Nature Contra Wagner

As I loitered on the waterfront promenade in front of Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, the freshly redesigned belvedere at the southern terminus of Battery Park City, a phrase wafted to the front of my mind: “There a pause will be made in order to consider the ramps.” It had returned to me from an old essay by the British landscape historian John Dixon Hunt; the specific injunction comes from Louis XIV, regarding the proper enjoyment of André Le Nôtre’s famous gardens at Versailles. I hadn’t given these ramps that much thought, being a bit too preoccupied with reconciling my memory of the previous grounds, designed in the early 1990s by Laurie Olin (of Hanna/Olin, now Olin, core contributors to the original Battery Park City master plan) with the architects Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti. But who was I to ignore a command from the Sun King himself?

The ramps, essentially, are the new park, bringing people up and over the ten-foot mound deemed necessary, under the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency framework, to plug a hole in the flood defenses protecting the Financial District from the next Sandy. Along Battery Place, roughly where Olin’s maple allées once stood, two broad boulevards now arc up from the street; on the promenade side, a narrower double switchback slices through terraced planting beds, sauna-style wooden benches (lit with horizontal LED bars), and low concrete retaining walls. The scene has the aspect of a vegetated ziggurat, with Marduk’s spot reserved for a weighty pavilion by Thomas Phifer and Partners.

AECOM’s landscape is executed in the neo-picturesque style now encountered in coastal cities around the world, not least here in New York. Shoreline projects like Hudson River Park have tended to play it safe, relying on the self-evident virtue of their sustainable agendas—holding back the sea while also furnishing public access to the waterfront—to generate a palatable result. At Wagner Park II, this complacency comes across as a general lack of intention. One example, chosen from among many: Halfway up the riverside ramp, the elbow of the northern switchback is elongated curiously into a sort of squished-lemon profile, about ten feet long and tapering to a rounded-off nub. You have to turn a corner somehow, but this weird sac form struck me as a strangely useless disposition of fifty square feet of park. Maybe this gesture satisfies some functional or accessibility requirement, but I suspect the awkward geometry had no deeper rationale—that’s simply how the grading plan ended up. Trivial, perhaps, but such decisions like this add up to a whole that symbolizes just how little thoughtfulness we have come to expect from the people who design our public spaces.

Olin, America’s most celebrated living landscape architect, narrativized his approach to the site in a 1999 symposium at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Influences and invocations included, in order: the private gardens of Brutus and Pliny the Younger; the writings of Camus; Gramercy and Carl Schurz Parks; certain iconic components of New York’s public space heritage (hexagonal pavers, World’s Fair benches); Wallace Stevens; Claude Lorrain’s harbor landscapes; Flavian brickwork in Rome and Ostia; jazz, surrealism, and Cubism; geological processes such as plate tectonics, the rock cycle, and glaciation, along with their historical cultural interpretations; and the legacy of Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. himself. The plan’s logic of gardens and parkland flanking a rectangular lawn derived in part from a formal deconstruction of the parterres of Central Park’s 1930s Conservatory Garden, illustrated in a tight series of diagrams evoking cell mitosis. (Lynden Miller, the horticulturalist responsible for the restoration of the garden in the 1980s, was also involved in Wagner’s planting design.) This conceptual dérive underscores Olin’s understanding that public spaces, at their best, can enable people to develop distinctive personal relationships with the universe, society, and their own subjectivity. As he put it then: “While the park may be a series of spaces for viewing, strolling, picnicking, sitting, eating, napping, it is also a place to notice the conditions of one’s situations on the edge of the island, of the continent, the crust of the earth or of one’s own future.” It is difficult to imagine that AECOM’s landscape team had even one such cultural lens in mind as they splined together Wagner Park II; or, really, that they would even consider this kind of thought to be a valuable use of billable time. (Oddly enough, a plaque on the new pavilion’s roof garden states that “the design for the 3.5-acre Robert F. Wagner Park was completed in 1994,” describing the features of Olin’s design without mentioning that it’s since been demolished.)

It seems almost too obvious to point out, but the park does not actually provide visitors with a framed approach to the Statue of Liberty—the main organizing principle of the antecedent, which its designers conceived as a Parthenon whose cult effigy had simply marched off into the sea. The axis connecting the statue and the park now terminates not in a public plaza, as before, but in the third leg of Phifer’s pavilion, which resembles the Aphex Twin logo in plan and occupies the center of AECOM’s overall composition, such as it is. This massive pillar supports an impressively vaulted entry portico that interrupts the inclined approaches from Battery Place. Like leaves drifting around a rock in a stream, visitors curl into the narrow space between the pavilion’s wings, the Statue of Liberty edging into frame as they round the corner. By the time you see it, you have already passed through the threshold. This is the familiar view, of course—an oblique glimpse through a gap in the city’s zoetrope waterfront. But the reworked circulation marks another net subtraction from the unique offerings of the predecessor.

