Hunter's Point South Park
An aspirational and innovative blending of landscape, architecture, and infrastructure has transformed what was once a bustling rail site left as a barren wasteland into a verdant parkland teeming with community life and its restored riverain habitat. One of New York City’s most ambitious and complex developments in decades, Hunter’s Point South Park reveals and celebrates its natural riverain history of tidal marsh and hillocks with its industrial heritage.
200 years ago, the site was a series of wetlands before it was left as a contaminated brownfield with an irregular water’s edge and a steep decaying landfill bluff. Today, the post-industrial waterfront site spans 11 acres along Long Island City’s East River featuring a park, streetscape, and resilient infrastructural system that supports the neighborhood’s growing population in need of accessible green spaces.
The design embraces its diverse heritage and is a model of a landscape infrastructure approach to floodwater defense, enlisting nearly two acres of newly established marsh, with an expanded native plant palette that enhances water quality and fosters wildlife and fish habitation. The design leverages the site’s grassland topography with unique and stimulating features: a multi-use community green that doubles as a 600,000-gallon floodwater detention basin; a shaded promontory green with custom banquette seating and native bluestem grasses; a peninsula transformed into an island with a bridge that crosses the wetlands to reveal a Nobuho Nagasawa’s “Luminescence” installation; exercise and picnic terraces framed by precast concrete walls that double as flood barriers; a kayak launch; and a dramatic cantilevered overlook rising 30 feet, bringing the city to a precipice suspended above the marsh.
The park's design began in 2008 by Thomas Balsley Associates (now SWA/Balsley), with Weiss/Manfredi and ARUP, completing in 2019. A resilient, multi-layered recreational, cultural, and environmental destination, Hunter’s Point South Park brings the city to its wild riverfront and the community to each other. Whether a walk along the continuous bioswale, skyline sunsets viewed from the promontory and overlook, or escapes out onto the island, it is a unique park experience that is both urbane and otherworldly.