Closed for how long, exactly

Add the segments up and the walkway in front of these five buildings carries about 164 months of construction closure, more than thirteen years of frontage taken out of service, compressed into a little over four calendar years. No single stretch escapes it. The Gateway Plaza frontage alone, Area 6A South, is closed for about 50 months, more than four years for one block of esplanade. A child who starts kindergarten this fall will be a fourth-grader before it reopens.

Two of the segments are not even settled. The BPCA has easement agreements with the Regatta, Hudson Tower, and Gateway Plaza, but none with Liberty Terrace or Liberty House, whose boards, a BPCA source told The Broadsheet in July, wanted independent engineering studies rather than the agency's designs. In July the BPCA said it was redesigning the flood wall outside those two buildings so it can be built without an easement; in its October 2026 answers to Gateway tenants it called the redesign potential and said it "could result in significant cost increases and schedule delays, and keep portions of the BPC Esplanade closed to the public for longer periods of time," so the durations for Areas 6B and 6C could still move.

The BPCA's March 11, 2026 Q&A adds a sixth window not shown on the staging map: Area 5E, the Esplanade Plaza, was slated to close for construction from late in the second quarter of 2026 for approximately 21 months, and the BPCA's October 13, 2026 presentation to the Gateway Tenants Association lists 'Phase 5E West Began April 2026 (21 months)'. That brings the count of distinct closure windows on this stretch of waterfront to six, none shorter than about a year and a half.

What it shows: after the pandemic drop, crash counts in the area stayed roughly flat, while the people hurt in them rose. Pedestrian injuries roughly doubled in 2024 and 2025, 26 and 23, against 13 and 15 in 2022 and 2023, the years the fencing lines and detours spread. Correlation is not attribution: traffic patterns, tourism recovery, and citywide trends all move these numbers, and the dataset structurally misses sidewalk conflicts that never involve a vehicle. We publish the series, keep pulling it, and let it say only what it says. NYC Open Data, Motor Vehicle Collisions - Crashes (h9gi-nx95). Police-reported collisions involving motor vehicles only: a bicycle-pedestrian collision on a sidewalk with no vehicle and no police report never enters this dataset, so it understates exactly the conflicts residents describe. 2026 covers January through May, the last complete month in the dataset: the city last updated it on June 15, 2026, and later months are not yet available.