By Gus Saltonstall
A sinkhole is gaining in strength near a dog run in Riverside Park.
The sinkhole sits within the park directly next to the 87th Street Dog Run. It is around four feet deep at its lowest point and spans more than seven feet in length, based on West Side Rag measurements at the site.
Part of a fence has been engulfed by the sinkhole, along with a tree and multiple shrubs.
“I may have missed coverage of this, but the large sinkhole just south of the 88th Street dog run seems to be getting bigger every day,” Katherine Bouton wrote to West Side Rag on March 24, 2026. “Some of the dog run has now been roped off. What’s causing it? What are repair plans?”
The back portion of the 87th Street Dog Run, which is a dedicated area for smaller dogs, features an area cordoned off by yellow tape that appears connected to the sinkhole.
The area in front of the sinkhole is also sectioned off with metal barricades, which leaves less than half the typical pathway available for walkers and bikers.
The Rag received a second email about the expanding sinkhole on Sunday from Laurence Freed.
“There’s a huge sinkhole in Riverside Park next to the 86 St. dog run. It’s been there for many months, and it keeps getting larger,” Freed wrote. “We walk by it every morning and have noted that as it has grown, the fencing to keep people and dogs away keeps expanding, but we haven’t seen any efforts at remediating it. Recently, it’s consumed a few trees. Soon it will consume the dog run.”
A spokesperson from the New York City Parks Department told the Rag that its engineering team was “assessing the cause of the sinkhole” and that “the area has been barricaded for public safety, and any necessary repairs will be identified following the assessment and addressed accordingly.”
The Rag will continue to monitor the growth of the hole.
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Thanks for highlighting this. It’s been there for quite some time (at least a year, maybe longer?). At one point when it was smaller, it was filled with sand and gravel, but it just got bigger and wider.
There’s been a sink hole by the Dinosaur Playground for years. This one needs to get in line!
YEARS! And nothing is being done about it.
I was going to contact the Parks Dept. but thought it a waste of time. If it was in Central Park, it would have been fixed. But the stepchild park has second status and not the tourists. It has been in existence for over a year. It is quite dangerous. It has made the promenade walkway half the width for walkers and yes bikers.
It does not take a year to assess the reason for the sinkhole. It takes money. We treasure our old trees in Riverside Park and this sinkhole endangers them as well. Maybe the Parks Department will read this and mobilize themselves. All we need is a tragedy to get this fixed sooner and I pray that a tragedy does not happen.
Please fix this Parks Department! Thank you.
Lily G.
very good point! i’ve contacted the parks dept. and the riverside conservancy (along with many others) many times concerning various potential dangers. riverside conservancy never replies and the parks dept. just makes excuses or doesn’t reply either. i’ve even sent photos.
The Riverside Parks Conservancy is useless and a great example of the harm private-public “partnerships” did to NYC Parks under Bloomberg. Yet another excuse to pass the buck
Now is the ideal time to contact the Parks Dept, as their 2026-27 budget takes effect today. ASK THEM WHAT MONEY HAS BEEN APPROPRIATED TO FIX THE SINKHOLE? If they can’t give you a specific number, ask them why no money has been allocated to fixing this longstanding and growing pubic safety hazard
I notice that Riverside Park’s lights are still on during the day. Last summer I contacted a friend of mine who works in the commissioner’s office and they were turned off the next morning. I’ve given up on this kind of thing.
Maybe a good idea to turn them off in a heatwave to help avert a blackout?
It sounds like you e had success in your drawing attention to the issue. Why would you say you’ve given up??
I can’t believe this hasn’t been fixed. Someone is going to get injured. The City completely ignores the UWS particularly Riverside Park for the third administration now.
Current mayor is too busy taking low effort selfies. When you want to open up city grocery stores, there’s no money for sink holes.
DeBlasio appropriated $350 million to improve the Park’s infrastructure, which includes repairing the nearly 100 year old “overbuild” that portions of the park sit on, and which is the source of many of the park’s drainage problems including the sinkholes. Some of the planning and design work has started but it isn’t clear when the major work will start.
