THE STRANGEST ROOM I’ve ever been in was in the belly of a faded roll-on/roll-off car ferry called the Yaku II, which plows a daily 160-mile circuit between Kagoshima, Japan, and the rainforest island of Yakushima. A few hours into the voyage, having exhausted such diversions as the gift shop, the swarms of flying fish, and the video slot parlor, I noticed on the ship’s egress plan something denoted as the “Turtle Room,” tucked away at the farthest end of the lowest deck. It turned out to be a square, windowless chamber the size of a small living room, with vaporwave carpeting and drop ceilings. On a raised dais in its center was a two-hundred-gallon fish tank containing two small sea turtles, each about the size of a big rabbit, and some pea gravel. The turtles, which had human eyes, flapped around in circles, bumping into the glass like trapped bumblebees.
Other than the tank and a few storage lockers, the Turtle Room was empty of furniture. The walls were decorated sparsely with laminated posters, providing information on the turtles’ provenance, biology, habits, and care. There was also, mounted between Lucite panels like a rare baseball card, a framed CD copy of Brian Eno’s 1979 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Later, I asked a couple of teenage stewards at the information desk about the CD; one of them told me that it was BGM (i.e., background music) and that they played it sometimes when the Turtle Room was closed to passengers. When I asked whether the music was for the human staff or for the turtles, they just laughed.
If these turtles’ weird orthogonal lifestyle—swimming in circles in a box, on a boat, in a body of water, going nowhere—seems appealing to you, you’re possibly in luck: The experience could soon be available to New Yorkers (though probably with worse BGM) in the curious form of the Plus Pool, a long-foretold cruciform swimming pool on a barge anchored in the East River. The first arm of the cross (i.e., a minus, as wags were quick to note) is reportedly on track to open in the summer of 2027. Whether or not this happens doesn’t matter enormously; as pointless as it is, the floating folly is a useful beachhead for exploring a handful of Obama-era waterfront development proposals that are reaching some kind of fulfillment in the mid-2020s. Tax-advantaged and stamped with the imprimatur of idea competitions and international design firms, these optimistic offshore interventions once teased new concepts of aquatic pleasure and suggested the possibility of a greener future. Their maturing forms, now anachronisms, preserve the milieu in which they were conceived—a recent past that can feel surprisingly foreign from the vantage point of our diminished future.
TIME MAGAZINE’S TWENTY-FIVE best inventions of 2013 included “alcoholic coffee”; cronuts; such things as “the Amplituhedron,” “the 3Doodler,” and “the Gastric-Brooding FROG”; “artificial memories”; Northrup Grumman’s X-47B drone; and Plus Pool, which is what you get when you average all the others together. In the sixteen years since its debut, Plus Pool, which promises to use innovative filtration methods that would enable New Yorkers to swim in water taken directly from the East River, has drifted in and out of the shallow end of pop architecture coverage, accompanied by cerulean renderings and overly optimistic timelines. From the beginning, the pool’s boosters have presented its origin as a sort of chill parthenogenesis—a concept springing fully formed from the doldrums of 2010’s record-breaking New York summer. The core team consisted of Dong-Ping Wong and Oana Stănescu, then operating a small architecture practice called Family, notable for collaborations with Virgil Abloh and Kanye West; and Archie Lee Coates and Jeffrey Franklin, founders of the branding firm Playlab. The original pitch preserves a period-appropriate “just bros” discursive mode, recalling a time when movies were advertised as being “from the guys who brought you” other movies:
It was launched as a lark. It was a super hot summer. We wanted to swim in the river, and didn’t totally know why you couldn’t. Dong asked Archie and Jeff to grab coffee, and talk about an idea he had about a water-filtering, floating pool in the river.
