Workers have begun installing new roofs on picnic pavilions and are building new bathrooms in Rye Town Park using money approved by the State Senate and Assembly.
The projects in progress include the “beach level bathrooms,” whose construction will cost an estimated $550,000, paid for in part with $250,000 from the New York State Senate Local Community Assistance Program, matched by grants from the Town of Rye, which includes Port Chester, Rye, and Rye Brook. They should be fixed by next summer.
Senator Shelley Mayor sponsored the grant, which stated that it will create “an ADA compliant men’s room and a new unisex family restroom will be added, so that women and families with young children who require accessible facilities will have a restroom they can reach.” That should make things easier for families, who will no longer have to climb stairs and leave the beach to reach a bathroom in the park.
The picnic pavilion roof repairs will cost $488,000, to correct for “severe disrepair,” according to the grant. The roofs protect the facilities in regular use all summer for family reunions, quinceañeras (15th birthday parties in Mexican and other Latin American cultures), and other local and civic celebrations. Those have included well-attended evening concerts sponsored by the town on summer Tuesdays and an annual “community conversation” about the future of the park.
Rye Town Supervisor Gary Zuckerman said the work being done is on only a few of nine projects the Rye Town Park Commission believes important to rebuilding the historic beachfront buildings. Only three have been awarded funding grants.
The Rye Record reported recently on the extensive decay and neglect of many of the beautiful, historic buildings in Rye Town Park. The park does not have the money to make the needed repairs itself and has been seeking state and federal grants.
Photo Alison Rodilosso
Photo Alison Rodilosso
Outdoor showers are fenced-off because of a crumbling wall. The interiors of the bathhouse, with its imposing towers, need an estimated $854,000 in repairs. Its tunnels are dank, its upper floors closed off, the exterior stucco peeling.
Meanwhile, the bathrooms in the one-time bathhouse building desperately need repairs — yet they are what visitors to Rye, one of the country’s wealthiest communities, see when they go to its public beach.
The process of seeking state and federal grants is slow, and any application competes against others from across the state or country. Then there’s the park’s unusual governance structure, which requires local governments to draw on their own budgets to support a facility that is not only used by their own residents.
The City of Rye, for instance, is responsible for 40 percent of the Park’s funding needs, while it has its own competing need for public improvements, including streets, sidewalks, and sewers.
Following publication of The Record’s article about the state of the park’s facilities, Rye Mayor Josh Cohn and Emily Hurd, both members of the Rye Town Park Commission, wrote a letter to editor published on Oct. 11 stating that some work on the park already has been accomplished. They said that the bathhouse received a new roof, new windows, and exterior stucco repairs in recent years and is to receive an interior renewal, including bathrooms. In addition, they cited other improvements, including a new seawall and a concrete beach access ramps with beach access mats for wheelchairs.
At a minimum of $500 for four hours for residents, $700 for non-residents, rental of the pavilions is, in addition to beach and parking permits, an important source of Park revenue.
The current repair projects still, however, leave a long list of prospective grants the Rye Town Park Commission is seeking for capital repairs.
They include a guard rail and sea wall “coping” (the top of the wall sloped to carry off water) above the wall, which a $5.1 million grant application — submitted as a “Congressionally directed spending request” — describes as “crumbling.”
Also pending are grant applications for improved drainage of the park’s pond, which sometimes overflows after storms and causes flooding to Oakland Beach itself, requiring the beach to be closed. The application describes those floods as “costly, frequent and burdensome.”
“A recommended solution was devised that includes the installation of a diversion pipe, drainage devices and taking advantage of available open space for temporary stormwater impoundment to provide downstream relief,” the grant application states.
The Park Commission is seeking federal funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and county funds from the Westchester County Stormwater Management Program.
The Park Commission also is seeking $537,000 for a new “bath house retaining wall,” to replace the one next to the beach showers that currently is “crumbling;” $854,500 to renovate the interior of the park’s non-ADA-compliant bath house, where beachgoers could change into swimsuits, and $454,000 for new “promenade sidewalks” to replace current sand surfaces judged to be “unsafe for some users.”
None of those proposals seeks the many millions that would be needed to renovate the park’s towering administration building, its signature structure which dates to 1909 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.