Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park was closed in the spring of 2023, just prior to its demolition and wholesale reconstruction. Reopened this past August, the park features a landscape by AECOM and a pavilion by Thomas Phifer and Partners.
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 co…
