Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (14 page)

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What's in a name? The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York's intellectual senator, who loved Westway to the end, said, “If only we had called it ‘the Hudson Marshes.’ ”

One of the knocks on Westway was that it was put together to maximize drawing federal funds into the city. Merely because the money is available to us, argued critics, doesn't mean we have to take it, if the project is no good. We could “just say no.” On the other hand, if one believed the project was worthy, why not take advantage of a federal cash stream? In a sense this was payback, since New York City had historically given much more in taxes to Washington than it had received back in services.

Part of what made the Westway plan so costly was that it offered far more than just a highway, encompassing a park and commercial and residential development as well. The project would have created 234 acres of new (via landfill) and reclaimed land, of which ninety-three acres were to be set aside for parks. Ada Louise Huxtable put the matter in perspective in her January 23, 1977, architecture column for the
New York Times:
“Westway is not just a billion-dollar road. It has never pretended to be only an answer to transportation needs. There are simpler answers, as opponents claim, but that misses the point. Westway possesses rare vision: it is large-scale, long-term land use planning for the city's future. It is a chance to reclaim the mutilated waterfront and West Side. It is an opportunity to do something extraordinarily constructive and creative
—provided that it is done well.”
For Huxtable, the challenge was to ensure that the design of the project met the very highest standards, and that real estate speculation in the areas adjoining the new parks was held in check by zoning restrictions with teeth.

The complexity that Huxtable saw as Westway's strength—that it was a comprehensive land-use plan, accomplishing several things at once—became one of its vulnerable points. Some critics would continue to insist that over a billion dollars was too high a price to pay for any road, ignoring the plan's other components, while others would portray Westway as dishonestly piggybacking a development scheme onto highway construction. Those who were for Westway asked why this merger of two aims, highway and community development, should necessarily be considered a boondoggle. In a society that was not afraid to plan for the future, it would only make sense to design the public areas—park and highway—and the
private commercial and residential areas as one autonomous element, giving shape to the city.

THE PROPOSED WESTWAY was to run past several of the most contentious and politically active community boards in the city, Greenwich Village, TriBeCa, and Chelsea. Their support was essential for the project to go forward. As it happened, the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) factor played little part in the battle; the neighborhoods most affected were rather quiet during the Westway fight (perhaps preferring to have a highway submerged in landfill than run through their blocks). The main anti-Westway leaders, such as Marci Benstock and Albert Butzel, lived farther uptown. The local community mistrust that did exist tended to center on the development issue.

So Mary Perot Nichols, in her
Village Voice
column dated November 19, 1970, alerted readers that the man just put in charge of waterfront planning, Samuel Ratensky, represented “a dead hand from the past…. Sources close to Ratensky claim he already has a plan, composed of high-rise apartment buildings for the West Village…. Is Sam Ratensky going to give us a warmed over West Village Urban Renewal plan or has he turned over a new leaf? … Until we get these answers, maybe we should keep our paranoia alive but leashed.”

The Greenwich Village community was mollified, to some extent, by the Westway team's agreement to limit the height of proposed new housing. In 1976 the selection of the innovative architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, to provide a design for the new park, won over much of the architectural set. The elegant, user-friendly plan they executed for the elongated Hudson River shoreline, much of which was to be created through landfill, redesigned the whole waterfront area as a public domain. An esplanade, running along the course of the shoreline, would be sunken in relation to the green park strip; there would be a bikeway and a promenade; and a wall would separate the park from the adjacent street, making for a much more enclosed, contemplative park experience, buffeted from the clamor of the metropolis, than the current Hudson River Park. But the park strip would be linked directly to the street network of the grid, and divided, in its entirety, into a series of smaller and larger
parks, each of which would reflect the specific nature of the district bordering it. The Venturi, Scott Brown plan, improving on the best ideas of Olmsted and Moses, offered the chance for a great new piece of city-making to cap the end of the twentieth century.

