'Save East River Park March' To Be Held April 18

Press release from East River Park ACTION:

April 12, 2021

Dear ACTIONeers,

We are inviting you to join us in this urgent exercise of free speech and outlet for the immense frustration we feel at the betrayal by public servants i.e., our mayor, our City Council Member and the entire City Council, our Community Boards, City Planning Commission, the Parks Department and all who are engaged in supporting the farcical, greedy and short-sighted version of flood control known as East Side Coastal Resiliency.

We worked with city agencies since 2012 to come up with a strong green approach to coastal resiliency in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. We supported the original East Side Coastal Resiliency plan with its rolling berms. It did not require the destruction of an 82-year-old park with 1,000 trees, ballfields, a running track, an esplanade along the riverfront, picnic and barbecue areas and a paradise of growing things and birds and fishing areas.

The park is a multi-racial multi class multi age dream. It is a living symbol of the New York we love and treasure. It faces public housing and is the only available green space for largely low income BIPOC people who require this access to air and exercise for quality of life.

Instead, what our mayor’s office has foisted on us and we have been protesting for three years is total destruction of this park. It’s a plan that would add eight feet of fill, a million tons. And while the fill is being added and until it settles, it will blow in the faces of the residents across from the park. The city also wants to build a cement factory on the river’s edge.

The glamorous and synthetic plan the city promises will in essence be a concrete wall along the river with a levee covering all the parkland. It will be covered in artificial turf, concrete and saplings that will not provide shade for many years. There will be expanded tennis courts and parking lots for maintenance vehicles in what are now some of the prettiest sections of the park—just what our neighborhood doesn’t need. There will be walkways high above the river.
If the city says it will take five years, it will take ten. There will be NO flood control in that time. If a storm occurs, then it will be a muddy mess. It will turn our neighborhood into a bathtub full of contaminated flood water.

For starters we demanded adequate environmental review, because our concerns were dismissed in the public review process. Our group demanded the rationale for this plan, and we were told there was a value engineering report. It was not forthcoming. Its existence was denied and most recently a redacted form was offered. Now there’s a less redacted form. The city is making us fight to see how the park destruction plan came about.

We march today because we are demanding a moratorium on park destruction. Thousands of people have signed petitions since 2018. This march is a human petition.

We demand a stop to the East Side Coastal Resiliency plan now. We demand a real environmental review. We demand interim flood protection. We demand a better plan that does not now in a pandemic still–or ever–take away the only green space in a low-income neighborhood to replace it with a project twice as expensive that smells only of development.

Our mayor and the real estate cabal his government has become look forward to a park that will reprise what happened on the west side and will encourage gentrification and displacement while ending the best parts of the childhoods of the kids who live here and people of all ages including seniors living nearby who are being deprived of the joys of their publicly lived and cherished New York City life. It is all our city. We are marching for ours.

For too long our government has been happy to tell a tale of two cities, one is to sell and silence the other is to invite and lure. The tall shiny buildings all over Manhattan are empty, this park is full, the evidence against this plan is life itself.

And we march as life itself today to demand that we prevail and stop the plan to destroy the park and instead insure our natural and collective futures.

See you in the park,
Eileen Myles, Emily Johnson and Harriet Hirshorn
for East River Park ACTION

More details coming soon!
Check our ACTIONS NOW! page for ways to help put on our march.

Help our legal effort to add muscle to our passionate advocacy
We are currently suing for the full, un-redacted Value Engineering Study that we uncovered recently. It justified the change in the East Side Coastal Resiliency plan that will destroy East River Park. Why did the city deny the report existed for more than two years? We need to continue seeking transparency that will lead to a better plan for flood control for our great Lower East Side, East Village and East River Park. Read about our lawsuit here.

We have raised more than $40,000, but this kind of advocacy is costly!
Please Donate to East River Park ACTION legal fund via GoFundMe to help continue the fight to #SaveEastRiverPark. Send checks to East River Park Action, c/o Jon Lefkowitz, 428 E. 10th St., New York, NY 10009. We are deeply grateful.

This wonderful park we are trying to preserve is forever Indigenous land of Lenapehoking. We hope to honor and respect the land of this park by advocating its use as a resilient flood-absorbing sponge working with the river-side ecosystem, rather than in defiance of it. We oppose the ESCR project that continues assault on the land and recognize it adds a layer of injury to the ongoing systemic oppression of the original stewards of this land, the Lenapeyok People.

This press release was produced by East River Park ACTION. The views expressed here are the author's own.