New York City’s iconic waterfront just got a radical addition.
Rising from the Hudson River, this 2.4 acre park that cost more than $260 million to build
has been described as an oasis for New Yorkers,
kind of pushing the bounds of what a public pier can be.
In a sense, the surprise is that New York has seen through extraordinary projects.
What are the chances of projects like that really happening?
But between a massive donation from a local billionaire and numerous legal battles, the
project hasn’t come without controversy.
As a space, it's tiny and beautiful, like a little jewel, kind of a microcosm of Manhattan's
place in New York City, but it represents this terrible dilemma that New York is in
and has been in for many years. It has increasing amounts of public space
but decreasing public funds to deal with them.
This is Little Island – New York City’s new park on the water
that was almost never built.
Little Island rises from the remnants of Pier 54,
an historic point of entry along the Hudson River.
In the early 1900s, it was used by those traveling across the Atlantic, and it's where survivors
of the Titanic returned to safety.
During the 1970s and 80s the piers were used as a gathering place for the LGBT community.
Pier 54 was eventually run down and fell out of use, so the city held a design competition
to revitalise the area over the water.
To learn more, I spoke to Thomas Heatherwick, the visionary behind Little Island, and many
other iconic projects, including the Vessel at Hudson Yards.
We put in a proposal and presented it. Of all days our presentation, our final presentation,
was on the day of Hurricane Sandy. So we presented in the morning and Hurricane Sandy hit in
the afternoon and into the evening and during the night. So it was extra emphasising
the toughness that any piece of river infrastructure needs.
In 2014, the new pier was officially put forward as a partnership between billionaire couple
Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg and the Hudson River Park Trust.
It would be a futuristic new public park with a live performance
space that also happened to be in their neighbourhood.
If you build a public park across the street, doesn't your house gain value?
Isn't it wonderful to walk into the door of your corporate headquarters,
look across the street and say, that's my island?
This isn't a substitute for there being a project in the Bronx or in Harlem.
It's a project. Projects should be happening of this
level of ambition in every borough and in
every part of all types of cities.
The project was originally dubbed Pier 55, though it was more casually called Diller
Island.
Diller and Von Furstenberg eventually rebranded it as Little Island.
It was Heatherwick Studio and MNLA that worked together
to design the park. While engineering firm Arup
created the unique pot structures using 3D parametric scripts.
The project faced several lawsuits, notably from the City Club of New York, raising a
number of concerns about environmental reports and competitive bids.
After so many legal battles, Diller pulled his funding in 2017, but New York governor
Andrew Cuomo stepped in to save the project.
In the end, the City of New York contributed $17 million to the scheme, the state gave
$4 million and Diller and Von Furstenberg gave roughly $260 million, pledging an additional
$120 million to maintain it over the next 20 years.
To be clear, that's a huge donation.
Most major public works donations are in the tens of millions, not hundreds.
Little Island sits on 132 tulip-shaped concrete pots rising out of the water where Pier 54’s
old wooden piles once were.
Engineers used precast concrete to form the basis of the structure.
That helped the team avoid challenges of casting concrete over a river and the expense of steel
construction.
Though the pots look unique, each was modelled using a Cairo pentagon pattern that allowed
for slight variations from the basic pentagon design.
The pots were then cast offsite in smaller parts before being shipped to New York and
assembled over the Hudson.
You feel you're leaving behind Manhattan rather than just on a bigger piece of Manhattan.
It's the three dimensionality of it that makes you actually sort of de-stress and have the
associations that topography and landscape give you.
The entire park is designed to be like a giant sponge for stormwater, as it filters down
through the structure where it’s treated below
ground and gradually released back into the Hudson.
The island features hundreds of different plants, multiple scenic overlooks, an outdoor
amphitheatre, a smaller stage, picnic grounds and
food and drink vendors that sell $10 avocado toast.
It’s open to the public from 6am until 1am, though the park’s capacity is monitored.
If you want to enter after noon, you’ll have to book a free entry reservation. And
much like many New York attractions, it’s been kind of hard to get into, at least for
now.
Most people do not feel any tension whatsoever. People who study public space and are concerned
about privatisation feel a wrenching, gut wrenching tension is that you have a very
contradictory space with public ownership, public access, but private management.
This isn’t New York City’s first attempt at revitalising its piers.
In 1995, private funding revamped several piers on the Hudson to create a 28-acre waterfront
sports village at Chelsea Piers.
More recently, Pier 26 was opened to the public, featuring an open lawn and sports area.
And now a public beach is being developed near Pier 53.
Little Island isn’t Heatherwick’s first controversial public-private partnership.
He also designed the ambitious Garden Bridge project
in London, which was ultimately killed before it ever got built.
Whether you like it or not, people do draw a comparison between Little Island and the
Garden Bridge that was proposed in London. Is it just inevitable when you're creating
spaces that are of this profound in our cities that you're
going to have fans and detractors? Or would
you, would you prefer it to sit a little bit more on the kind of universally liked side
of the arena?
This shows what London missed. This got stuck in politics. Little Island was involved in
politics. It got stopped. But some politicians came together who had a bigger vision of
the strategic value for a city. But in a way, it's useful, the pier existing, because it
shows us that what seemed like fantasy in London wasn’t that.
In the end, Little Island’s opening proved to be both a political and logistical feat.
Whether or not it’s what New York needed, it’s a striking addition to the ever-changing
waterfront.
And it goes to show what a little persistence, and some millions of dollars, can get you
in this city.
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