Battery Park City: Reimagining Lower Manhattan

Abstract

Today, New York City is an alpha city, a commercial, financial, and cultural capital so connected with the global economy that its single hiccup reverberates around the world. New York’s development can be traced back to the 17th century, when industrious Manhattanites first tapped their island’s most important natural resource: the waters that surround it. With a protected harbor on the East River and access to the American interior via the Hudson River, New York originally emerged as an international seaport and place of trade. The activity on the waterfront directed the City’s economic and physical growth, as banks, law firms, and insurance companies developed to support the shipping and trade industries. Financial and legal service providers converged on Wall Street, and New York’s downtown was transformed into a dynamic business district.But while New York City shaped its international identity around its waterfront, its own populace grew increasingly detached from it. Over the course of two centuries, from the 1650s to the 1850s, expanding industry pushed Lower Manhattan’s residents away from the water, forcing them to retreat further inland. In the 1950s, New York’s port was supplanted by New Jersey’s when the low availability and high price of Manhattan land prevented the city from participating in the shipping industry’s technological revolution. Soon manufacturers abandoned the area and relocated their factories where production costs were lower, and Wall Street’s service firms looked elsewhere as well. With business no longer tied to the waterfront, many firms moved from downtown to midtown or out of Manhattan altogether, attracted by larger offices, lower rents, or both. With no residential population to hold it together, the downtown fabric disintegrated. The piers fell into disuse, crumbling into the Hudson River.In the 1960s, the desertion of the waterfront and the downtown business core spurred frenzied debate about urban renewal, resulting in numerous plans and proposals for the city. The renewal plans ranged in scale, some promoting a single building, others encompassing all of Lower Manhattan, and they were often at odds with one another. New York City did not suffer from lack of plans, but from competing interests and conflicting priorities that made implementation difficult. As described by Charles Urstadt, who served as New York State’s Commissioner of Housing and Community Renewal, eight years of plans and counter plans, visions and revisions […] had mostly benefited the companies making the Lucite used for scale models, and New York City’s printing industry, which churned out copies of each new plan.Most plans were permanently tabled, but a handful were merged and modified to form the 1969 Battery Park City Master Plan, a plan to reclaim the waterfront and revitalize Lower Manhattan. Over the next four decades, the project suffered numerous setbacks, from real estate and fiscal crises to the September 11 attacks, and the plan was revised repeatedly to overcome new political and economic obstacles and accommodate changes in urban design doctrine. In the process of adaptation, social initiatives were sacrificed as the BPCA eliminated public housing, suppressing diversity in the neighborhood, and the project changed dramatically in physical form. Nonetheless, the Battery Park City that exists today has achieved the primary objective of all the renewal plans: to save Lower Manhattan from economic and urban obsolescence.