One evening a few months ago, during the kind of brief but explosive rainstorm that has become almost routine, a woman in a fuchsia yoga outfit stepped off a bus on Hempstead Avenue where the current knocked her off her feet and sent her speeding off down the block on her back, like a pink kayak shooting the urban rapids. Those few seconds of drama in the middle of a severe but far from record-breaking cloudburst could have been a scene from Hollywood about nature’s revenge on the city.
It’s been nearly 14 years since Superstorm Sandy turned out the lights and transformed entire neighborhoods into networks of canals, killing 44 people and causing $19 billion in losses. Subsequent assaults have been quick and fierce, if not quite as catastrophic. Hurricane Ida blasted through the five boroughs in early September 2021 with cataracts of rain, drowned 11 people in their basements, killed two more, and left $1 billion worth of misery. Other bursts of nastiness have added to the sense of menace: gales that hurl branches onto the street, squalls that turn subway stairs into mini-Niagaras and parks into inland seas.
But as we stare into another hurricane season, it’s worth pausing to appreciate how much New York has learned about armoring itself against a wet and menacing future. The city has long survived by leveraging disasters. After every crisis, skeptics have written it off: No sane person, the Chicken Littles squawked, would ever again brave the streets, let their kids loose on them, buy property, bank, work in a skyscraper, share an elevator, or even just stick around in such a perpetually vulnerable metropolis. And yet, each time, the city has thrived by being nimble, drawing on its most abundant and renewable resource: confidence. Not all cities come back from a battering with such consistency; New York has aplomb in its DNA.
Today, the threats from climate change are at hand, and so are the means to ward them off. In fact, the techniques have become so varied and specific that the options can be overwhelming. The low-lying park where floodwaters swept into the Lower East Side has been bulked up with berms and walls. In Brooklyn, the courtyards of NYCHA’s Red Hook Houses, where Sandy knocked out boilers and filled basements, have acquired new topography and a campuswide electrical system that’s lifted out of danger. Willets Point in Queens has been reclaimed, raised, and fitted out with new affordable housing and a soccer stadium. Off the southern shore of Staten Island, a chain of artificial reefs seeded with oysters stands ready to slow destructive waves. And all over the city, sidewalks have acquired tree pits that can sponge up rainfall, keeping at least some of it out of the storm drains.
Together, these projects are the first visible results of a multi-decade campaign to keep New York dry and safe in an epoch of rising seas and more violent storms. After years of confusion, foot-dragging, fantasies, and conflicting agendas, New Yorkers are finally starting to see an urban landscape in mid-transformation, tangible evidence that the city is taking the challenge seriously.
Go for a run in East River Park, and you are jogging through the future. Along that undulating length of landscape at the edge of Manhattan, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge, a range of artificial hills rises from the shoreline, with a concrete floodwall embedded inside, before dipping back down to the FDR Drive. These are not bare mounds but the topography of leisure, kitted out with fresh plantings, young trees, smooth paths, shiny playgrounds, brightly surfaced basketball courts, stone bleachers. A year after it opened, the park still retains its fragile newness (except where the exposed wall is defaced with graffiti), and its still-fledgling foliage offers scant shade on a hot summer day. That’s because no park is finished on its opening day. Architecture ages; landscape matures.
On the east side of Manhattan, a range of artificial hills rises with a concrete flood wall embedded inside.
Regrading and relandscaping East River Park meant removing 1,000 mature trees in exchange for new slopes, seating, young trees, and flood-resistant sports areas.
MNLA designed the new East River Park flood protection to flow onto footbridges over the FDR Drive.
Floodgate, part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project.
Photographs by Barrett DohertyThe physical act of terraforming the old East River Park into the $1.45 billion East Side Coast Resiliency project proved easy compared to the political preliminaries. Thousands of New Yorkers spent four years discussing a proposal (originally conceived by BIG) that would have preserved much of the existing park before a conclave of city agencies blindsided them with a radical redesign in 2018. The new version, which reshaped virtually the entire area between the river and the FDR Drive and uprooted 1,000 graceful old trees, triggered years of furious opposition and depleted the local residents’ stock of goodwill.
