Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (6 page)

Though the project has been criticized for its retro aesthetic, as its guidelines seemed to play into the hands of the postmodernists' historical
eclecticism, Eckstut insisted the point was rather to offer the sort of comfortable apartment-house model that had been proven to work in the past, and that would put New Yorkers at ease. The guidelines, he argues, might just as easily have stimulated originality as inhibited it. As it happened, the participating architects chose to produce safe buildings that seemed like knockoffs of the past. “I wasn't really seeking great architecture,” Eckstut admitted to me. “I like doing background buildings.” The case for the background building, which doesn't show off or demand attention but fits in, in a neighborly fashion, with the rest of the street, springs from the valid notion that great cities are not necessarily the product of sublime architecture, but of certain basic, anonymously repeated building types. Still, a city with nothing but background buildings would be sad, missing out on a chance to shine.

The final guideline the BPC master plan had up its sleeve was that no one architect could impose his vision on the whole; each would get only one building to design, thereby ensuring a parti-textured diversity that would suggest, albeit in speeded-up form, the incremental way New York streets had traditionally gotten built.

The state legislature approved the master plan. It was familiar, people could picture it, and at the same time it was a very sophisticated urban design—architect-proof, in a sense. Even an ugly building would function adequately as part of the overall pattern. One of the side effects of Battery Park City was the momentary ascension of the once-lowly urban designer over the architect. A new star was born.

Shortly after, a collision of egos led to the Cooper, Eckstut design firm splitting up, and in the “divorce settlement,” Cooper was given the northern sector of Battery Park City to oversee, and Eckstut the southern, residential end.

More than twenty years later, with most of that residential complex built, it is striking to see how much of Cooper, Eckstut's guidelines have been translated into reality without significant dilution. For instance, the buildings closest to the water had been drawn in at a lower scale, to avoid blocking out the sunlight of the buildings behind them, and so they stand today. Sunlight and river views—some of the most spectacular in the city—have been maximized for each structure. The goal of having a variety
of building types, five-story townhouses and thirty-story apartment buildings, dovetail smoothly, has been realized without fuss.

Rector Place, the ensemble of grand apartment buildings around a civilized park rectangle, works, up to a point. The architecture won't make any-one's heart skip—today's bricks look so much blander and flatter, the effect is cartoonlike in comparison to the old apartment houses—but Charles Moore's extravaganza, River Rose, rises above the average, with its playfully chromatic art deco touches, and Parc Place, by Gruzen Samton Steinglass, holds its corner with a soberly majestic Upper West Side assurance.

Ironically, while these buildings may strike a nostalgic New York chord, they have very little to do with their immediate context, the Wall Street financial district. The stately proportions of buildings on West End Avenue and Sutton Place developed much later than the narrow, corkscrew Dutch lanes of downtown Manhattan. The master plan's intention to “extend the grid” evades the fact that Lower Manhattan does not really operate according to the same orthogonal street grid that prevails above 14th Street.

A second irony is that the façades of these luxury apartment houses in Battery Park City deceptively suggest, by their historical references, the same roomy, high-ceilinged interiors one finds in pre–World War II apartment buildings. In actuality, most of the apartments' rooms are smaller, their halls narrower, their ceilings lower and walls thinner. “By putting more money into the skins of buildings,” one architect complained in the magazine
Progressive Architecture,
“the developers cut corners on the interiors.”

The final, most telling irony is that Rector Place still feels like a stage set. It incorporates all the most up-to-date urbanistic wisdom, but it's not fully alive. Like so much of Battery Park City, there's no street life, no random pedestrian flow. Rector Park, with its herringbone paving bricks and ornamental fence, may not be padlocked the way Gramercy Park, its obvious model, is, but it gives off the same signals. As the
AIA Guide to New York City
maliciously puts it: “Rector Park is veddy, veddy propuh, using the finest materials very carefully detailed. Meant to be looked at, not played in.”

