Central plaza, fountain, and the arch

The center and northwest quadrant of Washington Square Park were opened to the public today for the first time since renovations began in December 2007. Until the second phase of renovations starts, you can walk through the whole park–the Parks department has even paved extensions linking the new, rerouted paths with the old ones. When I visited, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and a singer accompanied by an upright piano was singing “Get Back.”

Relocated fountain running (via Flickr)

Curbed and Washington Square Park Blog are reporting rumors that the gates will open on the refurbished section of Washington Square Park this Monday, May 18th. The Parks dept. remains mum. Yesterday afternoon, workers were still cutting granite curbstones for the paved paths, but with the fountain on things look pretty much ready to go. (In the course of the renovations, the whole fountain was nudged into alignment with the arch and Fifth Avenue, an extraordinary undertaking for the sake of what seemed like mere symmetry.)

c/o Cronicasbarbaras.com

According to Bucky Turco of Animal New York, 120 out of a planned 132 spots in Manhattan and Williamsburg were painted over. During the proceedings, four participants were arrested: one artist, two “whitewashers,” and a videographer. According to Jordan Seiler at Public Ad Campaign, the videographer still faces criminal charges.

As reported in the Daily Intelligencer and Gothamist, the ad companies went to work quickly, covering up the group’s blank walls and paintings by Monday.

(c/o Governors Island blog)

At the Center for Architecture on Friday, Adriaan Geuze, founder of the design firm West 8, presented his team’s interim ideas for the Governors Island Master Plan. The final plan is to be revealed later this spring.

Geuze gave a general introduction to the design principles and goals of the plan, as well as an overview of the park’s several sections. One theme of the presentation was the topography of the island. Currently, Geuze said, it’s flat: “flatter than Holland,” (Geuze is Dutch). As a result, the visitor to the park sees the whole expanse at once. The plan envisions a series of low hills on the island that will create a more visually suspenseful experience of the park by guiding and framing views. Geuze described this as an experience of “temptation and desire.” The hills will “make your eyes hunger for the park,” he said.

Not incidentally, the additional topography will elevate the surface grade of the park. Currently, Geuze said, you’ll hit seawater by digging a hole 3 feet deep. This shallowness will make it hard for trees to grow, and also puts the whole southern end of Governors Island underwater by 2100, according to sea level projections.

Some additional points worth noting:

• The plan calls for an additional 1300 trees to be planted in the park
• The “Promenade” and “Liberty Terrace” sections will be designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architects of the Lincoln Center renovations
• GIPEC’s popular “free bike Fridays” program will continue
• No mention of the mixed-use commercial districts

For all its positive language and sleek design, the presentation didn’t suggest that the plan would soon become a reality. During her introduction for Geuze, GIPEC director Leslie Koch said, “I hope that, God willing, this will come to pass in our lifetimes.”

I took the ferry out to Governors Island on a drizzly day late last September and sat in on a workshop run by West 8 and the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corp. The workshop was designed to solicit feedback on the master plan from representative visitors to the island. I found the organization of the meeting ingenious: they split the attendees (about 15 of us) up into groups of 4 or 5, gave each group a set of cards representing a variety of activities (nature walk, bike riding, unstructured play, outdoor concerts, and so on), and asked the groups to arrange the cards in sequence to create an ideal day of recreation on the island. This way, the groups collaboratively built a narrative about their use of the park–one whose terms and conditions were structured both by the activities offered and by the limited time in a single day. This helped focus the groups ideas, while also (not incidentally) reducing the chance that a domineering participant would monopolize the discussion. Our groups’ narratives of the ideal visit were then shared with the whole audience of attendees.

I’ll be interested to see in what way this public feedback will turn up in Geuze’s talk. It will also be worth noting how many of West 8′s dramatic ideas from their original proposal remain in the developing master plan (the wetlands, for example, or the mixed-use commercial zones). Whatever it looks like, of course, the master plan is certain to offer a glimpse into the distant future–funding for the island’s operating expenses passed at the eleventh hour this month, and with huge budget shortfalls at the state and city level, the island’s transformation will probably have some time to wait.

