The Ground Under the American Copper Buildings

Contents

1. A shoreline assembled by hand
2. What a century of power plants leaves behind
3. How the river behaved on October 29, 2012
4. Rules written for a wetter shore

Beneath the American Copper Buildings, the copper clad twins on the East River built by Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group, lies the East Side shore, much of which people built rather than found, and the parcel itself, once a Con Edison holding, was acquired in 2013. The design of the towers answered that shore, with waterfront resilient design worked out in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. To understand what the buildings stand on, it helps to treat the East Side edge of Manhattan as a material with properties of its own: how it was assembled, what industry left in it, and how it behaves when the river rises.

A shoreline assembled by hand

Much of the edge of lower and eastern Manhattan did not exist when Dutch settlers arrived. Archaeology Magazine’s account of the South Street Seaport explains that the original water’s edge followed approximately the line Pearl Street takes now, and that from the late seventeenth century into the early nineteenth the city pushed the edge outward on purpose.¹ The Dongan Charter of 1680 let the city raise money by selling water lots, strips of river beside the shore, reaching 200 feet out; the Montgomerie Charter of 1731 doubled that reach to 400 feet. Buyers were expected to build wharves, dump fill and put up buildings at their own cost.¹

The method was consistent. Workers sank a timber frame or crib onto the riverbed and packed it with debris until it rose above the water, and new streets and blocks were laid on top. Archaeologists digging for utility work have found those colonial timbers still holding back the river in places, so well that pulling them out has briefly flooded the trenches.¹

Figure

How the colonial city manufactured its shore

1. 01
   1680The Dongan Charter lets the city sell water lots reaching 200 feet into the river.
2. 02
   1731The Montgomerie Charter doubles the reach to 400 feet.
3. 03
   CribbingBuyers sink timber frames on the riverbed and pack them with debris.
4. 04
   StreetsNew blocks, wharves and warehouses rise on the filled frames.

The process kept going for centuries and the ingredients changed with the times. Gizmodo’s roundup of New York’s made ground notes that rubble, rock and dirt from the subway, Grand Central and other great excavations were carted to the shore, and that part of the FDR Drive rests on rubble from bombed Bristol, carried across the Atlantic as ship ballast during the Second World War. So much of it was dumped between 23rd and 34th Streets that the stretch came to be called the Bristol Basin.² The ground of the Kips Bay and Murray Hill waterfront is therefore layered history: river bottom, colonial style fill and wartime rubble, capped by a highway.

What a century of power plants leaves behind

Through most of the 1900s this shore was industrial. Michael Minn’s history of the Waterside plant describes the East Side waterfront as given over to industry until after the Second World War, when the arrival of the United Nations and new housing turned the area residential; the Waterside plant itself was taken out of service around 2005 and sold for development.³ The Con Edison properties along First Avenue burned coal for decades, moved by barge and conveyor, and later switched to gas.

Ground that has carried heavy industry for that long is investigated and treated before anything new goes on it. The history of the Waterside Generating Station records that after the plant closed, the site was demolished and put through environmental remediation, finished in 2008, before a rezoning allowed homes and offices on the former Con Edison parcels along First Avenue. Those parcels included the old Kips Bay Generating Station, which occupied the river side of the avenue a few blocks below 38th Street.⁴

The pattern repeats along the shore. A few blocks south, the Stuyvesant Cove Park Association’s history describes the land beneath its park as a bleak brownfield left by a former cement plant, which neighbors fought through the 1980s and early 1990s to turn into a public park.⁵ On this edge of Manhattan, preparing the ground is a first construction project in its own right, invisible once the buildings are up.

How the river behaved on October 29, 2012

Made land sits low, and on the night Sandy arrived it met the river at its worst. Bentley’s reconstruction of that night explains that the storm surge reached the city at the peak of high tide, and the two together pushed the East River over its banks. Salt water poured into the control room of Con Edison’s East River plant at the northern edge of the East Village, crews used rafts on Avenue C to bring plant workers out, and about 200,000 customers lost power when the plant and a nearby substation fell off the grid.⁶

Figure

One storm night and what followed

Customers who lost power when the flooded plant and substation dropped off the grid

About 200,000

Raised concrete pedestals under the new transformers

14 to 17 feet

Coastal barrier from East 25th Street to Montgomery Street

2.4 miles

Floodgates planned in that barrier

18

EV Grieve’s account of the same night records a reader’s report of water at 14th Street and Avenue C a little after seven in the evening, and quotes a published reconstruction of the flash at the 13th Street substation, an electrical arc that lasted about 30 seconds instead of a fraction of one.⁷ Farther north, CBS New York reported that 17 million gallons of floodwater filled the basement of Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue and knocked out all but one of its backup generators, forcing hundreds of patients out; NYU Langone Medical Center had already moved 300 patients after losing generator power.⁸

At Stuyvesant Cove the surge tore out plant beds and washed cars from their spaces on 20th Street, battering them with debris that had floated over from Brooklyn.⁵ The lesson for anyone building on this shore was plain. Water in a surge does not stay at the bulkhead; it follows the low streets inland and finds the basements, where the equipment that keeps a building alive usually sits.

Rules written for a wetter shore

The storm changed how the city regulates this ground. CityLand’s summary of the flood resilience zoning work explains that federal flood maps define the risk, that the Building Code applies them, and that new maps after Sandy raised flood levels enough to double the number of buildings in the floodplain. Accepted measures include raising the lowest floor and lifting mechanical equipment such as plumbing, electrical and heating systems above the flood line.⁹ Because the 1961 Zoning Resolution was written when flooding was not treated as a serious risk, raising a building or its equipment could collide with height and bulk limits, so in October 2013 the City Council adopted a flood resilience text that measured height from the new flood elevations and let mechanical systems sit above flood level as permitted obstructions.⁹

Figure

The floodplain before and after the 2013 text

	Before	After October 2013
Flood risk in the rules	Treated as a minor concern in 1961	New federal maps with higher flood levels
Building height	Limits written without flood elevation in mind	Measured from the latest federal flood elevation
Mechanical systems	Raising them could run into height and bulk limits	Allowed above flood level as permitted obstructions
Ground floors	No rule for elevated floors on the street	Elevated floors designed to suit the streetscape

The shoreline itself is being rebuilt as well. Bentley describes Con Edison’s East River plant as now walled and gated, its control room moved upstairs in 2017 and its new transformers set on concrete pedestals 14 to 17 feet high, and the East Side Coastal Resiliency barrier running 2.4 miles from East 25th Street south to Montgomery Street with 18 floodgates.⁶ The Stuyvesant Cove association traces that project directly to Sandy.⁵

Seen this way, the American Copper Buildings stand on a shore with a well documented character: much of it laid down in layers, loaded for a century by industry, cleaned before reuse, and prone to flood when surge and tide coincide. The towers’ waterfront design took shape after the storm had shown that character in full. The neighborhoods along the same edge are described in The East River Waterfront, and the plant that once dominated it in Waterside Generating Station.