An Architectural Historian’s Perspective of NYC
Lower Manhattan boasts new work by the world’s foremost landscape designers, as well as timeless vistas of New York Harbor
Published July 1, 2006
By Francis Morrone
Academy Contributor
Lower Manhattan was once notorious for its lack of parks and greenery. As the oldest part of New York, it was built up when most of Manhattan Island was still countryside and wilderness. Who needed open spaces when all around was one big open space? As the years went by, the countryside was developed, Downtown’s buildings grew ever larger and its streets ever more congested.
Fortunately for us, the twenty-first century is shaping up as a golden age for open space Downtown. From government-funded baseball fields to the re-landscaped riverside public plaza at privately owned 55 Water Street, a multitude of scenic options beckon those who wish to catch some fresh air and sunshine before or after a meeting. The recently opened 7 World Trade Center, new home of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), is an excellent starting point for a stroll through some of Downtown’s finest outdoor attractions.
Battery Park City and Hudson River Park
Two blocks to the west is Battery Park City, a mixed-use complex under development since the 1980s on Hudson River landfill. (Please bear in mind that this is “Battery Park City,” while “Battery Park” refers to a separate park, which we will visit later, at the very bottom of Manhattan Island.)
It’s a good thing Battery Park City wasn’t built in the 1970s, as was first planned. It would have looked like any gigantic, sterile high-rise housing complex built under the ill-conceived “urban renewal” rubric. In the years of waiting, architects and planners changed their approach to development. They started to stress recreating the charms of traditional cityscapes, with buildings of modulated scale and warm materials along real streets, together with ample outdoor space for recreation and relaxation.
Combining Utility and Aesthetics
New Yorkers are much taken with the waterfront parks and two-mile-long esplanades of Battery Park City, which anchor the southern end of Hudson River Park (and will eventually stretch unbroken all the way north to 59th Street). As you enter from Vesey Street, turn right to see Battery Park City’s northernmost jewel. Nelson A. Rockefeller Park is named for the New York governor (and U.S. vice president) who first conceived of Battery Park City.
This park was designed by a leading landscape architecture firm, Carr, Lynch, Hack & Sandell, as a park for active sports and recreation that was also pleasing to look at—a rare combination. At the northern end a children’s playground sports whimsical bronze sculptures by the popular Tom Otterness. “In this smallish utopia,” says one critic, “safety regs and aesthetics can coexist.” One also sees a gazebo inspired by Greek temples, designed with great care by Demetri Porphyrios, one of the leading classical architects in the world today. Broad lawns slope westward. The park is used for basketball, volleyball, frisbee, and handball, as well as running and biking.
The World Financial Center
Continuing south, one comes to the World Financial Center office complex, at the heart of Battery Park City. Headquarters of American Express, Merrill Lynch, and Dow Jones cluster around the greenhouse-like Winter Garden. Within is a space as big as Grand Central Terminal’s concourse. With its sixteen giant palm trees, benches, and sunlight, the Winter Garden is by day a reposeful haven for office workers.
On nights and weekends, it offers year-round cultural programming and performances. Before September 11, 2001, the grand stairway at the east end led to an aerial bridge over West Street to Six World Trade Center. Not only was that bridge destroyed on that terrible day, so too was the Winter Garden itself. That it was rebuilt and reopened within a year was indescribably heartening to New Yorkers. Today the east end has been redesigned as a viewing platform from which one may look directly down upon Ground Zero.
To the west outside the Winter Garden is World Financial Center Plaza, looking out on a boat basin and the Hudson River. Designed by landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg with artists Scott Burton and Siah Armajani, the plaza overflows with cafe tables and a variety of seating for eating take-out food, making it one of Manhattan’s most pleasant spots for weekday lunch in fine weather.
Beyond Battery Park City
Farther south, beyond Battery Park City’s streets of apartment houses opening off the esplanade, is the unusual South Cove Park, a collaboration of architect Stanton Eckstut, landscape architect Susan Child, and environmental artist Mary Miss. It is in part a recreation of the original 17th- and 18th-century Hudson River shoreline, replete with the rocks, plants, and wooden piers that one might have then encountered. In addition, the artful assemblage of rocks and exotic plantings screens a rear section of the park that is deliciously secluded. It in turn leads south to a curious, freestanding, elevated platform of steel, shaped like the crown of Lady Liberty. From this platform, one can look directly out at the iconic statue itself.
Continue south, past the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which opened in 1997 and was expanded in 2003. Within the museum is an outdoor, contemplative “Garden of Stones” by artist Andy Goldsworthy. Beyond the museum is the southernmost of Battery Park City’s parks, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Park, named for a three-term mayor of New York. Here are expansive lawns that on warm afternoons are as dense with sunbathers as any spot in Manhattan.
Set among the lawns are granite-rimmed “container gardens” of lavish floral displays created by renowned public gardener Lynden B. Miller, whose designs evoke the shimmering foliage in French impressionist paintings. The large arched structure at the southeast corner of the park has, in its base, a cafe and rest rooms. Climb to the top for splendid views of the gardens, the sunbathers, and the water.
Battery Park
Behind the Wagner Park structure one may follow the sidewalk to the south and east to enter Battery Park. Over the last couple of years, this city park has undergone extensive renovations overseen by the Battery Park Conservancy, a group dedicated to reestablishing it as one of the outdoor treasures of New York. The park has several interesting features. Leading from its northeast entrance (off of Broadway) on a southwest diagonal to the park center is a formal, tree- and bench-lined allée of a kind one seldom sees in New York, where our landscape architecture stems from the British 18th- and 19th-century romantic tradition that hated straight lines.
