Tivoli Park Preserve Stream Daylighting

Tivoli Park Preserve in Albany, New York, is the second-largest urban park preserve in New York State and has undergone numerous master planning efforts over the last century. The Albany Water Board saw an opportunity to jumpstart the redevelopment of the preserve outlined in the 2014 Master Plan by tackling the largest piece: daylighting more than a third of a mile of the culverted Patroon Creek. Given the preserve’s location within the watershed, daylighting a portion of the culverted creek presented a way for the city to ameliorate upstream flooding and protect critical infrastructure routed through the preserve while constructing new stream habitat, installing native plants, and creating meaningful opportunities for the adjacent underserved neighborhood and the greater community to engage with the natural environment.

Through a series of concept sketches and discussions with the AWB, CHA provided a concept that daylighted the stream while also hardening and strengthening the board’s critical water infrastructure, which has been historically damaged by high-flow storm events. This innovative concept proposed removing a majority of the culverted Patroon Creek within the Tivoli Park Preserve but leaving in place a section of the culvert to provide a high flow overflow to Tivoli Lake. Leaving this section of culvert in place allows the City of Albany’s water mains to remain in place and allows all flows up to the capacity of the 72” culvert to be maintained in a natural stream channel downstream of the culvert. By only allowing flows up to the capacity of the 72” pipe, the downstream daylit channel is more meandering, with natural banks and a pool, riffle, and run stream morphology.

The lower portion of the naturalized stream channel features a series of low-height waterfalls and runs to accommodate a grade drop that provides aeration of the water column, increasing dissolved oxygen before the water is discharged into the pool complex immediately to the west of the downstream culvert.