Groan: HHS & Parks Dept. Say Expect More Delays on UES Esplanade Reopening

Pedestrians eager to use the East River Esplanade between E. 71st and E. 79th St. will have to wait a while longer, it seems, with little clarity on exactly how much longer.

The news was broke by representatives from the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and the Parks Dept. at a Nov. 14 Community Board 8 subcommittee meeting.

HSS has shut the passage during its construction of a mammoth new $200 million expansion known as Keller Tower, and many local residents have not been too happy for quite some time now. Melissa Keifer, who was CB8’s guest from HSS, said that the project would “modernize” the hospital’s main campus.

Crucially, she said that HSS would rehabilitate the closed section of Esplanade upon the tower being finished, with the promise of new outdoor fitness equipment to its E. 75th St. stretch. “It will be brand new again,” Keifer said. Extensive landscaping would involve the planting of dozens of trees, and benches and lighting would be added.

This didn’t directly address the desires of people like Jennifer Ratner, the board chair of Friends of the East River Esplanade, who wants a temporary walkway put in place during construction. Keifer said that the area needed to be “blocked off,” to ensure that both construction materials and construction workers could have enough room to work. HSS’s position, she elaborated, was that providing pedestrians with such a walkway would delay construction.

Kiefer broke even tougher news last. She said that there has been “changes in schedule” when it comes to the project’s completion date, which meant that “opening [the Esplanade] in the warmer months of 2025” will likely be impossible. However, a sign leading up to the construction project has listed “Winter 2025” as an anticipated completion date for months, meaning that a summer reopening next year didn’t ever quite seem to be in the cards.

Indeed, even that later date may be put in jeopardy by the Parks Department, which is currently pursuing a separate sinkhole survey north of the construction site. Tricia Shimamura, the agency’s Manhattan Borough Commissioner, noted that divers would be examining the esplanade’s foundations for worrisome structural problems. All of this, both Kiefer and Shimamura noted, was part and parcel of shoring up Manhattan’s seawall.

“We are trying to time all of this at the same time, because it’s important, and we understand that one is connected to the other,” Shimamura said. There was currently no timeline in place, leaving open the possibility that a shutdown could continue past next year.

Shimamura also stressed that the issue was “deeply personal” to her, given that she lives near the Esplanade. In fact, it was also personal given that she used to chair the very same CB8 committee she was appearing before. She reminded meeting attendees of a terrifying sinkhole that opened up under the E. 76th St. portion of the Esplanade in the summer of 2020, which she witnessed firsthand.

Henri, a local resident who identified himself as an organizer of a Facebook group on the Manhattan Greenway, was curious what a restored Esplanade bike path between E. 71st St. and E. 74th St. would look like. It would be too narrow for a traditional bike path, but darker-paved stones will signify where bikers were supposed to ride. Henri appeared satisfied with her answer.

Ratner, the Friends of the East River Esplanade board chair, Zoomed into the meeting to let both HSS and the Parks Dept. know that she was frustrated with the ongoing delay. While she understood why a temporary closure would be necessary, and thanked HSS for a future restoration of the Esplanade, she added that Friends had “been trying behind the scenes” to get the hospital to cover more structural repairs.

“Cutting off a continuous waterfront for years...is really unfair to this community,” she said.