Riverside Park Is Having Two Different Summers at Once

Walk down the stairs at West 106th Street on a weekday morning this summer and you'll likely find Parks Department crews working around the Franz Sigel monument, some with paint brushes, others thirty feet up in a boom lift, occasionally wielding blowtorches. The 119-year-old bronze general on horseback is getting cleaned and stabilized for the first time in 22 years, and the crew tries to start at 6:30 a.m. and wrap by early afternoon because the torches get hot fast in July heat.

Head south to 79th Street instead and you'll find something that hasn't changed in five years: chain-link fencing around an empty marina basin, docks that have sat unused since 2021, and a waiting list with roughly a thousand names on it, some of whom have been waiting fifteen years for a slip. Riverside Park right now is running two completely different clocks. One measures projects in weeks. The other measures them in presidential terms, and keeps resetting.

The Fast Lane

The park's smaller, more surgical fixes are moving with real speed this year. The Sigel monument job started July 13 and was expected to wrap within about two weeks, funded in part through a Riverside Park Conservancy endowment established in memory of longtime neighborhood residents Thelma and Alex Schwarz. The conservators aren't chasing a dramatic before-and-after. The goal, as the project team told West Side Rag, is a slightly greener, more uniform patina that reads as cared for rather than freshly painted.

Farther south, on the steep slope near West 69th Street, the park has quietly deployed its first robot. The Spider ILD 01, purchased this spring by the Riverside Park Conservancy, is a remote-control mower built for inclines too steep for a standard crew to safely handle with a push mower. Before it arrived, keeping that hillside in check took four or five staffers with handheld string trimmers. Now one operator runs it by remote from the sidelines. It's the first machine of its kind working anywhere in the city, and it's already doing the job that used to require a small crew.

Then there are the goats, back for a seventh consecutive summer. This year's herd is stationed on a vegetation-covered slope at West 137th Street, having moved a few blocks south from a spot near 143rd Street the year before. Their assignment: ten weeks of clearing invasive plants like mugwort, poison ivy, and porcelain berry before human gardeners move in to plant native understory. The Conservancy marked their arrival with the Great Goat Graze-Off on July 18, and with a ten-week residency that started that week, they'll still be on the hillside well into September.

Even the less charming infrastructure work is moving on a defined clock. Between 108th and 116th Streets, the Conservancy has spent this year working through nearly a century of drainage problems, the product of a park built on a steep river-facing slope with a paved perimeter that funnels street runoff downhill. The fix includes new drainage swales and three wet meadows, a first for the park, planted with native grasses suited to intermittent flooding. The work is sequenced deliberately: upper path first, then the lower path once the upper section and the Riverside Drive intersections are finished, with the 116th Street ramp and 108th Street stairs staying open throughout construction.

The Slow Lane

Compare any of that to the park's two marquee capital projects, and the pace difference is stark.

The 79th Street Boat Basin, the only marina in the city where residents can legally live aboard their boats year-round, has been closed since 2021. The plan now on the table is a $90 million rebuild that includes a new dockhouse elevated on nine columns to clear flood elevation requirements, with a green roof and low-shine steel cladding meant to blend into the hillside. The city's Public Design Commission gave the design unanimous approval last year, a milestone Chelsea News described at the time as finally moving after more than a decade of delays, with construction permits projected to be finalized sometime in 2026. The reopening date attached to all of this is 2028, which would put the total closure at seven years for a facility that took Robert Moses about three years to build the first time, back in the 1930s.

The 79th Street Rotunda tells a similar story with a bigger price tag. The $150 million restoration of the three-level structure that carries traffic on and off the West Side Highway began in the first half of 2022. The Department of Transportation originally said the work would take four years, which put a 2026 completion on the calendar. By the time West Side Rag checked in during the spring of 2025, the agency couldn't confirm whether that timeline still held, and the most current project newsletter it could produce was dated the previous fall. That's the last public word on the record. The year the city itself named as the finish line has now arrived, and there's no confirmed update saying the work is done.

Somewhere in between sits the River Run Playground near West 82nd Street. After Upper West Siders pushed back hard last year against a design that would have eliminated the playground's signature water feature, the Public Design Commission gave preliminary approval in February to a revised $9.8 million plan that keeps the "runnel" intact alongside upgraded equipment and better accessibility. NYC Parks project manager Margaret Bracken told the Commission the redesign came from direct feedback gathered through Community Board 7 and the Conservancy. It's a real win for the neighbors who organized around it, but the approval is a design milestone, not a ribbon cutting. No construction completion date has been set publicly yet.

What's Actually Open Right Now

None of the slower projects should keep anyone off the park this season. Summer on the Hudson, the Conservancy's free outdoor arts series run in partnership with NYC Parks, is in its 24th year and running from May 3 through September 30 with more than 400 events between West 59th and 181st Streets. New additions to the 2026 lineup include:

• Story Hour, a weekly Saturday reading series for kids at the 102nd Street Field House
• Speak Up! Festival, a June 27 evening at Pier I mixing opera, jazz, Broadway, dance, and karaoke, co-presented with Opera on Tap
• Riverside Comedy Club, three Friday nights across June, July, and August at Pier I, hosted by comedian Nat Towsen
• New Horticulture Tours led by Conservancy staff
• An outdoor screening of In the Heights on September 18 near the Red Clay Tennis Courts, part of a new partnership with the Uptown Film Center

The full picture, reported by iLoveTheUpperWestSide when the lineup was announced, points to a park that's very much open for business at street level even while its two biggest structures remain behind fencing.

Why the Split Exists

None of this is mysterious once you look at what each project actually requires. A monument cleaning needs a conservator, a boom lift, and a couple of weeks. A robot mower needs a purchase order. Goats need a fence and a farm relationship the Conservancy has maintained since 2019. A drainage upgrade needs an engineering study and a construction sequence, but it doesn't need federal flood-zone review or a design competition.

The Boat Basin and the Rotunda need both. The marina sits in a FEMA-regulated flood zone and needed Public Design Commission sign-off on top of years of Community Board review, with its dockhouse design redrawn more than once after neighbors objected to earlier versions. The Rotunda is a different kind of heavy lift, a structural overhaul of a 1937 traffic structure that also has to stay open to cars, cyclists, and pedestrians throughout construction. Neither is a case of bureaucratic failure so much as the actual cost of rebuilding major infrastructure in a park where residents have a long, documented habit of pushing back on designs they don't like and getting them changed.

What This Means If You Live Here

If you're planning a walk, a bike ride, or a summer evening in the park, the smart move is to treat the waterfront edge between 72nd and 96th as a rotating construction zone through at least next year, while treating everything else, the lawns, the tennis courts, the goat hillside, the Summer on the Hudson stages, as fully open and arguably better maintained than it's been in years. The Franz Sigel statue will look a little greener by the time you read this. The Boat Basin almost certainly won't look any different at all.

If you're weighing what a longer-term stake in this neighborhood actually looks like, from a pied-à-terre near the park to a full move, the Antigua Team can walk you through how these kinds of capital projects tend to play out over a multi-year hold, and what they mean for the blocks closest to the water. Reach out for a Global VIP consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.