Still, this first phase, designed by MNLA, does a good job of softening a defensive perimeter with a dressed-up set of ramparts while announcing to the ocean: You shall not pass. The ESCR exists to protect more than 100,000 people who live upland and — especially when it is integrated into a future chain of barriers extending from East 25th Street down to Battery Park and up the West Side past Chambers Street — the untold billions locked into lower Manhattan. (Flood protection is mostly a matter of protecting investment. If saving lives were the top climate-adaptation priority, New York would pour far greater resources into coping with intensifying heat, which kills more than 500 people every summer.)
Encircling the city with fortress walls isn’t an option in low-lying stretches of Brooklyn that flood in a drizzle. “Manhattan sits on schist and granite, so you can defend it at a district scale, connecting the perimeter to higher ground,” says Kate Orff, the MacArthur-winning founder of the landscape-architecture firm SCAPE. “Red Hook has a completely different geomorphology. On old maps, it’s a marsh. It’s all low-lying, and there’s no high point to connect it to.”
Sandy rolled right over that peninsula, flooding virtually every block and knocking out power, heat, and hot water. The next freak storm of similar force will likely do the same; the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency project is under construction, but both its scope and its projected effectiveness have inherent limits. At least NYCHA’s Red Hook Houses now has a measure of protection, thanks to a $568 million grant from FEMA. That money paid to dig up leaky fuel tanks, replace buried steam pipes, and place new electrical-distribution stations in elevated freestanding structures designed by KPF to blend in with the existing architecture. (The camouflage is only semi-successful.) The architects, together with the landscape firm OLIN, also created a series of what they delicately call lily pads, raising each building’s courtyard a few feet up to lobby level. In Holland these would be known as terps, artificial mounds that can turn into temporary islands when the sea flows in, leaving homes isolated but unharmed. That 2,500-year-old practice might seem like an archaic solution for contemporary Brooklyn, but it works because the building entrances were already raised and reached by stairs. The strategy has refreshed the public spaces of a sprawling NYCHA development with new playgrounds, seating, and hardy gardens. When the next flood arrives, the water will still come in, but the lights should stay on, the elevators should keep working, and residents will at least be able to gather on a patch of dry land and watch the tide go out.
If New York’s arsenal of defenses comprised only the fortress, the terp, some spongy surfaces and a set of deployable floodgates, the city would be doomed. A vast metropolis with more than 500 miles of rocky coast, beaches, concrete bulwarks, esplanades, wetlands, and waterfront parks needs a full and flexible range of measures to grapple with innumerable different situations. That catalogue is slowly coming together. The challenge of coping with sudden surfeits of water has seeped into the building code, the zoning map, sewer management, subway maintenance, the power supply, park design, street repaving, and many other corners of municipal government. You can’t replace a streetlight or renovate a dog run without taking flooding into account.
Perhaps the most challenging places to protect are low-lying inland areas that collect rainwater even when there isn’t a wave in sight. Some are at the juncture of old and neglected sewage pipes. Others lack decent infrastructure altogether, like the literally and figuratively depressed East New York neighborhood known as “the Hole,” notorious for storing pools of filthy water and the bodies of Mafia victims. (Last fall, the Adams administration promised a $146 million upgrade to the neighborhood, mostly in the form of better drainage, new sewers, and less pitted, potholed streets. The design is now making its way through the bureaucracy.) “Coastal resilience is about keeping back the ocean. Stormwater resilience is about moving water out,” says Rohit Aggarwala, who, as head of the Department of Environmental Protection in the Adams administration, was responsible for the city’s sewers. “They are different design challenges. If you build a wall to keep out the ocean, it’s also going to keep stormwater in, if you close the floodgates. Then you literally have to pump water up and over the wall.”
