DON’T LET ANYONE tell you that Little Island isn’t a great place to meet French tourists. Now in its fourth year of operation, the mediagenic pier garden on Manhattan’s West Side, designed by Thomas Heatherwick and Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects principal Signe Nielsen, has settled into its place among New York’s ponderous attractions. Three minutes down the quay, opposite the Whitney Museum of American Art, sits the even newer Gansevoort Peninsula by Field Operations. These two parks, representing about eight acres of land, cost something like $330 million. By way of comparison, the United States recently authorized Taiwan’s purchase of a fleet of ALTIUS-600M-V suicide drones, intended to “turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape” in case of Chinese attack, for $300 million. Considering this cheaper alternative to waterfront development raises some obvious questions about these new investments on the Hudson River. Why did they make this pair of parks? (To stoke speculative development.) Why did they put them right next to each other? (No real reason.) Who were “they”? (Married philanthropy titans Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, as well as the grandees of the Hudson River Park Trust, and various other power brokers.) Less easily answered is whether these parks are any good or whether parks can be “good” or “bad” at all.
I first visited Little Island in the spring of 2022, about a year after it opened. On my way up to the Island’s little crow’s nest, I thought I might be able to see the exact spot on the Hudson where Andrew Jackson Downing, the original home and garden influencer, met an early demise in a steamship explosion. Downing’s popular landscape writing had introduced antebellum America to the notion that naturalistic landscape design could nourish civic virtues, whether at the scale of the backyard or the town green. The opening editorial of an 1848 issue of Downing’s magazine, The Horticulturalist, featured an imagined dialogue with a patriotic “Traveller” just escaped from revolution-addled Europe, yet still impressed by some of the nascent public landscapes then emerging in the capitals of the Old World. “You may take my word,” cried the Traveller, that municipal parks, once established in the New World, would be “better preachers of temperance than temperance societies, better refiners of national manners than dancing schools, and better promoters of general good feeling than any lectures on the philosophy of happiness ever delivered in the lecture room.” Even in the 1840s, even before the United States had seen such a thing as a public park, there was the idea that a landscape is something for improving people.
“Landscape architect” has always been an awkward job title, because it never intrinsically meant anything; Frederick Law Olmsted just married two words to generate prestige for a made-up profession through association with a respected one, like “water sommelier” or “prompt engineer.”
As it turns out, my memory had been wrong; the Henry Clay had sunk up by Yonkers, well out of sight of the Meatpacking District. But the ersatz connection has been helpful in making sense of the West Side’s gleaming Island and Peninsula. They refresh Downing’s idea of landscape for our own time, enacting a particular set of civic ideals through their organization and presentation of public space.
Landscapes are difficult to critique precisely because of this conceptual pass-through; journalists and stakeholders find it easier to talk about what they represent than what they are. In this sense, these two parks are just the freshest facts on the ground in a decades-long struggle between developers, environmentalists, community board members, and residents over the gentrification of the West Side, translated into a more contemporary language of wellness and sustainability. Barely had the soil settled on the grave of the much-protested Westway plan (buried highway, park on top) when the current scheme (highway on top, parks alongside) emerged, bearing a showy recourse to community input as virtue and alibi. Under the auspices of what is now called the Hudson River Park Trust, the project initially prioritized remedial interventions—the refurbishment and development of piers and docks—before eventually hitting upon the successful formula of starchitecture plus greenspace. The historical debates over overdevelopment, air rights, funding streams, fish habitat, and general nuisance, undertaken in sometimes-questionable faith and recorded dutifully by an uncritical press, appear somewhat gothic in hindsight. A 1990 New York Times article (“Hudson River Park Plan Draws Critics”) reported that “the pier that juts into the Hudson from Bank Street, for example, sustains three levels of life, residents say: strollers on the topside, addicts who step down into its recesses to smoke crack, and maturing fish, like striped bass, that are nurtured in the calm water lapping at its pilings.” It’s hard to determine whether the author was for or against; in any case, the Bank Street pier was not one of those chosen for resurrection.
