Creating the Hudson River Park

Environmental and Community Activism, Politics and Greed

By: Tom Fox

Rutgers University Press 2024

The looming question about the Hudson River Park has long been obvious. Why isn’t it better? In his book, Creating the Hudson River Park, environmental activist, Tom Fox tells us why, in copious, gruesome detail. For those of us concerned about creating and maintaining great public spaces the issues are laid out clearly, fairly, and with specificity in this excellent volume. It is an absolutely essential contribution to the literature of public space-making in America. Tom has gone deeply into the archives to tell as much as possible of the now 70-year history of this highly visible project. Perhaps most remarkably, he fairly explains the subjects, giving the competing ideas of those over the years who have (fervently) not agreed with him their due. Most of those concerns are ones that face the development or restoration of any large and/or highly visible public space.

The answer as to why the park isn’t better is because it is the product of decades of comprises that were the result of endless fighting over the shape of the park and the adjacent highway. The amount of conflict involved in the creation of the park is both heartbreaking and depressing. It may sound naïve, but “why can’t we all just get along?” The park’s origin was in the conflict over Westway – a highway cum real estate development plan concocted in the shadow of the era of Robert Moses that proposed to replace the southern portion of the West Side (Miller) Highway with an underground expressway, topped with new construction and public space adjacent to the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. So, controversy is unfortunately in its DNA. The project was stopped as the result of the early use of Federal environmental legislation and regulation enforced by legal action brought by private citizens and non-profit organizations.

In the interest of disclosure, it is probably useful for me to point out that I know/knew most of the important actors in this endless saga either first or second hand. Remarkably, many of these folks, a generation older than me, were at Harvard together in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, some of whom came to become friends and an inspiration to me, including the late attorney, Al Butzel, who was the lead attorney in the original Westway suit. It is also important to note, those people did not necessarily get along with each other! During my career I intersected with the park’s development in other ways, including working at the law firm that represented Chelsea Piers (one of whose partners was the brother of the developer), the major park tenant and on a study sponsored by the Regional Plan Association, on the economic impact on adjacent property of the park, in an attempt to persuade the powers that be to create a district to support the park’s maintenance and operation through a special assessment on adjacent property. I also once interviewed for a job at the Hudson River Park Trust.

Tom Fox, however, was not one of those Ivy Leaguers. He grew up working class in Brooklyn, served in Viet Nam (truly, thank you for your service), and became a community environmental activist in the 70’s. He was a kind of Zelig of environmentalism, involved in community gardens, the Brooklyn Bridge Park and the provision of ferry service in the New York harbor. His personal ideals appear to be derived from Jane Jacobs and the anti-poverty programs of the 1960’s – maximum feasible community participation. Tom has consistently been with the project, both as an employee, and for longer periods of time, as a community advocate, for decades. His persistence is one of his great qualities. It has also driven some of his partners and adversaries crazy.

And it is here that Tom and I part ways. He believes the Hudson River Park is great because it reflects active community engagement, and that its best features are the result of such participation. I would argue, by contrast, that, while the park’s existence is something of a miracle and the result of public resistance to substantial government overreach, the execution of the plans for the park isn’t all that it could be because the endless fighting, processes and compromises resulted in something that very much a mixed bag as a vital, attractive public space. Despite being a West Sider, I don’t use the park. That is principally because while the highway was supposed to be transformed into a grand boulevard, it is in fact a dismal, difficult to cross multi-lane, high speed roadway that makes access to the park difficult. It is far from the subway and unpleasant to walk to. No doubt, for the people of Tribeca, the West Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, though, it is a blessing.

Great public spaces are all about balance. One of those balances is between professional expertise and public involvement. Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom among advocates that “the community is the expert,” actually people don’t generally know what they want from public spaces. On the other hand, unaccountable professionals like landscape architects, attorneys and public space managers, usually end up pushing grandiose schemes that fail. Getting to that middle ground of responsiveness and professionalism is extremely difficult, and that is one of the reasons why there are so few truly great public space projects. In the case of Hudson River Park, tipping the initial balance towards total community engagement created a power vacuum that was filled by the professionals of the State Highway Department and the succession of self-promoting, narcissistic public figures who came to dominate the Hudson River Park Trust and the Friends of Hudson River Park, the two organizations that ultimately ended up with the most formal responsibility for the park’s development and operation. The former are responsible for the anti-urbanist highway (in the interest of the moving as many cars as quickly as possible) and the latter for the multiple failed development plans for the commercial piers and the highly questionable enabling of a billionaire to create one pier the way he wanted to (Little (aka Diller) Island) (N.B. the book, by the way, could use a map of the piers – not being all that familiar with the park’s history, I was regularly confused by what was happening where).

