Stalled Funds Stymie Vision to Revitalize South Bronx Waterfront
Curbed
By Caroline Spivack
The city allocated $2.75M for the Haven Project, but the funds remain stuck with the wrong agency
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Melody Hernandez visited a dilapidated pier on the South Bronx waterfront at East 132nd Street. There is no open green space along its shore, no tree-lined patch of waterfront where residents can sit on a bench and gaze out at the water that encircles their community.
Instead, she visited a rocky shore surrounded by a fence littered with trash, and wondered what it would be like one day to stroll on parkland there with her seven-year-old son.
“We’re surrounded by waterfront, but my son is growing up without any access to that,” says Hernandez, who lives in Mott Haven and teaches at an elementary school in the borough. “We have to go to other communities, other boroughs, for that access. It shouldn’t be that way.”
For decades, Hernandez’s family and other South Bronx residents have been cut off from the waterfront by a web of infrastructure and industry. A plan initially developed by the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) and the community aims to change that with what they’ve dubbed the Haven Project: a network of connected open spaces near the Mott Haven and Port Morris shore.