A glossy targeted pamphlet campaign and website followed, spawning an internet virality that in retrospect seems a bit bewildering for a pre-Instagram media environment. The proposal benefited from extreme conceptual simplicity and a memetic form, as well as the team’s obvious facility with PR and networking. In one early charitable coup, the Manhattan flagship of multinational engineering firm Arup funded the analysis and subsequent pilot of the filtration system, lending technical credibility to match the project’s seductive renderings and success on the cocktail-party circuit. By 2015 Plus Pool had raised more than $300,000 through two Kickstarter campaigns, produced a working prototype the size of a hot tub, and established a governing nonprofit, Friends of Plus Pool, with a board whose members included Joshua David, the Friends of the High Line cofounder, and Marc Kushner, cofounder of the architecture firm Hollwich Kushner and the website Architizer (and cousin of Jared).
This last feat seems to have been an inflection point. The first-person timeline hosted on Pluspool.com kicks off with milestones like “Win ACEC Award for Engineering Excellence” and “Filtration Proves Successful.” After the 501(c)(3), however, progress begins to be measured in crossovers and collaborations, and the autobiography becomes so loaded with brands (Heineken, MacLaren, Campari, Lavazza), celebrities, and charitable honors that it feels feudal, like a wedding invitation from the elector of Brandenburg. This largesse was redistributed in more and less familiar altruistic modes, such as swimming classes for children living in NYCHA properties, a documentary narrated by Neil Patrick Harris, and, in 2019, a giant floating neon cross moored off the South Street Seaport that used bisexual lighting to indicate the presence of Enterococcus bacteria.
“The only print publication I look forward to receiving in the mail.” — KATE WAGNER
Amid all this ferment, Dong-Ping Wong was ejected from his own brainchild. He alleged that he was “frozen out” of board meetings as early as 2022 for raising concerns about “exposing the project to the levers of gentrification” and criticizing the nonprofit’s lack of leadership diversity. (His former collaborators delivered PR-approved responses to the debacle.) Nevertheless, and in spite of a series of technical and regulatory setbacks (the deployment of prototypes has been bedeviled by seaweed, ice floes, and bacterial surges), the Friends succeeded in consolidating support from the political class. The de Blasio administration green-lit a site—across the FDR from NYCHA’s Laguardia Houses (and the proposed location of the Two Bridges Towers luxury high-rise quartet)—while New York Governor Kathy Hochul pledged $12 million to finally launch a demonstration version of the project as part of her NY SWIMS initiative. Hell Gate’s Max Rivlin-Nadler, a committed Plus Pool hater, has suggested that Hochul might have been guilt-tripped by a 2022 New York Times editorial about pool inequity; whether thanks to the Times or Neil Patrick Harris, Plus Pool’s message got through.
That it did makes some superficial sense; New York has struggled with swimming capacity for years, having just barely bounced back from a postpandemic staffing gap. (A new contract for the notoriously omertà-sealed lifeguard union, boosting pay and weakening some testing requirements, seems to have helped.) But people continue to drown at the beach—seven each in 2025 and 2024—and the city is getting hotter every year. In a situation where pool access is supply constrained, any additional lanes, no matter how tardy or potentially gentrifying, might seem beneficial. But $50 million for 300 swimmers (in the Plus Pool’s hypothetical, fully quadri-brachial form) isn’t the kind of math that will change anything. For comparison, the monumental Astoria Pool, one of eleven aquatic centers erected by Aymar Embury II and Gilmore D. Clarke in the Moses–La Guardia era, was built to fit upward of six thousand and recently saw a significant functional renovation for just $19 million, which won’t even get you half a plus these days. What makes the Plus Pool hype feel the most exaggerated of all is that the city already has a quixotic floating pool, which is to say a barge with a pool on it; it’s just in the Bronx, where no Kushner would want to have a gala.
THE FLOATING POOL LADY is a 2,540-ton deck barge, retrofitted with a seven-lane swimming pool and the requisite support spaces by the same Gulf Cost shipbuilders who fabricated Plus Pool’s prototype. The lady in question is the planner and former city official Ann Buttenwieser. While working on an architecture dissertation at Columbia (an interesting if somewhat chaotic grouping of waterfront development case studies published as Manhattan Water-Bound in 1987), she became captivated by images of offshore swimming platforms set up in the 1890s to afford tenement dwellers opportunities to bathe. After twenty or so years of op-ed writing and fundraising that led to speculative plans drawn up by the architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld, Buttenwieser purchased and outfitted her vessel in time for the summer of 2007, which it spent moored off Brooklyn’s Pier 4. The following year the lido voyaged north to Hunts Point in the South Bronx, where summer amenities are hard to come by, for what was supposed to have been a short stay; it has held anchor there for eighteen years. Capacity is limited to around 175 swimmers. Expect long lines to get in.
