Flood risk in East Harlem identified in the published summary of Vision Plan for a Resilient East Harlem.
Ms. Marie Winfield is an attorney and freelance consultant on land use, zoning and community planning issues, with a focus on environmental review. As an advocate in the East Harlem community, she served as a member of Community Board 11 in Manhattan, numerous neighborhood plan committees, the Department of Sanitation Community Advisory Group for the M11 Sanitation Garage, and Metropolitan Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine Community Advisory Boards. She also served as the Deputy Director of Fair Housing Justice Center, and the President of the East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust nonprofit. In 2021, she joined Columbia University’s 9th class of A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholars.
Located in upper Manhattan along East River, a significant portion of East Harlem lies within the 1% floodplain as outlined in New York City’s PFIRM maps. The neighborhood luckily dodged the full impact of Hurricane Sandy, as the storm hit a low tide when it arrived; however, recent research has found that a six-hour difference in Sandy’s landfall would have easily brought severe flooding into the neighborhood.
In 2017, NYC Parks and Mayor’s Office of Resiliency started to produce a community-scaled resilience plan for East Harlem named Vision Plan for a Resilient East Harlem. However, until today, only a 25-page summary of the plan has been released. The lack of transparency in resilience planning has led to questions raised regarding the city’s oversight of a neighborhood with significant flood risk, which also suffers other challenges including infrastructural disinvestment.
Digital news platform The CITY has published a series of articles (respectively in January 2021 and October 2022) following up on resilience planning in East Harlem as well as the community’s fraught fight to access the Vision Plan; Ms. Winfield, along with other CB11 staff, expressed opinions on local resilience planning in these articles. In this interview, Ms. Winfield shares further observations on the environmental justice implications of challenges faced by the East Harlem community, and envisions community-level resilience planning as a valuable opportunity to reach integrated land-use decisions and develop localized environmental education programs.
This interview was carried out on Feb. 20, 2023 over Zoom.
“Community-level resilience planning can be a valuable opportunity for integrated land-use decisions and localized environmental education programs."
Ziming Wang: We know that although a significant portion of East Harlem is situated in the 1% floodplain, the neighborhood was spared from the full impact of Hurricane Sandy. But how has the neighborhood suffered from other forms of floods — such as storm surges — in recent years? And what’s the public perception of flood risk in East Harlem?
Marie Winfield: Well, I’m not an expert on flood risks; however, based on what I’ve heard in the community, people who live along 1st and 2nd Avenues often had flooding problems during Sandy and other storms — there were cars that submerged under flood water. East Harlem is also home to a great number of NYCHA campuses; some of them are vulnerable to flooding as well. Along 116th and 117th Streets, people may have felt lucky for being spared by Hurricane Sandy. However, the community’s concern revived when Metropolitan Hospital announced last year that a “FEMA wall” (the Metropolitan Hospital Flood Wall Resiliency Project funded by FEMA) would be placed around its perimeter. It’s a Federally funded project, which didn’t have to go through city-level land use procedures; and when we got to know it, it had already passed environmental reviews. You see, sometimes we have these piecemeal interventions and adaptation projects; however, we don’t really have a comprehensive understanding of the neighborhood’s flood risk, or an integrated agenda to adapt for resilience.
Ziming Wang: I think this echoes a point you made in the CITY article, that the lack of community-level resilience planning was not only a problem by itself, but is also connected to other challenges such as the infrastructural disinvestment that we see on Pier 107. So could you give me some more details on the implications of the lack and intransparency of community-level resilience planning?
Marie Winfield: First of all, I always believed that a comprehensive neighborhood resilience plan could serve as an opportunity to solve infrastructural issues in East Harlem. The Pier 107 near 110th Street is literally falling into the East River; and sinkholes have appeared on the East River Esplanade. If elevating low-lying sections of the waterfront is something considered in the Vision Plan, then it would reasonably create a chance to upgrade and repair our esplanade. However, we haven’t seen much progress in either infrastructural upgrades or resilience planning yet.
The problem of the piecemeal solutions that have been given to us is that they are not coordinated with each other, and they’re often not able to address the pre-existing infrastructural and land use issues in the community as I just mentioned. In around 2017, the city announced the Harlem River waterfront park project as part of the Manhattan Greenway that loops the island; at roughly the same time, the Vision Plan was also introduced by NYC Parks and the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency. I was like “Wait — don’t they potentially contradict each other?” They are essentially disparate planning processes happening at the same time, and may likely end up with different recommendations for the esplanade and piers. Meanwhile, we also have other individual projects that we’ve committed resources and money to — such as the FEMA wall around the Metropolitan Hospital, and capital projects under the NYC Community Parks Initiative. Furthermore, East Harlem has recently been through a rezoning process, and there’s the creation of the East Harlem Historic District — a quite new historic district that resulted from the advocacy of local organizations such as East Harlem Preservation and Ascendant Neighborhood Development. All these efforts and new changes are calling for a more unified and consolidated strategic planning process. During my time as a member of CB11’s Environment, Open Space & Parks Committee, I worked with NYC Parks to advocate for flood resilience measures such as bioswales and porous landscape materials in the renovation of local parks and playgrounds; but again, that’s only a piece of the whole picture that should be established.
