Illustration of the BIG-led "BIG U" resiliency proposal for Lower Manhattan. Image courtesy of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group).

In late October 2012, Superstorm Sandy crashed into the East Coast. Causing more than $70 billion in damage, the storm ripped buildings from their foundations and flooded streets. In New York City, the hard concrete edge that separates Lower Manhattan from the East River was breached, filling the FDR expressway with brackish water and short-circuiting ConEdison’s 14th Street Substation, causing the much-circulated image of a near-total blackout in all points south. With the freeway flooded and the Lower East Side dark, this unprecedented damage came to represent the vulnerability of coastal infrastructure.

In response to the destruction, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched a novel competition in 2013: Rebuild by Design (RBD). Seeking to address the combined effects of climate change, sea-level rise, and aging infrastructure through interdisciplinary design solutions, the competition tapped into the combined expertise of architects, ecologists, and engineers. The goal was to make cities more resilient. Capitalizing on the large sums of federal funding, designers could create holistic plans, rebuilding while righting historic urban design wrongs. Indeed, many of the urban areas with aging infrastructure damaged by Sandy like Hoboken, New Jersey; the Rockaways in Queens; and Bridgeport, Connecticut have high levels of income inequality and vexing public health disparities.

In New York City, BIG’s plan, The BIG U, proposed a total redesign of Lower Manhattan’s relationship to water. Wrapping the southern tip of the island with an emerald belt of wave-buffering wetlands and parks, the plan combined flood gates with a redesign of the coastline. The proposal sought to soften this hard edge, concrete bulkheads and piers that hold back the rising waters of the Hudson and East Rivers from one of the densest and wealthiest urban settlements in the United States.

Where there is wealth, there is also poverty. Along the East River, the plan was produced with input from the residents of the historically working-class Lower East Side. As one of the largest blocks of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) tenants in the five boroughs, many of the 28,000 public housing residents supported a plan in which East River Park would gradually terrace into the river—allowing the rigid bulkhead to soften into a more natural, sloping coastline. The park would flood in high-water events and the addition of a long berm along the perimeter of the park would separate it from the inland housing during future flood events.

The plan also envisioned the prominent Robert-Moses-era expressway, the FDR, converted into a public transit corridor, turning the smog-inducing automobile lanes into space for dedicated buses and light rail. The combined effects of creating a floodable park and reducing motor vehicle traffic would improve public health for the large population of low-income, people of color. At the same time, this would reduce greenhouse gases, which are a major source of planet-warming and the ultimate cause of the sea-level rise. With a more natural connection between the city and its surrounding estuary, people could engage with their local waterways inducing civic desire to improve local ecology.

The proposal sought to soften this hard edge, concrete bulkheads and piers that hold back the rising waters of the Hudson and East Rivers from one of the densest and wealthiest urban settlements in the United States.

Instead, in 2018, the city vetoed the community plan and submitted a redesign that calls for the park to be buried under eight to ten feet of fill. Ignoring the recommendations of the architect-led design team, the city opted to rebuild the same park at a higher elevation—the water’s edge unchanged and the highway preserved.

At least one group, East River Park Action, has sued the city to obtain redacted documents related to the study that led to the original BIG plan being scrapped. According to the local Sixth Street Community Center: “Resiliency planning must address the root causes of the climate crisis and it must address the inequitable effects that such plans may have on our most vulnerable, indigenous, Black, communities of color.” According to the center, the city’s plan keeps the automobile expressway intact, cuts down over 1,000 trees, and does nothing to address the root cause of the climate crisis: car exhaust. Meanwhile, De Blasio’s plan “is a massive billion-dollar shrine to the automobile and fossil fuel,” says the community group. That is, the plan ignores the “elephant in the park,” which is the FDR.

While the city has installed sandbags along the Lower East Side’s waterfront—one of the only visible improvements to the infrastructure of resilience and storm-water management in the last decade—earlier this summer, contractors finally broke ground on the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project.

