Welcomed Opening for Battery Oval, Lush Lawn within a Transformed Park

On the Battery Oval's opening day, June 25, there were 100 new blue chairs on the lawn, with 200 more coming soon. The chair, designed by Andrew Jones, is the winning design in a competition sponsored by the Battery Conservancy. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Sunning, running, reading or cuddling. Visitors right away found themselves at home on the two-acre, lush green Battery Oval on Saturday, June 25, the opening day for this long-awaited park within a park.

Long awaited because The Battery’s Oval was completed a year-and-a-half ago. But the roots of its Kentucky and tall fescue grass needed the time to toughen up against what Battery Conservancy President Warrie Price called “the love of millions of people.”

“We just want all of Downtown to really cherish this great asset that we’ve been so patient to wait for,” said Price, the driving force behind the $145 million renovation and redesign of the park. “Waiting that year-and-a-half has served us well.”

Residents who have been longingly eyeing the turf were indeed enjoying the results.

“I love it. I’ve been wanting this grass for a long time, but now we’re moving,” lamented Exchange Place resident Emma Markham, who was lounging in the shade with her son Will, a kindergartner at the Peck Slip School.

Lance Pilgrim and Elif Aksoy, who live on Broad Street, were seated in one of the new blue chairs scattered around the lawn, their dog Whiskey enjoying the shade beneath one of them. “We’re extremely happy that they finally opened up the oval,” Pilgrim said. “Being able to sit in this grass instead of just walking around looking at it—it’s fantastic.”

Those chairs—there will ultimately be 300 of them—are a special feature of the Oval. Called “The Fleut,” they are Toronto designer Andrew Jones’s winning submission in a Conservancy-sponsored competition.

“I wanted to find what would be a nice expression with the lawn, so I arrived at this idea of a garden of chairs, a chair that has this image of a flower” Jones said, as he sat for an interview in one of his creations. “In my competition brief I promoted the idea that people come to the Oval and they pollinate these chairs.”

The designer was spending much of the day observing how people used the chairs—delighting in the ways they arranged them, used them as foot stools, headrests or, for some kids, made them an ideal place to curl up.

“I didn’t want people to just perch or sit like on a bench,” he said. “I wanted people to be able to sit for a long time, to come and bring a book and just kick back and enjoy themselves.”

The Oval is just one installment in the transformation of the 25-acre park that includes the Seaglass Carousel, an urban farm, the Battery Bosque, a bikeway and, in the works, a new playground. It has been a massive project filled with delays, Price recalled.

“We had the funding for the bikeway and the Oval before 9/11 happened. We had to make way for the tunnel of the new Number One subway system, that was seven or eight years. Then we started the bikeway and we had [Superstorm] Sandy, and that put us behind a number of years.”

“And now it’s open,” Price continued, turning her gaze and smiling towards the park’s newest addition, the Battery Oval. “Look at it! Isn’t it grand?”