![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/f1fc15e00d629b0def6f1ab7c77ff555ac-flood-resiliency-project.rsquare.w700.gif\")
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\n Two images juxtaposed: Flooding in Battery Park City during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and a present-day image of a portion of the East Side Resiliency Project\u2019s floodgates and landscaping.
\n Photo: Craig Ruttle\/AP, Barrett Doherty\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n One evening a few months ago, during the kind of brief but explosive rainstorm that has become almost routine, a woman in a fuchsia yoga outfit stepped off a bus on Hempstead Avenue where the current knocked her off her feet<\/a> and sent her speeding off down the block on her back, like a pink kayak shooting the urban rapids. Those few seconds of drama in the middle of a severe but far from record-breaking cloudburst could have been a scene from Hollywood about nature\u2019s revenge on the city.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been nearly 14 years since Superstorm Sandy<\/a> turned out the lights and transformed entire neighborhoods into networks of canals, killing 44 people and causing $19 billion in losses. Subsequent assaults have been quick and fierce, if not quite as catastrophic. Hurricane Ida blasted through the five boroughs<\/a> in early September 2021 with cataracts of rain, drowned 11 people in their basements, killed two more, and left $1 billion worth of misery. Other bursts of nastiness have added to the sense of menace: gales that hurl branches onto the street, squalls that turn subway stairs into mini-Niagaras and parks into inland seas.<\/p>\n \n Water floods the Plaza Shops in the Financial District in the wake of Hurricane Sandy on October 30, 2012. But as we stare into another hurricane season, it\u2019s worth pausing to appreciate how much New York has learned about armoring itself against a wet and menacing future. The city has long survived by leveraging disasters. After every crisis, skeptics have\u00a0writ<\/a>ten it off:<\/a> No sane person, the Chicken Littles squawked, would ever again brave the streets<\/a>, let their kids loose on them<\/a>, buy property<\/a>, bank<\/a>, work in a skyscraper<\/a>, share an elevator<\/a>, or even just stick around<\/a> in such a perpetually vulnerable metropolis. And yet, each time, the city has thrived by being nimble, drawing on its most abundant and renewable resource: confidence. Not all cities come back from a battering with such consistency; New York has aplomb in its DNA.<\/p>\n Today, the threats from climate change are at hand, and so are the means to ward them off. In fact, the techniques have become so varied and specific that the options can be overwhelming. The low-lying park where floodwaters swept into the Lower East Side has been bulked up with berms and walls. In Brooklyn, the courtyards of NYCHA\u2019s Red Hook Houses, where Sandy knocked out boilers and filled basements, have acquired new topography and a campuswide electrical system that\u2019s lifted out of danger. Willets Point in Queens has been reclaimed, raised, and fitted out with new affordable housing and a soccer stadium. Off the southern shore of Staten Island, a chain of artificial reefs seeded with oysters stands ready to slow destructive waves. And all over the city, sidewalks have acquired tree pits that can sponge up rainfall, keeping at least some of it out of the storm drains.<\/p>\n Together, these projects are the first visible results of a multi-decade campaign to keep New York dry and safe in an epoch of rising seas and more violent storms. After years of confusion, foot-dragging, fantasies<\/a>, and conflicting agendas, New Yorkers are finally starting to see an urban landscape in mid-transformation, tangible evidence that the city is taking the challenge seriously.<\/p>\n Go for a run in East River Park, and you are jogging through the future. Along that undulating length of landscape at the edge of Manhattan, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge, a range of artificial hills rises from the shoreline, with a concrete floodwall embedded inside, before dipping back down to the FDR Drive. These are not bare mounds but the topography of leisure, kitted out with fresh plantings, young trees, smooth paths, shiny playgrounds, brightly surfaced basketball courts, stone bleachers. A year after it opened, the park still retains its fragile newness (except where the exposed wall is defaced with graffiti), and its still-fledgling foliage offers scant shade on a hot summer day. That\u2019s because no park is finished on its opening day. Architecture ages; landscape matures.<\/p>\n On the east side of Manhattan, a range of artificial hills rises with a concrete flood wall embedded inside.<\/p>\n Regrading and relandscaping East River Park meant removing 1,000 mature trees in exchange for new slopes, seating, young trees, and flood-resistant sports areas.<\/p>\n MNLA designed the new East River Park flood protection to flow onto footbridges over the FDR Drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n Floodgate, part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project.