City to Scrap East 81st Street Cul-De-Sac Ramp, Pedestrian Bridge Work to Continue

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Representatives from three city agencies laid out plans for the long-awaited completion of the reconstructed pedestrian bridge on East 81st Street during a public forum Wednesday night.

The East 81st Street Pedestrian Bridge project will undergo several changes, including minimizing lighting on the bridge, adding viewing windows to bridge fencing and scrapping a plan to add wheelchair-accessible ramps connecting the bridge to the esplanade and the cul-de-sac at East 81st Street, said Chris Esposito Bernard, the community liaison for the project.

Lighting:

Responding to concerns that the lights on the new pedestrian bridge would be too bright and spill into nearby buildings, the city is now planning on reducing bridge luminaries to the lowest allowable wattage, Esposito Bernard said.

Additionally, light poles proposed for the south abutment of the bridge, Pier 1, Pier 2, Pier 4, the top of the East 81st Street steps and the East 81st Street cul-de-sac will be scrapped.

Viewing windows:

To address complaints that the bridge, specifically the fencing, would obstruct promenade views, the city took an innovative approach to add more viewing windows to the project. Twenty 3-foot-by-3-foot windows will be installed along portions of the bridge fencing to attempt to give the space a more open feel.

"What this did was create a far more fluid space so it created an opportunity for the people who were on the promenade to really embrace the full vision of Roosevelt Island, East River and appreciate the space more fully," Esposito Bernard said.

Community members have adamantly opposed the city's proposal to use wire mesh fencing along the bridge and have instead called for glass paneling. The city officials said Wednesday that the plan to use wire mesh will go forward, but they could replace the mesh with glass panels at a future date. Officials said that they wanted to test how the wire holds up before putting in the more costly and harder to maintain glass.

But some residents and members of the community board were not happy with the "future date" explanation.

"The future is now, we want the glass now," said Peggy Price, co-chair of the Community Board Parks and Recreation Committee. "We don't want to have some arbitrary future date that probably never happens, and we deserve this, this is our money and we should have the right to say what happens with our money."

East 81st Street cul-de-sac:

The city will completely scrap a plan to construct wheelchair-accessible ramps leading from the East 81st Street cul-de-sac to the East 81st Street pedestrian bridge, Esposito Bernard said.

The city parks department will go back to the drawing board to figure out how to best provide handicap access to the esplanade, said Steve Simon of the parks department. Whether that means redesigning the proposal on East 81st Street or moving the ramp to another area such as East 82nd Street or East 84th Street has not yet been determined, Simon said.

While residents of East 81st Street clapped, a contingent of East 82nd Street residents made their opposition clear.

"We were not invited and not advised about it," a woman shouted from the auditorium. "Unacceptable."

There is no guarantee that the ramp will be constructed on either East 81st or East 82nd streets, as the parks department is still in the design phase for the project, Simon said.

"Taking [the ramp] out of this project was not an easy thing to accomplish," Simon said. "So what we had to do was assure people that we were going to provide accessibility to this pedestrian bridge ... we're not saying that anything is foreclosed, we're not saying that anything is a fait accompli, we still have to come up with these plans, see if they're feasible and present it to people."

Remaining construction:

The city has begun resuming construction on the East 81st Street Pedestrian Bridge after it had apparently stalled during the summer. The project is almost complete, according to Esposito Bernard, and there are just a few more tasks left to complete.

The construction is expected to be completed in early 2017.

While residents and board members did have complaints about specific aspects of the new proposals, it seemed most were thankful that the city agencies attempted to rectify the community's major concerns with the project.

"There's been, I'm guessing, a lot of money spent, and we feel that a lot of progress has been made over the years, and we appreciate the agencies' efforts with us," said Charles Whitman, an area resident and member of the Committee on the East 81st St. Pedestrian Bridge.

Photos: Patch