The Northwest Resiliency Park project is a 6-acre urban park located in Hoboken, NJ. The project advances the City’s Green Infrastructure Strategic Plan and Rebuild by Design’s strategies of Delay, Store, & Discharge through utilizing ‘Parks as Defense.’ The design mitigates localized and neighborhood-wide flooding through capturing and detaining over 1-million gallons of stormwater runoff from the surrounding sewershed, as well as from the site itself. Detaining right-of-way runoff from the adjacent neighborhood alleviates demand on the City’s water treatment facility during large storms which reduces the frequency of combined sewer overflow (CSO) events into the Hudson River.

The property was initially acquired by the City of Hoboken as an asphalt capped lot due to environmental constituents of concern in the subsurface soil. Prior to extensive community engagement and design phases, a Pop-Up Park was built on the asphalt lot to encourage the residents to start using the space for recreation (see image below). The comprehensive public engagement process allowed the design team to address the neighborhood’s need for recreation and public space amenities. The design team integrated both physical and social resiliency by finding a balance of serving the community through park elements as well as engineering measures to reduce stress on existing City infrastructure. Park amenities include a multi-sport athletic turf field, basketball court, large play area, great lawn, as well as community and café buildings. Many of these site features are utilized as stormwater retention basins or capture areas such as the athletic field that is lined by underdrains and the basketball court which is sunken to detain flood waters.

Site constraints, such as high groundwater, soil contamination, and projected flood elevations, required innovative solutions to ensure a constructable park. To adhere to state permitting requirements, the design team created complex changes in topography on site which brought features out of the water table, combined like-on-like contaminated soils, and elevated two park buildings above the design flood elevation. The resulting topography allows visitors to have an immersive experience varied and unique experiences that serve as a refuge from the typical dense streetscape of the city. The project was made possible by a large team of partners and stakeholders including the City of Hoboken, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and North Hudson Sewerage Authority. The project has been under construction since the Summer of 2019 and the site portion was recently completed in June of 2023.

More information regarding this project may be found here: https://nwpark-cityofhoboken.opendata.arcgis.com/