Avast—construction work's fully underway downtown by the South Street Seaport. The city kicked off its four-year infrastructure-slash-park remake of Little Boston in style last week, booting an ages-old parking lot that occupied the lower half of Peck Slip and installing in its place a protected parking area for backhoes and other pieces of heavy machinery. Once that was complete, the backhoes got to work on the Slip itself. Team Curbed dropped by to have a look around and assay the future.
Last week, the owner of Peck Slip-facing restaurant Suteishi gave a pretty upbeat take on the remake in an interview with Downtown Express: “One of our assets is that we open our doors in the summer... [Construction will make my restaurant] less appealing, but it’s not going to affect us on the grander scale. I think New Yorkers are pretty resilient and they’re used to construction.”
As if to test that very faith, the first pit to be excavated is at the corner of Peck Slip and Front Street, directly in front of Suteishi. This morning, construction workers excavating a glistening pool of black nastiness amongst pipes that, yes, do look like they could use an upgrade. Still: Peck Sludge! For businesses that hang on through the next year and a half that Peck Slip is remade, they'll enjoy a new era in construction when the Parks Department gets its hand on the area to build out a new park noted for its bizarre "ghost ship" segment. That'll only take another 18-24 months, so all should be spiffy here just in time for inundation by the rising Atlantic Ocean in 2018 or so. But boy, will the infrastructure rock.
· Peck Slip Construction Begins, Businesses Wary [Downtown Express]
· Peck Slip Businesses Clash With Park [CNY]