West Side Rag would do well to assign someone to a Riverside Park “beat” to try to get the inside dope on what’s going on with park projects like this.
Oh come on. It doesn’t take four months to “assess” ( note they avoid using the phrase “determine the cause of a sinkhole. It takes money to fix it, which was not made available in the last Parks budget. However, A NEW FISCAL YEAR STARTS TODAY. WEST SIDE RAG MUST ASK PARKS IF THERE IS A LINE ITEM IN THE NEW BUDGET DESIGNATING FUNDS FOR THIS REPAIR. Don’t let them con you.
Mamdani! Mamdani! Mamdani! Get in touch with the social democrat you elected. Or is he too busy imposing rent freezes and grinning at the camera?
It would be much more useful to contact local elected officials. His rent freeze is fair, especially given the recent hikes. Perhaps you don’t know that many made millions when rent control was the norm. That’s how Trump’s father made his millions, for example.
Hmm. It’s almost like decades of graft have resulted in systemic issues that will take time to fix! Kind of like all the dirt washing out beneath the surface until one day the while things collapses.
Most of these sink holes are caused by climate and weather. Maybe your president shouldn’t have cancelled all funding on climate change and the environmental protections and parklands. New York City lost tens of millions of dollars for parks, environment, climate.
No, sinkholes are geological events, or drainage issues. It depends what is underneath. Not all are sinkholes.
Sink holes are caused by global warming? Wow. Today I learned … that some people will insert their pet causes into any argument no matter how ridiculous!
Actually, sink holes are not caused by climate or weather. Sink holes are caused by a lot of things, but the main idea is something that was there (soil) is not there anymore. This can be caused by drainage issues, primarily, in an area like RSP. These drainage issues are most likely caused by the crumbling infrastructure of the concrete cap over the rail tracks. Thus, the fix can be way more complicated than most people commenting on the Rag can actually understand, not being civil engineers.
Now that we know, what are we going to do about it?
Folks here don’t usually want to acknowledge that these problems are not simple.
The Parks Department lost money while NYPD gained. There’s plenty to go around in the city budget if you all stop yelling for a bloated carceral state
LOL
Yes, because it never rained in New York before the current administration.
Perhaps it has more to do with the ancient piece of infrastructure *directly below it* that hasn’t been maintained by any mayor in decades.
There are also underground streams springs and different soil compositions—it’s called nature—pretty sure there’s also an uptown fault line
That’s up by 125th st.
Seems like a metaphor for something. Oh wait … the metaphor is already the reality.
Speaking of sink holes, there is a giant one that consumes almost half of Dinosaur Park at 97th and Riverside Drive. It’s been cordoned off with yellow tape for I’m guessing more than 10 years! The Parks department just completed a beautiful redesign of the stairs and ramp leading to this park, but nothing seems to be happening at the children’s playground. Does anyone know if there are any plans to address this unbelievable, unsightly, and dangerous section of this park.
A redesign of the playground has been completed, and there is about $8 million in the budget for the renovation. Next step is for the Parks Department to bid the project out. Not clear when that will happen.
Since Sept 2021.
There is another sinkhole on the lawn in Riverside, near the 104th street staircase entrance. The fenced-in area is now filled with tall growing plants. Is there any information about that sinkhole as well? It’s pretty small now, but its concerning that so many sinkholes are popping up… especially when the Amtrak train line runs below these sinkholes under the park.
Gus. You always choose wonderful topics! Sinkhole forming on West 96 St bet CPW and Columbus. Near 35 W96. If u park there you are likely to lose a wheel.
There was a large sinkhole on the bridle path near 5th Ave at one point, and I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t roped off, and the nearby schools were having their gym classes a few feet away from it. I called 311 and told them it was a safety issue, and when they asked me how big the hole was, I said, ‘big enough for a child to fall in to,” and within 20 minutes there was a crew there. I don’t know what an assessment entails but they just put down some kind of netting and filled it up. Those sinkholes in the photos are a lawsuit in the making!