A WATERFRONT PARK WAS ONE thing; but from whence came the landfill/development impetus? Nathan Silver, in his 1967 necropolis of a picture book,
Lost New York
, put the matter astutely:

The New York Regional Plan of 1929-31, a proposal that was not timid about its new highway plans for Manhattan, nevertheless roundly disowned the West Side Highway. The planners found fault with it because its location cut people off from the Hudson River and made the development of new riverfront recreation facilities most difficult. The influence of the Regional Plan Association's comment was presumably modest, because the alignment of the new East River Drive soon repeated the mistake on the other side of the island. Since the penny-wise New York commissioners who laid out the 1811 grid of streets had reasoned that the City did not need many parks because of New York's healthful relationship with its river edges, one finds that official planning has, in its history, both turned people toward the water and then stopped them from getting there. This double bind may one day have to be resolved by means of expensive landfill and development.

Besides the statement's elegant terseness, what stands out today is that Silver, a champion of New York tradition and preservation, accepted without hesitation the solution of landfill. After all, Manhattan had grown physically, from the 1700s on, largely as a result of landfill: it had added Front, West, Water Streets, and more; it had connected the Battery and Castle Clinton, once surrounded by the water, to Downtown; it had filled in swamps and marshlands to support rail tracks and highways; it had rounded out shavings of land to the north; and, more recently, it had added nearly a hundred acres to make Battery Park City. In 1967 there was as yet no revulsion attached to the word. That taboo would come later, perhaps in the form of a delayed reaction.

The impetus for the inclusion of commercial and residential development in the plan had its own history; it grew out of Manhattan's anomalous possession of two competing business districts, Midtown and Downtown. Downtown was going through one of its periodic uneases: ever since the 1950s, the businessmen and realtors of Wall Street, headed by David Rockefeller, had been calling for some larger strategy to compete with Midtown, by making the financial district more attractive to new firms, meanwhile retaining the older ones. In 1958 the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association had outlined the area's problems, such as a lack of new building sites, gridlocked traffic, a monotonous single-use that made the area deserted after dark or on weekends, and a paucity of residential units and retail or cultural attractions to hold white-collar workers. The canyons of Wall Street being already crammed with skyscrapers, the obvious solution was to add on to Lower Manhattan, by building a whole new, day-night district on landfill—which is where the idea of Battery Park City came in. During the mid-1970s, with the city's economy approaching bankruptcy, and with Lower Manhattan neighborhoods' flattened growth seemingly in need of some economic boost, the billion dollars promised by Westway looked very tempting.

Here is how the anti-Westway attorney Michael Gerrard put it: “A remarkably successful effort to consolidate business and labor support for Westway ensued in 1975 and 1976, headed by the odd couple of David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Harry Van Arsdale, president of the Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.” Since New York City had just “brushed with bankruptcy” and “construction was in a terrible slump,” Gerrard concluded: “The business community came to see Westway as a way to spur economic and real estate development; the construction unions saw Westway as a massive source of new jobs.” To this picture of collusion among strange bedfellows, one might counter: How else could any massive public work, from Central Park to the water delivery system, have gotten built in New York without a broad alliance of business, labor, and government?

ON DECEMBER 15, 1973, the weight of a dump truck, hauling tar to fill the uncountable potholes on the West Side Highway, caused an elevated
section of the roadway to collapse. The truck driver landed below, near West 12th Street, his vehicle upended like a turtle on its back, and eventually received $250,000 from the city as compensation for his injuries. The highway was then closed to traffic south of 46th Street, and that portion slated for demolition. In the interim, what followed was an urban idyll of sorts, in which bikers, strollers, and sunbathers liberated the deck for recreational uses. To the city government, the collapse of one highway section only increased the urgency to construct Westway or some other replacement road. But some citizens, especially those without cars, began to entertain the thought that maybe the metropolis could get along without new highways. A species of Luddite fantasy arose from deep within the bohemian subconscious of New Yorkers: a perpetual pedestrian be-in. The opposition to the Vietnam War had made any large government construction project suspect. Interstate highways seemed a domestic form of pacification, and cars were junior tanks, aggressive, lethal, spreading air pollution. Why should society's limited resources be squandered on that pampered convenience?

