Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (62 page)

The hardest thing for cities now is to replace their vibrant old ports with lively, casual urban texture. Different as they are, the three most important recent projects that have begun to transform the Manhattan waterfront—Battery Park City (a new town), the South Street Seaport (adaptive reuse of an old historic quarter), and the Hudson River Park (a “green necklace” of public access)—all have in common a certain antiseptic, deadened quality, as though the theoretical air of the original prospectus renderings clung to them even after they were translated into physical realities. All three have made wonderful additions to the open public space of New York. Yet all three resist integration into the nitty-gritty, everyday city, partly from failure for the skin graft to take, partly from explicit intent. The original marketing of Battery Park City as a residential zone depended in part on its being perceived as separated from the city, safely insulated from the “undesirable aspects” of urban life. “This combination of a unique location and an air of isolation was exactly what determined the commercial success of the project,” wrote Han Meyer in his useful book
City and Port.
Meyer further noted that South Street Seaport, with its comfortably suburban retail, “has become an enclave, which may be a successful tourist attraction” but which “remains an isolated phenomenon in the context of contemporary New York and a rewarding target for sarcasm and irony.”

Urban design today seems at odds with the spontaneous uses people make of the city, in their casual daily routines. The discipline of city planning has become tentative, guilt-ridden, and uncertain of its mission; and new construction technologies foster a monotonous gigantism that impedes the flow of street life. While acknowledging that “the city of daily life is simply difficult to incorporate into the built work, given the means and concepts that architects typically use,” planner John Kaliski nevertheless insists: “As urban environments continue to evolve, designers must
find new ways of incorporating the elements that remain elusive: ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity, and simultaneity.” These are the very elements ingrained in New York culture, from Duke Ellington to Frank O'Hara, from Weegee to Merce Cunningham to Martin Scorsese. Is there some way of incorporating the city's everyday syncopation and aesthetic spirit into a design for the new waterfront? Or is the discipline itself so programmed to work against the city's flux, by pinning space down into single-use, static forms, that it would be hopeless to try?

ANY REDESIGN ON THE WATERFRONT must start from the premise of public access. A venerable legal principle known as the Public Trust Doctrine, dating from the Roman era, assures the citizenry the right to public waterfront access. This noble principle has been sometimes honored more in the breach than in the observance, but recent lawsuits by citizens' groups have helped to reestablish the precedent. Because it took such a battle just to ensure that right, and because New Yorkers have so often been faced with threats of massive luxury housing taking over the river's edge in boom times, there is an understandable fear of allowing any private use to contaminate the shore. I think this is a mistake. By all means, the public should be able to get to the water's edge, to walk along the riverfront and enjoy sea breezes. But that does not mean that the entire waterfront needs to be protected by a prophylactic greenbelt. That would be a very monotonous and antiurban strategy. We ought to remember that people do not relocate to New York only to commune with nature: the pleasures of living in a big city derive partly from surrounding oneself with the street's retail enticements. This horror against allowing commerce to invade the new waterfront derives from a fundamental misconception that confuses public access with open public space, untouched by the private sector. Many of the great “people magnets” in the world—think of the Piazza Navona in Rome, or the Piazza San Marco in Venice—are a mixture of public and private.

If the only way to ensure public access to the waterfront is to keep the whole area around it commercial-free public space (a dubious proposition at best), then let's put architecturally prominent public buildings at the periphery, as other great cities have done. The waterfront could house
schools, libraries, courthouses, post offices, police stations, transit stations, firehouses—could be a destination point for ordinary citizens in the course of their daily routines, not just when they are in a leisure-seeking, park mood.

Parks are splendid; and surely quiet, contemplative places have a crucial role in the daily life of cities. But they can also be an overdone solution, from lack of imagination if nothing else. In trying to ensure that the public would have waterfront access, many communities have regarded the safest strategy as demanding that all vacant areas be turned into parkland. As James Howard Kunstler wrote, in his book
The City in Mind,
about Boston's decision to turn over to green space the land liberated from burying the Fitzgerald Expressway (the “Big Dig”): “In the context of contemporary cultural confusion, ‘green space’ or ‘open space’ essentially means build nothing. It is a rhetorical device for putting city land in cold storage
in the only currently acceptable form,
that is covered by grass and shrubs, aka
nature….
To make matters worse, ‘green space’ and ‘open space’ in this context are always presented as abstractions—and if you ask for an abstraction, that is exactly what you'll get. You'll get a …berm! But a berm is not a park. A bark mulch bed has no civic meaning. This is ‘nature’ in cartoon form.”

