The New Brooklyn Bridge Park...

...should be called Governor's Island.

The park is free, the ferry is free.

It's an island surrounded by the cooling breezes of NY Harbor which, I might add give you all the easy feeling of being at the beach, minus getting in.

It partly belongs to the National Park Service with rangers and everything, including historic forts.

It's a historical landscape, with a 92-acre National Historic Landmark District and New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Historic District.

There are acres of lawns -in the sun and under huge trees. Because the island has been underused, the grass is quite nice, even under the trees.

Many of the big trees are labeled (who did that?).

There are historic homes you can simply walk into, doors are open.

You can bike around it.

You can walk around it.

There are no dogs -so no poop, relax in the grass without giving it a thought. Walk in the grass with your shoes off.

• There is culture coming from Creative Time, the Sculptor's Guild, Childrens Art Museum, Figment, and in the future, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Its all over the place and at times, surprising. There's also scheduled music, performances, and events that will only become more frequent as people learn about the island.

• You can get as close as possible to the Statue of Lib without actually going to its island.

• There are NO CARS.

• There are lots of birds to see

• It's quiet in the mornings, very peaceful.

What does it need?

Lose the helicopters. Constant helicopters. This has been a plague on our ears since the middle nineties and has gotten worse every year. Governor's gets tons of low-flying helicopters overhead. Lose em!

More real bathrooms, less porta potties with excellent real estate.

Ferry service from Brooklyn all the time, not just on event days!!

• Bring in the cooks from Red Hook soccer fields to add to the jerk chicken food stand (tasty, inexpensive) in the Nolan Park area and you may just get a foodie crowd.

• Get busy with revamping the facilities for even more things to do. To keep up with what's going on, the island has a blog.

• Set up a kayaking/canoeing dock if there isn't one already. The Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance is on it -City of Water Day.

• Have it open to the public more often: Governors Island will be open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from May 30th through October 11th. On Friday, the Island is open from 10 AM to 5 PM; on Saturdays and Sundays, the Island is open from 10 AM to 7 PM.

NYC bought this parkland for a dollar. Imagine if we built a simple water's edge promenade on the Brooklyn waterfront, forget the piers, the real estate development, all the trouble and used some of that dedicated BBP $350 million for hourly ferry access, 7 days a week, and other recreational support services on Governor's Island, which is just yards away from Brooklyn.
Who needs Brooklyn Bridge Park underneath the the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, when this first class park is just another few feet away. Wouldn't that be a better return on our initial dollar investment?

High Time For High Line

There has been one major park in all of New York City that has managed to go from waste land (or structure) to park land in 10 years, that is the High Line. Recent money donated has given the completion of the new parkway a boost. In fact, as the New York Times pointed out, "This could be the friendliest public/private venture ever attempted in New York City." With a total cost of about $150 million, the High Line has created a stir at under half the cost of the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park. Of course, no one can complain about the private capital connected to the High Line, as that it is of its essence. While the city owns most of the High Line trestle and NYC Parks appears to have some role to play, it is not a stretch to view this parkway as a privately funded and maintained park with public access.

As a public/private partnership, it makes the most sense that this new parkway has a dual personality -its public and private function. In this sense it is the most viscerally dual-purpose, built landscape that I can think of. On the one hand it is a high fashion, high design plinth for the the viewing of NYC architecture. On the other, it is a lowly, industrial structure, re-visioned as a metaphor for a car-less NYC. One aspect serves the vanity of private institutions and developers' dreams, the other serves the public imagination of a future NYC.

The High Line is an elevated parkway connecting destinations and residential neighborhoods, not unlike Vaux and Olmsted's original NYC parkways designed for horse, carriage, and pedestrian strolling. Unlike Robert Moses' parkway system (connecting parks throughout the region via the gentler travel of non-commercial road traffic, with screen plantings designed to provide a serene, bucolic driving experience), there is only modest screening provided by the planting design. In fact, this new parkway functions as a platform for taking in the sights of lower and midtown Manhattan, auspiciously relying on the local architecture. Imagine it as a stroll through a sculpture garden, but the sculptures are the size of buildings. If you live or work in one of these new buildings, you can take the step back to appreciate how wonderfully your own starchitect designed sculpture resides in the New York landscape. If you do not, you can stroll the High Line, panoramistic foldout in hand, ready to identify any building seen in the growing architectural landscape. This is the essence of the private High Line.

On another level we have the romanticization of the railway ruin. Functioning and defunct railways have been seen as picturesque components of landscapes for decades, and their minimal infrastructure is easily incorporated into park designs. The ruins have hosted many parkways throughout the country, mainly as part of the rails to trails initiative. In Paris, the Promenade Plantee created a formal garden from an elevated railway. Many cities are now looking at conversion of their dilapidated high rail. In our own city, Gantry Plaza State Park had, less than fifteen years ago, incorporated industrial rail into its park design. The incorporation of rail into park design, then, is nothing new as landscape design needed to make sense of the wasted, post-industrial landscapes -often the only new space open for park development in our urban centers. What is new, however, is the attitude of an elevated railway park in NYC.

