Click Here to Sign Petition to Save the East River Park’s Historic Track House
Join our petition to ask the City Administration to save, restore and renovate the East River Park’s beautiful, Art Deco style Track House, instead of demolishing the building under the East Side Coastal Resiliency project. Unfortunately its companion building, the Tennis Center, was recently demolished under ESCR.
Built in 1938, the building has been determined to be eligible for the State and National Registers of Historic Places, for both its unique architectural distinction and historic importance. This is the last remaining structure in an original ensemble of five buildings within the park, and is the only park building within the Lower East Side with design motifs that specifically refer to the area’s history, in this case its rich maritime past.
Based on preliminary architectural assessments, saving and renovating the Track House would not be unduly difficult from a cost, scheduling or structural engineering standpoint, or interfere with the current plans to rebuild the park for flood protection. Restoration would be a very small part of a very large ESCR project.
The building can be readily moved and enlarged to meet the park’s current needs. Interiors can be completely modernized including brand new bathrooms and other interior facilities that meet all Parks Department standards. And, in light of global warming and its effect on the Lower East Side, keeping and restoring the Track House would be a much greener solution than demolishing it and rebuilding new.
Click Here to Sign Petition for a New Lower East Side Historic District
Manhattan’s Lower East Side is recognized as America’s iconic immigrant neighborhood with unsurpassed architectural, historical and cultural significance to our city, state and nation. Its great variety of age-old tenements, institutional and commercial buildings not only enrich the streets with architecture based on human scale and beautifully crafted ornament, but have given the community and its residents a cohesive and stable environment with a strongly identifiable sense of history and place.
The only way to effectively preserve the historic streetscapes of this vital neighborhood is through New York City historic district designation. Therefore, we call upon the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark, without delay, the historically intact areas of the Lower East Side South of Delancey Street, as proposed by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative and Friends of the Lower East Side.