Scheme Team Picked for Governor's Isle
By Nick Pinto
POSTED JANUARY 1, 2008
City and state officials announced the selection of a design team last month for the public park to be built on Governors Island.
The team, led by Dutch design firm West 8, was one of five finalists selected last summer by a jury of city officials and design experts.
The team’s winning design features wetlands, lawns, artificial hills and a bicycle-friendly waterside promenade, but officials at the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, which is overseeing the revitalization of the island, said that the designs were purely conceptual and continue to assert that the jury is selecting “a team, not a scheme.”
In an interview with the Trib, GIPEC president Leslie Koch said the design process will take at least two years, during which Lower Manhattan residents can voice their opinions, both through Community Board 1 and public hearings.
“We’re absolutely aware of the importance of this to Lower Manhattan,” she said. “There’s an enormous need in the area for green space.”
Koch said the creation of a park on Governors Island will give New Yorkers a new sense of their city.
“One of the things we so often forget in New York is that we are a city of islands surrounded by water,” she said. “You get that from the Statue of Liberty, but our visitors and relatives are more likely to go there than we are.”
Koch said a design by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava featuring a suspended gondola running from Lower Manhattan to Governors Island remains a possibility, pending a city feasibility study. Proposals for the commercial, residential, and educational reuse of the buildings on the island will be considered as the park takes shape, she said.
Julie Nadel, chair of Community Board 1’s Waterfront Committee, cautioned against the kinds of impractical flights of fancy that she saw in many of the design teams’ proposals.
“There’s a specific, practical need and Governors Island could fulfill that need,” Nadel said. “The natural qualities of the island that are inherent there—the river, the harbor and the sky—are just so wonderful that you don’t need to add to that with an artificial environment.”
In particular she reiterated CB1’s desire for more frequent ferry service to the island, as well as amenities like ball fields that are scarce in Lower Manhattan. But ballfields, she said, are “not a designers dream come true. Designers like to design all kinds of fanciful things that they win design awards for.”
City Councilman Alan Gerson praised the selection of the West 8 design team, but said too much of the planning for the island’s future has happened behind closed doors.
In a prepared statement, Gerson, who chairs the City Council’s Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Committee, called for greater public involvement in the design process, and pledged to hold hearings on the Governors Island plan in February.
“Government makes its best decisions when they are arrived at through a democratic process,” Gerson said.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Eliot Spitzer have committed to funding the $200 million that the design work and environmental review are estimated to cost over the next two years.
The overall project is expected to cost $400 million, and advocates of the new park say the money will have to keep flowing to keep the project on track.
“We’re lucky right now to have a governor and mayor both committed to this, but you never know how long that will be true,” said Robert Pirani, the head of the Governors Island Alliance, a coalition that supports the park. “We’ve asked the governor and mayor each to contribute $40 million in the budget that’s going to be deliberated this spring.
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