The Hudson River Park Trust broke ground on the science playground planned for the upland area at Pier 26 — the space between the bathrooms and City Vineyard alongside the highway — and they have hired a team of architects to start work on the “estuarium” planned for the space just to the north.

The playground was made possible by a $3.5 million capital campaign completed by Hudson River Park Friends in 2021 and anchored by a $1.3 million challenge match by Tribecan Mike Novogratz.

This is the last fallow ground in the Tribeca section of the park. And other parts of the park are also moving along: the entire development of the Gansevoort Peninsula and Pier 97 at 57th Street. It’s all very exciting.

The playground, designed by Olin, the landscape architects who did Pier 26, will have two massive climbing structures in the shape of two sturgeon — the Atlantic Ocean and the shortnose. Those are being manufactured by the Danish artistic playground company Monstrum and are in production now outside of Copenhagen. See some cool pics of those below.

Tribeca architects Sage & Coombe, whose offices are on N. Moore, were recently chosen to be the leads on the project. They have done some cool projects around the city, including a bunch of public libraries, the Noguchi Museum, Poly Prep and City & Country. Their partners will be EHDD, an architecture firm from the West Coast that has lots of experience with aquaria, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Exploratorium at Pier 15 in San Francisco.

The estuarium is intended to be a center for research and education focusing on the Hudson River estuary. The Trust’s education team will operate their many programs for school kids out of the space, and it will be open to the public too. More TK as plans evolve there.