New York City officials are expected to announce Thursday that they’ve selected landscape architecture firm Starr Whitehouse to help design widened green space medians along 11 blocks of Manhattan’s Park Ave.
The Manhattan-based firm has worked on various park and green space projects throughout the city including Battery Park and Bushwick Inlet Park. Founding principal Laura Starr previously served as chief of design for the Central Park Conservancy, where she designed the Great Lawn and Naturalist Walk, among other park landmarks.
As previously reported by the Daily News, city Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez has said he wants to “put the ‘park’ back in Park Avenue” by widening the medians and turning them into public green space.
“This is a unique opportunity to make Park Avenue greener, safer, and more pedestrian-friendly — while honoring the character that makes it one of New York City’s most recognizable streets,” Rodriguez said in a statement.
The city’s 18-month contract with Starr Whitehouse is for design work on the park space’s amenities, public art, seating and landscaping, as well as infrastructural design like irrigation and drainage.
The firm is also expected to lead a series of public engagement events alongside the Department of Transportation to gather community input.
The planned construction work will piggyback off of MTA efforts to rebuild the subterranean Grand Central Train Shed, which extends north from Grand Central Terminal beneath Park Ave.
The iconic street’s name was first used in the 1870s, when plots of grass were put alongside an open railway cut along the northern portion of then-Fourth Ave. Not quite a park, the greenery was meant to hide the loud and dangerous steam locomotives making their way down the island of Manhattan.
That cut became a tunnel by the late 1880s, leading steam trains into the New York Central Railroad’s Grand Central Depot — the precursor to Grand Central Terminal.
By the turn of the 20th century, the medians had grown to include seating and green space, like the city now plans. But the advent of the automobile meant the medians were scaled back in 1927 to allow for more car traffic.
The only median on the avenue to retain that park-like look today is the northernmost block — between E. 96th and E. 97th Sts.
