Latest news with #HudsonRiverParkTrust
New York Times
12-08-2025
- General
- New York Times
Slimmer, but Still One Big Oyster
Good morning. It's Tuesday. Today we'll get an update on the biggest oyster found in New York Harbor in perhaps 100 years and what its apparent good health says about how clean the Hudson River is now. We'll also get details on the first stop on Zohran Mamdani's five-borough tour of the city. It's time for Big thoughts. That capital B was not a typo. It's the name of an oyster. Not just any oyster, but the biggest oyster found in New York waters in perhaps 100 years, according to the Hudson River Park Trust's River Project, which works to restore the Hudson estuary. How big is Big? So big that when it turned up, the River Project had to get a bigger scale. At its most recent weigh-in 10 days ago, it turned out that Big had slimmed down since last year. The readout was 1,192 grams, or 2.63 pounds, down from just over 2.8 pounds a year ago. Big weighed 1.93 pounds when the River Project found it in 2018. Since then, Big's fans have cast this unprepossessing creature as a metaphor for New York, which has a long history with oysters. And like the city, Big is a hub of high-density housing. At last count, two other oysters, 41 ribbed mussels and more than four dozen barnacles were making a home on Big's ragged, pockmarked shell. Tina Walsh, an assistant vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust, said she was not sure when the first of those hangers-on had bound themselves to Big. It probably happened after Big was moved from where it had grown up, attached to a pier that was being rebuilt. 'We could guess that was somewhere a bit darker and shadier' than the spot Big has occupied ever since. More sunlight could reach Big's new neighborhood. There could be more food there, too, she said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Climate
- New York Times
A Mostly Microscopic Sign of Spring
Good morning. It's Friday. Today we'll look at a tiny sign of spring in the Hudson River. We'll also get details on why the Trump administration's budget-cutting may force a do-over of the state budget. In the spring, Tina Walsh's fancy lightly turns to something that's neither romantic nor particularly poetic: phytoplankton in the Hudson River. 'Little green guys,' Walsh — an assistant vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust, which works to restore the Hudson River estuary — called them. That was after she said that the phytoplankton bloom that appeared in the river a couple of weeks ago was 'one of the hidden signs of spring.' It seems that plankton are underappreciated at the time when birds return from wherever they go in the winter and the Delacorte Clock in Central Park switches to its spring playlist, chiming out songs like 'It Might as Well Be Spring.' By tomorrow, with the forecast calling for temperatures in the mid-70s, it might finally be warm enough to leave the outerwear at home. It might finally be warm enough to hit the 'beach' on the Gansevoort Peninsula, a 5.5-acre recreational site on the Hudson River. New York has been waiting for a couple of days like that. The gardeners in Bryant Park have rolled out the sod, making the lawn green again for crowds eager to sunbathe. The forsythia and the hellebore in Central Park are out, and the Cornelian cherry dogwoods are starting to bloom. The Asian magnolias at the New York Botanical Garden are waking up. Phytoplankton in the Hudson do not face the world with the bright colors of springtime tulips. They give the river a greenish color that can be a turnoff for people who think that it means the water is unclean, Walsh said. But the presence of the phytoplankton is 'actually an indicator that we have a quite healthy estuary.' Plankton are often too small to see without a microscope, but not always. Jellyfish are plankton, though a different type from phytoplankton, and there are jellyfish in the Hudson — moon jellies, which have only short tentacles, and lion's mane jellyfish, which have long ones. 'We see them in the warmer months,' Walsh said. But even microscopic plankton have a part in a big job: Plankton release at least half of the world's oxygen. ('The trees get all the credit,' Walsh said.) They also occupy an important place in the food chain in the Hudson. Without plankton, Walsh said, 'there's not enough for the oysters to eat. If the oysters can't eat, they die. And there's not enough for crabs to eat. And if the crabs can't get enough to eat, then the diving birds and the cormorants can't eat. It really does have a chain effect.' Phytoplankton called diatoms have glassy shells made of silica, which helps with the photosynthesis they perform. 'It wouldn't make sense to have a shell light couldn't pass through,' said Toland Kister, a colleague of Walsh's who has researched plankton in the Hudson for nine years. 'The glass shell is awesome,' he said, but the plankton also have pores for other things, like nutrients, to pass through. He and Walsh were looking at diatoms magnified 400 times on the 'superscope screen,' a video monitor at the Discovery Tank, an interactive showcase run by the Hudson River Park Trust at Pier 57. Some were round. Some looked like blocks or puzzle pieces. 'In a drop of water, you see hundreds of phytoplankton,' said Carrie Roble, a vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust. 