Fencing it off so kids don’t fall in is pretty simple.
Assessing what causes it requires bringing in experts to look at what’s going on and determine why there is a sinkhole and how it could be repaired and prevented from growing bigger. Bringing in experts means drafting a proposal, going out for competitive bidding (because unlike the White House, the NYC Dept of Parks does not just give contracts to their buddies), choosing a consultant to do the work, getting on the consultant’s schedule, and then carrying out the analysis, which may take some time.
Once they know what’s causing it, they can figure out how best to resolve the problem and how much that could cost. Then they have to put the money in the budget to pay for implementing that solution – and there isn’t enough money in the Parks Department’s budget to fix everything that needs fixing. Once they actually have money in the budget for it – at least a year away, but probably more, because many other things need fixing too and there isn’t enough money to fix all of them – they have to hire a firm to actually do that work. More proposal writing, competitive bidding, and so on.
And then hopefully the work will get done.
If you want more money in the Parks Dept budget, so more things can get fixed, write to your elected officials, and support the work of New Yorkers for Parks (https://www.ny4p.org/), who are advocating for 1% of the budget to go to the Department of Parks. That might help!
Riverside park is built over a Railroad Tunnel that ends in the north at about West 124 Street, begins at West 72nd Street.
The tunnel runs approximately 2.6 miles (4.2 km).
Surely, that’s into what the surface ground is dropping down, creating the sink hole.
The tunnel is not that wide. It is only two tracks at most. The question would be, is the rest landfill that is settling, or is it porous limestone?
It’s in a park let it go back to nature. Why waste time effort and money.
WHERE IS THE PARKS DEPARTMENT??? WHAT ARE WE PAYING TAXES FOR??!?!
Not for the Parks Dept. to actually do anything, except maybe mow the lawns.
Who do you think repaved the trail from 101st to 125th St? Who do you think is working on the staircases at around 105th Street? I don’t know which work has been done further south in Riverside Park, but I imagine there have been projects there as well.
The Parks Department is getting much less funding than it should, and its staffing has been cut. Parks advocates have been pushing for 1% of the City’s budget to go to parks for years, but it doesn’t happen. They are also pushing for that money to go to parks that do not have rich conservancies to fund them – of course most of those parks are not in Manhattan, and other boroughs are far worse served than we are in terms of parks.
But if you want the Parks Dept to have the funds to do this kind of repair, please join New Yorkers for Parks – https://www.ny4p.org/ – and get involved with advocacy work to get the mayor to put 1% of the City’s budget into parks!
I work with the Parks Department on various issues, and from what I’ve seen their staff are incredibly competent and committed and they really care about doing everything they can to fix what needs fixing. They don’t have the resources they need to do everything that needs doing, and the checks and balances needed to ensure honesty and public input can make things move very slowly.
And figuring out what causes a sinkhole may not be straightforward, if you want expert analysis and not just someone’s first guess at the cause. Expert analysis means hiring consultants, which means going out for bid to get the consultants, and anyone who’s every worked as a consultant knows that takes time. If they don’t figure out the cause, they can’t come up with a solution that will reliably work – and if they jump in and just do something and it fails, for sure you folks will be after them again!
When Riverside Drive was built, together with Riverside Park, around 1900, the topography was smoothed out to make a relatively level road for horse-drawn carriages to negotiate. In some places hills were leveled off, in others bridges were built and the areas around them filled in, secured by the great retaining wall. I believe one of those bridges was built at 86th Street, spanning a small valley, right above this sinkhole. The engineers looking into this will have their work cut out for them!
Go to Gale Brewer’s office in person.
We had sinkholes all the time in Baltimore on the streets, the city would fill them in and they would just return a few months later, it’s not that easy. Some commenters are right sounds like infrastructure below and sometimes underground streams erode.
And we do know there are such streams on the Upper West Side.
There’s been a giant sink hole in the dinosaur playground since the beginning of Covid. Why isn’t that being addressed? A large section of the playground had been cordoned off – and it had gotten larger over the years.