Aerial shot of the South Bronx. The Hunts Point peninsula is dotted with warehouses and distribution centers reflecting varied industrial uses along the waterfront, with a small residential pocket at the upland core.
Photo credit: Hunts Point Vision Plan

Hunts Point Landing in the South Bronx, our latest project, was described by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, “River of Hope in the Bronx” this July. It is the fourth in our 20-project South Bronx Greenway master plan, conceived in 2006 to reclaim portions of the borough’s industrial waterfront by transforming brownfields into greenways and park space and providing public access to the river for the first time in 60 years.

Greenway routes and destinations from the South Bronx Greenway Master Plan (2006).
Photo credit: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects/NYC Economic Development Corporation

The Hunts Point peninsula, loosely bounded by the elevated Bruckner Expressway and ground level rail lines, is a relatively isolated locale. It is laden with massive food distribution operations, oil depots, waste-handling operations, scrap metal dealers, auto salvage yards, a sewage treatment plant, a prison, and a small mixed-use residential community. Our park is located at the former terminus point of Farragut Street at the Long Island Sound, wedged between a food distribution center and a City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) salt shed.

Clearly, the site’s constrained size presented considerable design challenges. In addition to these, our Green Team was also faced with an additional quandary—what to do about massive amounts of contaminated soil from a coal gasification plant that used to occupy the site? To meet our goal of restoring the degraded shoreline to a functioning tidal marsh and to treat all of the site’s stormwater in a biofiltration pond, we knew we had to excavate it. But the disposal of that much fill would have been very expensive. Trucking, lack of available receiving facilities, and disposal fees would have quickly added up to a large sum.

Material excavated from the shoreline (right) was stockpiled on site and dewatered prior to placement and fine grading of the upland berm.
Photo credit: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects

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