The Lady is docked at Barretto Point Park, an excellent, generous public space designed by Ricardo Hinkle of NYC Parks in 2006 on the southern shore of Hunts Point, a low-lying peninsula walled off from the rest of the Bronx by the Bruckner Expressway. Much of the neighborhood’s land mass is reserved for the vast Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, the transshipment point for a quarter of the city’s produce, a third of its meat, and nearly half of its fish, most of which arrives by truck. The noise and smog are horrendous; Hunts Point has some of the highest asthma rates in the city, and it’s a long, hot walk to the 6 train. The park and the pool are among a number of relatively recent government initiatives to improve quality of life for the community. This past winter saw the long-awaited scrapping of another, grimmer floating facility: the hulking Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, last of the city’s fleet of jail barges and long anchored next to Barretto Cove (just across from Riker’s Island). The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and Department of Transportation’s sprawling Blue Highways Plan aims to replace the endless maraud of particulate-belching semis with fleets of barges and electrified cargo bikes. A Metro-North stop and major upgrades to the food market are also forthcoming. It is potentially an exciting moment for the neighborhood.
And yet these ameliorations carry a wistful note—the memory of a more ambitious vision for Hunts Point that sprang from 2013’s epochal Rebuild by Design competition. Following Hurricane Sandy, Obama tapped his Housing and Urban Development secretary, Shaun Donovan, to head up a governmental task force to help the tristate area recover from this disaster and mitigate the effects of the next one. Freshly orange-pilled following an official tour of Dutch water-management infrastructure, Donovan produced a competition brief that called for urban, landscape, and ecological design alongside hydrology and civil engineering and that placed heavy, explicit emphasis on incorporating coastal communities and local stakeholders into the planning process. The contest had six winners; a third of the pot, some $335 million, went to Bjarke Ingels Group’s Big U (now d/b/a East Side Coastal Resiliency), a hybrid park-seawall wrapping the lower Manhattan shoreline with a lime-green buffer of wet-dry parks, sloping berms, operable floodgates, and other dramatic interventions to safeguard the dark patch in Iwan Baan’s famous Sandy blackout heliphoto. The smallest sum—$20 million—went to “Hunts Point Lifelines,” an entry from the University of Pennsylvania and the landscape architecture firm OLIN. It was the best of the bunch; not much of it survived.
An eternal 2011 reigns in the minds of the pathological optimists in charge of the American landscape.
The Lifelines team proceeded from a recognition that the vulnerabilities apparent at Hunts Point, a logistical hub barely above sea level and an inhospitable place to live, were recursive and self-reinforcing. Their proposal was equally polyvalent: a total reorganization of Hunts Point’s economy and surface landscape, interweaving vegetated pedestrian arteries, new microgrids and maritime supply lines, shore-oriented job training centers, and a flood-mitigating girdle of levee parks and constructed wetlands. Drawing on ideas generated by a thick ecosystem of preexisting local organizations, Lifelines recast the neighborhood’s proximity to the estuary as an amenity and a source of connection rather than a blight and hinted at a new kind of human habitat, better suited for the disasters coming our way. After New York City kicked in an additional $25 million, the NYCEDC convened a working group of politicians and power brokers who predictably lobotomized the scheme, omitting the landscape transformation in favor of functional upgrades to the food market (a $400 million electrification plan kicked off in December).
Preserved by bureaucratic inertia as if by the frozen vacuum of space, these ʻOumuamuan artifacts have maintained their initial trajectories from an epoch before the past decade’s rapid cancellation of the future.
