‘Simply Wrong’: Menin, Advocates Blast Mamdani for Scaling Back East River Greenway Uptown

City Council Speaker Julie Menin slammed the Mamdani administration on Thursday for canceling part of the city’s planned reconstruction of the East River Greenway between E. 94th and E. 107th streets, as advocates derided the decision as “insulting.”

City officials should have been well aware of the site’s potential construction challenges when they launched the project years ago, Menin charged at a press conference with Friends of the East River Esplanade and the neighborhood advocacy group Civitas.

“It’s not right, because a promise was made to this East Harlem community that the East River waterfront in this neighborhood would be developed, like it’s been done in East Midtown, like it’s been done on the West Side of Manhattan,” Menin said at the rally near E. 111th Street. “That is the promise that has been made, and that is a promise that is deferred.”

Earlier this year, the project’s managers at the Economic Development Corporation and the city Parks Department revealed they’d water down the nearly $300-million rebuild of the crumbling esplanade. The agencies pointed to the difficulty of staging the project between the FDR Drive and the river, and said the Department of Transportation did not allow enough time and room on the highway for construction, which ballooned costs for the city.

The city’s reversal is particularly noteworthy because the esplanade project belongs to a comprehensive, $732-million de Blasio-era plan to create a continuous greenway on Manhattan’s eastern waterfront — an enormous transit and recreational amenity that West Siders have enjoyed for the past 16 years.

Just three years ago, EDC spent $217 million to fill in eight blocks of the eastern greenway between E. 53rd and E. 61st Streets in the tony neighborhood of Sutton Place. It’s unclear why that project didn’t face such a dramatic reduction in scope.

“This is an equity issue,” Menin said. “The East Harlem community cannot be left behind. It is unfair, it is inequitable, and it is simply wrong.”

Staging fright

For the East Harlem section, DOT offered to close just one of the FDR’s six lanes, and only on nights and weekends. EDC, which is overseeing the project, and the Parks Department told locals at a community board meeting in July that the agencies couldn’t perform the required work if they needed to disassemble their setup every morning. They also could not bring in barges, since the river is too shallow at the project location, EDC reps told the civic panel. So instead, officials decided to build an expensive platform in the East River. That dramatically elevated the project’s price tag and forced them to slash its scope by more than half of its original length.

DOT spokesperson Will Livingston followed up on Thursday saying that the equipment cannot be staged in the roadway “at the scale needed” for the project, due to “strict weight restrictions” along parts of the FDR.

The water at several locations near the greenway is too shallow to ship in barges with cranes, said EDC rep Seth Schuster, adding that the “esplanade and FDR Drive are interconnected structures that must be decoupled for FDR Drive’s safety and integrity.”

But the city has set up building sites on the greenway — which is part of the same structure — just a few blocks uptown, and it has routinely closed several or all lanes of traffic on the FDR for other recent work along the riverfront.

“This has been done before, this is not rocket science,” said Jennifer Ratner, who chairs the Friends of the East River Esplanade. “That’s why almost $300 million was allocated, because it’s a complicated spot. You’re going to come and tell me… that it turns out that the FDR Drive and the waterfront are on either side of the esplanade — how insulting is that to say that?”

Political will

The city successfully staged large construction vehicles and equipment on the greenway north of E. 114th Street, as part of a separate project to stabilize the waterfront there. That suggests the path could be stable enough to hold at least some heavy gear.

The city has also previously closed off more of the highway for other projects in the southern half of Manhattan. In 2015, the city shuttered all northbound lanes on the Upper East Side. In 2022, DOT shut down a complete closure of the FDR for the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project on the Lower East Side. And in 2024, the city installed a new pedestrian bridge on Delancey Street by closing the highway below. The agency continues to impose double-lane closures south of the Williamsburg Bridge for that work.

“If there was a will, they would figure out a way,” Mark Alexander, president of Civitas, told Streetsblog. “They could reduce the downtown lanes to two lanes, and the uptown lanes to two lanes, and put in a new divider along the entire front of East Harlem, and in the span of a year or a year and a half, they would have complete access to the waterfront.”

“It’s completely specious to argue that they can’t stage [construction],” Alexander added. “It’s nonsense. They can stage it. They just need to be honest about it.”

The city built the greenway, also known as Bobby Wagner Walk, as part of the FDR Drive — then known as the East River Drive — in the late 1930s. The underlying landfill includes masonry rubble collected from London after Germany bombed the British capital during World War II.