New York Police Academy

This 35 acre state-of-the art training facility will consolidate all NYC Police Academy’s functions onto one campus. As execu­tive landscape architect of record, HMWhite led a multi-disciplinary team of consultants to integrate a high performance landscape design with the building’s operations and a matrix of complex site engineering re­quirements. Using low-maintenance native meadows, a series of landscape-defined outdoor gathering spaces were designed to support the facilities' every-day uses such as recruit mustering, training and active and passive recreation.

Classified as a filled marshland, the landscape design gives prominence to the site through a network of undulating, indigenous wet and dry meadows. The meadows emerge as spatial organization systems that also direct storm water movement and absorption. To restore the site’s original hydrologic connection to the Flushing River and Bay watershed, the site’s former “drainage ditch” was recon­figured to regenerate the native habitats of a partial tidal and fresh­water wetland.