Little of these visions, big or small, was noticeable on my last visit to Barretto Point Park, on a July day so scorching that I worried my proteins might start denaturing. The park was full of screaming children pouring buckets of water on each other, and I decided to take a circuit around the pier, a large fake-wood structure built in 1996 and reconstructed in 2000 after being struck by lightning. As usual, it was crowded with fishermen; on my return leg I paused to watch a man and three boys hoist up a big metal cage at the end of a stout blue rope and tip out its contents onto the planks—a half dozen oysters, which they put into a Home Depot bucket and took home. A tag on the rope indicated that the shellfish were a test cohort installed under the auspices of the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) education advocacy group, which recommends against eating its research subjects.
BOP has been seeding oysters all over New York Harbor for a decade now and is about a sixth of the way toward its titular goal. Last summer the outfit kicked off its highest-profile collaboration so far, with the New York landscape architecture studio SCAPE. The joint venture, Living Breakwaters, reprises elements of firm founder Kate Orff’s breakout project, Oyster-tecture, a precocious contribution to the Rising Currents exhibition, staged by the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, two years before Hurricane Sandy. Oyster-tecture imagined restoring biodiversity to the city’s waterways by seeding, as a start, Brooklyn’s toxic industrial waterfront with oysters. Dangled from rope nets to keep them off the silty, overdredged channel floor (oysters prefer to perch rather than settle), the bivalves would help clean up the Gowanus Canal and eventually, once agglomerated into semiartificial reefs, support a hybrid wave attenuation program with more nuance than the Army Corps’s standard tool kit of seawalls and levees. It was a PR success; something about the way the portmanteau channeled a vogue for biodesign, the vibrant teal section perspectives, and Orff’s rugged-nerd persona triggered dopamine valves in a certain kind of wonky reporter’s brain. For Rebuild by Design, SCAPE adapted the scheme for the Sandy-ravaged south shore of Staten Island. Living Breakwaters netted $60 million from the competition organizers, against a projected budget of more than $100 million. Construction began in fall 2021, with workers on barges mounding up great stone and concrete blocks, some custom designed to be more appealing to the oysters—carved-out chunks with the inscrutable specificity of prehistoric votive offerings. Seeding kicked off in July 2025 and is evidently going well.
The oyster, an ancient symbol of debauchery, is an odd avatar for landscape architects.
Out on Robinsons Beach, the closest public access point to the Living Breakwaters reef, there is no signage advertising the most viral landscape architecture project of the 2010s. But other than the less-than-turquoise water, the facts on the ground are pretty much in line with what SCAPE pitched back in 2013—certainly compared with the fate of Penn/OLIN’s Hunts Point plan. There are a few possible explanations as to why Orff’s plan survived, not least being that out there in the water there aren’t quite so many politicos jostling to make your project theirs. But some thanks are surely owed to that simplest tool for building group consensus: the mascot. The publicity genius of SCAPE’s little bivalve ties in ecology (it cleans the harbor naturally); history (oystering in these parts can be traced to Neolithic times); and a climate optimism buoyed by plain old cuteness.
In terms of New York coastal meme-power, the oyster might only be rivaled by Plus Pool itself. The metaphor is multifarious. (As are the organizational ties: As recently as last year the managing director of Friends of Plus Pool, a SCAPE principal, and a BOP director of programming co-juried a water-themed ideas contest supported by the Design Trust for Public Space.) Both the mollusk and the pool are primarily sessile—oysters secure themselves to rocks (and other oysters) with a unique mixture of organic glue and inorganic cement, while Plus Pool will ride the tides poised atop ten-story steel piles. They each also possess a free-swimming larval component: the oyster’s fragile, searching juvenile spats and the pool’s fleshy cargo of bathers. Most of all, both filter water, famously. Plus Pool’s central gimmick is its multimodal filtration system, which theoretically makes possible the baseline dream of swimming in the East River, unchlorinated and fully immersed (though the city recently mandated that the pool include an emergency chlorination system to handle heavy releases from combined sewer overflows). The oyster, meanwhile, can purify fifty gallons a day, a fact the BOP reiterates like a mantra. Visitors to Governors Island, home to the project’s headquarters, may have encountered one of its young ecologists showing off a single oyster in a tank of clarified river water—a hard day’s work.