'The sheer number is stunning.' Expect partly sunny skies and temperatures in the low 60s. In the evening, temperatures will drop to the low 50s, with a chance of showers. In effect until March 31 (Eid al-Fitr). The latest New York news Trump's spending cuts create uncertainty for the state budget New York's state budget is due on Tuesday. It's likely to be late — and whatever deal Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders agree to may not be the final blueprint for state spending in the 2026 fiscal year. The Trump administration's push to cut federal spending may force changes later on. State leaders no longer expect to get the $91 billion in federal aid that they had originally anticipated. Exactly how much the state will actually receive has yet to be determined. That has left Hochul and the Legislature to guess about how much federal money will remain available. So for now, the annual budget negotiations in Albany do not account for reductions in federal aid. Some experts warn that there could be another troubling variable. New York relies heavily on income taxes. Dips in the stock market as investors react to Trump's tariff proposals could affect how much money the state takes in, said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit policy group. The S&P 500 has lost about 3 percent so far this year. Hochul had based her initial $252 billion state budget proposal for the coming year on the assumption that Washington would provide almost $91 billion. That was roughly $5 billion less than the state received from the federal government in the fiscal year that ends on Monday. Of that, roughly $57 billion went to the state's Medicaid program. About $10 billion went to schools, about $4 billion to law enforcement and public safety and $2.5 billion to transportation programs. After President Trump outlined his plans to dismantle the federal Department of Education, Hochul wondered: Would that endanger her effort to expand free school lunches in New York? Would that affect the state's Pell Grant allocations for college undergraduates who need financial help? 'We don't have a crystal ball that tells us the scale of the cuts,' Hochul said. More followed. The Department of Health and Human Services abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. Two state agencies working on addiction services and mental health care told nonprofit providers that two federally funded state grant programs, which totaled about $330 million and were supposed to run through the end of September, had been halted. Sour Patch Dear Diary: It was around Halloween, and I was walking up Sixth Avenue, happily munching on some Sour Patch Kids Watermelon candies from a bag I had just bought. As I paused for the light at West Eighth Street, a large hand entered my field of vision. I turned my head. The hand was attached to an older gentleman. He was lounging against a store smoking a cigarette. The corner, it appeared, belonged to him, and so did the sunshine. It made sense that the candies would too. His palm remained in front of me, expectant. I poured some candies into his hand. His eyes crinkled. 'Good choice,' he said. 'The watermelons are way better than the kids.' I grinned back at him, and the light changed. 'Don't miss it,' he said, and nodded me on my way. — Beah Jacobson Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Hannah Fidelman, Sarah Goodman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Why Do I Keep Finding Padlocked Playgrounds in New York City?
"Play is the work of the child," wrote Maria Montessori, pushing back against the perennial tendency of adults to trivialize the child's constant quest for movement and exploration. "It is work he must do in order to grow up." Tell that to New York City. About two weeks ago, we received a rare spring day in the midst of a harsh and brutal February. After Mass, my son—a squirmy, active, skateboarding two-and-a-half-year-old—my husband, and a few of our friends walked a mile or two to the Pier 26 playground along the Hudson River to let Zev run around after he exhibited extraordinary skill at sitting still in church. Signs declared the playground closed due to icy conditions. There was a small amount of snow on the ground still, but it was quickly melting. It was 45 degrees outside. And I have the unfortunate quality of being a Texan lady who doesn't like to be told what to do, so I hiked up my skirt, took off my shoes, and scaled the fence. Boom, freedom. My friend boosted my son across the fence before following suit. Then the most beautiful thing started to happen: Other parents and kids saw how much fun we were having and we offered to help get their kids over the fence too. We liberated maybe two dozen kids. Naturally, such a good thing cannot last in modern-day New York: I came whooshing down the slide in my fancy church dress to be greeted by the authorities demanding my ID and threatening to fine me. I argued for a while, pointing to the fact that it's 45 degrees outside and there's no ice on the playground and suggesting that maybe, just maybe, children deserve just a morsel of red hot freedom. Then they started threatening arrest. Just a few weeks prior, my son and I had encountered the same thing in Madison Square Park. One complicating factor for libertarians is that both of these playgrounds are managed by trusts set up as public benefit corporations, governed by boards of directors appointed by the governor, mayor, and borough president. The trust is in charge of designing, building, operating, and maintaining the area, and the funding is a mix of private and public. Though these types of parks are supposed to have their own security, the person patrolling the Hudson River Park/Pier 26 playground was NYC Parks law enforcement. (The Hudson River Park Trust did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Though they're legally within their rights to decide what type of liability they wish to assume, these two incidents—as well as the COVID-era padlocking of public playgrounds by city officials for a virus that was neither especially deadly to children nor easily