East Side Story

Running the length of Manhattan’s west side, the Hudson River Greenway is familiar to most New Yorkers for both recreation and transit. The continuous thirteen-mile path is the “most heavily used bikeway in the United States” and has spurred development such as Little Island and Gansevoort Peninsula. The island’s east side is another story: A pathway along the East River, decades in the making, is still decades out from completion.

Even so, progress on that front is underway. The East Midtown Greenway runs alongside Sutton Place, the affluent micro-neighborhood where Midtown becomes Uptown, and where Woody Allen schmoozes Diane Keaton as Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me begins to swell. Grid-wise, the enclave’s namesake avenue runs parallel to FDR Drive (over which its coveted co-ops and townhouses cantilever) from 53rd to 59th streets, stopping just short of the Queensboro Bridge (it continues north as York Avenue). By the end of this year or shortly thereafter, New Yorkers will be able to admire—and circumvent—the stately neighborhood from a seven-block, 2,000-foot “outboard” esplanade over the water.

The Urban Design Forum convened its tour of the East Midtown Greenway at Andrew Haswell Green Park, at the terminus of East 60th Street, atop a former waste transfer station that was converted to public space in the ’90s. Standing beneath the park’s signature Alice Aycock sculpture, NYC EDC’s Ankita Nalavade described how the EMG aims to close the loop of the Manhattan greenway, a project “undertaken by every mayor since 1993, to develop a continuous thirty-two-mile waterfront promenade around Manhattan.” The new esplanade, which is the northernmost of three segments of the larger East Midtown waterfront project, was visible in full from where we stood, at the southeast corner of the pavilion.

“EMG is unique because it’s set on the outboard of the shoreline,” Nalavade said, explaining that “in the early 2000s, State DOT decided to do some repair work on the FDR, and this was a detour meant for that.” The Outboard Detour Roadway was originally intended to be dismantled upon the completion of the repairs in 2006, but NYC Parks, subsequently undertook a feasibility study to convert it into a permanent pedestrian and bicycle way. Ultimately, the city kept the permits but not the caissons; the new structure is designed to withstand sea-level rise through 2100.

Stantec—represented on the tour by Gentry Lock, Amy Seek, and Donna Walcavage—won the public RFP in late 2017; construction started in fall of 2019 and is slated for completion this December, more or less on schedule despite a six-month pandemic pause. Unfortunately, it was only after we descended from the cantilevered pavilion to the construction site that foreman Rob informed us that policy required work boots; mere closed-toe shoes would not suffice. The non-compliant sneaker contingent, which included yours truly and a rather more renowned architecture critic, were relegated to an alternate tour, led by Lock, to view the esplanade from the pocket parks at the ends of East 53rd, 55th, 56th, and 57th streets (we skipped the one at the end of 58th Street, where that scene in Manhattan was filmed). Backtracking south through AHG Park, we strolled down under the Queensboro Bridge overpass to Sutton Place proper for an ad hoc neighborhood tour.

Sporting tan tennis shoes, the architecture critic shared more neighborhood lore, pointing out I.M. Pei’s former residence, as well as Andrew Bolton and Thom Browne’s manse. The power couple acquired the handsome Georgian number, designed in 1920 by Mott Schmidt for Anne Vanderbilt, in 2019, and were recently recognized by the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts for their “contribution to preserving the majesty of the Upper East Side through the careful renovation of their home.”

Per a New Yorker profile of Browne, the home features “an enormous lawn stretching down to the East River,” walled off from the Sutton Park at the end of 57th Street; from the terrace, writer Rachel Syme notes that “the water looked like a private lido.” We shoe-leather reporters got the view from the public park, from where the river appeared to be sandwiched between the new esplanade and Roosevelt Island. The greenway is forty feet wide per the specifications of the original DEC permit; as we could see from above, half of that is bike lane, the other is esplanade and planting; not visible is the substructure, composed of eighty-plus-foot-long tub girders, three bays wide for most of the greenway, some of which have been hollowed out to hold soil for the plantings—“a thousand cubic feet of soil per tree,” Lock said. To minimize visual impact, she credited architect Miguel Rosales with the elegant solution: angling the parapet walls such that they “cast light in a way that makes [the structure] look less bulky.”

In addition to pointing out the clusters of “art tiles” embedded at various points in the esplanade, Lock also shared the local legend of “Washington’s Rock,” an outcropping where the founding father reportedly stood during the Revolutionary War. We popped over to the end of East 55th Street to peer down at the water, where a partially submerged park bench and bicycle could be seen among the boulders. “Washington’s bench,” the critic quipped.

The tour ended at the foot of the bike/pedestrian bridge, designed by Rosales to DOT’s stringent specifications, which connects the EMG to mainland Manhattan at East 54th Street, over seven lanes of the traffic on the FDR. The sinuous ramp ascends from the awkward corner of South Sutton and East 54th to the bowstring truss spanning the highway. Nalavade and Lock noted that the next section of the greenway, currently in the design phase, will prove more challenging: the half-mile-or-so connection between the newly built portion and the so-called Waterside Pier at 41st Street comes with the major security headache of bypassing the UN Headquarters.

The timeline for that twelve-block stretch remains TBD, which means that EMG-goers will still have to pass by Sutton Place to access the outboard esplanade for years to come. “I’ve been working on [the East Side plan] since 1995,” Walcavage reminisced, even producing a brochure from that era. “So, I’m just letting you know that someday, it actually happens. You just need patience.” Call it waiting for the other shoe to drop.