<\/p>\n \n Photographs by Barrett Doherty\n <\/p>\n The physical act of terraforming the old East River Park into the $1.45 billion East Side Coast Resiliency project proved easy compared to the political preliminaries. Thousands of New Yorkers spent four years discussing a proposal (originally conceived by BIG) that would have preserved much of the existing park before a conclave of city agencies blindsided them with a radical redesign<\/a> in 2018. The new version, which reshaped virtually the entire area between the river and the FDR Drive and uprooted 1,000 graceful old trees, triggered years of furious opposition and depleted the local residents\u2019 stock of goodwill<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n An aerial view of the East Side project shows the landscaping as it meets a gated opening in the flood wall . Still, this first phase, designed by MNLA, does a good job of softening a defensive perimeter with a dressed-up set of ramparts while announcing to the ocean: You shall not pass. The ESCR exists to protect more than 100,000 people who live upland and \u2014 especially when it is integrated into a future chain of barriers extending from East 25th Street down to Battery Park and up the West Side past Chambers Street \u2014 the untold billions locked into lower Manhattan. (Flood protection is mostly a matter of protecting investment. If saving lives were the top climate-adaptation priority, New York would pour far greater resources into coping with intensifying heat, which kills more than 500 people every summer<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Encircling the city with fortress walls isn\u2019t an option in low-lying stretches of Brooklyn that flood in a drizzle. \u201cManhattan sits on schist and granite, so you can defend it at a district scale, connecting the perimeter to higher ground,\u201d says Kate Orff, the MacArthur-winning founder of the landscape-architecture firm SCAPE. \u201cRed Hook has a completely different geomorphology. On old maps, it\u2019s a marsh. It\u2019s all low-lying, and there\u2019s no high point to connect it to.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Flooding on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Sandy rolled right over that peninsula<\/a>, flooding virtually every block and knocking out power, heat, and hot water. The next freak storm of similar force will likely do the same; the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency<\/a> project is under construction, but both its scope and its projected effectiveness have inherent limits. At least NYCHA\u2019s Red Hook Houses now has a measure of protection, thanks to a $568 million grant from FEMA. That money paid to dig up leaky fuel tanks, replace buried steam pipes, and place new electrical-distribution stations in elevated freestanding structures designed by KPF to blend in with the existing architecture. (The camouflage is only semi-successful.) The architects, together with the landscape firm OLIN, also created a series of what they delicately call lily pads<\/a>, raising each building\u2019s courtyard a few feet up to lobby level. In Holland these would be known as terps<\/a>, artificial mounds that can turn into temporary islands when the sea flows in, leaving homes isolated but unharmed. That 2,500-year-old practice might seem like an archaic solution for contemporary Brooklyn, but it works because the building entrances were already raised and reached by stairs. The strategy has refreshed the public spaces of a sprawling NYCHA development with new playgrounds, seating, and hardy gardens. When the next flood arrives, the water will still come in, but the lights should stay on, the elevators should keep working, and residents will at least be able to gather on a patch of dry land and watch the tide go out.<\/p>\n \n From left: <\/strong>The reconstruction of the landscaping in progress in 2024. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis\/Getty ImagesFloodproofing Red Hook Houses involved replacing the underground infrastructure and relandscaping the campus with berms, raised plazas, seating, and new playgrounds. Photo: Justin Davidson\n <\/p>\n \n From top: <\/strong>The reconstruction of the landscaping in progress in 2024. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis\/Getty ImagesFloodproofing Red Hook Houses invol… more \n The new KPF-designed flood-resistant heat-and-power plant that serves the entire Red Hook Houses campus. \n Red Hook Houses residents, working with Artolution, painted the mural on a new pod, one of several that\u00a0distribute heat and electricity to individual buildings. If New York\u2019s arsenal of defenses comprised only the fortress, the terp, some spongy surfaces<\/a> and a set of deployable floodgates<\/a>, the city would be doomed. A vast metropolis with more than 500 miles of rocky coast, beaches, concrete bulwarks, esplanades, wetlands, and waterfront parks needs a full and flexible range of measures to grapple with innumerable different situations. That catalogue is slowly coming together. The challenge of coping with sudden surfeits of water has seeped into the building code, the zoning map, sewer management, subway maintenance, the power supply, park design, street repaving, and many other corners of municipal government. You can\u2019t replace a streetlight or renovate a dog run without taking flooding into account.<\/p>\n \n From left: <\/strong>Flooding in the streets of Willets Point in Queens. Photo: Andrew Burton\/Getty ImagesA new stadium rises in the neighborhood over the longstanding auto repair shops. Photo: Donovan\/NurPhoto\/Shutterstock\n <\/p>\n \n From top: <\/strong>Flooding in the streets of Willets Point in Queens. Photo: Andrew Burton\/Getty ImagesA new stadium rises in the neighborhood over the longst… more Perhaps the most challenging places to protect are low-lying inland areas that collect rainwater even when there isn\u2019t a wave in sight. Some are at the juncture of old and neglected sewage pipes. Others lack decent infrastructure altogether, like the literally and figuratively depressed East New York neighborhood known as \u201cthe Hole,\u201d notorious for storing pools of filthy water and the bodies of Mafia victims<\/a>. (Last fall, the Adams administration promised a $146 million upgrade<\/a> to the neighborhood, mostly in the form of better drainage, new sewers, and less pitted, potholed streets. The design is now making its way through the bureaucracy.) \u201cCoastal resilience is about keeping back the ocean. Stormwater resilience is about moving water out,\u201d says Rohit Aggarwala, who, as head of the Department of Environmental Protection in the Adams administration, was responsible for the city\u2019s sewers. \u201cThey are different design challenges. If you build a wall to keep out the ocean, it\u2019s also going to keep stormwater in, if you close the floodgates. Then you literally have to pump water up and over the wall.