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Hudson Park will be getting power back this weekend

Photo by Lincoln Anderson On Tuesday night at 11:30 in Hudson River Park, temporary floodlights powered by a portable generator illuminated the park’s esplanade near Bank St., where the park’s AIDS memorial is located. Most of the park’s Village section, however, was without any electrical light at all and the park remained closed during evening hours. Normally, the park is open until 1 a.m., but has been closing at dusk ever since Hurricane Sandy knocked out its electrical power seven months ago.
Photo by Lincoln Anderson
On Tuesday night at 11:30 in Hudson River Park, temporary floodlights powered by a portable generator illuminated the park’s esplanade near Bank St., where the park’s AIDS memorial is located. Most of the park’s Village section, however, was without any electrical light at all and the park remained closed during evening hours. Normally, the park is open until 1 a.m., but has been closing at dusk ever since Hurricane Sandy knocked out its electrical power seven months ago.

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Nearly a full seven months after Hurricane Sandy, the Hudson River Park is still struggling to restore electrical power to its Greenwich Village section.

Speaking last week, a spokesperson for the Hudson River Park Trust told The Villager that the hope was that power would be restored by last Friday in time for the Memorial Day weekend.

A message posted on the Trust’s Web site on Fri., May 24, said that the park had resumed operating under normal hours, from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. — though with exceptions.

Yet, as of this Tuesday evening, much of the Village section remained in the dark.

As a result, Park Enforcement Patrol officers are continuing to close the park every day at dusk, fencing off the entrances with movable metal gates.

Not only has this deprived people of use of the park’s Village section in the evenings, but it’s caused the adjacent bike path to become seriously overcrowded at night, flooded with joggers who can’t use the park’s esplanade, who the cyclists in turn have to swerve around.

After a cold spring, the weather is finally warming up — in fact, extremely high temperatures are predicted for later this week — so there will naturally be increasing demand for use of the park in the evenings after its long closure.

Speaking last week, the spokesperson said that, “by Friday, anything east of the bulkhead should be open,” referring to the so-called “upland” portion of the park, east of the Hudson River’s edge. This would include the park’s riverfront esplanade, meaning it would be open again for joggers in the evening, so they won’t have to use the bike path.

The spokesperson said, however, that he wasn’t sure if the park piers — including the popular Christopher St. Pier — would also have power back as of last Friday evening.

As for the bike path that runs next to the park on its eastern edge, it is actually under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Transportation, and does have its lights back for the most part.

However, this Tuesday evening around 11:30 p.m., most of the park’s Village section was still dark. The park was once again empty — except for the occasional couple sitting together on a bench in the darkness toward the northern end of the section — and, again, was closed well before its 1 a.m. curfew. Just as the week before, none of the blue bollard lights along the esplanade fence in the Village section were lit, except oddly four that glowed very faintly around Bethune St.

However, in a slight improvement, as opposed to a week earlier, when the entire Village section had been dark at night, the upland park lights were on between the north end of Pier 40 and the Christopher St. Pier, but again, not the blue bollard lights along the fence.

Also, while a week earlier the Christopher St. Pier, Charles St. Pier and Jane St. Pier were all dark when The Villager toured the park about 1:30 a.m., this past Tuesday evening, two of the three piers — Christopher St. and Charles St. — did have their lights back on. Yet, just like the previous week, the two park buildings at Christopher St. were still dark. On the other hand, just as the previous week, light could be seen glowing through the windows at the top of the park building near the children’s Jane St. Pier.

Gansevoort Peninsula, where a city Department of Sanitation facility is located, has its electricity. Chelsea Piers, of course, has its lights back, and so does the park’s Chelsea section north of it. Last week, though, a few blocks of the park’s Chelsea section south of the W. 30th St. Heliport were without power at night. But this past Tuesday evening, the lights in that section had been restored, save for three lights that ring the table sculpture at this section’s northern end.

As for why some park sections had light and others didn’t, a PEP officer in an S.U.V. parked on the bike path north of Chelsea Piers, just shrugged that it’s the park’s “wiring.”

