At the southern tip of Battery Park City, Wagner Park opened in late July. It belongs to an incredibly complex, multibillion-dollar assortment of resilience efforts to safeguard Lower Manhattan from rising seas and storms during the coming decades.

An earlier Wagner Park opened in 1996. It became an oasis for many residents of this well-to-do neighborhood. When Superstorm Sandy swamped much of the rest of Lower Manhattan in 2012, precipitating the herculean dreams to fortify the coastline, the former Wagner Park didn’t flood.

So opponents of the new park questioned the need to replace the original park. They staged protests. There were lawsuits and delays.

The usual New York story.

Two familiar questions govern much of American life today. Why change something that people like? And why does everything seem stuck? The questions frustrate progress at nearly every turn.

Lately, New York has proved that the city can still, occasionally, accomplish things, despite the headwinds. Wagner is one example. Another is a reconstituted green space on the other side of Lower Manhattan called East River Park.

Meanwhile, a third downtown site is a useful reminder of how and why stasis remains our default setting.

Thirteen years ago, Sandy cut power to 250,000 Con Ed customers, took more than 100 lives across the region and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. Wall Street shuttered.

The superstorm prompted a novel initiative by the Obama administration to jump-start projects in and around New York that would fortify coastlines and, in the process, improve the social fabric and public space of targeted neighborhoods.

The city and state embraced, among other projects, a proposal that focused on a lengthy swath of Lower Manhattan, which includes both Wagner and East River parks.

The old Wagner Park was flat, calm and austere. This new one is busy and hilly, with native plantings, salt-tolerant trees, various nooks and other gathering spots, an amphitheater facing the harbor, and a boomerang-shaped, hilltop lawn that is roughly the size of the old lawn — a detail crucial to community members who didn’t want to lose green space.

I like the new park. I gather some residents who liked the old one, don’t.

A quasi-Brutalist, burnt umber pavilion designed by the distinguished architect Thomas Phifer is not to everyone’s taste. It’s capital-A architecture, a commanding, spectacular presence on top of the hill.

Fluid like the water, with concrete vaults and sculptural curves, it firmly anchors a crucial corner of the island and nods formally to landmarks that dot the harbor, like Castle Williams and Castle Clinton. Its two parts, for a restaurant and a community center, separated by a little hilltop piazza, roughly echo the configuration of the park’s former brick pavilion by Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, whose central entrance was also oriented toward a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty.

The New York Post trashed the new park, calling it a $300 million “scam” and a “woke lesson in saving the earth,” orchestrated by “environmental zealots” allied with the Democratic Party. For thousands of New Yorkers whom Sandy left in the dark, in buildings that flooded, I suspect that money being spent in Lower Manhattan to ward off future floods is not going to save the planet. It’s going to save their apartments.

That said, nearly $300 million is a fortune for a 3.5-acre park. But the price of inaction typically ends up dwarfing the costs of prevention.

Much of the money at Wagner went to flood barriers in the new 10-foot hill that effectively turns the park into a levee. The fortifications are designed to link up with a network of walls, cisterns and other barriers that engineers and public officials imagine someday snaking along the Lower Manhattan waterfront — if New Yorkers don’t curtail the effort.

Since the 1960s, a growing number of public processes, codes and regulations, which were created to expand citizen participation and safety, have increasingly slowed the gears of progress. Little Wagner Park had to run a gantlet of 21 federal, state and local authorities.

At the same time, a crisis of authority has destabilized civil proceedings and discourse. Experts who study storms, traffic accidents or scourges like measles, making changes that reduce the impact or likelihood of disasters, are often blamed for sacrificing public resources and personal freedoms because those disasters don’t end up happening.

Some of the first renovated acres of East River Park also opened this summer. They’re replacing a ribbon of green built during the 1930s by Robert Moses. That earlier East River Park, unlike Wagner, did flood in 2012 during Sandy, overwhelming streets and public housing developments near the park.

Several years of community consultations and architectural planning sessions ensued, with city authorities ultimately deciding to build an entirely new park raised above the old one on 10 added feet of landfill, at an eye-watering cost of $1.45 billion.