Battery Park City's residents have often had to trek many blocks for basic necessities; yet the shops along the South End Avenue arcade haven't
done especially well, languishing from paucity of foot traffic. Some blame the design of the arcade, a concrete “colonnade,” dark and uninviting to walk under; but the real problem is the incomplete grafting of a city spirit onto this sedate landfill community. Shopping is an appetite stimulated by complex environmental cues; you can lay down a street and designate it “retail” and it still won't necessarily hop to that beat.

Battery Park City—like Roosevelt Island, if to a lesser degree—feels cut off from the rhythms of New York. Its very aloofness could be an asset: there aren't many places so detached from the hurly-burly. When I walk about it at night, especially by the water, I sense the wonderful, moody self-containment of the place, its dignified composure, its idealistic optimism, and I am tempted to live there. But then I remember: I would miss the city too much.

The greatest obstacle standing between Battery Park City and the rest of Manhattan is West Street. Hardly just a street, this eight- to ten-lane roadway used to be the tailbone of the West Side Highway. At the moment, West Street is a car-choked, pothole-happy immensity, risky to cross on foot. As I waited for a clearing in traffic, a doorman warned me, “You gotta be careful, you get run over. You better run like hell!”

You can cross West Street by taking overhead pedestrian bridges, but this is an inconvenient hassle: raised walkways between buildings are unnatural for New Yorkers and break the pattern of pedestrian wandering. Getting across West Street might be worth the nuisance if you had an extensive neighborhood to explore; but Battery Park City is a thin finger of land, two or three blocks deep at most.

The strongest incentive for making that effort is to enjoy Battery Park City's extraordinary suite of waterfront parks and promenades, from the Beaux Arts order of the Esplanade, to the grand plaza of the World Financial Center, to the family-friendly Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, with its children's playground and volleyball court, which curves behind Stuyvesant High School.
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Starting at the southernmost end, next to the Battery, is the Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, with its broad lawns. A
rather stiff, monumental brick arch holds a café, restrooms, and a staircase that leads to a viewing platform that faces dramatically, across the bay, the Statue of Liberty. These Battery Park City parks frame, in as many different ways as possible, the Lady of the Harbor. The Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park also holds the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Living Memorial to the Holocaust, with its Mayan-pyramid-like stepped roof by Kevin Roche. (An outscaled new wing is presently under construction.) I was initially dubious about the necessity for this Museum of Jewish Heritage, given that the city already has a Jewish Museum uptown; but I found the exhibits informative and moving. The large, bare, upper loft space with its myriad river-view windows is the place to be on a sunny day.

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Though it is not exactly a park, I would also like to mention the miraculously strange Irish Hunger Memorial: a replica of a bleak Hibernian hut and hill, perfect for seeing on a drizzly day, located in Battery Park City's Vesey Street and North End Avenue.

The next park moving north, South Cove, is to me the jewel of the complex. There is something mysterious and, above all, intimate about South Cove, with its haunting blue-glassed lanterns and wooden bridges that creak underfoot. Leaning over the wooden bridge, with waves slapping against the algae-covered pilings, you have the sense of being much closer to the water than at the nearby Esplanade. Alongside the bridge, the arrangement of rocks suggests a Japanese rock garden, while the wild rushes and other plantings present a rugged scene that might have been glimpsed by the first Dutch settlers. Incredibly, this serene retreat is but a half-mile from Wall Street, which can be glimpsed like a dream backdrop if you turn your head eastward.

All coves have something special about them: the world changes within their arms, becomes softer, more tidal. This insight seems to have guided the South Cove's designers: sculptor Mary Miss, landscape artist Susan Childs, and architect Eckstut. The result is a rare meeting of the natural and the constructed: curved metal bridges nicely complicate the choices for wandering, while a spiraling, tilted observation tower, whose oval top wittily quotes the Statue of Liberty's crown, offers a romantic outpost for lovers.

