Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (18 page)

The longer she talks, the more mesmerized I become by her conviction. She is someone with a vision. However skewed or cynical, it all fits together. You might call it the “permanent government” thesis, that special interests have a stranglehold over the decisionmaking process of New York City.

“So why is there so much waterfront development internationally?” I ask, a touch faux-naïvely, but sure that she will have a ready answer.

“Because the water worldwide is free, like the air, so the politicians are taking it over to make a bundle for themselves and their friends. Also, the United States finished building the interstate highway system so they need to move onto the waterfronts, to generate more pork. All this talk about ‘our crumbling infrastructure’ is very cleverly used as a wedge to unleash more pork-barrel public funding.”

“You don't believe our infrastructure is crumbling?” I ask. “What about the marine borers—the shipworms?”

“I have my doubts. That problem's overstated. The whole marine borer panic is being engineered to promote large-scale construction and restoration projects. It's all part of a massive public relations campaign to spread disinformation, and they are well funded,” Marcy says with an emphatic look. “You don't believe me? Look at the way they've distorted my position in the media. I went from being portrayed as a saint to someone who's an—evil nut! I've no desire to see the edge returned to a ‘pre-Colonial condition,’
as they said about me in one newspaper article. In fact, I'm all for parks, I love parks! I just think it should be enough for people to be able to walk by or ride by and look out at that mighty river, and not build on it. The Hudson River is glorious and wonderful all by itself.”

“You sound like Al Butzel.”

“Al Butzel never really cared about the river,” she says disdainfully.

The next day, sufficiently disturbed by her claims to want clarification, I drop in on Carter Craft at the Municipal Art Society. Carter, a pleasant, intelligent young man from the South, calm as a porpoise, with thick, dark-rimmed spectacles and dismayingly long sideburns, is also the most knowledgeable person I know about the waterfront. He heads an informational project within the venerable Municipal Art Society called the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. Carter is chomping down on a tuna sandwich in the conference room when he sees me, and he waves me inside. As usual, he takes an unruffled, objective tone after I repeat Marci Benstock's arguments: instead of scoffing at them, he tells me I should talk to So-and-So who assigns permits at the Army Corps of Engineers. In other words, check out the facts. If I were an investigative reporter, I would certainly do so. But I'm too lazy. I'm a belletrist, for God's sake! Finally I get him to fork over the information. According to the Hudson River Park legislation, there are only provisions for restoring sixteen piers, not forty, and of these, three will be habitat piers (that is, given over to wilderness growth, not people). He also says that legislation at present prevents construction in the water, though he understands Marci's fears, given the historical record, and he agrees with her that the state authorities are indeed largely unregulated: Battery Park City Authority was supposed to give back many millions of dollars for affordable housing years ago, and is still stalling. But he thinks the reconstructed piers are justifiable because 8 million people live in this city, these people could use more public space, and there can never be any extensive new public space created on the island of Manhattan itself.

…

IN THE AFTERMATH of the World Trade Center's destruction, many proposals were put forward to reknit the site to the surrounding urban fabric by placing a lid over the highwaylike West Street or otherwise submerging it. Though the tract being discussed was only the ten or so blocks adjoining Battery Park City and the old World Trade Center site, essentially what was being proposed was a Westway-type solution. The old bugbear even turned up by name in several articles. Ex-mayor Ed Koch was hauled in to reminisce: “Westway would have been wonderful.” Jacob Weisberg, in a
New York Times Magazine
piece about how the city should rebuild after the World Trade Center attack, wrote: “High on many people's list of things that should have happened in those years [the 1980s and 1990s] but did not is Westway, the plan to submerge two miles of the West Side Highway and build a glorious downtown park and beach. After a fifteen-year struggle, environmentalists killed the plan in 1985, on the basis that the Army Corps of Engineers had not sufficiently proved the project harmless to striped bass—a far-from-endangered species that spawns in the Hudson.” I was surprised and encouraged to see my private opinion corroborated in cold print, but dismayed to find it less excitingly heterodox than I had imagined. The pendulum was swinging back, apparently.

