But as the seventh hurricane season since then approaches, the city is relying on something more modest as the first line of defense against another inundation of Manhattan: a row of glorified sandbags.
In the next few months, the city’s Office of Emergency Management plans to oversee the installation of 4-foot-tall sacks of soil along the East River esplanade, from Wall Street to just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.
For up to five years, they essentially would form the only barrier to keep water from again rushing into the low-lying neighborhoods around the South Street Seaport.
City officials say they are a temporary step while permanent solutions to New York’s vulnerability to big storms are still being planned and debated.
But the barriers have already provoked derision.
“Six years of studying it and you come up with sandbags? Really?” said Marco Pasanella, whose family owns a 180-year-old building with a wine shop that faces the river on South Street. He said he felt no less vulnerable than he did on the night that Sandy flooded his shop and left the district without power for two weeks.
Along with the doubts about their effectiveness, the barriers have also been panned as unsightly interlopers along a stretch of waterfront popular with pedestrians and bicyclists — one woman called them “atrocities.”
They will cover only about one mile of the waterfront, leaving the area below Wall Street unprotected, possibly for another decade or longer.
Officials have admitted that they do not have a plan for protecting much of the financial district, which is home to about 100,000 people and accounts for one of every 10 jobs in the city.
They have concluded that Lower Manhattan is simply too congested, with 18 subway lines and a tangle of utilities running beneath its warren of narrow streets, for land-based defenses like fences that flip up from the ground.
Instead, they have a more ambitious vision and have begun planning to extend the shoreline of the island into the water to serve as a bulwark against rising sea levels and storm surges.
But making more of Manhattan will take a lot of time and money. In the meantime, the financial district will rely on a combination of commercial products that are typically used as temporary protections against flooding that look like they come from Home Depot: Hesco barriers and plastic tubes known as Tiger Dams.
The barriers are wire-mesh frames that can be filled with sand or gravel and linked together to form a low wall. They have been used to hold back raging rivers in many parts of the country, but emergency management officials said they were not aware of any other city using them in the way New York is.
“We’re in the Wild West of adaptation where it’s like anything goes,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president for energy and environment at the Regional Plan Association. “It comes down to the need to do something soon. Sometimes that looks a little uglier than the visions that are laid out.”
The city installed similar barriers in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and Astoria in Queens, where they either abut buildings or are tucked against or behind fences.
In Manhattan, however, they would stick up prominently between a busy street and the promenade. After being set up, they would eventually be decorated by artists in a process city officials call “beautification.”
Not everyone who has beheld them agrees.
“I saw the barriers in Red Hook, and they are not attractive,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, a former chairwoman of Community Board 1, which encompasses the financial district and the seaport. “They’re not contextual with the South Street Seaport.”
The barriers would be “atrocities,” said Alice Blank, a Tribeca resident who heard city officials present their plans to the community board at a recent meeting. “I guess what they were saying is, we’re going to put down these unsightly blocks and we’re going to paint them in the fall.”
City officials said the barriers can last up to five years and are worthy stopgap measures. “Our goal is to bridge the gap between the current hazard and permanent mitigation,” said Benjamin Krakauer, an assistant commissioner at the Office of Emergency Management.
While they seem like a makeshift solution to protecting urban centers, New York is not the only city to deploy them — other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles, have also used the barriers as temporary fortifications.
They filled gaps in levees in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005. In Los Angeles, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed a 3-mile line of them on a bank of the Los Angeles River out of concern about flooding from El Niño storms in 2016.
But after complaints from cyclists and equestrians about the barriers blocking access to a bike path and horse-riding trails, the Corps removed many of them after the El Niño threat had passed.
Other coastal cities facing similar challenges to New York, however, have opted not to use the barriers.
In Charleston, South Carolina, where flood prevention is a top priority, Mayor John J. Tecklenburg said the city plans to raise its sea wall by 3 feet and fit it with tracks for glass plates that could add an additional 2 1/2 feet.
But, the city’s chief resilience officer, Mark Wilbert, said the city had not turned to Hesco barriers because “there’s got to be a start and a stop on them, and where it stops the water will come around.”
In Lower Manhattan, the stopping point will be Wall Street. The barrier wall will start just north of the Brooklyn Bridge at Catherine Slip and extend nearly a mile to Wall Street.
Along the way, there will be about 18 gaps, mostly for pedestrian access to the riverfront. When a storm threatens, the Tiger Dams will be moved from storage in Brooklyn and filled with water to cover the gaps, Krakauer said.
That makeshift wall would not hold back a storm like Sandy, whose surge rose 6 1/2 feet as it swamped the historic Seaport district and destroyed one of its main attractions, Pier 17. But city officials told the community board that there had not been a storm since that would have triggered the deployment of the Tiger Dams.
In other areas of Lower Manhattan, the city’s Economic Development Corp. identified different ways of defending against big storms, at a cost of about $500 million.
Planning is underway for the installation of gates that would flip up along the esplanade north of the Brooklyn Bridge and attach to the underside of the elevated Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Along the Battery and in Battery Park City, esplanades would be raised.
But Elijah Hutchinson, vice president for resilience at the development corporation, said in a recent presentation that for the seaport and the financial district, “we don’t have a plan.”
City officials are embarking on the more sweeping plan of extending the shoreline of Lower Manhattan by as much as 500 feet, a project that Mayor Bill de Blasio said could cost $10 billion and would take at least six years to complete.
The city hopes to hire a team to design that extension by fall. But with no source of funding identified for the project, the plan could involve allowing developers to build on the landfill to help pay for it, city officials said.
Until then, a big section of the Lower Manhattan waterfront will not have so much as a row of big sandbags to protect it, a void that has left downtown residents and merchants feeling vulnerable, Hughes, the former community board chairwoman, said.
“Clearly, this interim plan has a big gap between Wall Street and the Battery,” she said, “and that gap also needs to be addressed.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.