Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City has seen several major disasters in recent memory, a fact that was not lost on the presenters at Thursday’s topping-out ceremony of the area’s new SeaGlass carousel. “This community, you cannot bring us down,” said Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who spoke at the ceremony. “You can attack us, flood us… but we are about building and creating.”
Borough President Scott Stringer speaks at the SeaGlass topping-out ceremony.
The carousel, designed by New York firm WXY, will be the centerpiece of the newly redesigned Battery Park. Several speakers at the ceremony lauded it not just as a new neighborhood landmark and beautiful work of design, but as a symbol of the resilience and strength of a community that has endured both the 9/11 attacks and hurricane Sandy.
Attendees admired the completed exterior. Inside, banners were placed to indicate the scale of the carousel seats. Read more…
Across New York City and the tri-state region, neighborhoods glimpsed the climate change forecast—massive flooding, storm surges, and rising seas. With lives lost and billions in damages, it’s safe to say our communities will never be the same.
Red Hook flooded, photo courtesy The Brownstoner
Into this new reality comes a renewed vigor for finding new ways to cope. In New York City we’re hearing about many different solutions including storm barriers, oyster reefs, and waterfront parks—and as many political opinions. Some of these ideas treat water as something to keep at bay, working like the Dutch to build walls to protect us and keep the water out.
But storm barriers pose a lot of problems. They wreak havoc on the marine environment, are challenging to implement legally and politically, can cost billions, and are a binary system, meaning they work up until they fail, then it’s a disaster. A barrier does help with one thing—preserving what we have.
Brooklyn Bridge and harbor, New York City, New York. 1903
I am a climate refugee, or at least, I was for nearly 2 weeks after Superstorm Sandy hit the NYC metro area. What is a climate refugee? It’s someone who’s been displaced due to the effects of climate change. Millions of people throughout NY, NJ and CT are now official members of this latest category of citizens. Climate change has been called a moral issue because impoverished nations are supposed to be the first impacted. Sandy illustrated that rich localities can easily become the Third World when the web of infrastructure we depend on collapses. It’s a good bet another Sandy will hit the region within five to ten years. It was the second hurricane to ransack the northeast in two years. Let’s hope the next downpour isn’t a category 3 or 4.
Climate Refugees Map by UNEP
The aftermath has brought about two major ways of looking at our future. One is to explore how the region can become more resilient and adaptive to climate change. The other calls for “rebuilding stronger than ever” and implementing sea walls to protect the Big Apple from surging water. Both paths are extremely challenging, because we are facing three-front fight. We have to adapt to how our footprint has already altered weather patterns. We have to muster the willingness to continue eliminating further damage to the climate, and we must unlearn what we think modern society is. Lastly, we have to do this as budgets and debt make it impossible for expensive solutions.
My Experience
At around 7p.m. on the night before Sandy made landfall, the lights in my house flickered and then went black. It would be nearly 14 days before they came back on. My house was built in the 1960’s – it is a beautiful vintage, mid-century style ranch home. When first built, it was a model for the future. Everything in the house is electric from the hot water heater to the space heating to the air conditioning. Three decades ago, electricity was cheap. Now, homes with electric-centric mode of operation are a financial burden.
Hurricane Sandy has brought home the responsibility that we share to make our region more resilient in the face of severe weather and more responsive to the threats posed by climate change.
What is certain is that we will need new policies, and new investments, to reduce our susceptibility to environmental disasters. Sandy led to the death of more than 70 people in the region and caused more than $50 billion in damage and economic losses. The storm also disrupted the daily lives and commutes of nearly all of the region’s 23 million residents. Whether or not these events are the result of human-caused global warming, it is clear that we need to do much more to lessen their toll.
Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath have awakened us to an uncomfortable reality: The country’s most populated area and its largest economic engine sits on a vulnerable coastline. Yet there are many measures that would help ease the impact of storm surges.
When the lights went out in lower Manhattan on that evening in late October, darkness enveloped everything around me. A week later I was grateful to see what two New York photographers and filmmakers saw that night. Their work helped me understand the magnitude of the blackout Superstorm Sandy visited on my beloved city, of which I could see only a small sliver from my windows. Here Ruggero and Valentina Vanni write about what it was like to be out on the streets as they documented this frightening and beautiful short film, which turns out to be a cautionary tale of modern life.—SSS
“Downtown New York, October 29, 10:13 pm.—The lights had gone out. The brunt of the hurricane just passed us. The wind fell and the rain stopped. We had to go out and see.
“We have been living here for over 30 years and photographed all over the city. We are in love with downtown Manhattan and its ever-changing urban environment at day and night. We knew this time it will be different. We could not imagine how different.
Hurricane Sandy has invoked a lot of change. Whether it’s coast lines or politics, we have experienced first-hand what scientists, planners, and architects have been warning about for years, that a storm like Sandy was going to happen.
“Sometime between now and 2100, a storm will dump 18 feet of seawater into lower Manhattan, flooding much of the financial district, Battery Park, and most of the subway stations south of Rector Street. Six hundred oil tanks in Bayonne, New Jersey, will be inundated. And all but a nub of Liberty State Park, the landfill opposite Ellis Island, will disappear into the harbor. That’s the grim forecast for New York.”
The above quote comes from Suzanne LaBarre in her 2010 blog post, Hope Floats, where she describes MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition “as an optimistic rebuke to the government’s stopgap approach to public infrastructure. Whereas the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erects concrete dams and levees, these architects favor broad solutions that reconfigure the social, economic, political, and natural landscape.”
An image from the MoMA Rising Currents exhibition, Courtesy of Scape Landscape Architecture
LaBarre rightly calls out how the Rising Currents exhibition took sustainable and creative approaches to dealing with cataclysmic storms like Sandy. The ideas in the exhibition illustrated concepts that would help create resilient communities; communities that are not only physically safe from the water’s wrath, but stronger socially, economically, and environmentally
Last week I experienced my first New Orleans hurricane. I’d been through big storms in the northeast before—a number of times, one time on a small island—but this one felt different. Maybe it was the timing, so close to the anniversary of Katrina. Maybe I’ve chosen to live in an inherently vulnerable city. The good news: the levees performed well (thank you, Army Corps of Engineers), the bad news: the local utility company didn’t. Hurricane Isaac did, however, provide some valuable life lessons:
1. There are only two kinds of hurricanes. Boring hurricanes involve power outages, unrelenting heat, unrelenting rain, fierce winds, agitation, anger, dead cell phones, and acute internet withdrawal. “Interesting” hurricanes include all of the above, plus boats, helicopter evacuations, National Guard troops, motels in Arkansas, brushes with death, and occasionally death. Boring is better.
2. There is no such thing as a small hurricane.
Unlike tornados and earthquakes, hurricanes are easily tracked. You are given ample warning. Having experienced Isaac, I have now established a baseline metric for future evacuations: if a storm turns the corner at Key West and enters the warm waters of the Gulf already a hurricane, I will immediately start packing.
3. Blizzards are more fun than hurricanes.
At some point you can venture out into a snowstorm. Throw a snowball, make a snowman, frolic. In New Orleans you really can’t step outside in a hurricane until the tree limbs stop crashing to the ground. And then what?
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