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Sinking Greenwich Street Sidewalk A Mystery
As president of Friends of Greenwich Street, a small group of neighborhood volunteers that tends the gardens and trees on the street, Boyce has long been concerned about what is happening beneath the sidewalk, especially from Harrison to North Moore. Concrete has dipped and buckled and cracked. The gardens near the street bend towards the curb, so much so that in one spot a garden’s concrete perimeter has snapped. Boyce said it is likely that there is little soil underneath to support the weight. Boyce has been after the city to figure out what is going on, and officials from various agencies have come by to take a look. In October, Department of Transportation inspectors declared the bench off limits. “They said it’s dangerous to sit here,” Boyce said as he led a Trib reporter on a tour of the problem spots. “The thing could cave in.” Inspectors put tape around the tree pit because of the trip hazard—a wide gap between the sidewalk and the sunken earth beneath it. Boyce said his Friends group has “thrown cubic yards of soil in there over time. We finally stopped doing it. It was ridiculous. We were throwing our money away.” Construction of the sidewalk was completed just seven years ago as part of the “Greening of Greenwich Street,” an eight-block-long project between Chambers and Hubert Streets that narrowed Greenwich Street by about half and doubled the width of the sidewalk, adding trees, gardens, planters, benches and pavers. A dense, spaghetti-like network of underground utilities complicated the job and limited the amount of landscaping. Signe Nielsen, the Tribeca-based landscape architect who designed the project, is familiar with the subsurface conditions, but says she has no “miracle answers” about what is happening down there. “It has to be solved,” she said, “because that area around the tree pit is extremely bizarre.” The contractor on the Greenwich Street project, PCS Construction, did not return a call for comment. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection investigated with sonar and found that subsurface water is not washing away the soil, Boyce said. So the city needs to dig into the tree pit to test for other problems. Luis Sanchez, the DOT’s commissioner for Lower Manhattan, told the Trib that the Economic Development Corp., the city agency in charge of the street project, approached his agency six months ago about digging an exploratory test pit but has yet to apply for the necessary permits. “If they applied today, they will probably get permits within a few days,” he said. Asked why it has taken so long for the EDC to apply for the permit, Yonit Golub, a spokeswoman for the agency, responded to the Trib in an e-mail: “We are working with our contractors to obtain all the necessary permits and to excavate the site and begin to assess and correct the causes of sinkholes. We are approaching this work aggressively and plan to begin as soon as permits are issued.” “I hate to find out what slow means. We don’t even have a permit application,” said Rita Lee, aid to Councilman Alan Gerson, who first began enlisting the help of city agencies more than a year ago. Discovering the cause of the problem should be a simple matter, Boyce said. But curing it, he acknowledged, may prove far more difficult. “It would effectively mean tearing up the whole sidewalk and starting over,” he said.
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