Of course, a filter is not just a filter; not all permeability is the same. The oyster’s prodigious purification takes place across the folds of its gills and mouth, where hairlike cilia seine tiny algae, plankton, nutrients, and toxins out of the water column. Some of the stuff is rejected and sent to the bottom; the rest lingers in the oyster’s shell and its soft parts. This is what gives these creatures their terroir, what separates a Blue Point from a Beausoleil. By virtue of its filtration, the organism itself becomes an environmental condenser, concentrating the qualities of the aqueous landscape into a singularity to be consumed as a delicacy or gorged upon. (The BOP says it will be a very long time before we can safely sample its local crops; New York’s waters remain too dangerous to be savored.)
Plus Pool. Lauren Martin
Plus Pool, on the other hand, is constituted to avoid terroir at all costs. Initially conceived as a wholly passive skin of nested membranes, the design has since changed to a less conceptually elegant but more practicable system of receiving tanks and various filters, through which river water is pumped on its way into the pool itself, leaving its concentrate behind. The evacuation of this East River bouillon is no small matter. In July, Friends of Plus Pool announced that it would postpone, by a year, a pool prototype originally meant to open at Pier 35 this summer because the only available sewer hookup is currently occupied by the Brooklyn Bridge–Montgomery Coastal Resilience project, a successor scheme of the Big U. In any case, the resulting pool water will be stripped of the qualities that would otherwise distinguish it from any other aqueous experience, be it a chlorinated city pool or a dumpster full of Croton Reservoir hydrant water. Plus Pool will still be a pool on a barge, despite the press releases practically promising the possibility of coming face to face with a fish. “Sea creatures,” Plutarch wrote, “are altogether strangers to us, and are born and brought up as it were in another world.… That place which we inhabit is hell to them, and as soon as ever they enter upon it they die.” The Plus Pool team believes that the inverse is true as well; we can come right up to the waterline, but it’s not where we belong.
WHETHER OR NOT IT LIVES IN HELL, the oyster, an ancient symbol of debauchery, is an odd avatar for landscape architects, generally strait-laced types who have tended to adopt a persona of responsibility, good health and temperance, and enlightened rationalism, at least since the days of Frederick Law Olmsted, a grade-A neurotic who gained celebrity on the strength of a Dixieland travelogue wherein he inferred slavery’s inferiority from the poor state of Southern room service. Consequently, our park makers continue to identify primarily with the tasks of resisting climate change, improving municipal efficiency, and encouraging physical fitness—priorities that are inscribed all along the city’s increasingly salubrious shoreline.
In a previous, prejogging epoch, the waterfront was a place for baser pleasures. My favorite historical sybarite, a peculiar Gay Nineties railway entrepreneur named “Diamond” Jim Brady, particularly favored the hospitality of the Manhattan Beach Hotel, emblematic of that era’s generous tables:
All dinners started off with oysters. These were then followed by soup, clear and thick. For finicky eaters, who could manage only one soup, the clear was generally given preference. After the soup came the hors d’oeuvres, consisting of timbales, palmettes, mousselines, croustades, bouchées, and the like.Then came the fish course, followed immediately by the entrée, which might consist of terrapin, oysters, crabs, lobsters, shrimps, or frog’s legs. A roast was served, after the entrée, consisting of saddles of lamb, veal, mutton, venison, or antelope; or else turkey, goose, or capon, accompanied by one or two vegetables. When the roast had been finished … antelope, venison, bear, five different kinds of wild duck, geese-both brant and wild geese-grouse, prairie hen, American or English hare, partridge, pheasants, pigeons, wild turkey, or woodcock. This was followed by a cold dish consisting of an aspic of goose, oysters, partridge, prawns, or whatever the chef happened to have left over in the ice box.
