Doyle at Hudson River Park Helm: 'We're Challenged in a Good Way'

Newly appointed Hudson River Park Trust president and CEO Noreen Doyle, who was at the center of the park's founding in 1998, and second in command for 17 years. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

“On a certain level, the job isn’t a change,” Noreen Doyle was saying, standing on the esplanade of Hudson River Park, the 4.5-mile-long respite from city life that she now officially oversees. Appointed president and CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust in a unanimous Trust board vote on June 3, Doyle said in an interview that she’ll largely be continuing the work that she’s been doing for years as second-in-command to Madelyn Wils, who resigned in January.

“The core of the work that we do, design and construction, working with communities, making sure the park is operating well, are things that I’ve always done,” she said. “I’ll just be doing different parts of them sometimes.”

In fact, Doyle, 56, has been at the center of the park’s development as far back as its founding in 1998, and executive vice president for the past 17 years. Now she takes the reins at a time of “incredible productivity,” as she says, when two major projects that have been in the works for years, the Gansevoort Peninsula and Pier 97, are set to go forward, and Pier 76 at West 57 Street is in construction. This on top of the opening of Little Island last month and Tribeca’s Pier 26 last September.

“What the public wants from open space now is, of course, a lot,” she said, adding, “We are taxed right now, we are challenged in a really good way, because all of this good work is happening simultaneously.”

In two years, Doyle noted, the park will have grown even bigger, with its two additional big spaces, and feature new enhancements to the current study of oyster and other river habitats. “And we will be continuing to explore how we will pay for it all,” she said. “We all need to think about what is the balance between commercial or income-generating uses, donations and other things that can support the park because we are a financially self-supporting place.”

Doyle credited the leadership of her predecessor, Madelyn Wils, with the years of planning that “in a big way” brought the park to where it is today. “Madelyn did so much to advance all of these projects that, at this exact moment, are now so active.”