High Bridge to be Re-Opened
From Joseph Sanchez & Ellen Macnow, Co-Chairs ([email protected] )
High Bridge Coalition Steering Committee
On Earth Day, April 22, 2007, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the High Bridge will be restored and reopened. Congratulations and thank you to all High Bridge Coalition members and friends!
Below is a portion of the text from the Mayor’s speech.
We also have to allow New Yorkers more opportunities to play the sports they love and enjoy the exercise that is essential to a healthy lifestyle. How do we do it? We will create new recreational facilities across every borough, for soccer, baseball, cricket, and more. We will open 290 schoolyards as local playgrounds. We will increase the hours of use at 39 fields by installing lights. We will cover 25 asphalt fields with artificial turf that will allow for greater use. We will reclaim eight large sites that were designated as parks decades ago but never completed. And we will also begin the most ambitious “street-greening” initiative in New York’s long history. The first installment in what will become a $250 million investment in nearly a quarter-million new trees on New York City streets – as well as a new public plaza in every community.
Taken together, all these initiatives will give New Yorkers the new open space and the outstanding recreational opportunities we will need for decades to come. They will ensure that, by 2030, virtually all New Yorkers live just a short walk away from a park.
One of the eight large parks we will be upgrading merits special attention, and I want to mention it today: Highbridge Park in Washington Heights. The park is named for the High Bridge, which was completed in 1848 to carry water from the Croton Reservoir across the Bronx and into Manhattan. It is one of our City’s oldest bridges – but it has been closed to pedestrians for decades, a glaring symbol of a time when New York failed to preserve its historical treasures. It’s time to fix that.
And that’s why we are committing to re-open the bridge, benefiting communities on both sides of the Harlem River. The High Bridge aqueduct was part of a water supply system that remains an engineering masterpiece – now delivering over a billion gallons of water, pure water, every day, to more than nine million people.
The High Bridge Coalition looks forward to continuing to work with the Department of Parks & Recreation to restore the bridge using historic preservation principles, to make it fully accessible for wheelchair users, and to connect it to New York City’s Greenway System. Please join us as these plans are prepared and the restoration begins to get off the ground!
Read the Mayor’s complete speech or watch the video at www.nyc.gov : http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.c0935b9a57bb4ef3daf2f1c701c789a0/index.jsp?pageID=mayor_press_release&catID=1194&doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom%2Fhtml%2F2007a%2Fpr120-07.html&cc=unused1978&rc=1194&ndi=1