<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/03/hoboken-new-jersey-kids-play-stormwater-capture-zone-playground>
"For a city that is almost small enough to fit inside Manhattan’s Central Park
just a few miles away, a lot of history has played out within the narrow
borders of Hoboken, New Jersey.
It was the site of the first organised baseball game in 1846, home of one of
the US’s first breweries in the 17th century and the place where Oreo cookies
were first sold in 1912. And, as any Hobokenite will tell you, the Mile Square
City, as it is called, is also known for something else.
“Everything floods up here,” Maren Schmitt, 38, said with a nervous chuckle on
a Tuesday afternoon as she watched her two boys climb at a city playground.
Nearly four-fifths of the land area in Hoboken – which sits on the western
banks of the Hudson River – rests on a flood plain. And its intense
susceptibility to flooding has probably never been more apparent than it was
during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when 500m gallons of storm surge flooded the
city.
But now, a dozen years after the storm, Hoboken officials have put in place a
series of measures designed to mitigate the destructive effects of storms that
are driven by climate change, including one innovation that the city hopes may
become known as another Hoboken first.
Located at the corner of 12th and Madison streets, one of Hoboken’s newest
playgrounds, known as ResilienCity Park, has for the past 15 months been
helping to mitigate the effects of flooding in Hoboken by doubling as a storage
area for roughly 2m gallons of stormwater runoff. City officials say it is the
largest resiliency park in the state.
The park, which sits on five acres barely a mile and a half from the Lincoln
Tunnel into Manhattan, features swing sets, slides, a basketball court and an
athletic field – and, underneath it all, a below-ground tank capable of holding
hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater that city officials say would
have otherwise spilled on to the streets or streamed into the basements of
Hoboken homes and businesses.
Building climate-resilient – or climate-smart – playgrounds is part of a
growing movement among municipalities and environmental advocacy groups in the
US. While precise figures for the numbers of play areas around the country that
have been reconfigured as climate-friendly spaces are elusive, the Trust for
Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group, estimates it has helped fund the
construction of more than 300 such play spaces in communities around the
country, including Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles.
In Chicago, resilient parks are an integral part of the infrastructure projects
planned in the city. On Chicago’s West Side, for example, the Garfield
Conservatory Play and Grow Nature Play Space has been designed to use trees and
rain gardens to help manage stormwater runoff. City officials said there were
at least 16 other play spaces making up a total of 2,000 acres that feature
deep-rooted plants to help slow down stormwater runoff by allowing it to soak
into the ground."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-plant-vaccines/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