It looked to me like a few hundred folks came with pillows, (more seemed to come with cameras instead) and everyone seemed to be enjoying the spirit of the thing. There was a significant police presence, mostly devoted to keeping Williams Street open, with vans full of cops on Broadway, presumably for backup. But they seemed to be in good spirits–”Not your typical day at work,” a bystander joked with one of them.

This project is both like and unlike the Improv Everywhere prank. In both cases, something mundane on the platform is transformed (through lots of work and close attention) into deliberate art. Jacobs aims to say something about media and celebrity, though, not the architectural space of the platform.

In addition to the cheeky surrealism of the prank–which is, of course, a roundly welcome retort to the prevailing if-you-see-something-say-something paranoia–Improv Everywhere reminds us that everyday objects in public spaces are worthy of our intense and sympathetic scrutiny. While the placards mocked the tendentious jargon common to that medium (“The null opacity of the glass is called to attention by the use of ink markers”), they also brought real aesthetic value into focus. One participant writes:

In the course of making the art labels, the mundane stuff of the platform really did become weirdly compelling and beautiful. I wasn’t sure if everyone else would have that experience, or if we would be busy consciously pretending that these random objects were art. In the course of the event, some other friends who came made brilliant observations about the pieces that helped bring my mindset firmly back into of-course-this-is-art, rather than viewing the subway as a collection of quick fixes over time.

I would argue that the “collection of quick fixes over time” lends even more dignity to the objects–what we see on the subway platform is the accretion of the labor of many workmen over time, making judgments and decisions about space, composition, and materials based on the existing conditions, which were themselves accretions of all the judgments and decisions up to that point. These judgments and decisions are, of course, pragmatic and functional, but are also of necessity aesthetic. The result is, to use one of K. Hill‘s favorite words, a palimpsest, the sum of its layers of successive intentions and uses. The historical narrative that these “quick fixes over time” tell has the same kind of aura (in Benjamin’s sense) as a work of art, or a set of old tools.

But the plan is also a super-sized version of the plazas that Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn has been reclaiming from streets at Madison Square and Gansevoort plaza. Those are two of the more successful examples of the city’s new street-use philosophy, one that re-evaluates the wisdom of committing a much greater surface area to cars than to pedestrians (who represent the much larger proportion of the street’s actual users). And just as those plans have had their detractors–mainly those who reckon that a Department of Transportation ought not to be in the business of sticking tables and chairs in the middle of traffic lanes (read: taxi drivers, quoted obligatorily in every article about the changes).

News sources lined up fairly predictably, it turns out. Livable Streets activist/journos at Streetsblog declared:

Bloomberg Puts Forward a Bold, Transformative New Vision for Broadway

while the Post wheezed ungrammatically:

B’WAY BLOOMY’S ROAD-KILL PLAN

The New York Times featured the plan in an edition of “Room for Debate,” in which Robert Sullivan’s contribution seemed to us vastly the most considered and best articulated (but not merely boosterish) argument in support of the plan; NYOC has spotted Sullivan’s words quoted in several blog posts and web-news articles on the reactions to the plan, so we won’t foist them here. Unfortunately, the best minds that the Times could muster to defend the “con” side of the debate were a car-oriented planning advocate and a Cato institute fellow, not the most inspired choices, and both voiced rather tepid, conditional and almost perfunctory objections. Turns out, some pedestrian malls in some cities have not generated swarms of happy shoppers–but of course, Broadway is already teeming with pedestrians. “Pedlock,” gridlock for walkers, in Times Square is one good reason to support the changes. Unless pedestrians flee the suddenly roomy and inviting public spaces opened up by the new plans, it’s hard to see how this would be bad for business.

This sensitivity to history is coupled with a blunt social mission. Only a delicate glass wall separates the lobby from an outdoor sunken plaza, so that the interior seems to bleed out onto the sidewalk. An unusual concrete seating area anchors the corner of Broadway and 65th Street, giving both the lobby and the plaza the feel of an outdoor meeting space. It’s a clear-cut defense of the public realm, something we could use more of in this age of corporate privatization.

WNYC will broadcast tonight’s program from the new concert hall.