Little Island’s roots purportedly trace back to a 2011 cocktail-party encounter between Diller and Hudson River Park Trust chair Diana Taylor, whereas discussions about turning the Gansevoort Peninsula truck depot into a beach go back at least to the mid-’90s. Both projects have been widely discussed in the media since their conception, but this attention has tended to focus on process, controversy, and only the most superficial features, at the expense of any sustained consideration of the parks’ design merits. But it’s the details that matter. The particular qualities of these two new public spaces—and of a third, in the East River—offer some clues about the ideologies driving landscape architecture in the 2020s.
BY NOW EVERYONE has seen Little Island’s graceful piers; they have been described as tulips, champagne flutes, and pots. (A friend of mine thinks they look like menstrual cups. Then again, passing under the park’s shadow, I always feel like a morsel from the perspective of a hungry lobster.) Different media personae have adopted different angles. For the tawdry, the clout-chasing saga of billionaire rivalries, soirees, and lawsuits that teased hellscape money out of the Diller–von Furstenbergs; for the righteous, critiques tying the Island’s pointlessness and expense to the broader gentrifying project of the High Line; for the insipid, encomiums in Curbed and the Times arguing that the Island is good because it reminds us that the rich still care. In each case, the park recedes from view, forced to give ground to the authors’ ideological concerns. What does the Island have to say for itself—if anything?
The primary experiential condition of Little Island is exposure. Nowhere else can you experience that finger-in-the-outlet jolt of capitalized disruption as here, poised a hundred feet off what might be the most boring skyline in Manhattan, at the business end of the High Line—which, for all its externalities, at least offers a unique vantage for encountering the condition of accelerationist hyperdevelopment, screened by twists, pinches, and plants. Little Island offers no such mediation, only naked sightlines onto an unfamiliar annex of a famous city. True, that’s the Statue of Liberty over there, but it’s so far away and facing the wrong direction. One suspects Thomas Heatherwick’s next civic proposal will be to move the statue closer to Manhattan so people can see it better.
It’s all very placeless, and it’s not just the site that creates this condition. The Times’ Michael Kimmelman praised Signe Nielsen’s landscape design as “everything green and flowering that visitors will see, smell, lay a blanket on and walk past.” It was a weirdly Victorian thing to say, but it gets the point across. The sensual plantings credibly evoke the mood of summiting a New England hilltop, though it’s unclear why an artificial islet on the Hudson should recall such a scene. Even after several years of aging in place, the flowers and shrubs still seem as though they were just dropped off, like centerpieces on a dinner cruise.
Little Island is not a place; it is a consumer product, even an appealing one. As such, it possesses the quality of disposability—not the cheap, twentieth-century disposability of a Styrofoam cup, but the expensive, twenty-first-century disposability of a MacBook.
Representational landscapes needn’t look so contrived. At the southern end of Hudson River Park, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ Teardrop Park mediates an equivalently placeless site—the negative space between four unremarkable Battery Park City condo towers—through the blatantly symbolic gesture of a full-scale replica of a Poconos highway roadcut. The difference is that MVVA’s enormous stone wall generates its own authenticity through mass and texture—as do the thickets that surround it. There are pores and gaps here to stick a skeptical finger into or to crawl inside.
Not long after Teardrop Park opened in September 2004, Ethan Kent, then an administrator at the Project for Public Spaces, wrote anxiously that “the park is not inviting because its spaces feel threatening—many parts are obscured from view as you experience it.… Most turns reveal nothing more than shrubs and another mysterious turn.” In concluding that “the real mystery is how the landscape architect expected humans to participate in this space,” Kent backed into the design’s key virtue. Teardrop Park’s convoluted disposition of pathways, plants, and rocks indeed offers its inhabitants the freedom to engage with the space according to their own needs and desires. It’s understandable why New York’s civically prurient might find it threatening, as they have long found the denser precincts of Central Park. (Kent was particularly affronted by encountering a couple “engaged in intimate physical activity.”) Luckily, they have little to fear from the Hudson’s newest offerings.