The primary public aspect of the High Line is its manifestation of the changing attitude towards street vehicles and traffic. It does this by anticipating the elimination of the vehicular traffic below, rather ironically through the preservation of the conduit for a mode of vehicular traffic previously considered too dangerous to keep at street level. It allows us to walk along what most of us recall as the unsafe terrain of train tracks and in doing so, gives us a glimpse of a future where walking on the street is possible and safe. The High Line removes vehicular traffic from the urban experience in an apolitical, non-threatening fashion high above the streets, out of sight and mind of the political body of racing vehicles below. In fact, the elevation of the High Line mimics the sense of civic idealism to which it speaks while, to the speedster below, perhaps it's the floating spectre of a return to biological speed.

There will be those who lament the loss of an urban "wild" space. They may have disdain for the "high design" approach. I sympathize with the sentiment for the tangled, messy spaces and the sense of discovery they contain. Yet I won't harp on it, that debate is over, it is built. I think the planting design looks good and the hardscape is nicely textured. I have noticed, however, the lack of what every overpass in this city has come to acquire -the protective chain link fence. Will it grow one in the future? I think we can all hope not.

This landscape offers the kind of close-quartered plant and hardscape experience that I expect to require high-maintanence. Time will tell how well-suited the plants are to this environment, but I am willing to give the High Line designers the benefit of the doubt. This park experiment has been well-funded, and that usually means better care for plants and hardscape. In fact, managing the horticulture and park operations will be a horticulturalist formerly of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. How well the High Line is maintained and at what cost, in conjunction with how much use or abuse it gets will be instructive for any future, parkway proposals.

As we watch the collapse of the American auto industry, and entertain the idea of a city free of personal automobiles, what new urban landscapes will we dream up? Look out Broadway, your next.

The first section of the High Line has been completed, from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, and is projected to open in June 2009.

The New Leisure: Looking At Manhattan

As a gardener, I am often aghast at what it takes to put a park together. Politics, of course, so many different constituencies. But then its the astronomical sums too.

Original construction cost of Central Park was about $14 million from 1858-73 (roughly $225 million in today's dollars). Central Park contains 843 total acres, including 136 acres of woodlands, 150 acres of water and 250 acres of lawns. Prospect Park, covers 585 acres and includes a 60 acre lake, cost $5 million (roughly $87 million in today's dollars) to construct.

The proposed, and somewhat begun, Brooklyn Bridge Park will have 85 acres including 6 piers and 1.3 miles of waterfront. The estimate for the entire budget, or today's estimate -we know what happens to those, to build Brooklyn Bridge Park is 350 million dollars. This is massive spending for a park that is, from what I've seen so far, a much less ambitious design than Central or Prospect Park. In today's dollars, it would have been possible to build both Central and Prospect Park for less money. Somehow, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benape sees this park as "a bargain."

What we get is a park that operates primarily as a plinth for the viewing of lower Manhattan, an interface for harbor activities, and concessions. Should this area be a park? Of course. Are we getting our money's worth? I don't think so.

Take the north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park, years ago re-configured into a public park where it was once a run-down, old NY kind of a hangout. There was a time when no one would accept a park in this location, if not only for the incredible amount of rattle and thrum from the trains on the Manhattan Bridge.

As city parks go, it's quite popular -people are sprawled out on the grass in warm weather, wedding photos are taken, tourists photograph the bridges, dogs are walked, little kids are bicycle-trained. The crowds accept the noisy racket of NYC and embrace the waterfront. The thematic embrace here is a bold revision of the city's infrastructure as a naturally sublime backdrop for leisure and a long overdue acceptance of the desire to near ourselves to water. The pleasure here comes from the calming of the watery middle ground as the Manhattan Bridge's massive, dark underbelly and rumbling incite.

The Brooklyn Bridge operates on the level of a functioning ruin in the landscape. Overshadowed by its slightly newer neighbor, the bridge incorporates engineering history into the schema of the picturesque sublime. The park grounds, benches, pathways and railings are all bland. There are hints of an ecological influence in its native planting. Only the massive stone ampitheater and kayak-launching beachfront under the Manhattan Bridge give us bold moments; a sort of big brother to those significant, original moments at Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens.

Touted for the new addition is the view of the palisade formations of lower Manhattan. Yet, much of what I get from the view of the lower Manhattan skyline I already receive on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, along with its quaint nostalgia for old New York. The low viewpoint offered from the piers has the effect of bringing us to the foot of the Emerald City, looking up, and if your me - wondering who's behind the curtain of Wall Street.

The sketch below, from the Urban Strategies Inc. website, proposes something of interest. It appears to add something new to the context between the bridges and I hope it survives the process. A fear of infant tourists falling into the sea might just divert this design proposal to the trash bin.

A park with this bold budget should have a bold design. Not only formally, but conceptually. A park that incorporates new conceptions of our relationship to nature. A park that gives us more than the plinth effect. I think it is telling that the park is named after the Brooklyn Bridge. After all, that's the part of the park that we know has a heart. That's also the part that is essentially finished and functioning as it should.