This unusual new park in Hoboken has basketball courts — and reduces flooding. Here's how
Hoboken city leaders celebrated the grand opening of a distinctive new park on Monday built both for fun and to help the city become more resilient against future flooding.
ResilienCity Park, at 12th and Adams streets, offers the public 5 acres of recreational space as well as flood mitigation technology thanks to infrastructure capable of detaining 2 million gallons of stormwater. It’s the largest park of its kind in New Jersey.
Low-lying areas in Hoboken are vulnerable to flooding during storms if an inch of rain or more per hour falls. Climate change has caused more frequent and intense rainfall events, which present flooding concerns along with rising sea levels in Hoboken and surrounding communities.
Resilient infrastructure is capable of withstanding, adapting to and recovering from changing conditions and the stresses they cause, according to The Resilience Shift, a global firm focused on building and educating about the concept.
ResilienCity Park’s stormwater detention system will collect rain and pump it into the Hudson River. This diverts water from streets and basements and lowers the amount of untreated wastewater entering the river.
Water retention and basketball court
The park features rain gardens as aesthetic methods to retain water, along with above- and below-ground irrigation and stormwater holding systems. It replaced a former industrial site with a playground, a basketball court that’s also a stormwater detention basin, a water spray area and an athletic field, along with open lawn areas. A terrace pavilion featuring a café and community room is expected to open in the fall.
“By reclaiming contaminated land to provide recreational opportunities and mitigate flooding, this remarkable park exemplifies the creative ideas communities across New Jersey," with help from the state Department of Environmental Protection, "are implementing to respond to the impacts of climate change," said DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette. "It truly embodies the resilient spirit of the people of Hoboken.”
Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla said the park’s open space amenities and “critical defense against rainfall flooding” provide the city with two “critical quality-of-life improvements.”
Expand another resiliency park
Hoboken has several other smaller resiliency parks, including Southwest Resiliency Park on Jackson Street. The 1-acre park is designed to mitigate flooding in the southwest Hoboken neighborhood by detaining 200,000 gallons of stormwater runoff through a combination of green infrastructure, including rain gardens, porous pavers, a cistern for rainwater harvesting, and an underground detention system.
Hoboken officials plan to double the acreage and increase stormwater detention capacity at the Southwest Resiliency Park by the end of the year. Local leaders are also in the midst of the public planning process for a fourth resiliency park, expected to sit at 800 Monroe St. The four parks together would bring the city’s resiliency park total to 10 acres, all brought to life since 2016.
ResilienCity Park is part of the Rebuild by Design project, an initiative dedicated to building infrastructure in Hoboken that helps prevent flooding in areas along the Hudson River. The project became a reality in part because of $230 million in recovery funding after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Hudson County’s Open Space Trust Fund and other sources funded the ResilienCity Park project, so its construction did not affect the municipal tax levy.
Protest at ceremony
About a dozen demonstrators at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for ResilienCity Park want to see Murphy make more efforts to address climate change. The group demands that Murphy, who attended Monday’s ceremony, suspend new fossil fuel projects proposed within the Garden State.
ResilienCity Park is not far from where two gas-fired plants are being proposed by state agencies — an NJ Transit plant in Kearny and one at the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission headquarters in Newark.
Murphy "can’t say he’s doing everything in his power to fight climate change if his own agencies are proposing new sources of the same emissions that are responsible for this crisis,” said Matt Smith, the state director for the national nonprofit Food & Water Watch. “We need the governor to live up to his rhetoric and … stop digging the climate hole deeper.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Hoboken NJ new park built to prevent flooding in communities