The hanging gardens at Little Island, shockingly species-rich and generous with their blooms and needles yet starkly inaccessible, offer no such probing access. (After all, those tulips are just big planters.) Visitors are kept to narrow pathways that can feel unsettlingly crowded; on what might have been the last warm Saturday of this year, the ascent to the pinnacle was as stuffed as the room where they keep the Mona Lisa. Or they perch nervously on the steep, seasonally restricted lawn, as though waiting for something to happen. It makes more sense at night, when the paths are lit theatrically and the referential placemaking falls away, leaving only a fragrant stage set—a venue.
But in the daytime, there in the river, fixed between the Whitney and the W Hoboken, framed in the background of other people’s videos, watched over by Blade helicopters and the rubberneckers atop the Highline’s Diller–von Furstenberg Sundeck, you’re caught in the searchlight of capital more blindingly than anywhere else in New York. Little Island is the immersive neoliberal urban experience: fungible, exposed, commodified. There is a sheen over everything that rejects the wandering mind required to cultivate vulnerability, openness, and introspection; you bounce off the surface like a water bug.
In thirty years, after Little Island has been decommissioned, cool people not yet born will sneak in and stage daring performances in the moonlit undercroft.
Some parks can acquire permeability over time, through the slow accumulation of blemishes and small wounds—the cracks and porous edges that allow a landscape to function as a gradual, prosthetic extension of the self’s boundary. But Little Island cannot weather in place for the simple reason that it is not a place; it is a consumer product, even an appealing one. As such, it possesses the quality of disposability—not the cheap, twentieth-century disposability of a Styrofoam cup, but the expensive, twenty-first-century disposability of a MacBook. It’s easy to conceive of the High Line aging, because it is already kind of broken down, reflecting its peculiar surroundings—yes, starchitect condos, but also water towers and drainpipes, odd lightwells, filthy and patched corners, the exciting vertical parking lot near David Zwirner. The presence of this scar tissue is proof that the landscape has the capacity to regenerate itself according to the patterns of its use and the conditions of its surroundings, like the crows who use antipigeon spikes to construct even-stronger nests. Even the elevator that leads you down from the Sundeck to the Genesis dealership (i.e., the route you take to get from the High Line to Little Island) is full of leaves and, as of my last visit, has a big X on the floor like in a Road Runner cartoon. It’s unlikely that any of this mediating maintenance will take place at Little Island, out there on its ratproof legs. It will receive baby Botox for as long as it isn’t embarrassing, or until Barry Diller’s twentieth yearly check clears—and then it will be condemned, for safety’s sake.
The best part of the Island is the least verdant. Halfway up to the west pinnacle, a landing offers a view out from under the substructure. To lean there against the railing and look out toward New Jersey through the forest of graceful stems is a wholly new way of experiencing the river, like being in the Great Mosque of Córdoba and Fallingwater at the same time. In the afternoon the reflected light plays on the underside of the tulips like on the ceiling of a Venetian boudoir. For this one moment, the designers managed to solve the impossible brief of placemaking in thin air—they just did it upside down. The vertiginous possibilities of this alternate-universe water garden, taking advantage of the quarter-billion-dollar infrastructural budget to do something truly strange, make the immersive Skyrizi commercial they actually built all the more depressing. More than a New England meadow or the West Side’s own glamorous ocean-liner past, Little Island reminds of how the world’s Dillers and their design courtiers demand their civic landscapes be pacifying, not stimulating (or even particularly interesting)—despite what Heatherwick, in his 2023 sermon Humanize, has to say about a “plague of boringness” in architecture today.
