Hey, down in front!
The Parks Department wants to remove a bunch of overgrown, invasive plants along Shore Road between Third Avenue and 95th Street so folks on the promenade can have a better view of the harbor, officials told Community Board 10’s parks committee on May 14. Committee members and several neighborhood gardeners gave the plan a green-thumbs up.
“I think it’s spectacular — I wish we had [this] project along all Shore Road,” said Linda Allegretti of the Shore Road Parks Conservancy.
When the first-of-its-kind project is completed, folks using the benches along Shore Road will be able to look out over the harbor any time of year — not just when leaves are gone in the dead of winter, said parks official Martin Maher.
The year-round view will be a first, too, Allegretti said.
“It’s always been overgrown,” she said. “I’m living on Shore Road since 1972 and it was like that then.”
The department will hand-clear small invasive species and take out some larger trees to create half a dozen “view corridors”, according to parks planner Michele White. It will also fix the perimeter fence and install locked gates that will make it easier for volunteers to access to the green area, she said.
White hasn’t settled on which native species to sow in place of what they’re taking out, but she plans to use low-standing plants like shrubs and ferns, she said.
The southern-facing slope gets a lot of sun and has no irrigation, but one longtime local gardener had a potential solution — Gray Dogwood, a hearty shrub native to New York.
“We’ve had a lot of success with that and it does great in dry conditions,” said Narrows Botanical Garden founder Jimmy Johnson.
When Parks takes out the trees, it will have to leave stumps. Since the roots hold the soil on the hillside, removing them may cause the slope — and the project’s budget — to suffer some serious erosion, officials said.
“If we start ripping away the stumps the hillside will go with it,” White said.
“And you run out of money very quickly,” Maher added.
State Sen. Martin Golden (R–Bay Ridge) funded the $1.6 million project in 2012. The long wait between allocation and the project’s start is common, Maher said.
“It takes a while for state money to get into our budget,” he said.
The planting won’t get underway until spring of next year — possibly late spring, Maher said.
But earlier is better, Johnson said. Without shade from the soon-to-be-removed trees, new plants will fry in the summer sun if they haven’t had a few weeks to toughen up after being transplanted, he said.
“That area is unbelievably difficult,” said Johnson said, referring to the intense sunlight that hits the slopes in summer. “If they don’t plant by March or April, they’re not gonna take.”
