It’s California on the Hudson.
Hudson River Park’s newest pier — opening Friday and stretching 1,000 feet into the river — adds a West Coast flair to the Big Apple with competition-ready beach volleyball courts, skate park and kids’ climbing walls.
“It’s like a small part of Redondo Beach here in New York,” Connie Fishman, president of the Hudson River Park Trust, said of the newly rebuilt Pier 25.
Like Redondo Beach, with an ocean pier and a national reputation for beach volleyball, Pier 25 was designed for the active, outdoors set with futuristic kids’ playgrounds and climbing walls, miniature golf, basketball and volleyball.
“This is the only volleyball court in the country with a view of the Statue of Liberty,” Fishman joked.
The three state-of-the-art volleyball courts are on a patch of sand that’s nearly 1,000 feet from the shoreline on a pier that extends further into the Hudson than any other point along the Manhattan waterfront.
“You’re further out into the river here than even at Battery Park City,” Fishman said at the pier’s end — about a fifth of the way across the river and so far from shore that it affords views of the harbor and of the Manhattan skyline to the rear.
“It’s a vastly expanded version of what used to be here,” Fishman said of the Pier 25 makeover that was built with $70 million in federal downtown rebuilding funds from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.
Fishman said much of what’s included on Pier 25 was based on feedback from the surrounding community.
“People who live around here liked what was here. We sort of took that old program and blew it up,” Fishman said during a tour of the newly rebuilt Pier 25.