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The Sunday Read: ‘What Does It Mean to Save a Neighborhood?’

Nearly a decade after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed piers and damaged riverside social housing projects, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to floods. Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, explores the nine-year effort to redesign Lower Manhattan in the wake of the hurricane, and the design and planning challenges that have made progress incremental. He goes inside a fight over how to protect the neighborhood in the future — revealing why renewal in the face of climate disaster is so complicated. The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square.For more information, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. This storywas narrated by Michael Kimmelman. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
Duration
49m
Broadcast on
19 Dec 2021
Audio Format
other

Nearly a decade after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed piers and damaged riverside social housing projects, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to floods.

Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, explores the nine-year effort to redesign Lower Manhattan in the wake of the hurricane, and the design and planning challenges that have made progress incremental. He goes inside a fight over how to protect the neighborhood in the future — revealing why renewal in the face of climate disaster is so complicated.

This story was narrated by Michael Kimmelman. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square.

The New York Times works with philanthropic organizations that share its belief that editorial independence is crucial to the power and value of its journalism. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.

 

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


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This podcast is supported by TikTok. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries are the ones you weren't looking for. That happens every day on TikTok. A science experiment can spark a whole new interest. A recipe you stumble upon can become a meal you make for the people you love. And a restaurant you've never heard of might become your new favorite spot. That's the thing about TikTok. Follow your curiosity and see where it leads. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Michael Kimmelman. I'm the architecture critic for The Times and the founder and editor at large for Headway. Headway is a new initiative at The New York Times that I started, which is focused on global challenges and paths to progress. It's intended, really, to try to promote a kind of constructive conversation around big issues to get away from some of the 24-hour news cycle and focus, really, on how we, as a newspaper and we, more broadly, as a society, can think about these problems in the long term. We can promote a conversation that looks across time and not just about what's happening the next day. The story is about a park in Lower Manhattan called East River Park. I see the park as a kind of parable about democracy and how we make decisions today. Very often, our system sort of grinds to a halt. And with challenges like climate change, where the scale and pace of them is so great, I think the park is an example of the problem we face. How can we begin to think differently? And how can we examine some of these systems we have in place? We have to begin by seeing how the system works or doesn't, and this is, I hope, what the park helps to show. So East River Park was built in the 1930s by Robert Moses. Much of New York City, as we now know it, was created by Robert Moses. Not all of what Moses did was good, much of it destroyed old neighborhoods, especially poor black and brown neighborhoods. But one of the better things that he did was to build parks like East River Park that would benefit one of the poorest parts of the city. The park is essentially a ribbon, a kind of promenade,

Transcription truncated.

Nearly a decade after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed piers and damaged riverside social housing projects, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to floods. Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, explores the nine-year effort to redesign Lower Manhattan in the wake of the hurricane, and the design and planning challenges that have made progress incremental. He goes inside a fight over how to protect the neighborhood in the future — revealing why renewal in the face of climate disaster is so complicated. The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square.For more information, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. This storywas narrated by Michael Kimmelman. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.