Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (New York, NY)

The Department of City Planning's Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan received a 2011 "Excellence on the Waterfront Award" from the Waterfront Center and the 2012 “Daniel Burnham Award,” the American Planning Association’s highest award for a comprehensive plan.

Released in March 2011, the Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan was a roadmap in achieving several waterfront goals through new citywide policies and site-specific recommendations. Those goals were:

Goal 1: Expand public access
Goal 2: Enliven the waterfront
Goal 3: Support the working waterfront
Goal 4: Improve water quality
Goal 5: Restore the natural waterfront
Goal 6: Enhance the Blue Network
Goal 7: Improve Government Oversight
Goal 8: Increase climate resilience

I contributed to this plan as a planning intern with the Manhattan Office. My primary responsibilities were to document assist in documenting existing conditions along the waterfront and determine opportunities for future action. I focused primarily on "Reach 5," which encompassed the majority of the Upper Manhattan waterfront. The presentation below summarizes my work on Reach 5.

I broke up Reach 5 into several subsections, and identified a number of priority areas.

One of these priority areas was the Harlem River Speedway, a pedestrian trail located between the Harlem River and Harlem River Drive. Access turned out to be a major issue, since the Speedway had only one entrance at each end of the trail. In addition, the southern entrance is very difficult to find and much of the corridor suffered from poor maintenance and wayfinding.

Another opportunity was the possibility of working with the Department of Parks & Recreation (DPR) to provide an access to the Speedway via the High Bridge. The DPR was moving forward with plans to renovate and re-open the High Bridge as a pedestrian bridge, and a previous entrance point to the Speedway existed prior to the construction of the Harlem River Drive, making the provision of an access point at that location a logical goal.

A major resulting recommendation was to attempt to rehabilitate important tidal mudflat ecosystems at the northern tip of Manhattan, and to concurrently expand the system of street-end parks that had been successfully implemented in the Sherman Creek area further south.