Stuyvesant Cove Park, Rebuilt for Flood Resilience

Stuyvesant Cove has been completely rebuilt since our first visit all the way back in 2010, the first year of this blog. The new Stuyvesant Cove Park is a climate-resilient riverfront park proudly sporting the city's new floodgates and walls. The idea is to prevent what happened during Superstorm Sandy in 2012 from ever happening again, and things are looking pretty decent from today's Stuyvesant Cove.

Entering from the southern end, it easy to see the contrast between the broken-up pavement of the old walkway and the fresh surface of the new Stuyvesant Cove Park.

The next time Poseidon flies into a rage, Floodgate Lucky 13 will save the day, sliding along a track to close up this part of the wall.

I expect little creatures like the one below will have hopped to safety in time. Animals will probably be better weather predictors than whatever shreds of the U.S. government remain by the time the next big storm surge threatens the Mid-Atlantic region.

The sunflowers may not be so lucky. If the water doesn't get 'em, I guess the wind will.

Architecture won't be most people's main reason for visiting Stuyvesant Cove Park. But up at the north end of the park, you'll be struck by the Solar One Environmental Education Center's new home, which includes a performance venue. Solar One's website says that "the Center will be an education destination for thousands of NYC public school children who participate in our Green Design Lab programs each year." The organization has been on site for years, but the built environment here is all new.

One thing almost impossible to find here in the park proper is shade. But the bikers, runners, and relaxers we encountered on our hot-day visit in late September 2025 didn't seem to mind.

A couple of NYC Ferry boats pulled in and out of the Stuyvesant Cove dock during our jaunt.

Past the southern end of the park, the path continues. Eventually it will, presumably, link up with John V. Lindsay East River Park to the south, including the section recently elevated and rebuilt, like Stuyvesant Cove, for climate resilience. Approaching Stuyvesant Cove Park from the southern pathway gives you a good look at the curve of the river, the ferry dock, and in the distance, the United Nations.

There are very few remnants of the old Cove. One is the outcropping visible in this video, which still causes splashy disruptions in the rough waters of the East River.

When those waters rise with the next storm surge, we'll see how well the new floodgates protect the residents and businesses of Manhattan's East Side.

All photos © Oren Hope

John V. Lindsay East River Park: New Elevated Section

After much effort both physical and political, a new raised section of John V. Lindsay East River Park opened this past Memorial Day. When completed, the new park, as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, should withstand the rising levels and tides of climate change.

Residents and some parks advocates complained as the project was proposed and planned. So many mature tress would be sacrificed. Neighborhood playing fields would vanish for years.

When the new section opened, visitors complained too – this is New York, after all. There's no shade! So much concrete! Plus now, the section north of this one is shut down. All the way up to Stuyvesant Cove.

Well, yes. These huge projects do have to be completed step by step.

Meanwhile, of course there's no shade at this new section by the Williamsburg Bridge: The freshly planted trees are still mere young'uns.

With all its amenities, this piece of riverfront parkland isn't yet connected to adjacent acreage, so as it's fairly far from the subway it's not so easy to get to if you don't live close by.

But lots of people do live close by.

The present access is via a footbridge at the the south side of Delancey Street, hard by the soaring arches of the Williamsburg Bridge itself.

(Biking would be a good option, but not if the biking itself is your reason for going – the bike path within is necessarily a mere stump.)

Once inside, you come upon square stone blocks picturesquely fringing snazzy new basketball courts.

The bridge looms overhead.

Past new plantings and wide grassy fields the Brooklyn skyline rises. That's right – the Brooklyn skyline. Whodathunk? (That tallest building is called Brooklyn Tower. Get used to it. The years when Brooklyn builders weren't allowed to build higher than the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower are long past.)

The intervening brick structure in the photo above is the East River Park Fireboat House. The Village Sun reported last year as construction of the park was underway that this "two-story Moderne-style building was erected in 1941 in East River Park for the Fire Department’s Marine Company 66, replacing similar structures that had operated from a pier at the end of Grand Street since 1898." Most recently the building served as the headquarters of our friends at the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

The barbecue area wasn't in use at 10 in the morning on a Sunday. But it's ready.

A handful of people were about. Strolling. Fishing.

The black dog you see in the distance in the next photo ran up to me eagerly, tennis ball in mouth. Dogs, right?

The day was already hot, making this fountain tempting.

The soccer field, baseball field, and tennis courts are already popular. Another complaint: there are only half as many tennis courts as there were before climate change got so urgent. People were already queuing for a court at the Brian Watkins Tennis Center. (It's named for "a Utah tourist and University of Idaho tennis player who was slain in the subway while attending the 1990 U.S. Open," Courts morbidly explains. The Courts article also has some good photos of this part of the park in former days.)

It was a slow Sunday morning. But the amount of trash this worker had collected suggested much heavier recent use of the grounds.

Some doubted whether this park would actually get off the ground – or off sea level, to be precise. Well, it did. And there's clearly much more to come. A small but maybe not insignificant bit of evidence that this chaotic, almost ungovernable city can actually get important things done. Sometimes.