The French, on the other hand, loved their “Cartesian” straightaways, as did New York master builder Robert Moses when he redesigned Battery Park after World War II. The allée leads to a circular stone structure, Castle Clinton, that was built as a fort just before the War of 1812 to protect the city from a British attack (which never came). When built, the fort was on an island in the water; later the space between it and the Manhattan shoreline was filled in. The fort served for many years as the New York Aquarium, now located in Brooklyn’s Coney Island. Today Castle Clinton serves as the ticket booth for trips to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
Also at the southwest end of the allée stands the great bronze sphere that sculptor Fritz Koenig designed for the plaza of the World Trade Center in the 1970s. Though badly dam- aged in the terrorist attacks, the sculpture nonetheless was reinstalled in Battery Park, serving as an unofficial 9/11 memo- rial until the memorial park on the World Trade Center site is completed.
The Southern Tip of the Park
At the southern tip of the park, along the water, sprout new fascinating gardens designed by the Dutch gardener Piet Oudolf. Oudolf eschews commonly used flowers like roses and favors a wild and natural look incorporating flowering plants such as sea holly, anemones, and astilbes, as well as wild grasses.
Along the sea wall, a long ribbon of flora is a “Garden of Remembrance”—a tribute to the survivors of 9/11 and a place of solace for all who seek renewal. Wider swirling flower beds surround sitting areas that also include snack kiosks. Oudolf is as famous as a rock star in his native country and, with works by him, Miller, and Child, this stroll showcases some of today’s foremost landscape gardening talent.
Continuing south and east round the waterfront railings, one comes to an austere octet of large granite slabs inscribed with names. Dedicated by President Kennedy in 1963 (his last public speech in New York), the East Coast Memorial honors U.S. servicemen who perished in the Atlantic during World War II.
From Worst to Best
The northeast corner of Battery Park leads to Broadway and Battery Place. A block west on Battery Place, at Greenwich Street, is a noisy, polluting, ugly set of facilities built in the 1950s to serve the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel: a big ventilation building, a big garage, and a great gash of car access ramps repellent to any walker. That’s why the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the New York City Department of City Planning, working with some of the nation’s best designers, plan a complete overhaul of this southernmost part of Greenwich Street—once, unbelievably, the ritziest residential thoroughfare in the city.
Among much else, the gash will be decked over—much as the train yards to the north of Grand Central Terminal were once decked over to create lower Park Avenue. Atop the deck will go a new, two-and-a-half-acre park that promises to transform one of downtown’s worst spots into one of its best. The timetable is uncertain, but will soon come into focus as construction proceeds on other big downtown projects such as the World Trade Center site and the Fulton transit hub.
Up Broadway to City Hall
Broadway is New York’s main street. At its foot stands the majestic edifice of the former U.S. Custom House that in turn faces the city’s oldest public open space, Bowling Green. The compact oval, once the focal point of a neighborhood of mansions and now loomed over by several of the city’s handsomest old office buildings, got its name from the games of lawn bowling that were played on the spot in Dutch colonial times.
In 1776 a mob of New Yorkers, fired with revolutionary zeal, broke through a protective iron fence to topple the equestrian statue of King George III that stood in the center of the green. Our city’s most remarkable relic of revolutionary times is that iron fence, the very one still surrounding Bowling Green. This park itself has also had a recent overhaul that has added to its charm.
Walk north on Broadway to Wall Street. To one’s left is Trinity Church. The church of today, a lovely Gothic revival edifice from the 1840s, is the third Trinity Church on this site. One may step inside at any time during the day for quiet meditation. The surrounding churchyard, with its picturesque gravestones, dates to the 17th century. On the southern end a granite obelisk marks the burial site of Alexander Hamilton.
St. Paul’s Chapel and City Hall Park
Farther north, at Fulton Street, is St. Paul’s Chapel and its surrounding churchyard. Built in the 1760s, it is Manhattan’s oldest standing church. St. Paul’s miraculously survived the Great Fire of 1776, was George Washington’s church when he resided in New York as the first president of the United States, and miraculously survived the destruction of the World Trade Center, which stood directly across Church Street.
In the days after September 11, 2001, the chapel served as a place where rescue workers could take a break, get something to eat, and listen to soothing live chamber music. The chapel then became the magnet for impromptu outpourings of grief and love in the form of banners, signs, flowers, and objects of all kinds, many of them now preserved in exhibits throughout the chapel interior.
City Hall Park is diagonally across Broadway from St. Paul’s. At the park’s north end is the beautiful Louis XV-style City Hall completed in 1811. Prior to its construction, this park was known as the Commons. In the 1990s it was extensively refurbished, with new pavings, plantings, and benches, and the return of an extravagant Victorian 1870s fountain, original to the park, which had spent sixty years in Crotona Park in the Bronx. In addition to being a fine place to relax, the park is a good spot for politician-spotting, as it is a frequent backdrop to Mayor Bloomberg’s photo ops.
After taking in these sights, one may walk west on Vesey Street to the starting point at 7 World Trade Center. Central Park may be more famous, but Downtown’s open spaces are among the most varied and interesting urban spots anywhere.
Also read: Archeological Discoveries Shed Light on Old New York
About the Author
Francis Morrone, an art critic and architectural historian, is the author of five books including An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn (Gibbs Smith, 2001).
