Progress on the East River Blueway Plan

Pre­vi­ous City Atlas posts have cov­ered the evolv­ing plans for the East River Blue­way Plan between the Brook­lyn Bridge and 38th street. The plan is to improve water access and hab­it­abil­ity along that strip of Man­hat­tan coast through the ren­o­va­tion of green spaces and improve­ments in trans­porta­tion and infra­struc­ture. Urban Omnibus recently posted an inter­view with Adam Lubin­sky, one of the prin­ci­pals of WXY Archi­tec­ture + Urban Design, the firm chiefly respon­si­ble this colos­sal undertaking.

Mr. Lubin­sky begins by dis­cussing the over­all plan for the Blue­way and its inspi­ra­tion and then goes on to talk about the chal­lenges fac­ing his firm, the city, and the rel­e­vant neigh­bor­hoods involved. It’s not sim­ply a mat­ter of water access, but rather a mul­ti­tiered approach to hab­it­abil­ity and improve­ment involv­ing san­i­ta­tion, the MTA, and var­i­ous com­mu­nity boards and envi­ron­men­tal groups as well as all the typ­i­cal con­struc­tion and engi­neer­ing con­cerns. And the aes­thet­ics of the end prod­uct are as much of a con­cern as any of these other issues.

The inter­view is nice inside look into the con­sid­er­a­tions that go into city projects of this mag­ni­tude and the con­cerns that dif­fer­ent par­ties have to deal with and con­cede to. In a city where change is the watch­word, the East River Blue­way Plan is one of the more excit­ing projects on the docket and City Atlas will be fol­low­ing its progress closely.