Cityscape

Just Add Water

By contrast, Peter Eisenman, the testosterone intellectual of New York architecture, is designing the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, which will draw crowds to the ferry, and Cambridge landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh is creating radical greenscapes for the Brooklyn Bridge Park proposed south of the Manhattan Bridge through Pier 5. Nothing in the DNA of the current Governors Island plan rivals Van Valkenburgh's environmental enigmas or the hypnotic curves and conceptual chutzpa of Eisenman's museum. Apparently on the defensive, Skidmore designers stayed safely inside the box and simply edited the plain postwar buildings from the site, proposing the urban Milquetoast.

After floundering in the gap between the mayor's and governor's offices, planning proceeded in the absence of any overall scheme for the harbor itself. In 1987, when asked why New York was not coordinating its Hudson River development with building along the New Jersey waterfront, Mayor Koch quipped, "New Jersey? New Jersey! That's the competition!" Nature may think of the estuary as a whole, but politically it's as Balkanized as the former Yugoslavia, and you can't design half a harbor. No single agency has jurisdiction, no elected or appointed figure has oversight, no computer has omniscience, and currently there are some 350 projects being planned or built, and water is their only glue.

Without a big picture, the plan for Governors Island cannot resonate within a larger whole: No one knows what the harbor will become, or even wants to become, so this design is flying blind and bland in a vacuum. The harbor slips between the jurisdictions of city, state, and federal governments in a benign drift.

According to architect John Beyer, a principal of Beyer Blinder Belle, which did critical feasibility studies for the island, the concept of a vast harbor park has long been an open secret, with the islands and edge connected by ferries into a kind of expanded Venetian lagoon. A water park would include pockets of community boating and bikeways, promenades, and open space.

Kent Barwick, head of the Municipal Art Society and the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, takes the idea further. From behind his office door, he pulls out a framed nineteenth-century engraving depicting a harbor alive with boats that extended the urbanism of the city onto the waves, as though Broadway shot straight out the end of Manhattan in liquid form. Already the harbor is springing back to life, with kayaks, sailboats, and rowboats coming out of nowhere. Ferries are proliferating, carrying 30,000 more people each day than they did a decade ago. Barwick contends that political leadership will follow a growing public awareness. The constituency is already heading for the H₂O.

Stakes are higher than weekend kayaking would make them appear. The metropolis has to match the quality-of-life standards of suburbia to stay competitive. Governors Island is a stepping-stone to the harbor as a whole. If only politicians and planners can connect the dots, New Yorkers will be able to walk on water.