Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (5 page)

Besides pragmatic reasons, there almost seems something in the character of New Yorkers that prefers the rough-and-ready, provisional solution to the perfected, built-for-the-ages approach, just as there is a tolerance for dirt and clutter that far exceeds the standards of tidiness in many metropolises. The New Yorker gets a thing off and running and says, “Good enough.” Perhaps it has something to do with the city's polyglot immigrant population, which never developed a culturally homogeneous, bourgeois communal standard, as in Holland or Japan, or perhaps it stems from the fact that, unlike other colonies in the New World, New York was not founded to serve some religious or civic utopian ideal, but solely to make money. Whatever the reasons, by 1872 an editorial writer in
Scribner's Monthly
was already commenting: “It must be a matter of serenest satisfaction and the most complacent pride that we, who have the reputation of being a city of money-getters and worshipers of the useful and the material, can point to our docks as the dirtiest, most insufficient, and the least substantial of any possessed by any first-class city on the face of the globe. To the strangers who visit us from abroad we can proudly say: You have accused us of supreme devotion to the material grandeur of our city and our land. Look at our rotten and reeking docks, and see how little we care for even the decencies of commercial equipment.…”

The waterfront was especially notorious for its muck. Edith Wharton, recalling that era in her memoir
A Backward Glance,
wrote: “I remember
once asking an old New Yorker why he never went abroad, and his answering: ‘Because I can't bear to cross Murray Street.’ It was indeed an unsavoury experience, and the shameless squalor of the purlieus of the New York docks in the 'seventies dismayed my childish eyes.…”

ON THE NORTHERN END of the Battery sits Pier A, another eternally promised restoration job. No one can pass by that elegant, dilapidated Victorian structure (formerly the Fireboat House) without admiring its Beaux Arts shell, and fantasizing some amazing use for it. A visitors' center with retail or restaurant is proposed, you learn with a thud. The developer who was most recently brought in to revive it, a loyal Republican appointed by Governor George Pataki, claims to have gone bankrupt, and now there is much finger-pointing all around.

Pier A was originally one of two piers (the other, Pier 1, is now buried under landfill) to be constructed out of granite and ornamented with tinplate. In 1870, Peter Cooper, the millionaire manufacturer, urged the city to build all-stone piers, but his advice was not taken, except for these two, whose construction proved so costly that the rest were made of timber, and are now, appropriately, in various stages of rotting. Pier A is one of the only tangible signs left of that heroic and ingenious, if now mostly forgotten, effort—the greatest public-works project of its period—to improve the New York waterfront, which dragged on for six decades, from 1870 to 1930. (So important was it that George McClellan, the former Civil War general and 1864 presidential candidate, was appointed as its first engineer-in-chief, to lead New York City's Department of Docks and oversee its challenges.) As ambitious, in its way, as the Brooklyn Bridge, employing more than a thousand workers, the Department of Docks' project erected a continuous concrete bulkhead or riverwall below sea level to “hold in” Manhattan Island and protect it from ramming boat hulls; transformed the island's geography by landfill; removed underwater reefs and shoals; constructed dozens of piers; dredged where necessary; and in every other way helped promote the Port of New York as a thriving commercial enterprise.

“The netting of the whale—in this case, the enclosing of its outline by the construction of bulkheads following the shape of the island—was a
military action against a natural landscape, initially led by a Civil War general who was determined to triumph. The whale was to be molded or cast into a tight corset,” wrote architect John Hejduk. It seems a paradox that, on the one hand, so much engineering effort was expended on recasting the waterfront's infrastructure, and, on the other, so little of the civic and cultural pride that had been lavished on other municipal projects percolated through sufficiently to elevate it above the makeshift. Le Corbusier, visiting New York in the early 1940s, wrote: “Along the avenue which skirts the river, the docks and ships form the teeth of a comb as far as you can see. The arrangement is clear, logical, perfect: nevertheless, it is hideous, badly done, and incongruous; the eye and the spirit are saddened. Ah! If the docks could be done over again!”

The docks will never be done over again, for shipping, but Le Corbusier may get his wish in the form of new recreational piers proposed for Hudson River Park. When the day arrives and they are all in place, surfboards and skates agleam, a part of us may long for the old, slipshod comb. Speaking of which, after September 11, with the sudden need for increased ferry service, a temporary, tentlike ferry dock has been constructed of vinyl and steel rods, and run perpendicular to the midsection of Pier A, into the Hudson River. A vendor has installed a wagon inside the tent to sell hot dogs and pretzels to the waiting travelers. It is pleasing to see the ad-hoc, provisional genius of the New York docks surfacing again.

Before leaving the Battery, I note the rather morbid monument to the Merchant Marines, an academic-realist statue by ex–Pop artist Marisol, which depicts a seemingly fruitless attempt to rescue drowning seamen, who disappear between the incoming tide and emerge from its ebb.

2 BATTERY PARK CITY

W
HERE THE BATTERY IS POROUS, GRUNGY, DEMOCRATIC, BATTERY PARK CITY IS CONTROLLED, SELECTIVE, AND POLITE. BATTERY PARK CITY
'
S SOUTHERN end has an imposing iron gate, with a security guard's sentinel hut, and signs that say do not enter. Curiously enough, the gates have been left open in one area, a test of your sense of entitlement: if you feel sufficiently privileged (i.e., some combination of white/middle class/educated/sol-vent), you may pass through them into Battery Park City without announcing your presence to the guard, who is there, it would seem, to keep away only people with self-doubts.

After 11:00 P
.
M., however, the gates are closed to all except Battery Park City residents, who in any case tend to regard the waterfront parks next to their apartment buildings as their exclusive preserve. This tension between public space and private enclave pursues you throughout your perusal of the complex's extensive grounds.

