Once a pipe dream, Tibbetts to run free

Tibbetts Brook will see the light of day in Kingsbridge possibly as soon as 2025.

The $133 million project to refashion the “Old Put” into a greenway in northwest Bronx overcame its biggest hurdle in January. The city cinched the deal to acquire CSX’s right-of-way for $11.2 million.

The design phase has kicked into high gear this spring.

The city parks and environmental protection departments are devising plans to liberate Tibbetts from a labyrinth of underground culverts. The engineering feat begins at the 1912 Van Cortlandt Lake weir where water is piped underground and merges with the Broadway sewer.

After the “daylighting” is complete, Tibbetts will carve an open-air route along a 0.77-mile stretch of abandoned rail bed before entering a closed conduit at West 230th Street and continuing south to the Harlem River. The corridor will become a new city park, with a bike path extending from West 230th Street to the Yonkers border, where the Putnam trail continues north.

It’s the largest green infrastructure project New York City has ever taken on as part of its long-term plan to reduce sewer overflow.

And the greenway may one day connect to the Bronx’s future Harlem River Greenway, a 7-mile waterfront corridor Mayor Eric Adams announced last month. The city’s transportation department is developing the vision with a series of public workshops taking place this spring.

Suddenly, the Tibbetts daylighting is “moving at warp speed,” said Bronx Community Board 8 environment & sanitation committee chair Camelia Tepelus.

CB8 will scrutinize the design closely in the coming weeks ahead of a review by the city’s public design commission set to take place in August.

Design crunch time

Draft plans revealed over the past year show a raised bike path over a new stream bed lined with native shrubs and trees. The greenway traces the route of the former Putnam Line along a 25-foot corridor to West 230th Street. A closed conduit will take it to the Harlem River, where it will empty through an outfall on Metro-North property at West 193rd Street.

Agency representatives will present detailed plans to CB8 May 24 in a joint meeting of the parks and environment & sanitation committees.

Questions about safety and noise from vehicles hurtling down the Major Deegan Expressway will likely dominate, along with board members’ vexation with Metro-North Railroad.

The state quasi-public authority may force a lengthy public review process before giving up access to its right-of-way south of West 225th Street.

The daylighting cannot proceed without an easement for a six-foot conduit passing below Metro-North’s operational tracks, said assistant commissioner of environmental protection Pinar Balci in the April 24 virtual meeting of the Tibbetts Advisory Group.

The environmental protection department began convening the group in 2022.

“You know that we’ve been really focusing on the CSX part, but now, our attention is on the MTA,” she said.

Flood resilience

Just two years ago, Kingsbridge was inundated when the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over the city, causing Van Cortlandt Lake to swell beyond its banks. The image of cars floating down the Major Deegan Expressway is stamped into local memory.

A greenway along the old Putnam Line has been more than a pie-in-the-sky idea for CB8 since at least the 1990s.

The parks department officially commenced the project in 2011. DEP officials began eyeing it as an opportunity for Tibbetts Brook, which currently makes its way through Yonkers and Van Cortlandt Park before being swallowed up into the Kingsbridge sewer system and the Wards Island wastewater treatment plant.

They proposed bringing the stream to the earth’s surface for the first time since Robert Moses’ mid-century reign over the Bronx.

The city’s Open Waters Long Term Control Plan estimates the Tibbetts daylighting project will divert 25 percent of the combined sewer overflow into the Harlem River.

Low-lying streets in Kingsbridge and Marble Hill will reap the benefits, as will the city’s waterways, which act as an emergency valve for the city’s combined sewage system during heavy rain.

The CSX stalemate

In their application to the city planning commission more than a decade ago, the parks department estimated it would take about two years to construct the Putnam Greenway.

But the city’s top lawyers failed for years to wrestle a fair price from CSX Transportation Inc. The freight rail company owns the right-of-way on the Putnam Line, a retired spur of the New York Central Railroad.

The closed-door negotiations remained at an impasse until 2017, when U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and former city councilman Andrew Cohen intervened. The parties agreed to hire an independent appraiser.

Though its results were never made public, the appraisal apparently had the intended effect.

Mayor Eric Adams announced earlier this year a deal was in the bag.

The parties signed a purchase and sale agreement Jan. 18, setting out a strict timeline for federal review of the deal ahead of an anticipated closing date in August 2024.

CSX filed for federal approval to abandon the segment of the old Putnam Branch April 11. The action sets the Surface Transportation Board’s year-long public review process in motion.

Rapid fire questions come from CB8 members

Bronx Community Board 8 has long championed the Putnam Greenway and Tibbetts daylighting project. The interagency collaboration began to gather momentum around 2016, when Tibbetts briefings from DEP officials begin to appear regularly in CB8’s minutes, which switched to the advisory group last year.

“We all love this project, and this is why we are kind of overly concerned in some aspects,” explained CB8 environment and sanitation committee chair Camelia Tepelus.

Karen Argenti, a longtime greenway proponent and advocate with the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, called the project “beautiful.”

Then, like many others, she launched into a list of concerns. She hasn’t seen an operation plan, Argenti said, which the city’s stormwater management rules require to be written down. DEP’s Tara Deighan thanked her and seemed to take note.

CB8 parks committee chair Deb Travis shared similar apprehensions. She asked for more information about how the daylighted stream will fare under heavy rainfall.

The Broadway sewer will gain incremental capacity from the project, replied Sandeep Mehrotra, a green infrastructure consultant on the project with Hazen and Sawyer. But, he said, “the solution to this is really doing things upstream and holding the water there, not once it’s already at you.”

“As you know, the corridor is very narrow, and it’s got multiple uses. There’s a limited capacity. So to me, this is more like a daylighting project than a total flood control project.”

The new Tibbetts corridor is designed to withstand a 5-year flood event, in line with other city projects, he said.

It was a more modest description than other city officials have provided.

Mayor Adams said in a statement about the project: “Not only will this create more green spaces to enjoy, but it will remove millions of gallons of water from our sewer system, lessening potential flooding on rainy days.” 

Abigail Nehring is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.