After Hurricane Sandy, a Park in Lower Manhattan at the Center of a Fight – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/us/hurricane-sandy-lower-manhattan-nyc.html

By Michael Kimmelman

• Dec. 2, 2021Updated 5:47 a.m. ET

This story kicks off Headway, a new initiative at The New York Times exploring some of the world’s big challenges through the lens of progress. It’s a tale about a park in Lower Manhattan. But it’s also a parable about making urgent decisions in a democracy. If it provokes thoughts about inclusion, expertise or problem-solving in your own community, we hope you share them with us after reading.

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“The day after the storm swallowed her neighborhood, Nancy Ortiz woke before dawn to buy ice. It was 2012, and Hurricane Sandy had reclaimed Lower Manhattan for Mother Nature. Making landfall near Atlantic City, it swept north, ravaging the New Jersey coast, destroying thousands of homes and inundating New York City with waves as high as 14 feet.

Sandy shuttered Wall Street, rattling global markets, and for a moment the storm restored Manhattan’s early 17th-century coastline. A brackish murk of waist-high water submerged all the landfill that humans had dredged, salvaged and shipped to widen the island, and that now supported the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. It also swamped a large cluster of public housing developments and a beloved but bedraggled ribbon of greenery built by Robert Moses during the 1930s called East River Park.”

“. . . . In the debate over what is officially called John V. Lindsay East River Park, I sensed there might be some useful lessons about how we got here and how we might try to think differently. The park saga is not a conflict between bad versus good actors, but a confluence of different interests, different areas of expertise, different notions of community. It is a parable of progress.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

Great story, thank you Michel Kimmelman. It’s complicated, and hard to fathom what is best. It seems at first glance that the Dutch solution, the Big U, was always the best of the various options, with the longest timeline and deepest bow to ecology. Sorry DiBlasio killed it.

Sooner or later, more Americans will come to see that including nature, and allowing nature to thrive and do its thing, will be an essential part of any successful long term fight against rising seas and the disruptions of climate change.