Noreen Doyle Was There When Hudson River Park Was Born

Noreen Doyle wasn’t just present at the creation of the Hudson River Park. She helped put the pieces together, step by step, pier by pier, beginning 30 years ago, doing whatever was needed.

On her first day of work, she even dressed up as a fish.

The reclaiming of Manhattan’s waterfront is a remarkable saga. Once the bustling hub of the Great City’s port, the waterfront had fallen into disuse and disrepair.

“It was the wild west at the time,” Doyle recalled of the waterfront when she arrived on the West Side as the assistant district manager of Community Board 4 in 1992.

“It was a place where, despite things being physically unsafe—like poles and planks and other things like that on some of the piers—people did try to get access to the water. Because that is what people do when they are near the water. They try to connect to water.”

Something clearly needed to be done. The massive Westway project of the 1980s, which would have sent a section of the West Side Highway underground and replaced it with parkland and landfill expansion for mixed-use development, had collapsed in a floodtide of environmental objection.

From the wreckage, a new idea emerged. In 1994, Tom Fox, an advocate for a park along the river, recruited Doyle as vice president for environmental planning and communications of the then fledgling Hudson River Park Conservancy, the predecessor to today’s Hudson River Park Trust, where Doyle has been president since 2021 and served as executive vice president for 19 years before that.

She still remembers that first day of work in October 1994, because it was the day of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. Fox seized on the parade as a chance to try to dispel some of the community suspicion that the new Hudson River Park efforts were just a Trojan horse for Westway-scale development.

Doyle and about two dozen colleagues dressed as various aquatic residents of the waterfront and marched in the parade, immediately behind a group of Mermen.

“Our appearance sent the message that we were a different kind of public authority,” Fox recalled in his book, Creating the Hudson River Park. “One that might relate to the communities we served.”

Those marching fish were as aspirational as they were symbolic. Doyle notes that the Park’s communities now include 400 acres of estuarine sanctuary that is home to myriad aquatic creatures from oysters to fish to kayaking people.

“There was a great deal of fear that this was really a development project in disguise,” Doyle recalled, looking back from her office on Pier 40 in the park. “That it wasn’t really going to be a park. That we were going to destroy the environment. That we were going to destroy the Hudson River. That we were the ‘son of Westway.’ ”

The 1998 act under which the park was created did, in fact, allow for commercial development on some piers as a way of paying for operation of the park.

“It took a lot of years of actually building a park and having it be a recognizable park,” Doyle said of how those fears were alleviated. “Our environmental credibility has grown by leaps and bounds. It is intrinsic to our mission.”

The Park now awards research grants and sponsors environmental education.

“We’ve been doing true habitat restoration. The Gansevoort salt marsh. We’ve got tens of millions of oysters that we’ve planted in two submerged areas. One in Tribeca. One in the Meatpacking area.”

For Doyle, the park has been a life’s work in more ways than one. She met her future husband, Michael Bradley, through park work. He helped build Riverside Park South, which runs north from 59th Street as the Hudson River Park runs south from there, for four miles to Battery Park City.

He won a WESTY award for that work. But Doyle and Bradley resolved years ago not to engage in “River Park shop talk,” she said.

The Hudson River Park is well along but remains a work in progress.

The stretch from 29th to 40th streets is due for upgrading. It includes several existing commercial uses, including the West Side Heliport, and poses the major question of what combination of park and commercial activity will be allowed on the enormous Pier 76, the former car-tow pound.

Also hanging over that stretch of park, figuratively and perhaps literally, is what will happen on the adjacent, western, portion of Hudson Yards, where a casino is proposed.

All of which prompted a reporter to ask Doyle if she felt the park was an example of that old saw: New York will be a great place if they ever get it finished.

“I already feel like it’s a great place,” she replied.

“Nothing happens by accident. This took so many people over decades to bring this together. People willing to fight for it. People willing to compromise for it. People advocating for the environment. People advocating for open space. People who are realistic about how do you pay bills. People who sort of believed in absolutes and people who believed in compromise. It needs both.

“I think that is a lesson that everybody can take with them with respect to all kinds of problems and issues in the world, right? You come together. You work on something. And you work on it in a sustained way and you can make change happen.

She adds, “There are many heroes of Hudson River Park.”