Staten Island Yankees Ballpark Waterfront Park

As waterfront design consultants to HOK-Sport Facilities Group, HMWhite developed a comprehensive open space design for Staten Island’s St. George waterfront with the Staten Island Yankees minor league ballpark. A bi-level open space system organizes and links Richmond Terrace to a shoreline esplanade, stadium plazas, marine woodland walkways and bikeway. Collaborating closely with marine engineers, a shore stabilization design was coordinated with the landscape design objectives, the ballpark's dimensional requirements, related public transportation, and recreational facilities. Provisions for future light rail were accommodated with municipal parking, children's playgrounds, a fitness course, and ballpark support facilities.

This one-mile-long waterfront walkway and esplanade is set within a restored coastal landscape—formerly an industrial railroad yard. Soil remediation, selective preservation of existing native vegetation, a landscape-based integrated stormwater management strategy, shoreline stabilization, and a native coastal planting restoration scheme were integral to establishing a comprehensive vision for this waterfront park. The landscape design emerged as a fundamental component to solving stormwater management and soil remediation requirements. Local marine ecology's natural purifying and absorption performative qualities were tapped as the fundamental plant community resource to renew and regenerate the site’s original natural conditions. Large contiguous and vegetated zones were dedicated early in the design process and labeled the project’s “green infrastructure.” By establishing the project’s landscape development as a critical component to solving the site’s environmental and engineering requirements, the scope and site coverage of planting systems created a proportionally scaled landscape that visually registered and anchored the ballpark structure to its dynamic waterfront landscape setting.