NYCxDESIGN Festival Tour: Wagner Park

Join NYCxDESIGN and the American Society of Landscape Architects New York on this fascinating walking tour of Wagner Park.

The rebuilt Wagner Park seamlessly integrates flood resilience and climate adaptation with urban and landscape design, creating a public space that provides recreation and flood risk reduction for the city. This project highlights how thoughtful urban landscape design can transform public space into a civic centerpiece. Beneath its terraced walkways and sweeping lawn lies an 18-foot flood wall and a 63,000-gallon stormwater cistern — mitigating risk for Lower Manhattan from storm surge and sea level rise while remaining virtually invisible to park visitors.

On this tour, visitors will see how infrastructure and landscape can work as one. The project team will share how designers and engineers collaborated to turn flood protection into a civic asset, ensuring Wagner Park remains open, green, and resilient.

Meeting location: 20 Battery Pl, in front of The Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Physical Considerations: This is a 90 minute walking tour.

Names of speakers: Gonzalo Cruz (AECOM), Kimberlae Saul (BPCA), Ruth Nervig (SiteWorks)

Speaker bios:

Gonzalo Cruz, ASLA, Vice President & NYC LAUD - Landscape & Urban Design Lead at AECOM

Gonzalo is based in New York, where he leads AECOM’s Landscape & Urban Design (LAUD) practice, overseeing projects and collaborations both locally and across the Americas. His award-winning portfolio spans a wide range of placemaking scales, with a particular emphasis on large-scale infrastructure shaped by public realm design. With a diverse, interdisciplinary background, Gonzalo has been at the forefront of innovative work at the intersection of infrastructure and placemaking. Notable projects under his leadership include South Battery Park City Resilience, Wagner Park and Pier A Plaza, Brooklyn Montgomery Coastal Resilience Open Space, Sendero Verde in Harlem, DUMBO Archway Plaza, and Harborside Waterfront Park in Hoboken, among others.

His work has received design recognition from leading organizations such as the ASLA, AIA, NYCxDesign, the Municipal Art Society of New York, and the Chicago Athenaeum. Honors include the Award for Design Excellence in Open Space for Liberty Park at the World Trade Center. Gonzalo holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the City College of New York and a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Tickets include a $3.40 Eventbrite fee.

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