Taking the long-range perspective, in thirty or forty years the present highway along the West Side, Route 9A, will need to be done over, and at that time no one will have remembered Westway and it will be possible then to reintroduce the outboard solution.

8 CHELSEA PIERS, CHELSEA, AND TROCCHI-LAND

C
HELSEA PIERS IS A FASCINATING EXAMPLE OF WATERFRONT ADAPTIVE REUSE. OCCUPYING A THIRTY
-
ACRE AREA BETWEEN
18
TH AND
23
RD STREETS, ON FOUR historic but neglected piers (59, 60, 61, and 62) and the headhouse that connected them, it has been turned into an elaborate sports complex, with ice skating, a golf driving range, roller rinks, gyms, a boxing ring, a volleyball court, a batting cage, bowling alleys, an indoor track, a rock-climbing wall, you name it. I know nine-year-old boys for whom Chelsea Piers is heaven on earth; I also know urbanists who grit their teeth at the mere mention of it.

I am in the ambivalent camp about Chelsea Piers, so much so that, were I to enumerate all my on-the-one-hand–on-the-other-hands, I would need as many hands as a Hindu goddess. As I've said, I have no purist objection to commercial development on the riverside; quite the contrary, it seems to me cities are inherent marketplaces, and commercial enterprises can help draw people to an underused waterfront. Chelsea Piers does attract considerable numbers (it is among New York's ten most frequently visited “destinations,” according to one survey), and it fulfills a function as the largest sports complex in the metropolitan area. What pains me is that Chelsea Piers is so grudging, unneighborly, and suburban in its relation to the streetscape, thereby giving commercial development on the waterfront a bad name.

The term “suburban” as a derogatory shorthand in writing about cities can be overdone. However, when it comes to Chelsea Piers, I think it is apt. As if the chasm of Route 9A were not enough to distance the complex from its adjacent neighborhood, Chelsea, the center's signage and visual cues conspire to discourage pedestrians, while offering every incentive to motorists to drive in and park at the rather expensive lot. If you are walking along West Street (here its name becomes Twelfth Avenue), you see an elongated concrete bunker painted with aggressively ugly cartoons of sporting activities; there is no perceptible entrance door on the street itself, or any way of peering in at the activities. The leasing of some floor space for movie soundstages and fashion shoots may explain the lack of windows, but not the tacky façade presented to the public, which seems intentionally to mislead about the well-appointed facilities within.

Staring at this eyesore, you would be hard put to connect it with its original graceful façade, by Warren & Wetmore, the architects who built Grand Central Station and the New York Yacht Club. A photograph of the piers when they opened in 1910 shows a breathtaking repetition of arch-windowed doorways and pedimented roofs, fronting a West Street haunted by horse-drawn cabs. As the authors of
New York 1900
, Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and John Montague Massengale, describe it, “Warren & Wetmore invested the fashionable Modern French façades with a strikingly monumental grandeur and simplified but overscaled details. The river façades, which sheltered open observation platforms, were contrastingly festive transformations of the utilitarian steel piers
which lay behind the street façades, and greeted the arriving passenger with a flutter of pennants and trophies.”