BY 1974 THE WEST SIDE HIGHWAY PROJECT ( WSHP) had produced a final Westway design. Here was Whitaker's vision: start with the Downtown tunnel piece, from 59th Street to the Battery, and hook it up with the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel at the bottom of Manhattan. Once that part had been built, and everyone saw how well it worked, with the barrier-highway removed and a generous-sized park giving the public easy access to the water, you could extend the submerged tube all the way north, to the George Washington Bridge, thereby freeing Riverside Park entirely of the highway that now mars some of its most beautiful waterside walking paths.

It was a clear, lucid vision, muddied at every turn by politics. The first occlusion involved a territorial squabble: the head of the Battery Park City Authority, a Governor Rockefeller appointee, was threatened by Ed Logue's infringing on his domain by proposing to run the tunnel underwater along Battery Park City's edge. (This was during the period when BPC still sat unbuilt, a tract of sand and mud.) He insisted that Westway
connect
inland
and aboveground with a ten-lane Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrance, which meant it would need to surface somewhere south of Canal Street to gain enough altitude, and run at street level for the last mile or so. For whatever reason—cronyism, political blackmail—Rockefeller acceded to this stupid demand, which in effect doomed Battery Park City to isolation by a moatlike highway. This last section of construction, running as it would through Manhattan's streets, also greatly increased Westway's costs, absorbing almost 40 percent of the highway's proposed budget.

Meanwhile, the Upper West Side community was nervous about Westway, fearing it was a Trojan horse that would gallop through Riverside Park. The district's state assemblyman, Albert Blumenthal, sponsored legislation that made it virtually impossible to disturb even a blade of grass in Riverside Park, for highway construction or any other purpose. The Westway team had no problem with that, since they had planned all along to build the northern extension of the highway underwater. Assemblyman Blumenthal, now reassured that Riverside Park was in no danger, became an enthusiastic supporter of Westway. However, the force of organized community suspicion, once unleashed, does not easily accede to fact. Whitaker recalls presenting to an Upper West Side community group the sketches showing how Westway would liberate Riverside Park of the present highway, and “dump it in the drink” alongside. At the meeting's end, an elderly woman approached him and said, “You seem like such a nice young man. Why would you want to destroy Riverside Park?” Years later, Whitaker, gray-haired, was still shaking his head at the memory.

One of the objections raised against Westway was that it would induce more traffic into the city. Roberta Brandes Gratz stated that position in her book
The Living City:
“[E]very new road in recent years has, by its very creation, stimulated new traffic. The reality of highway building is that highways encourage further automobile traffic.” This notion, which started as a valuable corrective insight, has hardened into a mantra. Certainly, building new highways
may
generate more traffic, by enticing people to avail themselves of the new roads; but whether it actually will do so depends on duplication of routes and many other factors. As it turned
out, Westway was not built, and traffic volume still increased in the 1990s along the old, patched-together West Side Highway. In the same years, subway ridership also increased, suggesting that the overall economic prosperity of the region during the 1990s led to more vehicles
and
more mass transit usage. In any case, the Westway plan called for the same number of lanes as the old West Side Highway, with no added capacity.

Again and again, it seems to me, the Westway team would answer some objection to the plan, only to discover their listeners had already made up their minds that these facts could not be trusted because they came from Satan. The irony of the Westway battle was that it pitted two groups of idealists against each other; but only one—the anti-Westway forces—was able to commandeer the rhetoric of virtue, perhaps because it was located outside the power structure. Ratensky's Raiders had started out with a pro-environmentalist perspective. Their willingness to compromise with opponents' objections stemmed partly from the fact that they were already sympathetic to the opposing point of view. “Everybody on that team hated highways,” recalled Richard Kahan, Westway's counsel at the time, adding that these were not your typical gung-ho Department of Highways stalwarts, intent on moving traffic faster at all costs. If they had gotten involved with building a highway, it was because it seemed the only way to accomplish other purposes, such as waterfront access. But precisely because the Westway team thought of themselves as idealists and people of goodwill, they were never able to grasp the seriousness of the animus directed at them.