Pearl Duncan: Holding Back the River, Riveting Water @ World Trade Center
[The author is completing a book about the variety of her ancestors’ DNA, ancestry and genealogy, and how each intersected with dramatic historical events.]
The water retakes the land, pushing against how well the seawalls hold back the Rivers. So much depends on how well the city’s seawalls hold, or do not hold. Separation of land and water is the challenge in cities that have seawalls, underwater structures, standing tall and firm in sentry poses, as bulwarks against the sea and rivers.
The World Trade Center sits on water. Separation of land and water is the reality in Downtown New York at the site where there is so much construction and reconstruction. Today’s developers should not only look to the future potential of the site, they have to respect the physical realities.
Bulwarks, seawalls holding back the Hudson River, was the reality at the site, even in the past, in colonial times when engineers first created seawalls between the island and its Rivers. Holding back the River is not a struggle today, because the engineers have the know-how. But the underground seawalls still test building foundations and the land Downtown, on a less threatening scale than in colonial times. Or so we believed.
There are seawalls under the World Trade Center site. The original water line on the Hudson River of the island was Church Street. Each century, when a street was added, Greenwich, Washington, and West Streets, three centuries ago, new seawalls or River walls, were created. In the last century, more than a decade ago, when the western streets of Battery Park City were filled with a landfill, new seawalls went up underground, between the island and the River. Seawalls are not new. There were small circular seawalls four centuries ago, when the Dutch settled and built villages on the Rivers, above the villages of the Lenape Native American Indians. Today, the seawalls, Hudson River walls, protect the buildings and streets, and prevent water from the Hudson River from breaking into the city....
Read entire article at NYC NearSay
The water retakes the land, pushing against how well the seawalls hold back the Rivers. So much depends on how well the city’s seawalls hold, or do not hold. Separation of land and water is the challenge in cities that have seawalls, underwater structures, standing tall and firm in sentry poses, as bulwarks against the sea and rivers.
The World Trade Center sits on water. Separation of land and water is the reality in Downtown New York at the site where there is so much construction and reconstruction. Today’s developers should not only look to the future potential of the site, they have to respect the physical realities.
Bulwarks, seawalls holding back the Hudson River, was the reality at the site, even in the past, in colonial times when engineers first created seawalls between the island and its Rivers. Holding back the River is not a struggle today, because the engineers have the know-how. But the underground seawalls still test building foundations and the land Downtown, on a less threatening scale than in colonial times. Or so we believed.
There are seawalls under the World Trade Center site. The original water line on the Hudson River of the island was Church Street. Each century, when a street was added, Greenwich, Washington, and West Streets, three centuries ago, new seawalls or River walls, were created. In the last century, more than a decade ago, when the western streets of Battery Park City were filled with a landfill, new seawalls went up underground, between the island and the River. Seawalls are not new. There were small circular seawalls four centuries ago, when the Dutch settled and built villages on the Rivers, above the villages of the Lenape Native American Indians. Today, the seawalls, Hudson River walls, protect the buildings and streets, and prevent water from the Hudson River from breaking into the city....