"Seeing the Daylight: Following 25 Years of Advocacy, New York City Will Uncover a Buried Stream in the Bronx," Landscape Architecture Magazine, June 2023.
The daylighting of Tibbetts Brook in the Bronx is the largest green infrastructure project in the history of New York City and the first time the city will have uncovered a buried stream, which has been diverted for more than a century into the Broadway sewer.
The project, approved this January to begin construction in 2025 at a cost of $133 million, will restore natural habitats and wetlands in Van Cortlandt Park, extend a spur of the 750-mile Empire State trail from upstate New York, and divert seven million gallons of freshwater that currently flows daily from Westchester County into the sewer system, rerouting it into the Harlem River. “It represents discharge to the Harlem River that’s kind of as clean as you can get in New York City,” says Marit Larson, the assistant commissioner for natural resources and planning in the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation.
The Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, an environmental nonprofit, has advocated for the stream’s daylighting since at least 1997. Drawings by then-student Gail Whittwer-Laird, now a principal at Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects, envisioned a meandering pathway to recover the natural stream, directing it through a disused stretch of former train line owned by the CSX freight railroad company. Now, Starr Whitehouse is leading the design effort for the city, in partnership water engineering company Hazen.
Karen Argenti, the Bronx Council’s executive director, attributes the city’s investment to the current political moment. “We’re in this phase where everyone’s measuring greenhouse gas, and climate change is an issue, and flooding is a big problem. It all came together as one,” she says.
The parks department has been conscious of the detrimental effects of the buried stream, including flooding in Van Cortlandt Park, for decades. In 2008, the department applied for a land use change along the rail route, which the Planning Commission approved in 2011. The approval coincided with a 2012 consent decree between the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which required the city to reduce combined sewer overflows through green infrastructure to comply with the Clean Water Act.
In the years following, a series of studies and installations helped the project gain momentum. Public art initiatives by the seminal land artist Mary Miss and her nonprofit City as Living Laboratory (CALL) helped bring attention to the site’s potential. Rescuing Tibbetts Brook: One Stitch at a Time organized a series of participatory walks with designers, scientists, and residents, and temporary installations by artists along the rail line. CALL produced a compelling visualization imagining Tibbetts Brook as a natural stream with a pedestrian walkway and proposed a series of billboards on the Major Deegan Freeway to argue for its daylighting.
A 2016 study by landscape architect Susannah Drake of DLANDstudio (which merged last year with Sasaki), in partnership with ecological consultants Biohabitats and engineering firm HDR, concentrated on the drainage of Van Cortlandt Lake into a pipe routed to the Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. That project’s mandate was limited to working within the existing parkland, conceptualizing how adapting six acres of the park into wetlands planted with native species and designed with nature walks would provide ecosystem services, retaining water and nurturing biodiversity.
“The exciting piece about this project was that it was very different from what the Parks Department and DEP normally do in creating this dynamic wetland environment,” says Joshua Price, former DLANDstudio associate and now senior associate at Sasaki. “There’s often not the space to do that in New York City, and this was an exception to that.”
In January 2022, the city announced an agreement to purchase the last section of the rail line from CSX for $11.2 million, greenlighting construction. A concession had to be made to one outlier lot, however: the final section of Tibbetts Brook will flow through a large pipe beneath Metro North’s Hudson line. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority refused to relocate a trash storage depot on the property, preventing the almost complete recovery of the brook.
Nonetheless, everyone credits Rohit Aggarwala, Mayor Eric Adams’s appointee as DEP commissioner, for putting the pieces together to make the Tibbetts Brook daylighting finally happen. “He’s this visionary, and he’s working on the new PlanNYC,” says Drake. “He has drunk the green infrastructure Kool-Aid in a big way and is a believer, and he’s trying to find every opportunity.”
