Cities around the country have found creative means to stay buoyant during the Great Recession - from single-minded developer led initiatives to diversifying their economies by attracting medical and university facilities. For the city of Yonkers, focusing on reinvigorating the city's long-hidden natural resource has proven to be a successful approach.
While development in the decade before the recession brought new construction, adaptive reuse, and public amenities to the city's Hudson River waterfront, with the daylighting of the Saw Mill River, the city's redevelopment efforts are being shifted downtown. Developers are now flocking to "A two-block section of the Saw Mill, a tributary of the Hudson River buried under concrete for nearly a century, [that] has now been uncovered and surrounded by benches in a parklike setting," writes Brenner. "When the next two phases of the $48 million daylighting project are completed in about three years, the river will meander through a six-block-long section of downtown Yonkers for all to behold."
"At Scenic Hudson, a Poughkeepsie environmental group that worked with Yonkers to undertake the daylighting project, Ned Sullivan, its president, described the Saw Mill River, which had become polluted before it was covered over, as 'no longer a resource people want to hide.'"
"Not only is it a catalyst for revitalization of the downtown," he said, "but now it will become the centerpiece of the city."
Comments
Is Yonkers a suburb?
How can NY state's fourth largest city be a suburb?
Hopefully someone from Yonkers will respond :-)
Irvin Dawid, Palo Alto, CA
Depends on your definition of "suburb," I guess
Some parts of Yonkers (Broadway across the city line from The Bronx) could be described as "urban," if you want to refer to density and mixed land uses. Other parts (Central Ave) are filled with stereotypical "suburban" strip malls. The whole municipality is entirely within the orbit of New York City, and "Going into the city" would always mean Manhattan. It's fair to call Yonkers a suburb, and it shouldn't be surprising that New York City could have suburbs large enough that they dwarf most of the towns upstate.