BY ANNE RAVER

Reed Hilderbrand overturns a century of casual destruction at Long Dock Park in Beacon, New York.
From the March 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Ten years ago, Long Dock was a postindustrial ruins built on fill?the layered detritus of its past?that sprawled 1,000 feet across the tidal flats of the Hudson River at the foot of the boarded-up city of Beacon, New York.
Now, this same site, Scenic Hudson?s Long Dock Park, is a 23-acre expanse of meadow and wetlands shaded by cottonwoods and swamp maples, with a sculpted dock and quiet cove, where a kayak pavilion hovers like a dragonfly over the river?s edge.
Reed Hilderbrand has remediated and reshaped the flat landscape, transforming it to a series of earthen berms and reconfigured marshes that hold and filter stormwater and tidal surges in storms as brutal as Irene and Sandy. ?We were fully inundated four times during construction, so each time we lost ground,? Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, said one midsummer afternoon, standing on the boardwalk that leads to the river?s edge. ?But we also proved that the hydrology works. The site drains the way we designed it to drain. So it was rewarding, in a sense, to go through that and understand the site actually is resilient.?
The firm won a 2015 ASLA Professional Award of Excellence in General Design for the project, which has been a long and complicated collaboration with the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, the city of Beacon, and many others, including Patkau A...