A River Study Center Can Finally Be Planned for Tribeca's Pier 26

Researchers at the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries deploy one of its many sensors that measure an array of water quality conditions in the Hudson River. Photo: Courtesy of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries

The barren expanse of concrete on Tribeca’s Pier 26 is beginning to take on life, if only in the eyes of its planners.

It has been nearly 10 years since the old Pier 26, near Hubert Street, was de­molished and its original Hudson River ecology center, The River Project, moved up to Pier 40. Now plans are afoot for the long-planned return of a river study center, or estuarium, on the rebuilt pier. Docked beside it would be the sloop Clearwater.

With the announcement last month by the Hudson River Park Trust that the center will be run by Potsdam, N.Y.–based Clarkson University and its subsidiary, the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, planning for the center has finally begun.

The proposed two-level, 20,000-square-foot estuarium will be a research and exhibition complex. Students in Clarkson’s Masters’ of Science in En­gineering Management program would take classes there. Clarkson says the tuition will pay for the operations of the estuarium, a big factor in the Hudson River Park Trust’s decision to select the institution.

“The beauty of Clarkson is that they are willing to actually pay for the operations of this,” Madelyn Wils, the trust’s president and CEO, told Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee last month. “We don’t get that very often and they have a sensible way of how they’re going to get there. And they’re guaranteeing it. That is a very big deal.”

Annual operating costs are projected to be at least $1.5 million, according to several sources, but contract negotiations have yet to begin. The exhibits will be paid for through fundraising, said Clarkson University President Tony Collins. “We think we’ve got a great location and a great story to tell and so we’ll be looking for individuals and corporations to help us with different exhibits that we’re planning,” Collins said in a phone interview. “The more clear our vision and compelling the story that we have to tell, the easier that gets.”

Part of that story will be told through environmental education programs in conjunction with the Clearwater, a replica of a 19th-century sailing vessel. The Beacon Institute would use the estuarium as a demonstration field station for its network of sensors that compile data about the river.

“This is a global showcase,” said Timothy Sugrue, Beacon’s president and CEO.

In order to help the public understand Beacon’s data collection efforts, Sugrue said he envisions a live camera and data feed from the submerged sensors, showing what is happening underwater, near the pier. The New York Hall of Science in Queens will be in charge of the exhibits.

“We’re trying to get people to think about what’s going on in the river, how it is important to the formation of New York City—to give them a sense of what’s under the hood, as it were, of the Hudson River,” said Stephen Uzzo, the museum’s vice president for science and technology, who will be heading the estuarium’s exhibits and programs.

In its proposal to the Hudson River Park Trust, Clarkson provided a preliminary floor plan that includes 3,300 square feet of exhibit space, a café, a bookshop, classrooms, a lounge and more.A $9.5 million grant from the Port Authority has been allocated to pay for the structure, though people involved with the project say those funds fall far short of what is needed.

“Building the best facility we can build for $9.5 million serves nobody’s purpose. It’s an eyesore to [the community], it’s an embarrassment to us, it’s an embarrassment to the Park Trust,” Su­grue said.

The right building will cost at least twice that, Sugrue said, but he is confident that Beacon can raise the money.

Plans for the building are in their infancy. The role of The River Project, with its emphasis on the study and display of live fish and other aquatic animals, has yet to be determined. The River Project lost to Clarkson in its bid to manage the estuarium.

(See video below on the River Project's recent "Release of the Fishes.")

“At the moment we’re in the honeymoon period where we’re trying to be all things to all people, and be creative,” Collins said. “At some point the rubber’s going to meet the road and we may have to make some more difficult decisions about what exactly the dimensions of the building will be and what particular audiences we can satisfy.”

Collins said that the expense of keeping live creatures was not figured into his institution’s projected operating budget.

“We had a model that lowered the operating costs through an emphasis on digital rather than live,” he said. “Ob­viously, we see the value in the work of The River Project so we’re rethinking the model and how that can work.”“We’re going to find a way to accommodate this cleverly,” Sugrue said, “and I’ve got a kind of out-of-the box notion for how we might be able to do that and make most people happy.”

“Can’t make everybody happy,” he added, declining to elaborate.

Stephen Uzzo, from the New York Hall of Science, said he could imagine showing marine life through the use of submersible cameras, but also provide “temporary ways to host these creatures that aren’t detrimental to them.”

“We want to find ways that minimize the impact to living things there but [still] bring people as close as possible to what’s going on in the river so they can have a fairly accurate perspective.”

During the spring and summer, the River Project features a live oyster reef in its Pier 40 facility and more than 50 of the harbor’s 210 fish species as well as innumerable invertebrates.

“We are biologists and that’s the study of life,” said Cathy Drew, The River Project’s executive director, who founded her organization nearly 30 years ago in an abandoned Washington Market produce shed on the old Pier 26. “We hope that Clarkson will want to accommodate all the programs that we do.”

“This was our home of 25 years,” Drew added, “and we always thought it would be our permanent home.” Discussions on how the work of The River Project can be incorporated in the estuarium are now ongoing.

The estuarium building would occupy only about 12 percent of the pier’s 80,000 square feet, which still lacks utilities, decking and landscaping. Until the entire space is completed, Wils said, it cannot open. Toward that end, the trust is seeking city funds, and Com­munity Board 1’s Tribeca Com­mittee passed a resolution supporting that request.

“We want to start the planning process to build Pier 26,” said Wils, a former chair of CB1. “For all of us who have been in this neighborhood for a long time and fought for park space, we’d like to get this park finished.”