Residents take offense at misplaced MTA barrier

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With its lush trees, slightly overgrown greenery and view of the Hudson River, Spuyten Duyvil Shorefront Park resembles a remote wooded area.

But neighborhood residents who came in one morning a couple of weeks ago to enjoy the park’s rustic beauty, as local residents often will, saw workers spraying yellow paint on the ground to mark off the line where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, intended to install a fence.

The fence – as the MTA learned after a flurry of calls by local residents to local officials prompted a closer look – was going up in the wrong part of the park.

After the yellow paint, came the poles – a “completely unsightly” structure that was “cutting the park in half,” making it “look like a prison,” said Susan Wolfe, a local resident who walks her dog in the park.

“As they were putting [the poles] up, all of us started making phone calls,” said local resident Lisa Gaglia. “Some called the politicians. I called the Parks Department, 311.”

The poles reached about 20 feet in height, she estimated.

“The poles just came out of nowhere,” said Carol Abramsky, a Spuyten Duyvil resident who takes a jitney that runs past the park to the Metro-North station. “It made no sense.”

“It’s a beautiful, unkempt preserved park,” she said, raising questions about why the MTA chose to build a fence at that location.

Residents hypothesized that the structure might have been a response to teenagers crossing the train tracks to get to the Hudson River.

“There is a rock that kids … want to jump off,” Ms. Wolfe said. “There is nothing preventing anyone [from jumping]. The MTA probably doesn’t want them crossing over their tracks to get to the water.”

But if that was the case, “the fence should really go at the end of the park near the tracks,” Ms. Gaglia said.

The residents’ guesses about both the fence’s purpose and its erroneously chosen location seemed correct.

“In order to improve pedestrian safety and reduce the chances that people could put themselves in harm’s way by walking onto the tracks, Metro-North is installing a fence parallel to the tracks near Shorefront Park,” MTA spokeswoman Nancy Gamerman said in a statement.

The MTA was initially alerted to problems with the fence by a call from the office of Bronx Councilman Andrew Cohen, Ms. Gamerman told The Press.

“The fence … had been erected in the wrong location, and we removed it as soon as we recognized the error,” she said. “We will install the fence in the correct location in the next couple of weeks.”

Ms. Wolfe said that she was happy the poles were gone and the park was back in its original state. “I moved from the East Village to Spuyten Duyvil a year and a half ago. I love that park,” she said. “It feels like when you go down to the park, even though it’s by the train, you really feel like you are out of the city.”

Others said they hoped city agencies would learn from the mistake.

“The Parks Department and the MTA should work together more collectively and [in a] more organized [way], so everyone could have an understanding about the project,” Ms. Gaglia said.

Shorefront Park, Lisa Herndon

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