In 1910, a day after the piers' official opening,
The New York Times
called them “the most remarkable urban design achievement of their day…. The Chelsea Piers replaced a hodgepodge of run-down waterfront structures with a magnificent row of grand buildings embellished with pink granite façades.” The 800-foot-long finger piers were designed expressly for the new transatlantic luxury liners, such as the Cunard Line's
Mauretania
or the
Lusitania
(which departed from Chelsea Piers before being sunk by a German U-boat). Before it struck an iceberg, the
Titanic
had been scheduled to dock at Chelsea Piers. We tend to forget that many immigrants arrived first at Chelsea Piers, before being transferred by ferryboats to Ellis Island. The famous were frequently snapped waving from its gangplanks. In 1927 the
Ile de France
put in at its Pier 57, and introduced a new standard of ocean liner style. Chelsea Piers played an important role as a troop terminal in both World Wars, but the Depression and jet travel cut into its luxury liner business, and container ships requiring larger berths spelled its doom. By the late 1960s Chelsea Piers' shipping days were over, and it became a municipal bus storage and a U.S. Customs impounding station. Decaying walls, shattered windows, and structural dilapidation led Mayor Lindsay's administration to employ the stopgap measure of enclosing it in a concrete casing, which gave it its present homely façade.

Thus the Chelsea Piers sports complex we see today cannot be accused of destroying an architectural landmark; if anything, it has preserved the bones of the original. It has also honored the site's maritime heritage with blown-up photographs and texts about the glorious history of the piers. Still, one wishes the owners would try to improve the façade, so that it at least begins to measure up architecturally to the distinction and quality of its predecessor.

There is also the question of striking a better balance between private and public space. In the past ten years we have embraced the profoundly desirable principle that the people of New York have the right of access to its waters, for their own enjoyment and spiritual nourishment. Chelsea Piers, born at about the same moment that the New York State legislature approved the Hudson River Park idea, raced to open its doors in late 1995,
and seemed to operate on an older model of river access. I mean that the entrepreneurs operating Chelsea Piers did not make it easy for the walker interested in completing a circuit around Manhattan's shoreline. The so-called public space left at the water's edge by the sports complex is extremely stingy, and at the driving range it is almost nonexistent. The range's net, suspended from steel poles to keep golf balls from falling into the Hudson, terminates virtually at the river, inviting most walkers to leave the shore and cut through the enclosed parking lot and then through the complex itself. The central open courtyard at 23rd Street functions like a plaza in a shopping mall. On the one hand, Chelsea Piers generously offers free musical entertainment “to the community,” or lets immunization vans park there; on the other hand, the signs that say welcome to chelsea piers subtly tell you, if you are of a mind to wander by the river, that you are in a private enclave, with its own set of rules, regulations, and security guards.

Some of the prime river-view space has been taken up with two private catering halls, Pier 60 and the Lighthouse, rented out successfully for corporate meetings, weddings, “bar/bat mitzvahs and sweet-sixteen parties.” Chelsea Piers also has several restaurants open to the public, suburban in décor and feel, but congenial for a drink with a friend in late-summer afternoons, on a deck overlooking the Hudson. The marina, another moneymaker, garages million-dollar yachts and an upscale version of the Circle Line, Bateaux New York, a sort of supper-club cruise that circumnavigates the island.

Chelsea Piers' profitable formula is based on a mixture of regular customers (annual club memberships, league play) and one-shot visitors (walk-ins and invitees to special events). On a tour of the complex, I was shown a beautiful, clean and airy, state-of-the-art gym, complete with its own sports medicine center, operated by New York–Presbyterian Hospital. While the interior spaces for children are knockabout-functional, all wrestling mats and primary colors, the adult facility's décor is an elegant white and maroon with sumptuous woods. The management of Chelsea Piers is thinking of franchising its concept, by setting up in cities around the world, particularly where there are large, architecturally intriguing, endangered structures on the waterfront.

The success of Chelsea Piers is especially remarkable when you consider
how hard it is to get anything built on the New York waterfront, much less a 1.7-million-square-foot complex. Roland Betts, a financier of films, was originally interested in leasing just a small part of the vast, unused space of Chelsea Piers, to create an ice rink for his figure-skater daughter. Told that he would have to bid on the whole complex, Betts and his partner, Tom Bernstein, went ahead, using their own money, outlasting the bureaucratic endurance test of state, city, community, and environmental regulatory approval, securing a break on the rent and, eventually, a long-term lease that would allow for low-cost financing.