Another reason for this omnipresent park solution to the waterfront problem is a rarely discussed collision between the values of environmentalism and those of urbanism. Over the last twenty-five years, much of the energy and organizational acumen fueling waterfront revitalization has come from environmentalist groups. They were the first ones to have understood that nothing salubrious could happen to the waterfront until the Hudson River began to be cleaned up; they lobbied for it, made it happen, and deserve all the credit for the happy results. They continue to be understandably suspicious of any large-scale development on the waterfront, knowing how it might tax the existing infrastructure, sewage or otherwise, and lead to more pollution.

Most urbanists have an environmentalist side; it's part of the liberal package, and if you love your city enough, you don't want to see it destroyed or degraded by pollution. Many environmentalists, however, are not similarly predisposed toward the urban; their idea of heaven is not New York City but the wilderness. Now, it would seem to me that the
hope of the world is for urbanists and environmentalists to join hands, realizing that their common enemy is suburban sprawl, which removes thousands of natural acres every week, and which drains the fiscal and civic energies of big cities. Given that the most energy-conserving environment in America is probably a Manhattan street, a truly progressive environmental activist might lobby for
greater
density in cities, as well as against office parks or shopping malls in the hinterlands. But I do not see Environmental Liberation Front radicals spray-painting graffiti in support of infill; congestion goes against their whole moral sensibility. And congestion at the waterfront now seems doubly objectionable—even though the historical pattern of many older cities, such as London, has been to grow outward from the docks, with highest densities achieved closest to the river's edge.

What I would like to see in some of the waterfront is a compromise: low-rise density that will not overtax the sewage treatment plants, but will begin to invite the activity of a human hive, or casbah.

THE DILEMMA OF waterfront development is global. Everywhere—London, Glasgow, Buenos Aires, Honolulu—cities are faced with converting their industrial waterfronts to other uses. A Washington-based organization called the Waterfront Center puts out glossy, upbeat coffee-table books such as
The New Waterfront,
celebrating what it calls “A Worldwide Urban Success Story.” The authors, Ann Breen and Dick Rigby, write: “We like to think that the popular success of many new waterfronts is a tangible sign of the vitality of cities, even in a world increasingly dominated by suburbs. That the inherent magic of water will draw people together at certain places or for special events is proof that the growing sense of isolation in our cities does not have to be.”

Others, such as the geographer Brian Hoyle, in a magazine given over to waterfront concerns, called
Aquapolis,
find the departure of the port from the city more problematic. “In urban terms the result is a vacuum, an abandoned doorstep, a problematic planning zone often in or very close to the traditional heart of a port city, a zone of dereliction and decay where once all was bustle, interchange and activity.”

In city after city, the same monotonous ideas for recycling the old
waterfront are put forward: (1) an aquarium; (2) a festival marketplace; (3) a convention center; (4) a museum; (5) a sports stadium; (6) a residential enclave, or “town within a town,” à la Battery Park City. “You will see a surprising similarity in projects constructed in every part of and in every climate of the globe,” observed planner Richard Bender in
Aquapolis.
“This is because projects more often express the processes of organization, finance, and management that create them rather than the lives and conditions of the communities where we find them. Too often, this development creates a kind of citadel, walled off from, raised above, or turning its back on the adjacent community.”

The economics of waterfront redevelopment lead again and again to the monolithic. Those developers who have the initial start-up capital and teams of lawyers tenacious enough to work through years of regulatory approval, tend to want the highest return on their investment, by squeezing the maximum number of million-dollar co-op apartments or high-rental offices out of their property. If the developer is the regional government, it will usually want some massive cultural or theme-park project it can exploit as a logo. Even small interventions in the waterfront's fabric require a momentum that can carry the developer into much larger schemes than originally foreseen; and the waterfront becomes a dumping ground for gigantic, hollow spectacle.

IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE to have a relationship to the water that is more day-to-day, functional, less contrived/aesthetic or compensatory/spiritual. Those who use the river regularly understand the language of its tidal changes, its placid moods and rages, where it is shoring up dangerously, when it is rising. If you speak to ferryboat captains, professional and amateur fishermen, divers, coast guardsmen, harbor police, canoeists, swimmers, and marine biologists, you find they have quite specific, quirky things to say about the waters surrounding a city. Such was the technical lore possessed by Joseph Mitchell's harbor monologuists, and he listened to them all, patiently and with fascination, as I to my regret cannot. But I can at least see that if the waterfront is to come alive again, it must regain a sense of purpose, and not just become a theatrical backdrop.

In short, we need a true water policy. So far, almost all the planning
attention around New York's waterfront has gone into land-use policy, with very little thought, beyond lip service, given to what should take place on or with the water. Intrepid kayakers, canoeists, swimmers, sailboat enthusiasts, and anglers have made forays into the Hudson River (the East River is more treacherous) to establish that it can be done, but there is still very little supporting infrastructure for them along the shore: places to tie up small craft, sandy beaches, electrical outlets for motor-powered boats in or near the bulkhead, fishing piers. South Cove in Battery Park is lovely, but its timbers are for show. No boat can dock there, as we learned after the attack on the World Trade Center.

September 11 taught us how unbalanced our waterfront policy had become. Carter Craft, the director of Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, analyzed the problem as follows: “The fight to create waterfront access was won by the aesthetes. Decades of decay and encroaching blight had to be beaten back. Flowers replacing corrugated steel. Grassy lawns where working piers once stood. Come September 11 this limited design palette was a recipe for disaster. ‘We didn't have anywhere north of Battery Park where a tugboat could pull up,’ said Capt. Andrew McGovern of the Sandy Hook Pilots. ‘The bulkheads in Battery Park City weren't strong enough, and even if they were, there is nothing to tie up to. The first couple of days of the disaster we were bringing everything by water—food, firemen, body bags, acetylene—all of it was brought over to Manhattan from a pier in Jersey City, a condemned pier.’ The region finally realized that the water is more than just a quiet vista.”

After having eliminated all those “unsightly” waste transfer stations on the Manhattan waterfront, interim transfer stations had to be installed along the Hudson and the East River to receive equipment and to discharge waste materials excavated from Ground Zero. The World Trade Center attack, which destroyed several subway stations, also caused ferry service to be reactivated between Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, showing how much more could be done with water transportation in the city. An expanded ferry service, such as existed at the turn of the twentieth century, could, in future, link Manhattan not only with the other boroughs, New Jersey, and Westchester, but circumnavigate the island perimeter, connecting various waterfront amenities. The New York Olympics 2012 Committee has a water-based vision of ferrying athletes to the main sports
arenas and facilities, most of which happen to be on the water, thereby guaranteeing the athletes won't get stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway; afterward, the city could inherit a fine ferry network and conceivably integrate it into its own mass transit system. Most major New York hospitals are also located near the water, and water ambulances could transport patients for emergency surgery.

Finally, the waterways could be used again for shipping goods into the city. Granted, Manhattan will never have enough backup space for containerized shipping; but once the shipments have been broken down in Newark, why can't they be placed on barges and brought up the Hudson or the East River and distributed from there? You could again have working docks all along the waterfront. Where is it written that trucks alone must deliver goods to the metropolis? For that matter, you could reconnect a rail freight system to the waterfront, and build a rail freight tunnel out of Red Hook in Brooklyn. You could continue to restore and expand pieces of the port on the Brooklyn shore, which has more upland space than Manhattan and a deeper channel than New Jersey. Of the four modes of moving goods—water, rail, truck, and air—the first two have been largely dismantled in the past century to benefit the newer ones: a big mistake, since boats and trains are less polluting and, in the long run, more economical.