The “new” Wagner Park in Battery Park City opened this week after a two-year closure and a nearly $300 million redesign.
But New Yorkers should howl to the moon — and to the state legislature in Albany — over the desecration of a public jewel, done to suit the agenda of environmental zealots egged on by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
It’s the most rotten Lower Manhattan scam since hustlers sold “tickets” to the free Staten Island Ferry — only the warped park’s victims aren’t tourists but Wagner Park’s millions of annual users, most of them New Yorkers.
The original Wagner Park, near Battery Park City’s southern tip, opened in 1996 to universal acclaim. New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger called it “one of the finest public spaces New York has seen in at least a generation.”
Battery Park City residents as well as New Yorkers from every part of town and tourists agreed. They fell in love with the 3.5-acre oasis’ peaceful, river-fronting lawns that were ideal for sunbathing and taking in views of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. A popular Italian restaurant buzzed indoors and outdoors with happy sun-worshippers and sightseers.
Now, they’re all gone in the name of “saving” the park from a mythical flood that exists only in its designers’ imaginations.
The state-controlled Battery Park City Authority is, naturally, trying to cosmeticize the debacle with promises of future outdoor arts programs and hype over four planted “ecological zones” that merely take space away from the original lawns.
We’re meant to be impressed by an “integrated flood barrier system” that “maximizes water capture and reuse,” a 63,000-gallon underground cistern for rainwater reuse, “flip-up deployables” (whatever they are), sustainable materials, native plantings and “lush gardens planted with native, salt-resistant species.”
But park-goers know otherwise.
Novelist Jon Pepper, a Battery Park City resident, said the new pavilion — slightly larger than the original one and relocated to the east — “looks like bunkers on the Maginot Line,” a reference to France’s WWII defense that failed to stop the Nazi advance.
Say this for the builders: They delivered, on time and within budget, precisely the lousy product that BPCA brochures promised.
Mature London plane trees were uprooted. The park’s central area was elevated 10 feet in order to conceal a buried flood wall. Much of the lawn was sliced and diced into a ziggurat of paver-surfaced ramps and stairs that have no clear entry points.
The park’s once-level, river-facing side swelled into a stepped cliff of wooden, bleacher-like seats where I saw precious few users on two sunny afternoons this week.
The revamped lawn is, on paper, only slightly smaller than the original one. But it’s effectively much smaller due to the way it’s segmented into landscaped portions that aren’t conducive to lazing and lolling.
The modest concession building on the park’s eastern side gave way to a lumbering red-brick structure that looms over the lawns’ remnants like an intergalactic invader.
The BPCA put out a “request for proposals” to operate a two-level, 5,000-square-foot restaurant — one-third larger than previous license holder Gigino’s. The greater number of seats, combined with the pavilion’s “community center” and rooftop viewing area, will shatter Wagner Park’s low-key ambience that was at the heart of its charm.
How did this all happen?
Besides enriching a legion of architects, engineers and landscape designers, the mutant “park” is supposed to protect against a theoretical, worse-than-worst case, one-day-or-someday “100-year” flood caused by rising sea levels.
In fact, no such catastrophe has ever occurred. The original park was so securely engineered that Wagner Park suffered no damage whatsoever when superstorm Sandy caused the city’s highest sea level rise ever recorded.
All of landfill-based Battery Park City was designed to withstand any conceivable high water. Which was why, as New York Magazine reported and illustrated, the entire three-mile long complex “shone brightly” after Sandy while most of the rest of Manhattan was dark.
Local residents fought fiercely against losing their beloved oasis, but in the end, the “resiliency” lobby of climate-change alarmists carried the day.
Of course, New Yorkers don’t want a woke lesson in saving the earth. They want a park easy to love — which, at Wagner Park, will live only in memory.