As residents brace themselves for the imminent closure of vast tracts of the waterfront park, the irony of the continued beautification and improvements to Manhattan’s West Side with indulgent—and admittedly architecturally exciting—additions like Thomas Heatherwick’s $260 million Little Island is hard to ignore. Ripe for continued real estate speculation, the West Side seems to keep getting nicer, while the East Side lacks a continuously navigable bike path to this day.

Ripe for continued real estate speculation, the West Side seems to keep getting nicer, while the East Side lacks a continuously navigable bike path to this day.

This is in keeping with political trends that have dictated the city’s approach to urban planning, infrastructure, and housing since the apex of its financial woes of the 1970s. In a 1974 New York Times article, “Making New York Smaller,” planning professor Roger Starr, who was also a former administrator of New York’s Housing and Development Administration argued for “planned shrinkage” in which the city focuses its investments in high-density areas and divests in “dead” areas like the South Bronx. Starr believed that the city was shrinking, that its population would level out at five million, and that the city should only invest in the areas of concentrated commercial importance, leaving peripheral zones like the LES to empty.

This policy has been enacted for decades, as New York consistently underfunds its public housing, infrastructure, and parks allowing these to deteriorate—then spending more to complete delayed, basic repairs. Unable to accrue debt like the Federal Government, cities like New York have opted to divest. This is especially true in low-income and areas populated by higher proportions of people of color. These areas also lack the benefits of the Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that have garnered large sums to improve the landscapes and streetscapes of wealthy, central areas of Manhattan.

What does the city stand to gain by ignoring the community-backed plan? Do city officials wish to make the lives of low-income residents as miserable as possible?

Framed in terms of this systematic withholding of funds, the rejection of BIG’s plan is still perplexing, as it was estimated to cost less than $800 million, substantially lower than the up to $1.5 billion anticipated for the city’s new plan. Furthermore, as community resistance to the ESCR has mounted, the mayor recently announced nearly $140 million in funding for additional community amenities. The press release does not mention that the mayor’s plan will require closing the park for at least five years. 

What does the city stand to gain by ignoring the community-backed plan? Do city officials wish to make the lives of low-income residents as miserable as possible? Is it a simple case of political cronyism in which the undisclosed entity that won the contract for the city plan is married to the retrograde engineering of the city’s plan? Is the city’s opposition to the BIG plan tied to the influence of agencies like the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) who would rather see a plan that keeps water off its shores at all costs—waterways that are still polluted by weekly loads of raw sewage as the agency struggles to process the effects of combined sewage and rainwater in its aging stormwater infrastructure? A floodable park might put additional pressure on the DEP to keep the water clean. Or would the park have to close during any high-water event, thus raising the consciousness of the state of NYC’s waterways? Imagine a city in which citizens are ever-conscious of the quality of their surrounding waterways. That would be dangerous.

This is of course all speculation, but one thing is for sure: This will not be the first time that the city has taken the opportunity to pass on plans that right the wrongs of infrastructure—passing at the chance to correct old plans that have unequally disadvantaged the city’s most vulnerable. The Cross Bronx Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, both Robert Moses projects, like the FDR, are above ground highways that cut through New York City severing entire portions of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Not only do these roadways contribute to pollution that unequally burdens already disadvantaged residents, but they often create physical barriers that divide: Manhattan’s LES is cut off from its East River Park; in Brooklyn, Red Hook is separated from its more white and affluent Carroll Gardens.

These are precisely the kinds of urban design issues that frame environmental and racial justice. The only thing lacking is the political will to enact these plans.

Of course, these freeways did not have to be this way. They could have been underground. Often dismissed as too costly, below-grade freeways flow below the stately limestone of L’Enfant’s Washington, DC, and have been installed in waterfront areas of diverse cities like Boston and Madrid. Designs for burying the BQE have been circulated widely, including calls from New York Magazine architecture critic, Justin Davidson and a feature by Times critic, Michael Kimmelman. Calls are mounting to use Biden’s infrastructure dollars to “cap” the Cross Bronx Expressway. These are precisely the kinds of urban design issues that frame environmental and racial justice. The only thing lacking is the political will to enact these plans. Now that the designs have left the drawing board, it’s time for architects to join the actual fight to ensure these historic wrongs can be corrected. If only there were a trade organization with enough gumption to push such a position.