\u201d \n Flooding in Flushing Meadows Corona Park after Tropical Storm Ophelia on September 29, 2023, with analytical diagram by SCAPE. \n It\u2019s impractical to elevate all of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, but a study by SCAPE shows that restoring wetlands and opening waterways will absorb significantly more rainfall and yield soil with which to raise berms. It\u2019s only the beginning. Aggarwala has estimated that making even just the most urgent upgrades to the citywide sewer system so that it can begin to meet the escalating demands of 21st-century rainfall will cost $30 billion<\/a>. The bill for fortifying the whole city\u2019s coastal defenses against rising tides and storm surges will come to something like $50 billion more<\/a>. Those are gobsmacking sums, even spread out over decades. And hardly a single step is smooth. The residents of Red Hook Houses were shocked that FEMA\u2019s largesse would pay for new landscaping but do nothing about the decrepitude they had lived with since long before Sandy: mold, falling plaster, befouled hallways, and so on. (And for every neighborhood that has to tolerate the years of noise, disruption, and digging involved in fortifying infrastructure, there\u2019s another that feels justifiably left out<\/a>.)<\/p>\n For now, the efforts to adapt to climate change remain fragmentary. We have a pretty good idea of what must be done, and we\u2019ve started doing it, but New York \u2014 like the country as a whole \u2014 lacks the administrative coherence and predictable funding to formulate, much less follow, a long-term strategy. The Adams administration created the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, with theoretical responsibility to coordinate efforts within the Department of Environmental Protection, but he left it tiny and underfunded. Mamdani recently announced his intention to beef the bureau up<\/a>, bringing the projected head count from six to 75 and giving it an extensive portfolio of projects. It remains to be seen whether that office will have the jurisdiction, the long-range view, or the clout to set the city\u2019s long-term priorities and make sure they get carried out. And so we muddle onward, project by project and storm drain by bioswale, while the sea advances on its own remorseless timetable.<\/p>\n That halting pace only raises the costs \u2014 not just because of budget creep but in political and social terms, too. Billy Fleming, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University and the author of Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions<\/a>, cautions that those of us who are lucky enough to benefit from a first generation of defenses may live to see them become obsolete. Large, federally funded projects are sold as definitive long-term solutions that will deliver an assortment of immediate amenities. The public is invited to share concerns and contribute to the design, but the final result is governed by strict cost-benefit analysis<\/a> that often takes place out of sight and winds up leaving a lot of people feeling shortchanged.<\/p>\n![\"East](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/068862557aff9ea50ea4726e346afaa523-GettyImages-154994391.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Barrett Doherty\n <\/p>\n![\"Hurricane](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/46f3125bfbbb16632c0dd85928ca9197ad-GettyImages-457668060.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Craig Warga\/NY Daily News\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n![\"Red](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1952f02e577e28724caa2bac0233ee3bab-GettyImages-2188777616.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n From top: <\/strong>The reconstruction of the landscaping in progress in 2024. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis\/Getty ImagesFloodproofing Red Hook Houses involved replacing the underground infrastructure and relandscaping the campus with berms, raised plazas, seating, and new playgrounds. Photo: Justin Davidson\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/f8cefbe8256e605f6496ba4a1c8efe21fb-IMG-8001.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Justin Davidson\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/bb941df125e39f83e3d31181f3100a9177-IMG-7995.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Justin Davidson\n <\/p>\n![\"Willet\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/756e56a49731e2723076460878458c358e-GettyImages-170773557.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n From top: <\/strong>Flooding in the streets of Willets Point in Queens. Photo: Andrew Burton\/Getty ImagesA new stadium rises in the neighborhood over the longstanding auto repair shops. Photo: Donovan\/NurPhoto\/Shutterstock\n <\/p>\n
Other danger zones, like Flushing Meadows\u2013Corona Park<\/a>, sit in primeval wetlands that keep rebelling against the encroachments of asphalt and concrete. Orff\u2019s firm SCAPE has helped the city come up with a preliminary plan to mitigate the flooding<\/a> by elevating playing fields and deploying a network of streams and lakes to absorb excess rainfall. The project\u2019s centerpiece is the desire to unearth the long-buried Flushing Creek, turning it back from an underground gurgle to an honest-to-goddness stream that could safely channel a strong current into Flushing Bay. \u201cIf you elevate everything, you just create flooding on the LIE,\u201d Orff says. \u201cSo you\u2019re not trying to keep water out of the system; the system\u2019s been designed to absorb it.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/621ffdcb98e55b32c0c0978c8352223091-09-Site-photo-Tropical-Storm-Ophelia-dia.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Waterfront Alliance\/SCAPE\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/89bb1ce1a296dcfd765411c14b6be0cd92-08-Lakeside-Edge-Restoration-c-Waterfron.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Waterfront Alliance\/SCAPE\n <\/p>\n