Fourteen years after Superstorm Sandy submerged its five-acre campus on the Queens riverfront, Socrates Sculpture Park is rebuilding for resilience and expanding at the same time. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation broke ground last month on a reconstruction of the park's seawall, work funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that is being carried out at riverfront parks across the city.

Much of the park will remain closed until the seawall work is completed next spring, but the project is being framed as more than a repair job. Executive director Shaun Leonardo describes the park's founding as a radical act of land transformation, and the current work as a chance to connect its future to that founding story as it marks its 40th anniversary.

The most visible sign of that ambition arrives on 31 October, during the park's annual Halloween Harvest Festival, when it unveils The Point, a one-acre expansion on a largely abandoned storage area at the southern edge of the site. The new landscape will feature a long-term installation of three monumental sculptures by Mark di Suvero, the park's founding artist.

Socrates, founded on a former landfill on the East River, has long been one of New York's most distinctive outdoor art spaces. The expansion and the seawall rebuild together amount to the most significant physical change to the park since its early years, reworking a site that has always lived with the river's risks.