Bobby Wagner Walk Esplanade
Subsurface investigation and field services supporting the reconstruction of a signature East River waterfront esplanade.
Locating legacy timber piles and cribbing beneath an active Manhattan waterfront corridor, with FDR Drive running directly alongside.
The reconstruction design hinged on understanding what was actually supporting the esplanade and pier footprint. Record drawings for a structure of this age only tell part of the story — the design team needed physical verification of timber pile layout and cribbing conditions before moving forward.
The site made that verification technically difficult. Test pits had to reach the pile tops and cribbing, at depths that required shoring. Groundwater followed the East River tides, which meant active dewatering through every pit and tide-coordinated excavation planning to keep pit faces stable and working conditions safe.
Add to that the FDR Drive running directly alongside the corridor and a manhole survey program that required controlled highway access — and every field activity had to move under careful sequencing.
Two parallel programs under one operational team: test pit investigation and FDR Drive traffic management.
Test pits were executed across the corridor to physically locate timber piles and cribbing beneath the esplanade and pier footprint. Shoring systems were designed and installed for the deeper pits. Dewatering ran continuously, with excavation sequencing planned around East River tide cycles to keep pit faces stable and working conditions safe. Every opening was restored behind the work — landscape rebuilt, not patched — so the site moved forward clean as we progressed.
In parallel, NYCEDC's manhole survey program required temporary shutdowns of the FDR Drive. Seylone managed the traffic control program for those shutdowns — coordinating with NYCDOT, staging the MPT setup, and running the closures on night shifts to align with FDR volume restrictions. We did not perform the survey; we made the survey possible.
Project management held both workstreams together: one scope, one point of accountability.
Subsurface verification delivered. Survey program supported. Corridor restored.
The test pit program gave the design team physical verification of the timber pile and cribbing conditions driving the reconstruction design. Landscape restoration closed out every opening on the esplanade footprint.
The parallel FDR traffic control program enabled the manhole survey to complete on schedule, with no incidents and no NYCDOT escalations across the night-shift closure windows. On a corridor where a single bad closure lands in the news cycle, clean execution is the deliverable.
Other recent work.
Unisphere, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.
Multi-discipline foundation investigation and restoration around one of New York City's most recognizable landmarks.
Camden County LINK Trail · Segments 1D–1E.
High-volume test pit investigation through difficult terrain along a linear trail corridor in Southern New Jersey.
East River Esplanade · 71st–74th Street.
Technical subsurface investigation on a tidal waterfront site flanked by the FDR Drive.
