Long-Delayed Pedestrian Bridge Moves Closer to Reality
Rendering of the West Thames Street Pedestrian Bridge, now expected to open by the end of 2017, will be enclosed by mesh fencing and feature a double lenticular truss. Rendering: WXY Architecture + Urban Design
The planned West Thames Street Pedestrian Bridge, in an off-again, on-again state of bureaucratic limbo for years, is inching ever closer to reality.
The project last month got the go-ahead from the Battery Park City Authority for a final payment—$750,000—toward a detailed design phase that will allow contractors to bid on the bridge, now budgeted at $27.5 million. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC) is funneling $20 million of federal money into the project; the authority has agreed to pick up $7.5 million in construction costs.
Over the years, plans for the bridge have been mired in jurisdictional and funding disputes between the city, state and the Battery Park City Authority, as well as slowed by a host of other delays.
“It’s an unbelievably complex group of governmental interests that have to come together to make this work,” LMDC President David Emil said in a phone interview. Aside from disagreements over who would pay for what, he said, “It is a city project that is landing in Battery Park City. It goes over a state highway that is going to be built by the city of New York using federal funds.”
“I wish it could’ve been faster and it should’ve been faster,” he added, “but it’s very complicated.”
Emil’s involvement with the bridge stretches back to the late 1980s when, as then-president of the Battery Park City Authority, he envisioned the structure as a connection between the yet-undeveloped southern end of Battery Park City and the Rector Street subway station.
The idea resurfaced as a replacement for the “temporary” Rector Street bridge that had been hurriedly built to replace the Liberty Street bridge, which was heavily damaged on 9/11. But real planning did not start until 2009, with the anticipated opening of P.S./I.S. 276 on Battery Place. The school opened in 2010, the year the bridge was first expected to be ready.
SHoP Architects drew up a preliminary bridge design in 2009. Four years later, a “final” design by the firm WXY Architecture + Urban Design was revealed, only to further be refined following a lengthy public review.
“When are they actually going to get started on it?” BPCA board member Martha Gallo, a Battery Park City resident, said before the board’s vote last month authorizing the $750,000.
“I’m coming up on my third anniversary [with the authority] and Mike Bloomberg thought he was going to cut a ribbon at the beginning of construction. And we’re still talking,” replied the board’s chairman, Dennis Mehiel.
“When is the last time that we saw the design?” Mehiel asked a few moments later.
“Not since I’ve been here,” replied Gwen Dawson, senior vice president for asset management.
According to Emil, construction is expected to begin in the fall. Despite the long string of delays, he said the project’s completion, which he expects to take two years, will be a victory for many.
“More than any other of these public projects, this is an everyone-in-the-community project,” Emil said. “So it would be very wrong for me to feel anything other than happiness that we all managed to pull it together.”