By global standards, Battery Park City is a huge success. Delegations from cities around the world constantly consult it as a model of waterfront redevelopment—as much for its financing mechanisms as for its built environment. Certainly, you have to give the Battery Park City Authority credit for the creation from scratch of a middle-to-upper-middle-class neighborhood that operates in the black, adds to the municipal tax coffers, contributes mightily to Lower Manhattan's public spaces and waterfront access, and is reasonably pleasant to look at—if not architecturally vibrant, then by no means hideously ugly. Many cities would drool at the chance to replicate those results.

A native New Yorker like myself, on the other hand, may still regard it as something of a transplanted organ that has never quite taken hold. It still feels like landfill, or an insular theme park, City World. It seems to have everything you would need for a good Manhattan neighborhood, except a pulse. It's a cyborg, a clone, a replicant. One time, wandering around Battery Park City, I realized I was going to be late for my next appointment across town, and had started scheming how many blocks east I would have to walk before I met a cab, when an unoccupied taxi pulled into the cul-de-sac alongside me. I had not imagined that ordinary yellow cabs could penetrate the theoretical shield that surrounds Battery Park City and cruise its pretend boulevards.

BATTERY PARK CITY occupies a narrow strip of landfill, ninety-two acres long, extending from just north of Pier A, near the southern tip of Manhattan, to Chambers Street. It was built at a cost of $4 billion (a late1980s figure). There are three zones, for purposes of discussion, into which Battery Park City should be divided: the residential blocks, the commer-cial/office high-rises that constitute the World Financial Center, and the parks and squares that form its public spaces. I will begin with the residential area, because there is where the grand experiment of urban design took place. But to explain what I mean, I will need to provide some historical background.

The idea for the complex first surfaced in the early sixties, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller's administration. The language of his February 1, 1966, message suggests that the project was sold as one that
would avoid the brutalities of previous urban renewals: “Because space is at a premium in Manhattan, replacement usually requires displacement. To make room for progress, people's lives are uprooted and beauty is often bulldozed.… Now the opportunity exists to add to Manhattan's distinctive locales without making any such sacrifices. The development of Battery Park City adjoining the new World Trade Center presents an opportunity unique for Manhattan: the creation, literally from the ground up, of a large-scale, imaginatively planned community comprising residential, business, light industry, and recreational facilities.” The light-industry component quickly got scrapped, and the promised inclusion of low-income or “affordable housing” was put indefinitely on hold, but the landfill began.

For thirteen years the project remained nothing but a sandy white beach (some may remember sunbathing there or visiting the annual “Art on the Beach” exhibitions), stalled by complexities of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, and New York's fiscal crisis in the 1970s. “It sat like the Sahara off lower Manhattan,” remarked Robert Wagner Jr., then a city councilman. Meanwhile, many noted architects, from Philip Johnson on down, took their crack at proposing futurist, space-station plans, Corbusian in their disdain for the typical New York streetscape. The original plan called for superblocks (those seemingly unending sidewalks) punctuated by apartment towers, our very own Brasilia. The first of these bland edifices, Gateway Towers, did go up. The rest of the complex remained in limbo.

Faced with bankruptcy in the dire bond-market days of 1979, the Battery Park City Authority decided to alter its course and, in their words, “look at the site afresh.” The BPCA's then-chairman, Richard Kahan, turned to the design firm of Cooper, Eckstut Associates to come up with a new master plan. At the time, Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut were unusual in the field of urban design (then riddled with garden-city utopians hostile to Gotham), because these two partners loved New York's density, diversity, and sidewalk vitality. Their notion was to create an area that would feel recognizably New York, by employing familiar materials and street patterns. The Cooper, Eckstut master plan rested on two premises: first, to avoid the usual antiurban design mistakes which had plagued large postwar projects (the superblock, the isolated, monotonously repetitive buildings that stood around like lunar objects, the lack of contextual relationship to the city nearby); and second, to learn from, even
copy, the most successful high-rise neighborhoods in New York City, such as West End Avenue, Riverside Drive, Central Park West, Gramercy Park, Tudor City, and Sutton Place.

Key to the plan was street layout. Stanton Eckstut put it this way: “The real design control comes not even from the buildings, it comes from the street plan. The city is set in motion there. Where are the avenues and the squares and esplanades? If I stopped right there, I could influence the shape of the city forever.”

Eckstut is a thin, proud man with a full head of curly, graying hair, a trim Vandyke beard and mustache, warm, restless eyes, and, like many architects, a self-conscious manner of dress, given to red bow ties and matching striped shirts. His idea was first to create a pro-pedestrian environment in Battery Park City and then have the buildings respond to it. So the master plan laid out a traditional Manhattan grid, extending the east-west grid of the city's existing streets wherever possible, to knit the project more to its surroundings, and provided one slightly curved boulevard for visual interest. The promenade along the Hudson River would bring the project gracefully onto the water, and provide a place for the public to stroll; the recreational green spaces designed into the plan also would be urbane, rather than trying for an isolated Shangri-la.

The developers and architects who wished to build in Battery Park City would have to follow Cooper, Eckstut's strict guidelines, which were partly intended to connect the separate buildings visually through shared cues, and partly to reverberate with associations of their dignified forebears. These rules included using stone at the building's base, to give importance and human scale to the street level; brick above the stone base; and an articulated roof of some sort, for a varied skyline effect: in short, the familiar tripartite apartment building of base, shaft, and shaped roof that one sees, for instance, all along West End Avenue. Buildings would have to begin at the street wall and connect to each other in a continuous, unbroken line; cornices, changes in window, corner details, and other ornamental “expression lines” were encouraged, to break up the façades, particularly in taller buildings. No narcissistic, free-standing glass boxes. The emphasis would be on the totality of the ensemble.