The park—wedged between the luxury rental towers, the FDR Drive, and 36th Street—will feature a prominent fountain outfitted with seat/walls in addition to limestone and granite paving, benches, tables, and a variety of plantings and trees.

“A big part of the design was to create this kind of fountain that has a lot of movement and reflectivity to animate the park,” said Orff.

The property’s significant flood risk also factored into Scape’s overall design scheme. The site was inundated with water during Hurricane Sandy, and now the developer, JDS Development, is taking extra measures to prepare the buildings for future storms. Orff said that they plan to implement a number of strategies to make the park more resilient and mitigate the impact of flooding from designing a riprap edge on the interior of the plaza to building an underground detention system and planting vegetation to withstand flooding. The goal, Orff said, is to make “the landscape almost like a water plaza, which holds and retains water.”

Once built, the park will not only provide a leafy retreat for residents and New Yorkers, but will also “hang together with those different levels of circulation, access, and water.”

The park is slated to open in early 2016—coinciding with the completion of the towers.