Lower Manhattan’s Community Board 1 approved a plan to resuscitate a long-stalled green plaza in Tribeca on Wednesday.
Ten years ago a real estate firm promised to turn a triangular pedestrian crossing at Sixth Avenue and Church Street into a lush, vegetated plaza in return for a zoning variance. That firm, DDG Partners, then abandoned the project and stopped responding to all electeds and community members’ attempts to intervene.
But Community Board 1 and the plaza’s neighbors have not given up the fight. The board passed a resolution on Wednesday night that advances a plan to finish the neglected concrete wedge – named the Barnett Newman Triangle after the famous abstract expressionist painter — without the help of the real estate firm.
“It essentially calls for a series of steps to help us create tangible action on developing this space into a usable community asset,” said Andrew Zelter Waterfront, Parks and Cultural Committee co-chair.
It’s not for lack of trying that the plaza has not moved forward, the board wrote in its resolution. The former local councilmember and the borough president tried to get DDG to fulfill its obligation without success. Over the summer, the Real Deal reported that the real estate firm’s co-founder was attempting to dissolve the company. DDG did not respond to amNY’s request for comment.
Local residents decided a new strategy was needed. Over the past year, a group of community members has formalized a 501(c)(3) organization named Friends of the Barnett Newman Triangle, to secure public funding and create a new design for the space. According to a preliminary diagram the group released, it would extend the edges of the plaza to encompass a section of the street used now for street parking and form a design using “resilient green space through thoughtful landscaping.”
The triangle is the only designated green street or plaza in Lower Manhattan that has been left incomplete in one of the district’s lowest-lying areas, according to the community board’s resolution. The resolution bolsters a plan to mitigate potential flooding in a low lying area of Manhattan that contains no other trees and resilient surfaces.
The community board’s resolution endorsed the initial concepts plans that the advocates proposed, including the expansion into the areas currently used for car parking with the aim of maximizing the usable public space and green landscaping, emphasizing the plaza’s important role in reducing local environmental challenges like flooding. To this end, it prescribes permeable surfaces, native plantings and green infrastructure features.
The board wrote that it strongly urges the city’s parks, transportation and environmental protection departments to prioritize the completion of the plaza, allocating necessary resources and personnel to expedite the project as soon as possible, and it appealed for discretionary funding from Borough President Mark Levine and Councilmember Chris Marte.
The resolution passed overwhelmingly.
