c/o Hospital for Special Surgery
For a long time now, a familiar piece of the Upper East Side waterfront has been something you could only look at, not walk on — boxed in behind plywood, chain-link, and the constant churn of a construction crew working over the FDR Drive. Next week, neighbors who have spent years turning back at the barricades finally get a little of it returned to them.
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The 71st Street pedestrian ramp and the stretch of the East River Esplanade between 70th and 71st Streets will reopen to the public on Monday, June 15, presenters told Community Board 8’s Parks and Waterfront Committee at its June 11 meeting. Both the ramp and that segment of the walkway have cleared their final sign-off walkthroughs with the city’s Department of Transportation and the Parks Department, and the construction fence will be shifted north to 71st Street to open the section up.Monday’s reopening is the first stretch of pavement to come back from a much larger waterfront overhaul tied to the Hospital for Special Surgery’s new Kellen Tower, the 12-story clinical building that rises over the FDR near East 70th Street and opened earlier this spring. As part of that project, the hospital committed to funding improvements along the esplanade, work that builds on a roughly $1.8 million investment HSS made to restore the 70th-to-72nd-street stretch back in 2018.
The crew has divided the job into two pieces: a restoration phase between 70th and 72nd Streets, and a beautification phase running north to 78th Street, eight blocks in all. With the 70th-to-71st portion now finished, presenters said they expect to open the next segment — 71st to 72nd Street — by mid- to late July.
There is a catch for anyone hoping to stroll the full run. The 78th Street pedestrian bridge, the one beside John Jay Park, is scheduled to close in July so crews can finish playground equipment and run irrigation lines underneath it. As the barrier moves north to 78th Street, walkers won’t be able to continue south along the esplanade past that point, and the bridge won’t reopen until the entire eight-block project is done. Presenters said they’re aiming to have everything wrapped, and to be fully off the site, by the end of October.
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A few other changes are coming to the route along the way. The Con Edison building that sits beside the path is set to be repainted later this month in a Parks-approved beige — not the mural that had once been floated — and the chain-link gate that lets trucks in and out near the building will be swapped for a heavy-duty, movable crash barrier. That last fix addresses a worry neighbors have raised for years about how little stands between the narrow walking path and the highway. A new irrigation system is also going in, which should finally give plantings a fighting chance along a stretch where greenery has long struggled to take.The news was welcomed at the meeting. Maria Kessler of Friends of the East River Esplanade said she planned to announce the reopening at a weekend event at Andrew Haswell Green Park, and predicted the crowd there would cheer. Another longtime walker who lives in the 80s said she’d mostly stayed away during construction because there was nowhere to go north or south — and that she was looking forward to getting back out on the water’s edge.
For now, the fence moves Monday. The rest comes back, block by block, through the fall.
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