Tag Archives: hudson river park

SWIM WITH THE FISHES

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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. Continue reading →

Island Magic

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07_View_of_Southern_space_looking_north_from_Gansevoort_Peninsula

A rendering of the proposed redesigned Pier 55. Heatherwick Studios

The decades-long saga of Hudson River Park recently took another twist when prominent philanthropists withdrew their promised gift of as much as $250 million to the park for a new facility citing prolonged litigation as making the project no longer viable (http://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/nyregion/diller-hudson-river-pier.html). The Park’s story began with a proposed sub-surface Westside highway topped by commercial development and a park. The plan was opposed by a historic lawsuit challenging the environmental impacts of the project (http://openjurist.org/732/f2d/253/sierra-club-v-united-states-army-corps-of-engineers-c). The most recent episode ended, at least in part as a result of litigation (involving some of the same individuals, half a century later) citing the process by which a proposed replacement for the decaying Pier 55 was approved.

Like many recent disputes about the development of public space, the issues arose in large part out of attempts to generate income to support the operation of a new park. Considering itself stretched for resources to manage its portfolio of existing properties, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) is loath to take on continuing responsibility for new public space without a dedicated income stream for maintenance and operations. Most of the largest recent park development projects have called for economic activity generated on parkland to pay for their operations (i.e., Brooklyn Bridge Park). The City’s inability/unwillingness to dedicate sufficient resources to maintain operate and program its parks is essentially a political problem of prioritization, and to some degree of imagination of what the benefit of a fully funded parks program might be like. The DPR budget is almost $500 million out of an $82 billion total city expense budget. Given the political forces involved, most people concerned with New York City’s public spaces take the existing level of funding more or less as a given. In the twenty-five years I have been involved in public space management in New York City I have never heard a serious discussion of a material increase in DPR operating funds. This leaves new facilities like the High Line, Governor’s Island and Hudson River Park (HRP) scraping around to find sufficient money to maintain their physical plant as well as for operations and programming. Continue reading →