Other danger zones, like Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, sit in primeval wetlands that keep rebelling against the encroachments of asphalt and concrete. Orff’s firm SCAPE has helped the city come up with a preliminary plan to mitigate the flooding by elevating playing fields and deploying a network of streams and lakes to absorb excess rainfall. The project’s centerpiece is the desire to unearth the long-buried Flushing Creek, turning it back from an underground gurgle to an honest-to-goddness stream that could safely channel a strong current into Flushing Bay. “If you elevate everything, you just create flooding on the LIE,” Orff says. “So you’re not trying to keep water out of the system; the system’s been designed to absorb it.”It’s only the beginning. Aggarwala has estimated that making even just the most urgent upgrades to the citywide sewer system so that it can begin to meet the escalating demands of 21st-century rainfall will cost $30 billion. The bill for fortifying the whole city’s coastal defenses against rising tides and storm surges will come to something like $50 billion more. Those are gobsmacking sums, even spread out over decades. And hardly a single step is smooth. The residents of Red Hook Houses were shocked that FEMA’s largesse would pay for new landscaping but do nothing about the decrepitude they had lived with since long before Sandy: mold, falling plaster, befouled hallways, and so on. (And for every neighborhood that has to tolerate the years of noise, disruption, and digging involved in fortifying infrastructure, there’s another that feels justifiably left out.)
For now, the efforts to adapt to climate change remain fragmentary. We have a pretty good idea of what must be done, and we’ve started doing it, but New York — like the country as a whole — lacks the administrative coherence and predictable funding to formulate, much less follow, a long-term strategy. The Adams administration created the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, with theoretical responsibility to coordinate efforts within the Department of Environmental Protection, but he left it tiny and underfunded. Mamdani recently announced his intention to beef the bureau up, bringing the projected head count from six to 75 and giving it an extensive portfolio of projects. It remains to be seen whether that office will have the jurisdiction, the long-range view, or the clout to set the city’s long-term priorities and make sure they get carried out. And so we muddle onward, project by project and storm drain by bioswale, while the sea advances on its own remorseless timetable.
That halting pace only raises the costs — not just because of budget creep but in political and social terms, too. Billy Fleming, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University and the author of Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, cautions that those of us who are lucky enough to benefit from a first generation of defenses may live to see them become obsolete. Large, federally funded projects are sold as definitive long-term solutions that will deliver an assortment of immediate amenities. The public is invited to share concerns and contribute to the design, but the final result is governed by strict cost-benefit analysis that often takes place out of sight and winds up leaving a lot of people feeling shortchanged.
Take the story of Jamaica Bay, just one startling example of massive ambitions dwindling nearly to the level of tinkering. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers initially considered protecting the Bay shoreline with 44 miles of levees, floodwalls, and gates but chose instead a plan centered on a storm-surge barrier across Rockaway Inlet. Then it kicked the barrier project sometime into the future, broke protection of the surrounding communities into nearly two dozen local schemes, extending from Canarsie to the Five Towns in Nassau County and along the bayside of the Rockaways. After subjecting each to economic scrutiny, the Corps ultimately recommended just two: Mid-Rockaway and Cedarhurst-Lawrence. Those surviving defenses are meant to stave off routine flooding, not neutralize major storm surges, and the protection they provide will diminish as seas rise.
Fleming points out that such disappointments aren’t the product of malicious stinginess or stupidity; they’re just baked into the process. The kind of economic analysis that federal rules require, he says, “means building walls that aren’t tall enough and stripping away many of the bells and whistles that are promised early on and will never come back. So when it comes time to build projects in a more sufficient and better way, we will have burned through a lot of the political capacity we need at the local levels.”
And yet, despite chaotic procedures, bumbling secrecy, byzantine funding, shortsighted planning, and chronic opposition to everything, New York is slowly rebuilding itself with an eye to wetter days. It’s hard to detect when you get up close to any single project, with all its wrinkles and delays, but take a more panoramic view and you can see that we are in the early stages of a multigenerational modernization, a burlier coastline, and a constellation of public works on a scale not seen since the road-building spree in the middle of the 20th century.
The Anti-Flood City Is Finally Taking Shape
August 14th, 2026
August 14th, 2026
Via Curbed, a look at how – from concrete walls to hilly landscapes – New York can see its early defenses against future catastrophe:
This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2026 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Green Design, River Flooding, Sea Level Rise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.
'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.
It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.