East River Esplanade

You are standing on a stretch of coastline with an unusual history written into its very foundations. During the construction of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive in the late nineteen thirties, city engineers needed massive amounts of fill to extend the Manhattan shoreline into the river. To solve this, they used thousands of tons of masonry rubble salvaged from buildings in London that had been destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War. These remnants of a blitzed city were shipped across the Atlantic as ballast in convoy ships, eventually settling here to form the base of the promenade you are walking on today.