Another vector to be balanced is commercial activity. A lot of the book is about the constant attempt to put offices, retail, housing and more into the park, in part in order to create a revenue stream to support the park’s capital and operating needs (and, by the way, keeping piers from falling down is both an endless and expensive proposition). This is not a binary problem. As Tom recognizes, some level of appropriate commercial activity is important to drawing users into the space, especially at night and in the winter.  I don’t entirely understand why some people think they can make a lot of money doing un-waterfront related private activity in the park and are always pushing for more of it. So far, none of the proposed mega-projects have ultimately penciled out. I mean really, why bother? But the pressure for expanding the debacle of Hudson Yards further west out into the river, and to increase the density of development across 9A from the park, seems unceasing, and needs to be resisted. There is no sound public policy reason for more towers in Manhattan.

Billionaires are a big part of the story, as another one of the failures in connection with the park’s development has been the inability to create a sustainable business model for park’s operation. Fox’ idea, and it was (and continues to be) the right one, is the creation of a special assessment district around the park. New York property owner and developer Douglas Durst spent a decade and many hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get such a district established (Durst, along with Al, are among the heroes of Tom’s story).  The idea for the district being that the value by which real estate adjacent to park increases as a result of the park’s existence should be tapped for the space’s maintenance and operation. This is modeled on the success of Bryant Park, which is supported by a business improvement district. Ironically, the implementation of the assessment district was defeated by loud “community opposition.”

Before engaging in a discussion of the park management district, I should say that the first choice for new public spaces should always be complete, direct government support for capital costs and operations. This is not crazy or unrealistic. Democratic government is the ultimate form of community engagement. Making this happen is a matter of budget priorities. With respect to Hudson River Park, if you look at the total capital costs over the years, they have not been an out of scale number for the City and State capital budgets. If that amount had been consistently budgeted for over the three decades that it took to finish the park, the park would have been better and less expensive without all the turmoil. Private dollars at a scale sufficient to build and maintain the Hudson River Park were both a pipe dream and bad policy – giving billionaires too much sway over what got built.

But with respect to the implementation of the park management district, here’s a secret. Nobody likes to pay more for something that benefits a broad group. They would much rather be what economists call a “free rider.” This is a good example of how the community doesn’t know what it really wants. Because, generally, once such a district is established and is successfully up and running, everyone in the affected community, except for a few, loud, easily identified cranks, thinks it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The proposed district would have cost about $75 per residential unit per year. Bupkus.

Here’s another secret. The statute for setting up a BID doesn’t require community input or approval – that’s a layer that has been arbitrarily put on the program by the city’s bureaucrats. As a practical matter, if the local council person (or the Council Speaker) and the Mayor want such a district to happen, it can happen. Period. Full stop. Mayor Adams and Speaker Adams could still make this happen now, and it would be a major advance for the quality of the Hudson River Park experience.

And that is a new additional wrinkle in the long Hudson River Park story. After passionate involvement in park issues by Governor Pataki, Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg and their elite Manhattan-centric (and not always competent) minions to build a monument, the folks now in charge care way less about the park. When this mayor says he is an outer borough, working class mayor, he means it. This development could cut a lot of ways. It is certainly likely to lower the temperature of all the clawing and scratching about what the park should be. It may also be likely to provide leeway to public space professionals to shape the park (for better or worse) without the meddling of politicians and billionaires. I do see an opening for putting in a bunch of fixes by persuading the new sheriffs in town that the right thing to do is to narrow the roadway (if for no other reason than the likely decrease in traffic due to congestion pricing) and get the park management district in place (with the statutory district management association replacing both the Trust and the Friends– eliminating a major source of discord).

One final thought: let’s give up on the estuarium. From the start Tom has been an advocate for riverine and environmental education in the park (along with a romance for recreating the maritime uses of the past). One plan for a river-based museum after another has failed. Some ideas just don’t want to happen – or even may not be good ones. I know how difficult it is for self-styled visionaries to abandon their visions – I’ve talked a couple of them out of bad ideas that the market (broadly defined) didn’t support. The estuarium is probably one of them.

Creating the Hudson River Park needs to be read by all the stakeholders in the park for mapping its future, because Tom has been as comprehensive and fair to the various interests and points of view as anyone could possibly be. It also should be read by anyone planning a new public space project of size. The narrative is compelling, and the book is well-written – so that reading it is by no means a burden. My take away from the book is that if a single entity had originally been put in charge of the park and the highway, given the authority and resources to develop the park over a long period of time and provided with a governance structure that gave it the capacity to execute the park, while at the same time being responsive to (but not trammeled by) park stakeholders from the start (as we mostly were in Bryant Park), the result would have been much, much better. At the same time, we should all be grateful to Tom for his intelligent mania for the park and the environment more generally, both in writing the book and advocating for the park.