East River Vistas-continual transformation

The East River Esplanade is one of those projects that has been in the works for many, many years and while some sections of it have been completed ( such as far up on the Upper East Side), others have just been "on the boards" for years...with a promise now that a lot more will be done.

This section shown here is hidden away at the East End of 37th Street, and I stumbled on the entrance to it pretty much by accident...it is only a couple of blocks long and is something of a "secret garden."

While the City is always complaining of being out of money, my state representative sent me a newsletter noting that that more work was going to be done linking the area that has been done with the empty site below the United Nations...somehow they got the money approved at some point and then the Esplanade will really be more of a resource for people who live in lower East Midtown.

I may no longer be living in this area when the work is finally completed...but that's the way things go in New York these days...for instance, the Second Avenue subway is (of course) taking much longer to build and costing a hell of a lot more than originally estimated...even in its now truncated version ( it was supposed to extend down to Wall Street originally, but not will turn over to Grand Central Terminal, where other new rail links are also going to be put in for Amtrak trains).

Building the Esplanade will probably somehow affect the traffic flow on the FDR Drive --more aggravation for people in cars and taxis-- but that will nothing like the problems the new subway has already caused ( displacement of huge numbers or rats, cutting off businesses from street traffic, and weakening the foundations of all sorts of buildings near the route--all that blasting takes its toll, of course).

They are, in fact, having so much trouble building the Second Avenue subway that it is like somehow New York has forgotten how to build subways along the way...while other cities like Washington D.C. are always expanding their lines and in places like Paris, the Metro stations have often been turned into works of Art.

So, we will believe in the extended Esplanade when we see it...