Such appetites have vanished, never to return. For the waterfront Dionysian, the only pleasures that still come close are the city’s evermore anachronistic subsidized booze cruises: the Staten Island Ferry, which this spring reinstated alcohol sales, correcting one lingering Covid-era indignity, and the lower-deck concession stand of the NYC Ferry, where a $4.50 ticket unlocks a floating world more sensuous than a dozen Museums of Sex and Ice Cream. NYC Ferry is another NYCEDC outfit, launched in 2017 and operated by the Hornblower Group cruise conglomerate. Various other companies provide passage between points on and adjacent to Manhattan, but Hornblower’s flotilla has achieved a unique quasi-municipal quality in its short lifespan. The two longest cruises, east to Rockaway and north to Throgs Neck Bridge, were recently combined into one feature-length excursion, certainly the cheapest two-hour show in town.
I sat there in a condition of perfect immobile pleasure for almost two hours, time’s passage marked only by the regular lowing of the Staten Island Ferry, gliding by like a lantern-bedecked junk on the half hours.
One afternoon last summer I took the northerly route all the way to Throgs Neck. I’d never visited Ferry Point Park—another Robert Moses original, built atop land acquired by the city during the Whitestone Bridge project—and wanted to see what we all stand to lose from the construction of the three-million-square-foot Bally’s Bronx Casino on park property adjacent to the old Trump Links. Not long after we cast off aboard Time Traveler (ferries are named by city second-graders), I watched a Blade seaplane splash down off Twenty-Third Street, observed a kayak rescue near Brooklyn Bridge Park, and opened my second Hofbrau Oktoberfest before we even passed Roosevelt Island. Not until Yorkville, opposite the Department of Sanitation’s elegant Ninety-First Street Marine Transfer Station (designed by Dattner in 2019), does the view diverge from the FDR’s, passing to the east of Randalls Island, through Hell Gate, and between Scylla and Charybdis Playgrounds, fancifully named by NYC Parks Commissioner Henry Stern in 1997. (Charybdis, in the shadow of Astoria Pool, features a whirlpool-themed splash pad, while Scylla lacks obviously Homeric elements.)
On that Sunday Ferry Point Park’s bosques and bountiful shrubby margins, ringing an expanse of sun-toasted lawns and ballfields, were fragrant with sweet linden, salt spray, and the aroma of grilled onions, curries, and charcoal wafting from grill stations and Little League tailgates. In the cool air and the hot sun my stroll through the idlers and tall browning grasses was positively Elysian—a fitting terminus for the city’s greatest pleasure cruise.
IF YOU GET BACK ON THE FERRY and sail as far as you can in the other direction, you’ll eventually land at Governors Island, which is a different kind of park, offering its own set of pleasures. (This itinerary does require a transfer at Pier 11, where the concession stand will sell you a Stiegl Radler in a paper bag—sunny hospitality not on offer at the Governors Island Ferry’s grim terminal underneath Casa Cipriani, better suited to a Polyphemus than a Diamond Jim.)
Governors Island today aspires to be a sort of bourgeois Prora, offering restorative and commodified pleasures and entertainments just a few minutes from the Battery. It hasn’t quite matured according to these genteel goals, and the somewhat chaotic experience generally confirms the anachronistic power of a water margin to defy social control. There are sixteen different wheeled conveyances available for rent, with little traffic control; the pedal-broughams and tandem bicycles careen wildly off embankments and threaten to annihilate children and small dogs. The glamping site, locked from the outside at night, serves as a sort of human zoo, while beyond its gates the only real symbol of authority is the ranger whose job is to tell people not to bicycle inside the historic Panopticon next to the boba van. Service workers project an upscale carny energy; on one recent visit the man at the craft beer cabana had coopted the food court sound system and was playing Oneohtrix Point Never to a captive audience of ten-year-old summer campers. Everybody is vaping constantly.
