Grade Changes and Paths Define the Pedestrian Experience
{"autoplay":"true","autoplay_speed":"3000","speed":"300","arrows":"true","dots":"false","loop":"true","nav_slide_column":5,"rtl":"false"}

DETAILS

LocationBronx, New York, USA
ClientCity of New York
Size0.7 miles

Since the closing of a city-owned landfill in 1963, the site’s transformation into Ferry Point Waterfront Park has been a long, complex process. The new Ferry Point Waterfront Park will be a long linear eastern ecological extension of the previously built and conventionally programmed western Ferry Point Park. Part of a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, this new park extends east from the anchorage of the Whitestone Bridge approximately 0.7 miles along the East River. It is intended to become what the actively programmed western park is not, an environmentally focused place of passive recreation and contemplation.

The armature of this long linear waterfront park is a system of earthworks and grade changes that create an upper park and a lower park within a relatively long and narrow span. To further articulate the park, a circulation system of diagonal cross-grain connectors defines a discrete series of coherent landscape spaces while elongating and accentuating the distance from the upland margin of the site to the waterfront. This path system redirects and choreographs user movements, crenellating the “perceived” water’s edge and revealing site. The interstices of the path system are a series of swatches that vary in texture, tone and ecology. The path system operates along the interface of two landscape typologies affording visitors a varied experience while strolling along the designated path system. These eco-swatches are large enough to be viable ecologies and to accommodate unforeseen future programmatic changes. The cultural ecology will complement the ecological underpinning of the park. The plan includes an urban beach, small boat center and a waterfront restaurant, all of which will help transform Ferry Point Waterfront Park from blight to bright.

Related Projects

Shanghai International Dance Center

Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station...

Soundview Park

Soundview Park, built on 212 acres of landfill at the junction of the Harlem and East Rivers in the South Bronx, is the most significant recreational facility in Community Board 9. As part of the PlanNYC initiative, Thomas Balsley Associates was selected as the lead designer of Soundview’s master plan. This brownfield remediation will drastically improve both ...

Sava Promenada at the Belgrade Waterfront

SWA’s role includes creating a detailed master plan, conceptual design, and preparation of design guidelines for a one-million-square-meter (100-hectare) site along the Sava River, next to the historic town center of Belgrade. The developer’s goal is to create a world-class sustainable waterfront development, as the single largest regeneration proj...

Balsley Park

Located on Manhattan’s West Side, Balsley Park, formerly known as Sheffield Plaza, has been transformed from a barren, lifeless plaza into the community’s most cherished common ground.

Following public outcry and many failed attempts to redesign the plaza, Thomas Balsley Associates was hired to build community consensus around a new park-like image and ...

Perk Park

Originally completed in 1972, Perk Park is a vestige of IM Pei’s urban renewal plan. It was built in an era when the street was seen as a menace so parks turned inward. Rolling berms around the edges and sunken areas in the middle, filled with concrete retaining walls, reflected that era. Not surprisingly, the park fell into decline; abandoned by the neighborh...

Main Street Garden Park

Thomas Balsley Associates was selected from an outreach to international design firms to design the first new park for the Dallas Central Business District in 50 years. A key component in the downtown revitalization strategy, Main Street Garden Park required the razing of two city blocks of buildings and garages making way for its transformation into a vibrant...

Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park

Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park was envisioned as an international model of urban ecology and a world laboratory for innovative sustainable thinking. The project is a collaboration between Thomas Balsley Associates and WEISS/MANFREDI for the open space and park design with ARUP as the prime consultant and infrastructure designer.

What was once a ba...

Residences at W New York Downtown

The Residences at W New York Downtown is located in lower Manhattan. The at-grade public plaza creates an urban space with a food kiosk surrounded by a large raised wood deck with table, chairs, and built-in custom stainless steel benches and bar seating along the perimeter. A series of interplaying IPE wood and pre-cast concrete benches creates seating and co...