Down there among the sparkling columns, an off-limits gantry hangs low over the water. It’s an invitation. The desire to climb out onto it is unavoidable, and the future becomes obvious: In thirty years, after the Island has been decommissioned, cool people not yet born will sneak in and stage daring performances in the moonlit undercroft. Ten years afterward, the city will notice this and solicit design proposals for its sanitizing, and the cycle of the High Line will begin again.
IF LITTLE ISLAND OWES its insistent, unmoored whimsy to Heatherwick’s manic pixie dreamboy vision for the civic landscape, then its new neighbor, Gansevoort Peninsula, opts for a different approach—one that crystallizes all the imaginative proposals swirling around the remnants of the failed Westway plan into a single, irresistible idea: a beach, touted as the first public one in Manhattan. The park’s October 2023 opening was buoyed by breathless evocations of summertime fun, with the New York Post reporting that “bathing suits and bare chests were on full display” and Kathy Hochul herself urging everyone to “get this party started.” And so, on my first visit, in late spring, I was surprised to find no beach at all.
Speaking neither as a geologist nor philologist but simply as someone who has lived in the world, I would submit that the minimum viable qualification for a place to be a beach is that you can go into the water. At Gansevoort, a sandy rectangle is separated from the Hudson by a fortified barrier of riprap and stone blocks; park employees are sometimes on hand during the day to supplement the placards warning people not to wade in. Even kayaking, for which Field Operations included a whole concrete ramp, is frequently prohibited due to the proximity of combined sewer outflows. I watched a kayaker, unexpectedly, get pulled over by a police dinghy a few hundred yards offshore, though whether this was due to E. coli levels or some unrelated traffic infraction I do not know.
Manhattanites have always had beaches, of course; they just happen to be in Brooklyn and Queens. Way back in the gumshoe era, New Yorker mainstay Joseph Mitchell reported on a typical summer scene at Coney Island:
There are over 1,000,000 hot, happy humans on the three miles of clay-colored strand. The sand is covered with wriggling flesh. The sand is carpeted with brown, red, pink and white flesh. Males with paunches as big as beer kegs are stretched out flat on their back. They wriggle their toes.
At Gansevoort Peninsula, few paunches are in evidence, and in all of my subsequent visits I have yet to see an unattractive supine body in its luxuriant sandbox. (It is officially designated a “sand bluff,” but you’d never know.) Media write-ups and even the pictograms on the elaborate Hudson River Park maps reinforce this normative stance on who and what the landscape is for. This is not a beach; it’s a place to be sexy near water. Not to have sex, of course—there are no Rambles here, and there’s really just too much goose shit in the sand for the idea to be appealing. This denatured eroticism is especially ironic because the piers that Little Island and the Peninsula replaced were, not that long ago, cruising grounds and unsanctioned nude beaches. The Hudson River Park Trust is not ignorant of this history (the group’s decades-long ambition to “clean up” the West Side has always carried multiple meanings); to an extent, the bowdlerized memory of an “authentic” past is part of the brand, from euphemistic informational placards to David Hammons’s eerie and enormous steel sculpture Day’s End (2021). Naturally, the impact of any of these references is dependent on the viewer’s own knowledge (and baggage); thanks to the adjacencies of the trust’s big investments, Hammons’s wireframe homage to Gordon Matta-Clark mostly makes me think about the latter in relation to Andrew Jackson Downing—two New Yorkers, both perplexed by architectural form and both dead by their midthirties.
David Hammons’s Day’s End (2021) Ben Nadler
James Corner’s path to the Peninsula tells a similar story of flattened nuance. Before he became the leading promulgator of the global corpo-picturesque, Corner was a provocative landscape theorist operating in a self-consciously hermeneutic mode. Field Operations, the design practice he cofounded with the architect Stan Allen before later parting ways, broke through with two projects now considered instrumental in catapulting landscape to the front lines of ecology-inflected urban transformation: the High Line, begun in 2004 and completed in three phases from 2009 to 2014, and the remediation of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, whose first phase opened last fall after twenty years of planning. In his seminal 1997 essay “Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity,” Corner writes how the new millennium promised:
landscapes that precipitate (and are caught within) processes of indetermination and diversification; landscapes that engage, enable, diversify, trick, emancipate, and elude—put simply, landscapes that function as actants, as continual transformations and encounters that actively resist closure and representation.
