Developing a Sustainable Water Management Plan for Central Park, New York using ArcGIS

Abstract

This research examined how 20th century changes to the design of Central Park, and New York’s water management systems, turned an iconic 19th century “naturalistic” urban park into a 21st century “ornamental” city park. Central Park’s past water management practices throughout its 160+ year history form the basis of this study to explore the park’s potential as a sustainable 21st century urban wetland. Unlike other historical national landmark parks such as Hyde Park in London (on which it was modelled), Central Park, NYC, underwent a number of drastic modernization changes to the design of its original waterways and park drainage systems in the 20th century. These changes greatly affected Central Park’s ability to independently manage its own waterbodies, to retain the stormwater runoff from its own watersheds, and to control its municipal potable water consumption. Central Park is a wonderful recreational facility for the city that surrounds it, but it does not contribute its fair share of its resources to the city’s green infrastructure. Central Park today is an “artificial” urban park that depends on millions of gallons of municipal potable water per day to feed its man-made concrete-lined water bodies and to irrigate its landscapes and relies on the city’s overwhelmed 19th century combined sewer system to carry off its stormwater. My research focused on creating a sustainability plan using ArcGIS mapping analysis that recognizes Central Park’s potential as a major green infrastructure resource for the City of New York and reduces the park’s burden on the city’s gray infrastructure. The main objective of my thesis was to bring the issues from my research of Central Park’s water intake and discharge management practices to light, to trace their origins in the design, construction and management decisions of the past, and run analyses to test my findings using the latest geological mapping and data analysis tools available from global information systems (GIS) analysis program: ArcGIS. This study identified the historical factors that arrest Central Park’s development and keep the park functioning more like an ornamental garden, rather than as a sustainable stormwater retention resource and urban wetland. This analysis explored the hypotheses that: 1) Central Park’s decommissioned reservoir with a carrying capacity of one billion gallons of water could be retrofitted to act as a stormwater retention lake for the entire park’s watershed; 2) Central Park’s artificial concrete-lined waterbodies could be returned to a more natural state and adapted to retain stormwater from their own watershed instead of draining to the city’s overloaded combined sewer systems; and 3) Many of Central Park’s historical streams underlying its present waterways that were diverted underground during the park’s 20th century renovations could be brought to the surface and daylighted as an additional source of freshwater to the park’s waterbodies. I used ArcGIS geodatabase data management applications to analyze both historical and present-day topography data for Central Park to create comparison maps that represent past, present and future water management conditions. My research results supported my hypotheses that Central Park has the potential to convert its decommissioned potable water reservoir to a stormwater retention lake, to return its concrete-lined waterbodies to a more natural state, and to reclaim the historical freshwater streams and waterbodies that pre-date the park and underlie its major waterways.