fall and Yuh-Line Niou and Metropolis Councilman Christopher Marte.
After the Wagner plan was first made public, they picked nits over fantastic factors — however steered away from condemning the general atrocity that it's.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorses each one among Cuomo’s rotten real-estate and building schemes, is unlikely to thank her opponent Zeldin for his enter and announce she’s canceling the challenge.
The Put up first howled over the Wagner Park drama two months in the past. Native residents who’d given up hope of blocking the bulldozers rallied anew towards it.
The BPCA tried to mollify them by proclaiming that the newly designed venue can have 74% extra inexperienced area than within the unique design. Goll-y! But it’ll nonetheless have barely much less inexperienced area than now, supposedly to permit different adjustments to make the park extra “accessible.”
All this to guard it from an imagined, catastrophic future that’s past a worst-case state of affairs. Superstorm Sandy, which walloped the town with the best sea surge in its historical past, didn’t lay a drop of water on Wagner Park. The remainder of Battery Park Metropolis suffered solely minor harm at a couple of factors close to its northern finish, removed from Wagner Park.
Regardless of warnings from Metropolis Corridor for Battery Park Metropolis’s 16,000 residents to evacuate because the storm approached, the condominium buildings by no means misplaced energy and got here by means of simply fantastic. Residents returned to search out their houses intact.
Why? As a result of Battery Park Metropolis, which is constructed on landfill, was designed to be storm-resilient from the start.
It is perhaps too late for Wagner Park, however a Zeldin victory in November may steer the town (and state) again to some sanity on local weather change — and head off the subsequent Wagner Park we’d in any other case stand to lose.
scuozzo@nypost.com
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