spreads outdoors—are good reminders of why this city is hemorrhaging its child population (and why Hasidic dads took bolt cutters to playgrounds during the virus days). Since 2020, the five-and-under population in the city has fallen by 18 percent, and it shouldn't be shocking why: High cost of living, a culture intolerant toward children, coupled, and extreme risk aversion have led to an untenable situation for parents. If the first half of the 20th century was termed "the golden age of child play," the first quarter of the 21st feels like a death rattle. The mid-'80s brought milk carton kids. Amber Alerts, which send out messages about missing or abducted children in suspected danger via cable news, radio, and text message, were invented a decade later. In the early 2000s, certain prosecutors started cracking down on child truancy. Now, in the 2020s, that icon of American ingenuity—the McDonald's PlayPlace—has started to become replaced by screens, with glorious plastic kingdoms torn down all across America. The culture shifted from one of widespread permissiveness to one of extreme scrutiny and worry. And nothing was exempt from this parenting culture shift, not even the playgrounds. Since 1981, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has been publishing the Public Playground Safety Handbook, which contains such dictates as "bare metal slides, platforms, and steps should be shaded or located out of direct sun." If you cannot do so, you must "provide warnings that equipment and surfacing exposed to intense sun can burn." Free-swinging ropes "present a potential strangulation hazard" as they could "fray" or "form a loop." Handrails meant for toddlers "should have a diameter or maximum cross-section between 0.60 and 1.20 inches" and "a diameter or maximum cross-section of 0.90 inches is preferred to achieve maximal grip strength and benefit the weakest children." For toddlers, balance beams are not recommended. For school-age kids, they should be no higher than 16 inches off the ground. And, "because of the complex way children are required to cooperate and combine their actions, fulcrum seesaws are not recommended for toddlers or preschool-age children." What the regulators won't admit is that children have an uncanny ability to turn all kinds of every day (and unsafe!) objects into playthings; that board out in the backyard, with rusty nails poking out, balanced on a tree stump sure looks like a magnificent canoe to the eyes of the enterprising 7-year-old. Of course, the federal playground guidelines are used as evidence in court. Take the kindergartener in New Jersey who, in 2014, got injured on a slide that was five degrees steeper than the federal guideline recommendation of 30 degrees; her family won a $170,000 settlement. In New York City, an East Harlem dad scored $75,000 from his kid's fractured forearm after she fell off a spinning wheel. In Brooklyn, five kids fell off a swing in 2013 at Slope Park Playground, leading to complaints; the city removed the swing. Even structures not meant for child play have been destroyed in the suing craze. In my husband's hometown on nearby Long Island, an older kid—late middle school, early high school, he recalls—got injured on a half-pipe in the yard of the local skate shop; the parents sued. The shop closed a year or so later, possibly from this court-mandated cash hemorrhage; the town's lone half-pipe disappeared with it. Perhaps most ridiculous was a 2010 scandal over "The Mountain," a metal climbing structure in Union Square Park playground in Manhattan, which the city's Department of Parks and Recreation cordoned off, claiming it got too hot in the summer. This prompted a bill in the state legislature that would have required temperature measurements of different play structures during the summer. "The issue of heat exists in any playground," reminded the snarky landscape architect who had acquired the structure from Germany. Of course, some spaces meant for play had legitimately been too risky. Amusement parks in the '80s and '90s faced tons of lawsuits, with many shutting down. "People were bleeding all over the place," recalled one now-grown patron of Action Park, in New Jersey, which reported 14 broken bones and 26 head injuries in 1984 and 1985 alone. The growing emphasis on child safety throughout the 20th century led to a two-thirds decline in childhood deaths from accidents between 1900 and 2000. But somewhere near the start of the 21st century, the culture embraced a new goal: Totally eradicating any accidents—and thus any risk—from childhood. This is a goal I can't get behind. As Maria Montessori recognized a hundred years ago, we lose something quite important when we crack down on kids' ability to play—and parents' ability to decide for themselves what type of conditions their individual child can handle. Even if the playground had been icy and it had been 30 degrees that day, I would have still allowed my son to play; I would have simply dressed him in more wool layers and maybe watched him more closely (or recognized that that skateboarding child of mine can handle a fall or two). If the trusts that manage these playgrounds (or their insurers) are so afraid of liability, I'd note that the above incidents—the Slope Park swing, the too-hot Mountain—stand out in part because they're relatively rare. Be bold, take heart, and choose to foster a culture of childrearing in which parents accept risk and responsibility. "Since it is through movement that the will realizes itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act," wrote Montessori. I'm happy to assist; the only question is whether modern-day New York City will let me. The post Why Do I Keep Finding Padlocked Playgrounds in New York City? appeared first on
