Expanding a park usually means modifying an existing landscape. The designers of Pier 26 faced a far more daunting challenge: creating an entirely new one in the swift current of the Hudson River.
The results can be seen on Wednesday afternoon, when the revamped pier opens at the end of North Moore Street in Manhattan. The latest addition to Hudson River Park, this 2.5-acre expanse is the city’s only public pier dedicated to river ecology. Incorporating a lawn, a sports court and decks elevated more than 12 feet above the water, it exhibits indigenous plants and trees that hark back to when only Native Americans occupied what is now New York. But the pier’s most distinctive feature is a feat of 21st-century artifice: Because the park’s sea wall prevented developing a rocky intertidal wetland — a science-education bonanza — at the shoreline, the trust decided to engineer one on the river itself.
Read more at the New York Times.