Ziming Wang: Would you say that these challenges have demonstrated a case of environmental injustice against the East Harlem community? I noticed that the Harlem River waterfront park was only proposed because East Harlem was one of the several gaps in Manhattan where waterfront access was still missing.
Marie Winfield: Yes, this is a case of environmental injustice. We’ve seen governmental neglect on a neighborhood with environmental risks; we’ve seen mismatched priorities in land use and resilience planning. There are many things that we’ve been promised that don’t seem to pan out: repairs to the pier and the esplanade, as well as the M11 Sanitation Garage. I moved into East Harlem when my daughter was two years old; and as we walked along the esplanade recently, I noticed the same sinkholes that I found when we just moved here — my daughter is 16 now.
Speaking of the community resilience plan, it was launched in parallel with other resilience plans in downtown areas — such as the East Side Coastal Resiliency Plan and the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR) initiative. However, the East Harlem resilience plan didn’t receive quite as much attention and investment: it was overseen by the city’s Department of Parks, which seemed abnormal in the first place. The city did send someone from the Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency (MOCR) to CB11; but without giving an explanation, they just said that the project was “going to be done well.” Resilience planning should be an action where government agencies at different levels, community members, and consultants get together to find solutions; especially in our case, where taxpayers’ money went into the project. However, in reality, after the Vision Plan was made, city officials would again propose pilot projects in their own ways. I believe that part of the problem really had to do with the stewardship of planning processes and capital projects: the Community Parks Initiative has been more successful, because it allowed influential community organizations to steer the money and projects, and thus boosted the democratic participation of local residents. The James Weldon Johnson Park was reconstructed within 18 months — a reminder that infrastructural upgrades don’t always need to take a generation to be done.
Ziming Wang: Community engagement and participation are of course the key to success for every planning project. So if the city government and CB11 are to restart the making of a community resilience plan for East Harlem today, which governmental or non-governmental organizations would you like to have at the table?
Marie Winfield: The short answer is Any and Every. Past planning projects such as the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan had identified specific organizations to engage; however, I feel that it may work better if policy-makers keep their doors open for any community organization or individual to come in, and that incentives are provided for those who come to share opinions. I sometimes feel that local schools which have already established extensive social networks are not well-used in planning projects. Also, it’s important for city agencies to take community inputs and translate them into part of the outcome of planning projects: in other words, community inputs have to mean something. As a Community Board member, I used to receive a lot of requests saying “I need to speak with you by tomorrow to have this community engagement task checked off.” But we shouldn’t be “pawns” of planning processes; community input is meant to really inform policy-making.
Ziming Wang: Another issue identified by community leaders in articles published by the CITY is that without a resilience plan, it’s hard for a community to apply for Federal and municipal funding to carry out adaptation projects. Do you know of any Federal or municipal grant that has been spent in East Harlem in support of resilience planning and flood adaptation? Are there buildings elevated, retrofitted, or bought out in Harlem following Hurricane Sandy?
Marie Winfield: There are projects that were carried out under Federal or municipal support from time to time — the Vision Plan and the Metropolitan Hospital Flood Wall project both used Federal funds, and some of the NYCHA campuses in the neighborhood have been selected for pilot projects on flood mitigation by the city. However, overall speaking, Federal and municipal funding is still drastically lacking in East Harlem, in terms of resilience planning and climate adaptation.
Speaking of building-scaled retrofitting interventions, I can’t think of any case in East Harlem. However, at CB11, we were well aware of New York City’s recently published Zoning for Coastal Flood Resiliency (ZCFR); and, besides building-scaled adaptation policy-making, I personally hope that the city pays more attention to the development of complex-scaled strategies for NYCHA campuses.
Ziming Wang: The Vision Plan recommended a number of large-scale flood resilience strategies, such as rebuilding the 106th Street — the historic waterway of Harlem River — into a “green corridor” with mid-road streams or ditches. In your imagination, what will East Harlem look like when it’s properly adapted for flood resilience? What features would you like to see in the community’s resilience plan?
Marie Winfield: I actually haven’t ever imagined that — however, I have perused every single resilience proposal that’s been made for East Harlem in the last 12 or 16 years. Very often, in these studies, planners and consultants would say “Let’s look at what they’ve done in Amsterdam, and take those strategies here!” However, the real challenge lies in bringing these strategies into reality. I believe that we have plenty of successful cases to learn from — other areas of New York City are already benefiting from initiatives such as the Billion Oyster Project and the Solar One Green Energy Education Center.
As for East Harlem, one thing I’ve wanted in the neighborhood’s resilience plan is the creation of an environmental education center where intergeneration knowledge exchange can be made on the environmental history of the neighborhood. Many older East Harlemites used to fish or crab along East River; but nobody is going there anymore — people are afraid that their children may fall into the sinkholes. It’s important that the local history of human interaction with nature is made known to our younger generations.
And also, East Harlem has a number of diaspora groups — such as Puerto Ricans and Mexicans — that have environmental practices historically connected to the water. These communities are usually very creative in arranging native plants in their community gardens; so it would be great if their knowledge on climate and environment were also given a chance to be communicated and heard across the neighborhood.
* This interview text has been transcribed and edited based on the interviewer’s notes.
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