NYC Sees Sense in Daylighting
Friday, January 14, 2011 at 08:24PM Tweet Water, Water Everywhere
An excellent piece from Urban Omnibus lauds the progress that New York is making in the incorporation of stormwater solutions. It is well worth a read to better understand the myriad of obstacles that have been overcome in order to bring about the Green Infrastructure Plan:
Work is now underway to make visible the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, which is currently covered by a public parking lot called Larkin Plaza. The raison d'etre of that industrial city, the River had been put into a flume in the 1920s by the Army Corps of Engineers as a sanitation and flood control measure. The support of ever-broadening stakeholders, including Governor Pataki, Yonkers mayor Philip A. Amicone, former State Senator Nick Spano and opponent-turned-proponent developers, culminated in the groundbreaking of the project last month. The discovery of American Eel in the River by local environmental group Groundwork Hudson Valley critically shifted the project design from an open hard-edged channel to a recreated habitat. Not that the Saw Mill's "daylighting" means restoration to a former ecological functionality. In fact, the water flowing over replanted reeds and rocks arranged just-so will be ancillary to the flume. Such limits to ecological restoration force us to evolve past a dualistic stance that puts storm drains in one category and naturalized creeks in another. The water-oriented environmental comeback stories in New York have come because groups like the New York Restoration Project, the Bronx River Alliance, and the Parks Department's Natural Resources Group have embraced such an understanding.
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