With almost as much solicitude as a child feels for an aging parent, New Yorkers should consult the well-being of the southern tip of Manhattan, which has just received a new park and subway entrance. By the southern tip, I don’t mean anything as far north as City Hall, let alone Canal Street. I refer to that diminutive spit of land jutting out into the tidal estuary of the East and Hudson rivers that served for nearly a century as the length and breadth of the Dutch and British settlement, beyond which were farmsteads, marshland, and cows.

Few parcels of the island are as poignantly historical as Bowling Green. Once a cattle market and parade ground, it became, in 1733, the city’s first public park. It was here, in 1770, that the British formed, out of 4000 pounds of gilded lead, the equestrian statue of a togated George III that was pulled down with revolutionary zeal on July 9, 1776. Less than an acre in length, the park is as strange and beautiful as it is intimate. Shaped like a teardrop, it is occupied almost entirely by a fountain whose basin reaches to the elegant wrought-iron fence that surrounds it.

One can’t pretend that the surrounding site should remain as it was in the colonial era. Cass Gilbert’s Alexander Hamilton Custom House, which now houses the Museum of the American Indian, completely altered the scale of the place. Still it is a fine Beaux-Arts building. The same cannot be said for that tactlessly awful modernist slab, 2 Broadway, which Emery Roth & Sons built in 1959 and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill remodeled and reskinned in 1999.

But such intrusions as these scarcely make more palatable the brand new subway entrance and elevator that have just been completed in the space between the park and the Custom House. The problem with these two structures — designed by Richard Dattner and Partners — is not the design itself. They are quite skillfully managed and would look good in many other places in the city. But not here. If ever there were a patch of Manhattan that cried out for the ministrations of some contextual historicism, this is it. Clearly what was needed was a dapper, fin de siècle subway kiosk like the one confected at Astor Place in 1985 by Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen.

Instead we have a brashly modern affair. An assertive, greenish arch, fashioned from steel and fritted glass, rises up from the ground like Hokusai’s wave, frozen just as it is about to come crashing down around the pedestrian. The aesthetic here, with the accentuation of the metallic armature, is clearly machine age, though not as much in the historicist manner as this architect’s work at the Broadway Station at 72nd Street. The base is clad in solid-looking grayish stone as are the steps that lead down into the pre-existent station, a garish blast of tomato-red with which — to his credit — Mr. Dattner had nothing to do.

This structure, in addition to its effect on the gated park immediately to the north, succeeds in clashing stylistically with the Custom House and 2 Broadway at the same time. If only it were not as aggressively curved, if only it were as decorously rectilinear as the nearby metal-plated elevator, one of Mr. Dattner’s better designs to date, all might be well. At least we can give thanks that the space between the park and the Custom House has been carefully redone with large, broad granite pavers.

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It would be nice to be able to speak better of the infinitely wellintentioned British Memorial Garden, set to open any day now in Hanover Square, roughly a four minute walk from Bowling Green. Built in commemoration of the 67 Britons who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, its aesthetic purpose is to make way for an English Garden, with its programmatic irregularities, in Lower Manhattan. The main problem is the shape. With typical British politeness and restraint, it wouldn’t dream of actually taking control of Hanover Square. Instead it cuts a wobbly and irregular path down the center of the space, its footprint undulating like a Turkish dagger. The result is a twofold inadequacy: It provides no sense of escape from the city, even as it seems at odds with its urban environment.

The winning design in the competition for the new park had been submitted by the British landscape team of Julian and Isabel Bannerman. But in typically dispiriting New York municipal fashion, some of the local suits decided that the couple did not fully understand the wear and tear of New York life. And so they sought the assistance of Signe Nielsen, who has worked for the Parks Department on Union Square and Verdi Square on Broadway and 72nd Street.

In neither case, however, has this designer distinguished herself. I am unable to determine with any exactitude which elements of the design are hers and which are the Bannermans’, but in the backless seating, which accommodates the rim of the planters, I note a similarity, and not a becoming one, with Verdi Park. Other elements, such as the typography of the words that run along the area, recall certain parks in London, especially Leicester Square. It should be noted that these words — the names of British towns, I believe — are oddly illegible, which is precisely retrograde to the point of a memorial.

jgardner@nysun.com