On the other side of the hill, Olin’s controlled axial lawn has given way to an indeterminate grass expanse. The old rectangle, an archaic form echoing the historical Bowling Green, was praised contemporaneously by Paul Goldberger as “a lush void,” even “as rich and as sensual—and as tranquil—as a thousand acres in the country”; Michael Kimmelman, writing in the Times in August, critiqued it in hindsight as “flat” and “austere.” AECOM’s irregular, fetus-shaped greensward has little to offer in terms of orientation or bounding. (Public artworks like Louise Bourgeois’s Eyes[1995] and Tony Cragg’s Resonating Bodies [1996], relocated from the old park, now recall left-behind cookout accoutrements.) What it does do is indicate roughly how high a storm surge the planners are expecting, though the defensive structure itself, a sheet-pile flood wall, is hidden beneath the turf. The project’s raison d’être, to literally shore up coastal resilience, is in fact only legible in one place, on the southern flank of the ziggurat. Here, a sturdy-looking masonry wall emerges from the steep planting beds to carry the flood datum over to a row of flip-up flood barriers, camouflaged with a hex-paver veneer, that ties into the battery’s defenses. Even in this obvious defensive structure the designers have attempted to disguise the function by tilting the stone blocks about thirty degrees, in a move similar to the rhetorical bluestone wall at the nearby Teardrop Park (2004) by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates—breaking up the datum line like the business end of a zebra.

When I saw the first test videos of the deployable flood barriers that have been installed under the FDR Drive as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, I was unexpectedly moved by the display of rational competence in public infrastructure—a feeling rarely encountered in the US these days. One wonders whether a similar setup might have simply been incorporated into the existing Wagner Park, without the need for so much erasure and obfuscation. (The first publicized redesign proposal, released in 2017 by Perkins Eastman, split the difference somewhat.) Garden design has always absorbed and abstracted functional typologies. Couldn’t the deployable flood barrier join the allée, the ha-ha, the espalier, or the lawn itself in an updated landscape vocabulary of diluvian Third Nature? Alas, American landscape architects have been hamstrung by a fear of revealed function at least since Frederick Law Olmsted’s Boston Back Bay Fens—a work of green infrastructure that now reads like science fiction in its 1880s context and whose naturalistic artifice was so convincing that its utility was almost immediately forgotten, reverting to the inert picturesque ornament that it remains today. Closer to home, the glass-topped floodwalls around the Museum of Jewish Heritage immediately to Wagner’s north make no attempt to disguise themselves. Maybe this is because the museum is architecture rather than landscape architecture.

Not every public landscape needs to be a polysemous puzzle box that bespeaks singular novelty or design vision; there is a great need for anonymous space, where people can derive their own meaning through discovery of their own favorite spots and chosen genius loci. New York is full of these: Some are brand new, like the recently reopened East River Park, which, like its Battery Park City counterpart, was razed, raised, and replanted in a controversial redesign that nonetheless produced a tapestry of scenes for individual dramas—that is, a landscape. But when the generic is substituted for the specific, there is a net loss of meaning. Where Wagner Park’s erstwhile allées served as permeable thresholds between the city and the shoreline, its new ramps do the opposite, dissolving Phifer’s pavilion into the smooth flow of the fungible Hudson River waterfront. A few place singularities still make an effort to interrupt this flow, like Mary Miss’s South Cove (1987), just a few minutes’ walk up from Wagner. The environmental artist’s compact assemblage-garden feels like a four-dimensional catalogue of New York’s coastal conditions—built and natural, past and future, kitschy and severe—all lensed into a circular form like light wrapping around a black hole. But in general, New York’s coastline is homogenizing as it hardens and greens.

In the end it is the disposition of seating that most explicitly reveals the Battery Park City Authority’s attitude toward the place. In the 1990s, a rim of backless double benches surrounded the lawn, providing inward sightlines in addition to harbor views, while broad exterior steps turned the pavilion into an inverted amphitheater oriented toward the plaza. That a landscape might be worth thinking about while you are in it seems to have escaped AECOM entirely; attention was instead lavished on the materials, detailing, and quantity of seating facing the promenade, from which the park is invisible even when you’re looking back over your shoulder. Visitor and greenspace alike are primarily entourage for photographs of the Phifer pavilion, one wing of which is soon to be occupied by a ghost kitchen operator that promises “affordable, all-day, sit down and grab & go service.” The resulting landscape is a “place” in the way that a “bowl” is now something that you can have for lunch—that is, a container of things standing in for a thing in its own right. According to Laurie Olin, the brief for the old Wagner Park was simple: “The clients made it known that they desired a green park with trees, grass, and flowers, and that they expected it to be somehow special.” The new Wagner Park is, indisputably, a green park with trees, grass, and flowers.