The landscape architects hired to create a 15,000 square foot public space as part of the Essex Crossing project made their first appearance before Community Board 3’s parks committee last night. The takeaway? A more vigorous effort should be made to consult the broader Lower East Side community.
The session was led by Jamie Maslyn Larson, a principal of West 8. The firm, based in the Netherlands, established a New York City office after winning the competition to design Governors Island Park. She brought along the model you see pictured above, depicting the Broome Street parcel where the park will be built.
Earlier today, the developers of the big Essex Crossing project announced an agreement with the building workers’ union, 32BJ SEIU, to hire its members for up to 80 positions in the new mixed use complex alongside the Williamsburg Bridge. Part of the deal includes a job training program through the Lower East Side Employment Network.
But the network, a partnership among seven neighborhood non-profit organizations and Community Board 3, has a larger role in local hiring at Essex Crossing. Michael Zisser, a founding member of the LES Employment Network, tells us all parties will have signed a Memorandum of Understanding today or tomorrow to make the arrangement official.
Essex Crossing Site 2; view from the intersection of Delancey and Essex streets. Credit: Handel Architects.
Tonight at University Settlement’s Houston Street Center, developers of Essex Crossing are unveiling their designs for the first four buildings of the large residential and commercial project coming to the former Seward Park urban renewal site.
Thanks to a press briefing held earlier today, we’re able to bring you a condensed version of what members of the public are seeing this evening. Delancey Street Associates, the consortium building the nearly 2-million sq. ft. project, asked us to wait until the meeting of Community Board 3’s land use committee got underway before we published the renderings you see here.
Thanks to Robert Cordero, Grand Street Settlement’s executive director, who sent along this overhead view of Essex Crossing Site 5. Workers this week have been installing trees inside a 15,000 square foot park that’s going to be part of the big development project.
The Broome Street park, designed by West 8, will be publicly accessible, open from 7 a.m.-10 p.m. daily. Here’s the somewhat overwrought description on West 8’s website:
With a few simple moves, the Park at Essex Crossing delivers a calm, verdant, island within the urban fabric. An entirely native palette of trees and groundcovers are located in raised planters around a central open plaza. Picking up on the Lower East Side’s history of beloved urban gardens, the Park design layers canopy and understory trees, swaths of woodland planting, and vine-covered vertical plantings to create a woodland garden in the city. Meandering geometries and an oblong central gathering area gives the illusion and opportunities of
Rendering of Essex Crossing Site 6; Dattner Architects.
NYU Langone Medical Center has filed an application with the State Department of Health for approval of its 55,000 square foot ambulatory care facility at Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side. The news was first reported yesterday by Crain’s.
In January of 2016, Delancey Street Associates, the consortium building the mixed-use project, announced that NYU had signed a 15-year lease for a space at 175 Delancey St. The medical facility, which will be called the Joan H. and Preston Robert Tisch Center, will be located in the same building housing affordable senior rentals and Grand Street Settlement’s senior center.