From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Battery Park Gets a Recharge
Good news for a long-neglected area near Ground Zero.
NEW YORK--According to the popular song, "the Bronx is up and the Battery's down." But for as long as most people can remember the Battery has been "down" not just because of its location down at the tip of Manhattan but because it has been neglected. Today, however, a plan is under way to transform what was little more than a maze of asphalt paths into one of the city's most exciting open spaces.
Working with city, state and national parks agencies to make this happen is the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit corporation. Its president is Warrie Price, who has made re-creating this park her personal crusade for the past 10 years.
Ms. Price is a tireless advocate for Battery Park and its 23 acres of historic waterfront land with stunning views of the Harbor and Statue of Liberty. In l994, after an unsuccessful bid for a City Council seat, she was at rather loose ends when her friend Betsy Barlow, then president of the Central Park Conservancy, suggested that she replicate the private-public partnership model so successful at Central Park and establish a similar Conservancy for Battery Park.
Ms. Barlow knew there was an existing master plan for the Battery that had been drawn up some years earlier but was languishing in some bureaucrat's back drawer and thought that establishing a conservancy might be the one way to breathe new life into it. But the Battery comes under the jurisdiction of the city, state and federal governments, unlike Central Park, where the conservancy's only partner is the city. This would have deterred many people, but not Ms. Price, who came to the task with a background in community-based planning and experience in serving first as a member and then as chairman of her local community board.
When she arrived on the scene, Battery Park was little more than a pass-through route to reach the embarkation point for the ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. A tangle of circuitous and confusing pathways wound around a few sparse plots of exhausted grass, shaded to one side by a large grove of London plane trees, and eventually led to the waterfront, which was dominated by 48 parking spaces reserved for city and federal officials and bounded by 1,500 feet of chain-link fencing. "Cars on our historic waterfront. Can you believe it?" Ms. Price asks rhetorically with mock drama in her voice. "Of course, they had to go!"
Now, 10 years later, a master plan for the park is in place, the seawall has been rebuilt, the ugly fencing and the parking spaces are long since gone, and the park is undergoing a renaissance. Ms. Price may appear diminutive, but removing those 48 parking places was the first clue that this was someone who meant business, and as Ms. Barlow puts it: "Don't be deceived, she's a real fire ball." Together with her board, she has raised $10 million in private funding, which in turn has leveraged $47 million more in public funds--the largest single grant of $8 million coming this year from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. But her masterstroke perhaps has been hiring Piet Oudolf, the acclaimed Dutch garden designer--winner of the international competition to landscape the Lurie Garden of Chicago's new Millennium Park--to design and implement a horticultural master plan for Battery Park.
Mr. Oudolf's work is to be done in tandem with the original master landscape plan made by Philip Winslow, but his own design style is instantly recognizable. It involves natural-looking gardens and swathes of grasses mixed with drifts of perennials chosen for their shape, color and hardiness. He designs beds that have yearlong interest and project broad sweeps of color and rhythmic structure. "I don't want to copy nature but to give a feeling of nature," he says.
The first phase of the park's restoration is now complete. It has released the waterfront, installed new railings, and restored the lower and upper promenades. Mr. Oudolf's first planting schemes are on view in a series of beds that run along the upper promenade. They were planted last year and formally opened this year when they were dedicated as The Gardens of Remembrance in tribute to the events of 9/11--as this promenade was itself an evacuation route used that day. New granite benches have been ingeniously banked into the sides of the beds and provide a wonderful vantage point to view the sweep of New York Harbor.
The next stage is more ambitious and involves the redesign of a 57,000-square-foot shaded area to be known as the Bosque. The old grove of 140 London plane trees has been limbed up and will preside over a series of shaded "rooms" punctuated by 23 more beds to be designed by Mr. Oudolf. There will be a children's fountain, new paths, lighting, food kiosks, a place for outdoor dining, and even a carousel with an aquatic theme harking back to the original New York Aquarium (which was housed in the Battery until it was dismantled by Robert Moses in 1941). The big yellow machines are already at work removing the asphalt; the pruning and shaping of the existing trees has begun; and next spring, 34,000 plants chosen by Mr. Oudolf and arranged to his specifications will be planted.
And there's more to come: a new bikeway and an ambitious plan to open up a broad lawn in front of early-19th-century Castle Clinton, and in partnership with the National Parks Service a plan to revitalize Castle Clinton itself. This includes constructing an open-air glass structure on its ruins to serve as a performance-arts space.
Making a neighborhood park of this caliber costs money, and though it is expected that some funds will come from city, state and federal sources, Ms. Price and William Rudin, chairman of the Battery Conservancy board, are very much aware that a great deal more private money must be raised, and they are looking to companies that work in the downtown area to help them with this endeavor.
Ms. Price insists nothing could have been achieved without the support and enthusiasm of the city's Parks Department, whose commissioner, Adrian Benepe, gives her credit for being "the sparkplug for igniting the renaissance of the park." It's already October, but the Gardens of Remembrance are still abloom with Mr. Oudolf's mix of interesting shapes and textures, and more people are coming to see and enjoy the park. The era of benign neglect is already a thing of the past. Thanks to Warrie Price and her board, the Battery is no longer down.
Ms. Garmey lives in New York and writes on gardens and gardening for The Wall Street Journal.