The small, strategically situated island, named for its erstwhile role as a pleasure ground for British colonial administrators, has balanced military discipline with odd recreations since its initial occupation by the Dutch West India Company in the 1620s. Despite the fall of Nieuw Nederland and a subsequent quarter millennium of continuous Anglo-American fortification, even the sturdy walls of Fort Jay and Castle Williams couldn’t keep Stuyvesant’s countrymen at bay forever; after the G. W. Bush administration relinquished the island to New York State, a competition for a new master plan was won by the Rotterdam-based studio West 8, led by the internationally celebrated landscape architect Adriaan Geuze. The public redesign, completed in 2016, combined a certain twee exuberance with the global Netherlandish brand of responsible and sustainable hydraulic technocracy. This managerial precision is somewhat belied by the gleeful disorder everywhere—the bike crashes, the aimless looping paths to nowhere, the day-drinking gawkers crowding the antique architecture. If it’s Dutch, it’s in the Bruegelian sense: On Governors Island, everyone gets to be a tumbling peasant for a day. The topographical highlight is the jungly hill at the center, codesigned by (American) Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects with a satisfyingly involuted bimodal ascent (elegant spiraling blacktop for strollers; big, chunky granite blocks for clambering).
However, order is possibly coming. Like Plus Pool and Living Breakwaters, Governors Island is approaching the completion of its perfect form. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s New York Climate Exchange, a four-hundred-thousand square-foot interdisciplinary research hub, is scheduled to break ground this year, bringing hundreds of (presumably more serious) daily occupants to the island. Unless the climatologists intend to have funnel cake for lunch every day, we can assume that Chopts and Wonder food halls will soon follow, like the containerized Burger King Bush sent to Afghanistan. A decade hence the campus-sized Governors Island will probably come to resemble the Cornell Tech campus on its prim northerly counterpart Roosevelt—still a trip, but Benadryl rather than salvia.
If it’s Dutch, it’s in the Bruegelian sense.
So far, Governors Island’s only truly pacified spot happens to be yet another insular statement pool, the centerpiece of the so-called QC Spa of Wonders. Occupying two Georgian mansions on the island’s northern edge, the spa offers an assortment of themed rooms—some familiar (cold plunge, sauna), others less so (in one room all the furniture is nailed upside down to the ceiling; in another, books like All Quiet on the Western Front are mounted in Joseph Cornellish boxes on the walls). The centerpiece is a large, two-tiered outdoor pool overlooking the Battery. On a Wednesday evening last October I was the only solo party, all other patrons falling into one of three categories—amorous couples, sexy friend-pairs taking Instagram photos of each other, and Germans, who periodically appeared to tell me that I was doing things incorrectly. The air was chill and the sky ink colored. Head cold but body warmed by the turquoise water, with up lit sycamores in the middle distance and lower Manhattan beyond, I sat there in a condition of perfect immobile pleasure for almost two hours, time’s passage marked only by the regular lowing of the Staten Island Ferry, gliding by like a lantern-bedecked junk on the half hours.
THE POOLS, THE OYSTERS, the island; the remnants of Rebuild by Design, in Hunts Point and along Tottenville’s southern rim. Earnest or cynical, resilient or diminished, all are alike in one way: They are emissaries from a lost world of early twenty-first-century good humor, state capacity, and general optimism—not that long ago but now wholly alien. Preserved by bureaucratic inertia as if by the frozen vacuum of space, these ʻOumuamuan artifacts have maintained their initial trajectories from an epoch before the past decade’s rapid cancellation of the future, in which the world mostly surrendered to right-wing accelerationism, techno-corporate death cults, and unmitigated global warming. Yet an eternal 2011 reigns in the minds of the pathological optimists in charge of the American landscape. Each new coastal eco-folly reminds us that nobody has yet imagined an appropriate form for the contested commons of the 2020s—let alone the next decade or the next.
At the end of that pleasurable October evening, I realized that the QC Spa of Wonders’ womb-warm underwater chaises offered a direct sight line from Governors Island over to Plus Pool’s eventual anchorage. If it ever finally opens, maybe blithe soakers will lock eyes across the intervening distance, under the Brooklyn Bridge, and forget about their shore-bound cares for a minute. Or maybe not; as Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “Baths may be good for one melancholy man, bad for another; that which will cure it in this party, may cause it in a second.”