Tobi Bergman, a park activist and Community Board 2 member, said the Trust really could have used some help restoring power, especially given the way the bike path was so heavily impacted by the park’s closing.

“I think the Trust has done an admirable post-Sandy job, given the hit the park took and their financial situation,” he said. “But I think the city should have stepped in with an emergency response to repair the lighting, which is really a safety issue. The park having to support itself financially was the Hudson River Park Act deal — but that doesn’t mean the city and state should leave it in the lurch when a disaster causes damages beyond its resources. It is still an important public resource, even if a self-supporting one, and the city should take ultimate responsibility for its return to safe use after a hurricane.”

Rich Caccappolo, chairperson of the C.B. 2 Parks and Waterfront Committee, noted that lack of power not only affects lighting, but also other things that park users have been complaining about, such as bathrooms.

The Trust spokesperson confirmed that electricity is needed to run the pumps to supply water for the park’s bathroom facilities.

On Monday, Jules Kohn, a Village resident, told The Villager that the bathroom situation in the park on Memorial Day was a nightmare: The Village section of the park was extremely crowded but the bathrooms at Christopher St. and at the children’s playground at Jane St. were closed.

“There was only one portable toilet at the children’s playground and it was overflowing and unusable,” he said. “There were only two portable toilets on Pier 45 [Christopher St. Pier] where there was a constant line.”

However, Kohn subsequently was happy to report to The Villager that Madelyn Wils, the Trust’s C.E.O., personally returned his distressed phone message from Memorial Day the following day.

“She said the power problems should be corrected and bathrooms open this weekend,” Kohn said.

Speaking this Wednesday, Wils told The Villager that power was restored throughout the park shortly before Memorial Day, but that there subsequently was a “brownout,” which hit the Village section from Christopher St. to Pier 51, the Jane St. children’s pier. She said this was basically due problems in the cabling throughout the park, and that workers were going into the park’s many manholes in this section to find the problem and fix it. That the Jane St. Pier was without power Tuesday night could be part of this brownout, she said.

“There are over 30,000 linear feet of cable up and down the esplanade,” she noted. “We had to repair and inspect over 100 splices.

“So far, the lights in the rest of the park are holding,” she said.

As for the bathrooms, these were backed up and flooded by the storm, and so everything has to be replaced: sewer ejectors, toilets and all the hardware. Everyone up and down the Eastern seaboard is replacing these parts, as well, so there is simply a time lag to get these parts, according to the Trust.

“The bathrooms will be operating Friday,” she assured.

The electrical problems have also plagued the park’s programming, specifically, kayaking, outrigger boating and community sailing at New York River Sports, at Pier 66. Nancy Brous, who runs the Pier 66 facility, said their power was basically restored only two weeks ago and their office electrical outlets last week, a couple of days before Memorial Day.

“We still do not have working plumbing,” she said. “Our exterior water has been on and off for the last several weeks, but now seems to be working with an additional source ‘hosed in’ from a source further out on Pier 66. It’s a boathouse, so the ability to rinse with fresh water is critical.”

According to Brous, hosing off is important because the Hudson’s water is deemed safe for secondary contact, such as boating, but not primary contact, such as immersion or swimming.

Most of the boathouse’s doors are electrically operated, as well — and many of them quite heavy — which posed serious operating difficulties for the facility.

“This has been a nightmare for tenants, many of them small businesses, and many others which serve the public through volunteer-run, free and low-cost programs with few resources, who couldn’t get their own systems back up, as Chelsea Piers and some of the larger ones did,” Brous said. “And it was a sad thing for neighborhood residents, since our only open space closed at 5 p.m. over the winter and is just now, seven months after the storm, seeing some real improvements.”

The sailing and kayaking facilities both offer winter programs, she noted, which obviously suffered due to the power issue. The sailing program did temporarily relocate.

But things, at last, appear to be tacking toward a return to normal for the boathouse.

“So our offices are functioning again,” Brous said. “Our main overhead lights seem to be on the blink but hopefully will be fixed soon — hard to say if it’s a simple or serious problem. We have two porta-potties — and a source of fresh water for rinsing after boating. So we’re operating, getting back on our feet, finally.”