The initial proposal for Fresh Kills, which released migrating bosques and meadows to crisscross the enormous dump in a permanent state of becoming (the park, now styled as Freshkills, isn’t expected to open in its entirety until 2036), still feels like lyrical theory given physical form.
Corner went on to corner the market on high-profile, high-complexity green-urbanist masterplans, corporate plazas, and downtown parks in China and the US. Gansevoort Peninsula has more in common with these glossy landscapes than with the sprawling Freshkills, which valorized process, the free play of materials, and emergent order. The Peninsula is perhaps the most rigorously differentiated landscape in New York; the boundaries between materials and programs are rigid, thin, and straight, like carbon nanothreads. The control over edges is impressive. The possibility of anything “emancipating” itself is unimaginable.
There is only one boundary with any nuance in the entire park. On my first summertime visit I decided to try to have a picnic at one of the sturdy, generous tables next to the Peninsula’s little lawn. As I drank a revolting wine cooler, I listened to an ecological educator explain to a small group that the water below Day’s End is technically safe enough for recreation for more than 300 days out of the year. A whiff of methane drifted by. I watched someone push a dog in a stroller and noticed that the square cobblestones in the picnic zone were of the same dimensions and materials as those in the adjacent walkway, but with a rougher, sparklier finish and more irregular heights, allowing for a little bit of relief. It looked like a giant ball had rolled through the area, crushing the pavers in its path. The boundary is revealed only glancingly, as a shimmering moiré effect.
This subtlety serves to highlight the strictness of everything else. Even the trees have little fences around them. The boarded and paved areas abut one another tightly, sometimes differentiated by nothing more than a controlled texture rotation. The programming is similarly controlled; there are probably more signs per square yard here than anywhere else in America. (Many are related to dogs, who can’t read: no dogs on the lawn, no dogs on the sports field, no dogs on the “beach,” no dogs in the planting, no dogs over twenty-three pounds in the “dogs under 23 pounds” dog-run.) The squareness of everything, the clear demarcation of activities, even the rakish angle of the perimeter paving strip give the whole park the feeling of an isometric simulation game like Rollercoaster Tycoon or SimCity. The logic matches too: Given appropriately designed infrastructure, users will behave predictably.
The primary virtue championed by Gansevoort Peninsula is correctitude. It presents an orderly vision of New York more akin to the authoritarian beta and gamma world cities that Field Operations and its landscape-urbanist peers have found to be especially fertile ground. The only emancipatory actants I observed during my picnic were one little girl who spent twenty minutes collecting pieces of trash to throw into the river and city birds behaving in unfamiliar ways. Seeing a pigeon or a sparrow sporting in the spray of cruise wakes, perhaps dreaming about catching a crab, reminded me that a real beach is a landscape with chaos at its heart, confounding to authority, where you can really expect to see anything because everyone has the opportunity to just run off into the ocean and disappear. (Sous les pavés …) So I went downtown and caught the ferry to the Rockaways, where a stretch of the beach is currently all torn up, bulldozed into ziggurats and craters by the Army Corps of Engineers, which is trying to keep the shoreline from washing away. I drank a michelada and watched some frisky pigeons acting inappropriately.
