In Search of Governors Island
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Plans to redevelop Governors Island bring to mind the changing relationship of the city to its harbor over the several centuries of its rapid growth. Once upon a time, Manhattan was one island among other islands in the bay of New York, but not the biggest, by any means. Staten Island — despite its diminished scale on our city’s subway maps — was, and remains, almost twice the size, and Long Island, of course, is far bigger than that. Even the smaller islands in our midst, those that now go by the names of Roosevelt Island, Randall’s Island and Liberty Island are of no contemptible size. As recently as the turn of the last century, when the world was a bigger place and boats were a more viable means of public transportation, water played a much more important role in city life than it does today, and New York was built around the harbor as much as around Manhattan. Eminent New Yorkers such as Frederick Law Olmsted were just as likely to dwell on Staten Island.
But now the fortunes of Manhattan have so thoroughly eclipsed those of the other islands that it requires a leap of the historical imagination to return to those earlier times. Consider that Roosevelt Island is only a stone’s throw from Manhattan and Queens. And yet, to visit the place, something that most tourists and most inhabitants of the five boroughs seldom do, is to travel back in time — specifically to the 1970s, when the island, for better or worse, was extensively reconceived. Staten Island often feels not only as though it dwelt in another age, but as though it were 1,000 miles away. But a change is starting to take place in the relation of Manhattan to the water and the islands that surround it. Having turned from the circumference to the center in the early years of the last century, a process expedited by the decline in New York as a port city after World War II, Manhattan is now reclaiming its right to its own water in a process ratified by the creation of Hudson River Park and now the redevelopment of Governors Island. The future of that paisley shaped, 172-acre parcel of earth, separated from Brooklyn by what is known as the Buttermilk Channel, is being debated even now by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC). Most of the island, which had been an Army post between the dawn of the republic and 1966 and was for 30 years thereafter a Coast Guard installation, was sold in 2003 to New York State for $1. (GIPEC, a partnership between New York City and State, holds sway over 150 acres, the remaining 22 being controlled by the National Park Service.) In the next few weeks, they promise to select from among five plans for developing the property.
Considering the involvement of Albany in the decision making, the designs under consideration offer only the roughest approximation of what will eventually materialize. Moreover, each of the designs cover just 40 of the GIPEC-controlled acres, and represent plans for only the most public part of the island on its southern side, already reserved for parkland.
Some have criticized the plans for a lack of ambition, but that claim, I believe, misses the point. The space in question, roughly two-and-a-half times that of the World Trade Center site, is surely big, but not big enough to permit of the highly ambitious visions that Olmstead and Vaux could entertain in conceiving Central Park and Prospect Park.
The odds-on favorite seems to be the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which has won a number of important commissions in Manhattan in recent years, namely the Highline and the redevelopment of Lincoln Center. Their proposal, a collaboration with Rogers Marvel Architects and West 8, consists of a dense earthwork whose vocabulary, a mix of masonry and grass, is reminiscent of the Irish Famine Memorial in Lower Manhattan. It also conceives a causeway connecting it to Liberty Island and a glass auditorium that, in the rendering at least, looks a little too much like the Sydney Opera House.
The firms of Hargreaves Associates and Michael Maltzan Architecture have jointly conceived of a series of walkways that swing around the island and resemble, in their use of metal and wood, those that have already been employed in various installments of the Hudson River Park and the landscaping around Trump Place on the Far West Side. As for the chief structural component of the project — a hydrofoil shaped monstrosity scowling at Lower Manhattan — we must hope that it will never get built.
A third design, by Field Operations and Wilkinson Eyre, includes a series of scallop-shaped structures that are too conceptual for the tastes of our elected officials to merit real consideration. Slightly more promising is a plan by REX/ MDP that is the most neo-Modern of the five, given the flatness and the strict rectilinearity of its public spaces.
Surely the most conservative project is the one cooked up by WRT and Urban Strategies, which comes closest to a traditional park in its emphasis on greenery, sunlight, topiaries, and smiling children — always a plus when going before city and state boards. Of all the five plans, this is the only one that does not appear to emphasize the urban context of the park, choosing by contrast to turn its back on the city and create an oasis of nature surrounded by water.
Even if the parkland is successfully achieved, and even if the development of other parts of the island prove as extensive as many in the real estate community now hope, great care must be given that the island not be — literally — isolated from the rest of the city. This is the fate that has largely condemned Roosevelt Island to the status of a backwater, despite its being far closer to Manhattan and Queens than Governors Island is to Brooklyn or anywhere else.
One possible solution to this would be the lovely aerial gondola system that Santiago Calatrava recently designed to span the waters of Buttermilk Channel. Such a structure would insure that, whatever the ultimate outcome of Governors Island, getting there would be unforgettable.
jgardner@nysun.com