SWA/Balsley-Designed Hunter’s Point South Park Wins ULI Award of Excellence
The Urban Land Institute (ULI) announced that Hunter’s Point South Park—an 11-acre climate-resilient waterfront park in Long Island City—received one of ten 2025 Awards of Excellence, among the real estate industry’s highest honors.
Behind every urban park is a philosophy for how public space should serve its city, and since its completion in 2018, Hunter’s Point South Park has been widely recognized as a precedent-setting model integrating flood resilience, ecological design, and community-oriented planning, a front yard to over 5,000 new housing units in Queens. The park’s proximity to Gantry Plaza State Park has remade the borough’s East River shoreline into a remarkable urban open space befitting this rapidly growing borough.
The park features a multi-use green large enough to host community events of any scale, from soccer practices to summertime festivals. In stormier months, the green doubles as flood mitigation infrastructure as a massive stormwater detention basin. The core of the park is surrounded by diverse amenities: a water taxi dock, a pier, and a bustling café. Families of all sizes can find facilities from the play grove to the dog run or a walk through the heritage rail garden that references the site’s former industrial use.
Hunter’s Point South was much like the rest of New York City’s original coastline: swampy marshland. As the city modernized, the site became home to a landfill, a concrete plant, a newspaper printing facility, and a railroad site. The site was selected as a part of the vision for Queens West, a large mixed-use development for the borough’s industrial waterfront. By 2008, Thomas Balsley Associates (now SWA/Balsley), who led the 1993 Queens West Vision Plan, undertook the park’s design alongside architects Weiss/Manfredi and engineering firm ARUP.
The first of two design phases began in 2009. Phase 1 included 5.5 acres of parkland and a $25M investment by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). Despite the impact of Hurricane Sandy, the park opened to the public in 2013, along with new schools, a library, and thousands of affordable housing units. Phase 2, which consisted of a similar scale of parkland and investment, opened in 2019. Today, Hunter’s Point South Park is managed and maintained by the NYC Department of Parks and supported by the Hunters Point Park Conservancy.
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