INSOFAR AS LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS can be considered stars, Manhattan’s new emerald choker is studded with them—Laurie Olin, Ken Smith, Thomas Woltz, Corner, Nielsen, Van Valkenburgh. Meanwhile, the provisionally named East Midtown Greenway (EMG)—a bike path and pedestrian walkway that starts at 53rd Street and runs about a half mile north, twenty feet out in the East River—was designed by the faceless Canadian megacorp Stantec. But sometimes a ghost kitchen delivers a great burger; the park is replete with design touches that a more acclaimed landscape firm would never make, and for the most part its anonymity serves it well.
The EMG opened in December 2023 to muted media attention compared with its wave-lapped counterparts in the Hudson. This might reflect a less overtly accelerationist agenda on the part of planners; rather than modeling a new form of urban immersion or driving speculative development, this floating causeway is ostensibly intended to plug the gap in the otherwise continuous pedestrian thoroughfare wrapping Manhattan’s eastern shore (the Sutton Place Tunnel necessitates the jog out over the water). These greenway schemes nest confusingly: The East Midtown Greenway is one section of the East Midtown Waterfront, itself a subcomponent of the East River Greenway and the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, which also includes the Hudson River Greenway (and Hudson River Park). Perhaps the city’s planning potentates were content with small praise and an easy win after the controversy that continues to surround the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, a drearily protracted affair that has seen Bjarke Ingels Group’s initial “Big U” system of floodable parks, protective berms, mobile gates, and elevated pathways stretching from east Midtown to west Midtown downgraded to conceptually simpler remedial projects, such as the bulldozing of the Robert Moses–era East River Park and rebuilding it ten feet higher. In its own public relations, Stantec sounded a genial note, describing the EMG as “both beautiful and parklike” and emphasizing its “three major components: a pedestrian bridge, an in-water structure, and the topside landscape,” which is a bit like saying your favorite things about your new house are the front door, the foundation, and the house.
Instead of being forced to look back at the gentrifying wreckage of the Meatpacking District as though in an over-bed mirror, here you gaze out over Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, Astoria—the root suckers of Manhattan’s core growth.
There are remarkably few gimmicks here. One possible exception is a distribution of hexagonal pavers featuring molded outlines of radially symmetrical microorganisms, in the Ernst Haeckel style. This detail, tenderly named Diatom Lace (2023) by artist Stacy Levy, takes pride of place in the PR blurbs but isn’t pushed too hard on the ground. A more sophisticated landscape architect might have written an algorithm to scatter the diatoms among the broader paving patterns, but these are clustered in big gray swatches that gently slide into focus like heat shimmer or drifts of fog. The explanatory placard is already coming loose; in a few years the modest plankton will just be one more of the million unexplained delights that ornament New York’s public spaces.
Other details tend toward the artless. A mounded, planted spine separates the cyclists from promenaders; the soil runs right into the paving on the leeside, spilling mulch everywhere, and the mounds themselves are alternately sparse, weedy, or overcrowded. The peripheral soil pits are hewn roughly out of the hex pavers in big loopy spline curves. These, along with the KNAACK® JOBMASTER™ chests and off-the-shelf streetlights and railings recall a suburban high school or office park.
The most obvious difference between the EMG and the Hudson River Park centerpieces is that most people here are alone, doing nothing discernible as either recreation or exercise. The scene recalls a previous epoch of Manhattan’s public waterfronts—the ecosystem of weirdos Melville’s Ishmael describes as comprising “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.” Every single seat along the Greenway’s course faces Brooklyn, ignoring a Manhattan skyline infinitely more graceful than the High Line strip. Instead of being forced to look back at the gentrifying wreckage of the Meatpacking District as though in an over-bed mirror, here you gaze out over Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, Astoria—the root suckers of Manhattan’s core growth.
