Events

East River Charrette: Creating a Vision for East Midtown’s Waterfront

New York has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to open up access to Manhattan's Midtown East waterfront. The midtown section of the FDR Drive is being rebuilt, the former Con Ed site is being redeveloped, and the City is planning to facilitate the expansion of the U.N. campus and create an adjacent waterfront esplanade. If planned together, these projects could be designed to create new park space, provide access to the waterfront, and complete a greenway that would go all the way from the Battery to Harlem.

By Aaron Donovan

7:39 PM EDT on May 29, 2007

New York has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to open up access to Manhattan’s Midtown East waterfront. The midtown section of the FDR Drive is being rebuilt, the former Con Ed site is being redeveloped, and the City is planning to facilitate the expansion of the U.N. campus and create an adjacent waterfront esplanade. If planned together, these projects could be designed to create new park space, provide access to the waterfront, and complete a greenway that would go all the way from the Battery to Harlem.

But we need a vision first. In just a few weeks, the Municipal Art Society, Manhattan Community Board 6, Councilman Dan Garodnick and other elected officials will convene six of the world’s leading landscape architects for an extraordinary 12-hour design charrette (an intensive design workshop) to create a vision for the East River waterfront from 34th Street to 63rd Street.

Be a part of it. Join the charrette to give input and ideas to help create the vision.

Aaron Donovan

Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

Events

Comments Are Temporarily Disabled

Streetsblog is in the process of migrating our commenting system. During this transition, commenting is temporarily unavailable.

Once the migration is complete, you will be able to log back in and will have full access to your comment history. We appreciate your patience and look forward to having you back in the conversation soon.