Just north of South Cove is the aforementioned Esplanade, a straight concourse edging the residential sector, and a perfect place to stroll, bicycle, jog, or meditate on the passage of the river. Tastefully done, its innovation, if you will, was to eschew novelty, and borrow a vocabulary of materials already familiar to New Yorkers from Central Park and Carl Schurz Park: the gray hexagonal flagstones, the curved iron railings, the comfortable benches that are replicas of those at the 1939 World's Fair, and
the old-fashioned gaslight stanchions. Stan Eckstut, who designed the Esplanade, now says, “In hindsight, my biggest mistake was using those old-fashioned lampposts.” He agrees with criticism that the Esplanade's New York's Greatest Hits design wasted an opportunity to evolve new prototypes for light stanchions and park furniture. But at the time, Battery Park City was an iffy proposition, and it was necessary to reassure investors with familiar visual touches. In any case, the Esplanade works beautifully as a public space. Let's leave it at that.

Farther north along the river's edge, you come into the spacious North Cove, with its marina and plaza, in front of the World Financial Center. The plaza is very large, and opens onto the river in a dramatic fashion that suggests, at sunset, the landing pier before Piazza San Marco in Venice. It could accommodate a huge crowd in a festival, and provide the sense of a ceremonial entrance to the city. Unfortunately, since it opened, the marina has essentially been a parking lot for luxury yachts going nowhere; post-9–11, the crossings of water taxis at least bring some maritime activity to the cove.

What makes the plaza itself special is the tremendously expansive openness of the vista. The multiple levels invite walking around. There is also a wonderful literary homage in the form of an iron fence: you walk along it reading, letter by letter, lines from Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara. “…City of the sea! City of wharves and stores—city of tall façades of marble and iron! Proud and passionate city!” rhapsodizes Whitman. Frank O'Hara's wised-up voice tells us: “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a radio store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” As it happens, no subway comes into Battery Park City, and the shops of Radio Row were obliterated long ago by the World Trade Center. In fact, both quotes, meant to celebrate the ongoing spunk of New York, read like unconscious valedictions: in Whitman's case, for the bustling port whose demise led to this tame, provincial replacement, with its echoes of Baltimore Harbor; in O'Hara's, for the 1950s Manhattan street that generously threw up casual surprises—such as still exist across town, but nowhere near the suburban-mall premises of the adjacent World Financial Center.

Battery Park City's World Financial Center consists of four homogeneous
jumbo towers, thirty-four to fifty stories high, comprising 8 million square feet of office, retail, and public space. The original guidelines by Alexander Cooper for this commercial office development had called for seven or eight buildings of a more slender, classical skyscraper form, all done by different architects. However, in 1979, Olympia and York, a Toronto-based realty firm (and at that time the largest developer in North America, before it came to grief in another new-town waterfront project, London's Canary Wharf ), pledged to build the entire World Financial Center. This major financial commitment, more than anything else, allowed Battery Park City to take off. The drawback was that it also consolidated too much land under one developer, who hired a single architect for the whole project. Cesar Pelli, an international star, had evolved from bolder projects in the 1970s, such as Los Angeles's blue-whale Pacific Design Center, to a suavely discreet, late-modernist style, the architectural equivalent of Giorgio Armani. The first financial giants who signed on to the World Financial Center—Merrill-Lynch, American Express, Dow Jones, Oppenheimer & Company—demanded huge, unbroken 40,000-square-foot floors; and Pelli obliged with a design that would accommodate these widebodies, at the same time trying to minimize the beefiness by a filmy curtain-wall skin with flat little windows and maroon or dark blue squares, which suggest a child's peel-off blocks. The resulting structures are like Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, airless yet taking up considerable room—much chunkier than the old filigreed skyline of lower Manhattan.

As it is, the World Financial Center resembles nothing so much as an office park in Houston, like the Four-Clover Center, which Pelli also designed. It employs the same corporate campus vocabulary: a superblock; four “object” skyscrapers separated by uncomfortably large distances from each other and turning their backs to the street; a politely suburban grass slope; raised bridges between buildings to circumvent the weather; retail shops buried inside; and an overall visual monotony. Pelli has topped each of the towers with a different geometric configuration—mastaba, dome, pyramid, stepped pyramid—but essentially they are all the same building.