On the landward side is an authentic backwater, lined with rusting pipes and vents and gantries and combined sewer outflows like a Terry Gilliam filmset. Around 56th Street—signs embedded in the pavers helpfully situate you—a shoal of slick black rocks breaks the oily surface. A placard explains how engineers employed unusual methods and materials “to extend Manhattan Island into the river,” including “muck, animal carcasses, war rubble shipped from England, and whole ships sunk in place.” This preponderance of fill annihilated the East River’s once-rich submerged ecosystems, and no indication is given that coastal rehabilitation, habitat-formation, or a million oysters are on the horizon. It’s hard to believe that a park built in the 2020s would advance such a declensionist narrative—another thing that distinguishes the anonymous megafirm from the charismatic Pollyannas who represent landscape architecture in the public realm.
The morbid tone persists. The “No Swimming” signs here are less apologetic than those in Hudson River Park, which, like an admonishing adult, suggest that wading in the sewage water isn’t in your best interest; these just flat-out say you’ll die if you fall in. There are, in fact, many more reminders that jumping is a real possibility—life preservers and ladders and emergency call boxes as well as the simple fact of the chest-high railing. The East River burbles and folds, threatening to form whirlpools. Ishmael went down to the sea when he found himself “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.” The EMG could be an area of refuge for someone in such a state.
The true value of an accessible shoreline lies not in its provisions for play or fitness but in the relief that the undifferentiated world of water provides from mental landscapes wrecked by anxiety and alienation.
On a recent visit I got caught in a thunderstorm. About a block north from the Greenway’s 54th Street entrance, the sinuous concrete bench-wall that holds back the tree mounds abruptly disappears, superseded by big granite blocks, already weed-choked. I had stopped to look across the river at the tops of the linden trees that surmount Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, a more serious riparian intervention than any of these, and was thinking about Harriet Pattison, its immensely thoughtful landscape architect, who died last fall. Four Freedoms uses its evident expense to clarify rather than distract, trusting visitors to engage on their own terms with its lawn, allée, and court. (Of all our new riverside amenities, only Olin’s assuredly restrained Pier 26, near the Holland Tunnel, displays a similar respect for its public). I felt a few drops, but it was warm and pleasant and so I kept walking north until I saw lightning flash and sheltered under an impressive young white oak located near the promenade’s midway point. It was only when the sky lit up a second time that I began to consider just how isolated I was, a quarter-mile from dry ground in either direction.
If the East Midtown Greenway offers a more acute sense of physical vulnerability than its close-berthed counterparts in the Hudson, it also surpasses them in affording a kind of subjective vulnerability—the attenuation of the rigid skin that separates humans from their environment. The topological purpose of a pier is to increase the city’s surface area, like the folds in your brain, improving the permeability of the wet-dry boundary. The general effect of New York’s coastal greening is, of course, to expand access to the vicinity of the water; but there are different kinds of porosity, and different kinds of boundaries. The true value of an accessible shoreline lies not in its provisions for play or fitness but in the relief that the undifferentiated world of water provides from mental landscapes wrecked by anxiety and alienation. There is a reason that strange things happen on the waterfront. Parks that use littoral redevelopment to perpetuate psychopolitical systems of control are not attenuating boundaries; they are reinforcing them.
In his 2000 book Greater Perfections, the landscape historian John Dixon Hunt wrote that “landscape architecture has no clear intellectual tradition of its own, either as a history, a theory, or even a practice.” The book’s title comes from Roger Bacon: “When ages grow to Civility and Elegancie, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.” In this sense, Little Island and Gansevoort Peninsula have followed the High Line–adjacent towers by Meier, Nouvel, Ingels, Gehry, et al., and perfected their operation, adding a veneer of sustainable virtue to the production of gentrification. “Landscape architect” has always been an awkward job title, because it never intrinsically meant anything; Frederick Law Olmsted just married two words to generate prestige for a made-up profession through association with a respected one, like “water sommelier” or “prompt engineer.” Now, finally, there may in fact be an authentic niche for the landscape architect—a one-stop consultant for the manufacturing of green credibility, from community charrettes to informative placards to metropolis-spanning greenways and floating gardens. The city where landscape design and business-friendly social control have mated most perfectly is Singapore, which William Gibson infamously described as “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” (and where Field Operations and Heatherwick Studio are currently engaged in a major airport project). It is good that New Yorkers have ever-increasing access to clean, well-designed venues for exercise and recreation. But if the capitalized and sanitized vision of the Hudson River Park Trust and its agents continues to predominate in the shaping of our public spaces, then New York may be on its way to becoming Equinox with Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment.
