My primary responsibilities were to document existing conditions along certain stretches of the waterfront and determine opportunities for future action. I focused on "Reach 5," which encompassed the majority of the Upper Manhattan waterfront.

I broke up Reach 5 into several subsections, and identified a number of priority areas.

One of these priority areas was the Harlem River Speedway, a pedestrian trail located between the Harlem River and Harlem River Drive. Access turned out to be a major issue, since the Speedway had only one entrance at each end of the trail. In addition, the southern entrance is very difficult to find and much of the corridor suffered from poor maintenance and wayfinding.

One major opportunity was the possibility of working with the Department of Parks & Recreation (DPR) to provide an access to the Speedway via the High Bridge. The DPR was moving forward with plans to renovate and re-open the High Bridge as a pedestrian bridge, and a previous entrance point to the Speedway existed prior to the construction of the Harlem River Drive, making the provision of an access point at that location a logical goal.

Another major recommendation was to attempt to rehabilitate important tidal mudflat ecosystems at the northern tip of Manhattan, and to concurrently expand the system of street-end parks that had been successfully implemented in the Sherman Creek area further south.