All photos © Oren Hope

Sutton Place Park

Checking Google Maps to remind myself where Greenacre Park was in preparation for my recent visit there, I noticed a tiny sliver of green all the way to the east, hugging the FDR Drive between 53rd and 54th Streets. Couldn't be a park, I thought. But I zoomed in, and sure enough:

Sutton Place Park is indeed tiny, but it's a park all right.

Complete with landscaping, a curved path, plants and flowers, and locals relaxing and walking dogs, Sutton Place Park (or Sutton Place Park South, to distinguish it from Sutton Place's enclosed vest-pocket parks) is dedicated to landscape architect Clara Coffey (1894–1982), who became the Parks Department's Chief of Tree Plantings in 1936.

Coffey supervised numerous landscaping projects, including the Park Avenue Malls. At the base of a handsome urn decorated with Greek-style reliefs in a small garden (a onetime sandbox) in Sutton Place Park, a stone plaque commemorates her work.

There's even an armillary sundial (or armillary sphere), like the one on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade but more ornate. Albert Stewart designed it, inspired by Ancient Greek astronomical models.

Look out over the East River and you'll see Roosevelt Island's Smallpox Memorial Hospital, which is just north of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the southern tip of that island, and beyond it the now landmarked Pepsi sign just north of Gantry Plaza State Park, where a landing just opened for the newest NYC Ferry line, the Astoria Route.

Everywhere you look in New York City, there's a park. And another park beyond that one. And another one beyond that.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Sherman Creek Park and Swindler Cove

In Inwood, Manhattan's far north, you'll find one of the borough's newer green and natural jewels.

Sherman Creek Park and Swindler Cove are, more or less, gifts to the city by Bette Midler (starring in Hello Dolly on Broadway as I write this). Since 1995 her New York Restoration Project has brought (says its website) "private resources to spaces that lack municipal support, fortifying the City's aging infrastructure and creating a healthier environment for those who live in the most densely populated and least green neighborhoods."

The singer-actor has been a fixture in Gotham parkland and beautification for a long time. The highway-cleaning gag from the fourth season of The Simpsons was inspired by a real sign I used to see on the West Side Highway.

There's not much to the Sherman Creek part of the park. The eye candy is all in Swindler Cove (photos below). Following the Sherman Creek sign takes you down a pleasant wood-chip path with a view of the water, and that's pretty much it.

There's actually no sign of a creek. But if you look at the legendary Viele Map from 1865, you can see a number of creeks emptying into the Harlem River from upper Manhattan. (In the image below, north is to the right.)

Glimpsed through the trees, the water looks peaceful, if not pristine.

Forgotten NY in a post from 2013 tells us that the "creek" is actually just the inlet here, originally called Half Kill, and that a few years ago it appeared as "a yacht graveyard full of discarded ketches and pleasure boats."

This may be the place in question today:

It seems some design or restoration work is still going on.

There's a bit of beach hidden away here too. Curbed has a photo in a post from 2012.

Sherman Creek and nearby Sherman Avenue are named for a family of relatively obscure local settlers. Even a website devoted to the street names of Inwood says only that they "lived on the south side of the small bay also named for them" – in other words, on the inlet that we call a creek. (If there was never a real creek here, maybe the Sherman family wished they had one; maybe their motto was "It's all creek to me.")

Swindler Cove, or Swindler Cove Park, is marked as "a cooperative effort of the State of New York Department of Transportation, the City of New York Parks and Recreation, and the New York Restoration Project." A plaque reads, "These trees were planted by the New York Restoration Project, a nonprofit founded by Bette Midler and dedicated to revitalizing underserved parks and open space in New York City."

The Riley-Levin Children's Garden was in its springtime splendor on our recent visit – and free of children. (Unless "children's garden" really means a place where children are grown, in which case maybe the shoots just haven't emerged yet.)

The park itself in May is green as green can be.

Coming upon the bucolic pond with its rushes and turtles can be a shock. There are beautiful places like this in more famous city spots, like Central Park. But they're always crowded with people. Here we encountered almost nobody – just a caretaker and one or two other wanderers.

Catching sight of an American Goldfinch on a water fountain was a treat.

A path winds down to the waterfront past a small artificial waterfall.

And there, floating in the river, is Swindler Cove's final surprise: The Peter Jay Sharp boathouse, another New York Restoration Project effort and home of Row New York, one of whose enthusiastic instructors intercepted us as we wandered ignorantly towards the building and took us on a tour.

Sharp was a hotelier, real estate developer, and one-time chairman of the New York City Opera who died in 1992. Countless New York theatergoers know his name from the performance spaces named for him, but how many know about the boathouse? We sure didn't, though it's been in operation since 2004. There's even a regatta named after Sharp.

Forgotten NY tells us the boathouse was constructed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and "designed to resemble the Central Park Dairy with board and batten styling."

This isn't "gently down the stream" rowing. This is crew. Children and college students alike learn here.

The environs aren't as picturesque as the Charles River, but Ivy Leaguers practice the distinguished old sport here too. A few of the kids we saw might end up rowing for Columbia in a few years.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media