Battery Park City: Jacobs' Manifestation; or is it really?

As a feature of both Modernism and Postmodernism, Battery Park City is a great example to study the possibility of planning a region deriving from historic pattern while satisfying contemporary utility. The transfer from 1969 master plan to that of 1979 explicitly demonstrates the transfer of urban planners’ concern from merely economy and technology to humanity and ecology. It can even acts as a watershed between megastructure trend led by Robert Moses and humane community propagandized by Jane Jacobs.

Battery Park City is a mixed-use development on 92 acres of landfill in the Hudson River adjacent to the west side of Lower Manhattan. It consists of 5-6,000,000 square feet of office space, 960,000 square feet of retail space, and 12,000 to 16,000 units of assisted and unassisted housing. Current residential neighborhoods of Battery Park City are divided into northern and southern sections, separated by Brookfield Place. The northern section consists entirely of large, 20–45-story buildings, all various shades of orange brick. The southern section, extending down from the Winter Garden, contains residential apartment building such as Gateway Plaza, and Rector Place apartment buildings. In this section lies the majority of Battery Park City's residential areas, in three sections: Gateway Plaza, a high-rise building complex; the "Rector Place Residential Neighborhood"; and the" Battery Place Residential Neighborhood". World Trade Center had acted as a great role for Battery Park City, because the soil for landfill is from the excavation for the foundations of WTC and WTC had been a vital motivation and primary factor for the planning of Battery Park City. Along with WTC, Battery Park City as artificial expansion of Manhattan is originally designed as a new attraction in Lower Manhattan and to help Lower Manhattan capable of competing accelerating developing Midtown. What’s more, Battery Park City can be a supplementary and buffer zone for Lower Manhattan as it can share the crowds and works as residential and logistical district for offices in Lower Manhattan. “The presence of a mixed income population downtown after working hours was seen as the key to supporting better retail services; they, in turn, would help downtown compete with midtown for new office employment.”

History

Project Evolution

Throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, the area adjoining today's Battery Park City was known as Little Syria with Lebanese, Greeks, Armenians, and other ethnic groups.
By the late 1950s, the once-prosperous port area of downtown Manhattan was occupied by a number of dilapidated shipping piers, casualties of the rise of container shipping which drove sea traffic to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. The initial proposal to reclaim this area through landfill was offered in the early 1960s by private firms and supported by the mayor. That plan became complicated when Governor Nelson Rockefeller announced his desire to redevelop a part of the area as a separate project. The various groups reached a compromise, and in 1966 the governor unveiled the proposal for what would become Battery Park City. The creation of architect Wallace K. Harrison, the proposal called for a 'comprehensive community' consisting of housing, social infrastructure and light industry. The landscaping of the park space and later the Winter Garden was designed by M. Paul Friedberg.

Design

The 1969 master plan as a linear city of low-rise, big density fabric by Wallace-McHarg is one of the answers to the waterfront. From the rendering of the proposal we can see the similar desire and perception with Brooklyn Bridge by Robert Moses: office and housing are mostly towers constituted whole blocks on the waterfront. And the blocks are with no connection with inner-core pattern and colossal mass blocks most of the vista from the original streets. And the towers are designed as groups with sky-corridors which are symbol of modernism at the time.

It was before 1979 that Alexander Cooper, together with a team of planners for the city of New York worked to study the factors that promote and protect integral urban form that gained impetus in the 1960s with the theories of Jane Jacobs. And they established goals common to neighborhoods and good urbanity in general: “security, stability, maintenance, privacy, scale, variety on a city scale with homogeneity on a neighborhood scale, convenience and identity. “ These studies all acted as the foundation of the 1979 Master Plan.

The 1979 Master Plan criticized the previous emphasis on large, interconnected groups of buildings as megastructure which are unrealistic and impeded the investment of developer due to risky and enormous capital demands. And the 1979 Master Plan, instead, was to create a “simpler and more achievable form” carrying out the enduring principles of the present scheme and build an everyday city written by Jane Jacobs.