The Living Breakwaters at Conference House Park, a Project of Ambitious Regenerative Proportions
The Living Breakwaters at Conference House Park, a Project of Ambitious Regenerative Proportions
This piece originally appeared in Capital Institute’s Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy. The Field Guide tells the stories of a new economy—one that supports enterprises and practices that empower individuals, and that regenerate human communities and the natural systems upon which all life depends.
On the first of June—one of those rare days invoked by the American poet James Russell Lowell—we met our advisor and Patagonia's long-time chief storyteller Vincent Stanley, and boarded the Staten Island Ferry for a visit to Tottenville. The village is the last stop on the Staten Island Rapid Transit line, at New York City's and New York State's southernmost tip. We were eager to see with our own eyes the planned site of the Living Breakwaters, a $60 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a winner of HUD's Post-Sandy Rebuild by Design Challenge. Now in the conceptual design phase led byScape/Landscape Architecture LLC, and implemented by the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, the breakwaters will be located off the coast of Tottenville along the shore of Conference House Park.
John Kilcullen, director of the 267-acre Conference House Park, took us on a guided tour of its grounds and the proposed Living Breakwaters site. As we made our way along the winding paths, John, an arborist by training, and a former Senior Forester with the New York City Parks Department, pointed out the abundance of fauna and flora, including the Northern Hackberry tree, which thrives on the calcium-rich, shell-strewn soils near the shoreline, attracting a wide variety of bird species. We walked a trail along the little-known Lenape Indian burial ground (the largest in the city), and took in the shoreline vistas that make the site unique among the city's parks.
John is overseeing a capital improvement program for the park that includes the preservation and (hopefully) restoration of its historic built structures and their adaptive re-use. He fervently hopes that The Living Breakwaters project will draw the residents of Tottenville into a more active engagement with the park that sits in their own backyard. He also envisions the project-related infrastructure investments will raise the park's visibility as a destination for residents citywide. “Sandy is making everyone rethink the waterfront," John explained.
