June 2011 - Parks & Recreation - 52

Two Coasts, Two Champions
...And one driving passion: taking back
their beloved waterfronts
Richard Toussaint, Harlem
It started with Richard Toussaint's sketch
of a bike path. " There was one person who
sketched out an idea for Harlem River Park
which showed a bike path and a green
space, " Marcha Johnson, landscape
architect with the New York City
Department of Parks and Recreation,
explains. " Once he had an image like that,
he shopped it around and convinced the
parks department to adopt a large number
of those ideas. "
Having grown up in Harlem, Toussaint
remembers going down to the Harlem
River waterfront back in his childhood,
before construction of Harlem River Drive
made it largely inaccessible. " As a child I
was able to go down to the Harlem River
and throw rocks into the water, catch
small crabs, watch the tourist boats go
by, and watch the river commerce go by. "
After a cement factory at the site was
abandoned in the 1960s, Toussaint says
the land in the area lost most of its commercial entities, becoming a dumping
ground for cars and a haven for the homeless. So, in the early 1990s, while a member of Community Board 11 in Harlem and

a local tenants association,
Toussaint wrote a proposal to
develop the derelict waterfront
into a park. That proposal was
later incorporated into Manhattan Borough President Ruth
Messinger's vision for a waterfront greenbelt around the island of Manhattan, which in
turn helped result in a comprehensive waterfront master plan for the entire city of New York in 1994.
" On the west side of Manhattan, the waterfront greenbelt is pretty much in place-
you can actually go from Battery Park all
the way up to the northern half of Manhattan on a straight bicycle path greenway, "
Toussaint explains. " On the east side on
Manhattan there are some other issues. "
Toussaint is now a member of the Harlem River Park Task Force, a communitybased advocacy group formed in 2001.
The group initiated planning for the park,
helped raise money, and served as influential advocates for the park. The group
continues to advocate for park expansion
and connectivity to other parks, better
pedestrian access, and installations of

Designing the Edge
On Marcha Johnson's desk at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation sits a jar of Harlem River water. In it are two pieces of wire-one
a plastic-coated wire typically used on gabion rock
baskets and the other a piece of marine-grade stainless steel wire used in the Harlem River Park shoreline gabions.
" The one with the plastic-anyplace where the
plastic was scraped-it immediately started rusting, within days, " Johnson, a landscape architect,
explains. " The stainless steel is pretty still much the
way it was when I put in three years ago. "
Johnson received a " Designing the Edge " grant
from the New York State Department of State, Division of Coastal Resources, in 2004 through the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance in partnership with
the parks department to create a cost-effective yet

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artworks by Harlem children to bring cultural value to the park.
" A person could bike to work or do a
biking-and-transit connection, " Toussaint
recalls of his original idea. " What do you
do with this land? You make it into a recreational transportation piece for the
community to use. "
Although access issues and a perception of safety concerns still limit public
use of the park, Toussaint says the park
has been the site of weddings, graduations, and school field trips. Upcoming art
festivals and this summer's New York Water Day festival should help even more
people discover the park.
Johnson describes the reaction of
Toussaint and the other Harlem River

environmentally friendly prototype edge system for
urban waterfronts. Testing plastic models in a wave
tank, Johnson worked with her colleague Ricardo
Hinkle to focus on a design including gabion walls
and terraces.
Although gabions, or rock baskets, have been
used on shorelines since the ancient Egyptians, they
had never been used in sea walls in New York. The
gabions provide several advantages over traditional vertical steel sheeting by absorbing wave energy
rather than deflecting it, providing more habitat for
micro-organisms, and allowing water to pass through
from both the land and the water sides, providing a
stable hydrostatic pressure. However, constructing and placing the gabions at the narrow park site
proved to be a challenge. Few companies had experience working with gabions, and the baskets needed to be lifted into place from a barge.

June 2011 - Parks & Recreation

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