Sinkholes on UES Greenway Further Complicate Reopening

The complete reopening of the closed-off stretch of the East River Esplanade in the East 70s still appears to be a long way off, not least because of a yawning sinkhole looming right at East 70th Street.

The Hospital for Special Surgery, which has caused the blockade of the walkway while it builds an addition known as the Kellen Tower, recently told members of a Community Board 8 subcommittee that construction is almost finished; they intend to privately fund the restoration of the Esplanade once this happens. However, the staggered timeline to do so is quite long, with the aforementioned sinkhole—one of three—already possibly set to complicate things.

Currently, park users walking north have to leave the Esplanade at East 71st Street and make their way one block west, to busy York Avenue. They cannot get back onto the walkway until East 79th Street, eight blocks north. The blockade has existed since 2022, infuriating some locals and an advocacy group known as Friends of the East River Esplanade.

Yet HSS claims that things are finally moving in a different direction. First, a pedestrian ramp will be built between July and August, HSS spokesperson Melissa Kiefer told CB8’s Parks & Waterfront Committee on June 12—although it won’t be open until “four months after July 4.”

It’s unclear where the pedestrian ramp will stretch from, or whether it will serve as a placeholder that will temporarily unblock the now-closed stretch of the esplanade, while restoration of the actual paved walkway is underway. HSS has previously said, multiple times, that creating such a “temporary pedestrian ramp” during construction is unfeasible; this may change now that their multi-million-dollar construction project is reportedly nearing completion.

HSS’s actual reconstitution and “beautification” of the original Esplanade is supposedly a completely separate four-part process, some parts of which overlap with one another. Phase One, which will cover East 70th to East 73rd streets, is set to take place between August and January of next year. Phase Two, which will cover East 75th to East 76th streets, will take place between September and March 2026. The third phase, which will cover East 73rd to 75th streets, will take place between September and February 2026.

The final phase is “up in the air,” HSS says, as it will involve coordinating with the NYC Parks Department, which is currently engaged in (another) sinkhole mitigation project in the affected area, between East 76th and East 81st streets. This phase can only reportedly start in November 2026, at the earliest.

Underlying all of this, no pun intended, are the sinkholes. “There’s a sinkhole that developed under the pedestrian ramp [at East 70th Street] that we’re planning to repair,” Kiefer said, by means of a temporary infill. Another, at East 74th Street, has already reportedly been addressed by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). A third sinkhole, near East 78th Street, will ostensibly be covered by the Parks Department’s future mitigation project.

However, a temporary infill for a sinkhole could pose some serious problems, as CB8 member Judy Schneider pointed out. “If you’re just doing some kind of temporary work on 70th Street, we don’t want that. . . . It’s gonna get a lot of use, and there’s gonna be another sinkhole,” she said. Parks Department reps at the meeting soon revealed that they still had zero idea what was causing the sinkhole, despite checking it out, and had no funds allocated toward a permanent fix.

Jennifer Ratner, the board chair of Friends of the East River Esplanade, showed up to the meeting to demonstrate her visible frustration with the ongoing state of affairs.

“The fact that our contiguous park has been cut off for four seasons, four years. . . . This is our precious green space in this densely populated area . . . and there is no link now between East Harlem and the new beautiful East Midtown Greenway,” she said. Ratner added that putting a large hospital addition on the East River couldn’t have helped when it came to preventing sinkholes, given its weight.

In an interview, Ratner told Our Town that the “Hospital for Special Surgery is a benefit to thousands and thousands of people, because of what goes on inside their walls. However, HSS really benefited from using an important and vital public park and waterfront space. Now, they have to do whatever it takes to reopen it.”

Finally, Our Town paid a visit to the East 71st Street Esplanade diversion, near where the East 70th Street sinkhole is supposed to be. One conspicuous hole was visible under the metal ramp that has been leading pedestrians off the parkway, while a piece of plywood that simply had “HOLE” written on it was situated around 10 feet away. They could have represented one connected sinkhole with two entrances, or not. Either way, it looked dangerous.