Little Island and Gansevoort Peninsula have followed the High Line–adjacent towers by Meier, Nouvel, Ingels, Gehry, et al., and perfected their operation, adding a veneer of sustainable virtue to the production of gentrification.
James Corner has said that landscape architects no longer work for kings. But crown princes, general secretaries, corporate power brokers, and Barry Diller still need their green space. The floating park offers a well-tempered playing field for the exercise of landscape architecture in the neoliberal mode. It tends to generate gracious PR on the basis of novelty alone. Unchained from the city’s contested terrain, it bypasses obstreperous neighboring communities and isn’t liable to be used for unsavory purposes; the benches at Gansevoort Peninsula don’t even need to be homeless-proofed. After another year of protests, it’s easy to imagine why cities would be enthusiastic about peripheral parks with easy choke points and no abutting businesses or residences. Anyone who tried to go see the fireworks this past July witnessed how easily the NYPD turned Hudson River Park into an exclusion zone.
In any case, the processes of waterfront optimization beat on; as the mathematicians say, coastlines are infinite. The city has even scored the next choice parcel: 120 acres centered on the Brooklyn Marine Terminal (BMT) in Red Hook, acquired from the Port Authority in exchange for the Howland Hook container port on Staten Island. Already, city, state, and federal agencies have pledged $250 million. The coalition so far assembled by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) includes several dozen politicians and a whole roster of boards, chambers, labor and tenant unions, advocacies, trusts and conservancies, projects, hubs, and at least one beer distributor. The details are still far off; community meetings are ongoing and priorities remain to be set. At the sunny announcement junket back in May, an amped-up, pre-Türkiyegate Eric Adams talked up the plan’s pier-stabilization investments and “new electrified container crane,” while Kathy Hochul seemed ready to bury the dockworkers in the name of accessibility. “People living here have no access to … this,” she said, gesturing toward the river. “That’s unconscionable to me.… Yes, this was once a thriving port, but reality has settled in.” The Times was straightforward in its headline analysis: “This Waterfront District Is a Developer’s Dream.”
Regardless of which interest groups come out on top, the changes to this particular waterfront (and neighboring Red Hook, especially if the rumors of transit extensions prove to have any weight) are certain to be totalizing. The initial master plan consultants are the British design zaibatsu Buro Happold, which happens to be attached to another large coastal development project—the Neom appendage Oxagon, a floating pseudoarcology-cum-transshipment hub in the Red Sea. Initial reporting on the Brooklyn Marine Terminal has so far only vaguely alluded to “amenities,” mixed use, and accessibility; but it’s easy to see new pier gardens floating between the lines, plugging the last gap in a contiguous green band stretching from Corlears Hook in lower Manhattan to the Red Hook Ikea.
It will be difficult to situate design agency within the labyrinthine planning process that the BMT is sure to be. But perhaps the NYCEDC will stumble upon a landscape office that views public space as more than a maximization problem. To be sure, Red Hook’s hypothetical civic grounds may end up preaching temperance and refined manners; generating speculative real estate value; and offering a place for the improvement, and chaste display, of attractive bodies. (The latter is an old preoccupation; Downing’s Traveller promised that public parks would help rescue American women from their typical condition of “extreme delicacy,” brought on by too much “listless loung[ing].”) But it is also possible, given different voices and criteria on both sides of the conference table, that the peculiar conditions of this fresh terrain might lead to something genuinely liberatory: a public landscape that trusts occupants to derive their own values and desires through their encounters with the place, free from the ideology of the people who paid for it.