A group of East Village artists, professors and others, many of whom didn’t live in public housing developments that Sandy flooded but who used the park, convened to thwart the plan. They protested the loss of mature plane and pin oak trees. They questioned the science and motives of the climate experts, engineers and City Hall. A few of them chained themselves to the trees.

I wrote about the conflict before renovations began in 2021, noting how a years-long process of community engagement — intended to protect the area and bind a diverse neighborhood around an enhanced park — had instead delayed progress and divided local residents, often along class and racial lines.

Back then, I reached out to a Columbia scholar named Gil Eyal, who wrote a book called “The Crisis of Expertise.” Community activism, Eyal pointed out, gained momentum during the 1960s and ’70s, not coincidentally when the word “expertise” also entered common parlance.

At that time, nuclear energy opponents were arguing that nuclear physicists weren’t also experts in public health. Rachel Carson was arguing that industrial chemists weren’t wildlife biologists. And Jane Jacobs was questioning the top-down authority of urban planners, saying they didn’t know more about neighborhoods than the people who live in them do.

The Powers That Be responded to these calls for more People Power by admitting a wider range of experts and local representatives to the table — more stakeholders, with sometimes opposing viewpoints, whose biases could be used to undermine their credibility. Consensus, as Eyal observed, became “even harder to achieve.”

Partisanship has supercharged the problem. Gallup in April released a poll that found nine out of 10 Democrats believe the impact of global warming is already being felt. But only 31 percent of Republicans agree — down from 35 percent in 2024.

The future today lacks a broad constituency.

In June, some of the opponents of renovations to Wagner and East River parks helped to derail a long-planned, Habitat for Humanity-backed, affordable housing development for low-income seniors in a very well-to-do stretch of Lower Manhattan. The 123-unit development, called Haven Green, was to take over an L-shaped acre of city-owned land on the former site of a public school building that was demolished during the 1970s.

The owner of a nearby art gallery began leasing the property from the city in the 1990s, using it to store sculptures. He planted perennials, installed a gazebo and posted a sign alerting passersby to limited access through his gallery.

Then the city decided in 2012 to build apartments on the lot. Neighbors who liked what the gallery owner had done persuaded him to open the gate to the street, organizing public programs and establishing a nonprofit called the Elizabeth Street Garden, to fight the housing plan.

Although the lack of affordable housing now tops the list of New Yorkers’ concerns, lawsuits delayed the project. Robert De Niro wrote to City Hall and Patti Smith headlined a rally to save the garden.

At the eleventh hour, Mayor Eric Adams, who had earlier endorsed the housing plan, reversed himself. He announced an agreement with a local City Council member aligned with the Nimbys to consider rezoning three other properties in Lower Manhattan for affordable development. The alternative came with no developer, no financing, no designs and no guarantee that anything at all will actually be built.

Many tourists and New Yorkers had come to value the Elizabeth Street Garden, for good reason. It’s lovely. The opening of the gate expanded the garden’s constituency. Public support becomes easier to galvanize once something exists and gains value in residents’ lives.

That’s the encouraging lesson behind Wagner and East River parks. They have provided proof of concept that investing in coastal resilience, while it comes at some cost, can also deliver on a promise.

One recent Monday morning, I found three residents from the Wald Houses, a public housing development socked by Sandy, in the first new acres of East River Park.

Having trekked a mile or so from their apartments in the sweltering heat to a patch of rolling lawns, sapling trees, tennis courts and playgrounds, they gathered around a picnic table in the shade of a large umbrella. “This is so much nicer than the old park,” Dixie Camacho, one of the Wald House residents, said.

Her two companions, Eden Herring and Iris Santana, nodded. They have been coming to use the park’s new barbecue grills — a priority for residents in those community meetings. “We can’t wait for the rest of the park to open,” Santana told me.

When I visited Wagner on a Saturday, young couples were pushing strollers up the winding, wheelchair-accessible path that follows the hill concealing the flood wall. Joggers navigated the riverine promenade, which has been preserved, along with an allée of mature sweetgum trees.

It’s hard to lose sites like the former Wagner and East River parks. But their replacements are new boons to the city, for now, anyway. The future keeps its own calendar. Our desire to conserve old trees, to save money and thwart time — to imagine a better plan just over the horizon — always runs up against other forces. Change is inevitable. In the end, we either ride it or it runs over us.

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.