Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency

Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR) refers to a range of climate change adaptation strategies of coastal management to address impacts on the city in the wake of the extensive Hurricane Sandy flooding of 2012.^[1]

A more localized alternative to the New York Harbor Storm-Surge Barrier, it has some continuity with the centuries-long Lower Manhattan expansion trend and seeks to compensate for the historical loss of wetland buffer zones, and would be integrated into the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.

History[edit]

After Sandy, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg differed on their preferred infrastructure responses, with Cuomo favoring a storm barrier to protect the entire estuary, and Bloomberg localized protection for Lower Manhattan inspired by Battery Park City. Several studies have been commissioned since, including the BIG U from Bjarke Ingels Group for a semi-circle of berms that would allow small-scale controlled floods,^[2] in contrast with the more ambitious seawall proposals.^[3] Their 2014 plan largely involved constructing a series of berms in Lower Manhattan, inland from the shoreline.^[4][5][6] but has been deemed inadequate in parts and too costly to maintain.

^[7][8]

Bloomberg's 2013 concept of "Seaport City"^[9] has been replaced by the FiDi-Seaport plan,^[10] as part of the wider LMCR initiative by the De Blasio administration. It updates the BIG U with more substantial land reclamation that could be funded and finished, avoiding the occasional temporary flooding of the earlier plan and its maintenance costs.^[11][12] Initial plans focus on landfilling and building up East River Park.^[13][14]

References[edit]