Is Manhattan About To Get Drowned By The Sea?

Nothing, and I mean nothing, leads so quickly to the loss of all critical faculties as global warming hysteria.

One key claim in the maelstrom of global warming hype is the assertion that sea level will shortly rise and swamp coastal cities. I would put this claim in the category of total BS. For more detail than you would ever want to know on that subject, go to this link.

But for today’s purposes, assume that there is something to the claim of a big impending sea level rise. I live here in Manhattan, specifically Lower Manhattan (the southern part of the island). If sea level is about to rise and swamp coastal cities, Manhattan looks like ground zero, and Lower Manhattan in particular. We are an island surrounded by estuaries, otherwise known as the sea. Most of the southern half of our island, Lower Manhattan — the half with the high end business districts and pricey residential areas — rises up barely at all above sea level. Lower Manhattan has about 15 or so miles of shoreline, with the sea surrounding us on the East, West and South. The northern half of the island is hilly, and has much higher elevations; but in Lower Manhattan the first few blocks in from the waterfront are around 10 to 20 feet at best above mean high tide. If a big sea level rise is imminent, we are going under.

Belief in anthropogenic global warming and its associated natural disasters like sea level rise is an essential component of Manhattan groupthink. Therefore, it is clear that our politicians must “do something” about the impending calamity. But what? We’re not about to jack up some thousands of buildings by 30 or 50 feet each, even assuming that somebody could figure out how to do that.

Thankfully, our politicians have come up with the answer, namely, the “East Side Coastal Resiliency Project” (ESCRP). Our local newspaper The Villager first reported on the ESCRP on the occasion of a public hearing held back in June. Here’s the idea. There’s a park, called East River Park, that runs along about three miles of Manhattan waterfront on the Lower East Side (from about Montgomery Street to 14th Street, for those who know the area). We’re going to close the park for some three and a half years and undertake a massive earth moving project to truck in millions of tons of dirt and raise the level of the ground by about ten feet. The cost will be about $1.45 billion, to be jointly funded by the City and federal governments. (The Villager does not say how much the feds are kicking in). With the ground ten feet higher, even if the sea goes up by nine feet, it won’t be able to get in. Simple, right?

According to the Villager article at the link, the proposed ESCRP generated quite a bit of controversy in the affected community. Not that anyone expressed doubt about the premise that the sea is about to rise up from man-made global warming. Instead, most of the controversy was about losing the park for three plus years, plus the loss of some hundreds of trees that are about to be buried in dirt. But even if everyone accepted the premise of imminent massive sea level rise, you would think that someone would have asked the next obvious question, which is, how does it help us to raise the grade of three miles of the relevant shoreline while leaving the grade of the other twelve miles the same? After all, the sea level is the same on the Lower West Side as it is on the Lower East Side.

Since last June, it appears that the ESCRP has been moving along briskly through the approval processes. There is an update in the current (February 20, 2020) issue of The Villager, which however has not yet appeared online. As reported there, several lawsuits have been started by members of the community protesting the multi-year loss of the park, and the loss of the trees. (Suing is what we do here in Manhattan.). However, the project is now “fully funded” and ready to begin construction, pending another round or two of community meetings.

So you are probably wondering, what is going on in the Wall Street area — home to those dozens of iconic skyscrapers, including the re-built World Trade Center — let alone on the Lower West Side? After all, the Lower East Side, where the ESCRP is about to be built, has almost nothing but low-income public housing projects on the inland side of the park. In the Wall Street area and the Lower West Side, we have billions upon billions of dollars of high-value private investment. Isn’t all of that at risk?

Well, on the Lower West Side, directly across the island from East River Park and the ESCRP, what we have is our friends from Google building themselves a brand new $1+ billion, million-square-foot office building — and it’s right smack on the waterfront! The construction of the building is well under way. Here is a recent rendering of what it will look like when completed:

Many more images, including of ongoing construction, can be found at New York YIMBY here. This building couldn’t be more than about 10 feet above a good high tide.

But then, the same goes for the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, about a mile south in the Financial District. It’s also just off the water:

Would anybody be putting billion dollar plus buildings in these locations if they thought there was anything to this sea level rise hype?

For myself, I’m betting with the smart money at Google and Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, you would think that the Trump administration could put a stop to some of this ridiculous boondoggle spending like the ESCRP, but somehow that does not seem to be possible.