The Spliced City

I spent a lot of time around the edges of the island of Manhattan during my last trip to NYC. In fact, other than on my way to and from JFK, I barely touched down in Queens or Brooklyn this time, and only crossed over to the Bronx once, during a lovely Monday morning outing while exploring Van Cortland Village. (More on that later.)

This was not primarily intended as a research trip, but the spliced city themes emerged in abundance as I spent a good amount of time exploring Manhattan’s shoreline and witnessing its physical and visual interaction and intertwinement with its two adjacent streams, the Hudson and the East River.

We stayed on East 29th & Park Ave South this time so my first jog on day one was a short few miles out to the East River. The area north and south of the UN around there is still awaiting full completion of the Manhattan Greenway that is supposed to envelop the entirety of the island. In order to access the existing stretch of the run/bike path you have to cross FDR Drive either via the footbridge on E25th or the underpass at E23rd which brings you to the top of Stuyvesant Cove Park. This is an utterly surprising, delightful little sliver of coastline managed by the non-profit SolarOne in cooperation with the NY Economic Development Cooperation. On their website, they advertise the park as “a Lower Manhattan greenspace and educational hub for conversations on food, climate, and social justice, [b]uilt atop a former industrial site on stolen Lenape land.”

SolarOne’s Stuyvesant Cove Park Website

The organization’s discourse has a decidedly multi-species justice vibe, noting that they are committed to creating “a healthy ecosystem for all of the city’s stakeholders: humans, animals, birds, insects, fungi, and microbes alike:

Screenshot from the Stuy Cove Park Website

The entire stretch is part of the East River Coastal Resiliency Project, a massive effort to prepare Lower Manhattan better for the inevitable next Superstorm. As the pertaining website for the project explains, when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, it devastated entire neighborhoods and caused $19 billion in damage.

Image Source: own

Here are a few screen-grabs from the project website:

https://www.nyc.gov/site/escr/about/project-background.page

The design sketches for the project are impressive and will be transformative for Lower Manhattan. For the time being, however, the entire lower half of East River Park is closed during construction so to add on extra miles on the next day, I had to contend myself with switching over to the lovely Lindsay East River Track. The vibes were awesome, through, with kids and dads playing soccer on the inside field, a variety of joggers and walkers circling the astroturf, and a lovely group of ladies practicing their Tai Chi dance moves to music.

Image source: author

On Sunday, I finally had time for a longer run. I had originally planned to run up through Central Park and then up along the Hudson to the Little Red Lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge and back. It was a glorious, sunny morning perfect for a longer run, so rather than retrace my steps, I kept going, first meandering through Hudson Heights and Fort Tyron before finishing in Inwood. The official Hudson River Greenway is currently interrupted along two sections – one is undergoing scheduled maintenance while another section had a sizable sinkhole appear some months ago, which, much to the dismay of many bike commuters, still has not been fixed.

Even more upsetting is the fact that this very stretch had only recently been fixed at the expense of over 1.2 million dollars, only to cave in again mere months later…

Source: Streetsblog NYC

Folks on reddit report several workarounds, including hopping the barricades. I did not mind the detours as they took me back into the adjacent neighborhoods for a bit – into areas that I wanted to check out more closely anyway.

If you look at the series of photos below, you would hardly believe that all this is still the island of Manhattan. In some stretches, you are right next to the water, while other stretches take you high above the water with amazing views.

And then you just hop on the subway a few block away and get immediately engulfed by urbanity again…

Probably the most interesting new neighborhood I explored on this trip was Van Cortland Village. Definitely a hidden gem that I am not even sure I should be revealing to the world…