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.

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.

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Brainstorming a New Vision for Midtown’s East River Waterfront

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The Municipal Art Society of New York, City Council member Dan Garodnick, and Manhattan’s Community Board 6 ran an intensive day-long workshop last Wednesday to develop a new vision for Midtown’s inaccessible East River waterfront. On Sunday, MAS unveiled some of the results. From the MAS press release: "By realigning and lowering the 42nd Street […]

Draft Plan for Waterfront Promises Greenways, Silent on Ferries

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With New York City in the midst of a wholesale rethinking of its more than 500 miles of waterfront, the Department of City Planning recently released a draft of its new comprehensive waterfront plan, Vision 2020. That plan lays out both broad citywide objectives, such as a commitment to building borough-wide greenways across the city, […]

East River Day Waterfront Tours

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New York’s waterfront is being transformed. From Brooklyn Bridge Park to Throg’s Neck on the East River alone, over 1000 acres of redevelopment is slated to occur over the upcoming years. This scale of development is an enormous opportunity – and a risk. Too much waterfront development in recent years has created sterile, privatized places […]

New East River Ferry Service to Launch in May

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Big news from today’s Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance conference: a new city-subsidized ferry service will begin crossing the East River in May. City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden announced that the new service will run for at least two years, departing at least every fifteen minutes during rush hour. Making the ferry service possible, said Burden, were […]

Waterfront Plan Provides Timeline for Greenway Expansions

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The Randall’s Island Connector, part of the South Bronx Greenway, would run underneath an Amtrak trestle and create a new link to bike or walk between the South Bronx and Manhattan. Image: NYCEDC New York City’s greenway system will see steady growth in the next three years, according to city plans released earlier this week. […]