Nice article in The Broadsheet Daily Today. See below.

Battery Charges Up

Gehry Playground and Seaglass Carousel Among Amenities Coming Soon to Historic Park

The Battery Conservancy, the non-profit group that maintains the City park (adjoining Battery Park City) on Manhattan’s southern tip, is entering the final stretch of its design and construction phase this year. By 2014, the Conservancy hopes to implement its 25-acre Master Plan. “We have a sense of completing the culmination of the landscape in 2012-2013,” said Warrie Price, the Conservancy’s president since helping found the organization in 1994.

“We’re 97 percent complete or in construction now,” added Ms. Price. “The one-acre Frank Gehry play space is the next-to-last piece to be designed,” she added, in a reference to one of the park’s most anticipated features. Mr. Gehry is a renowned architect whose local work includes Eight Spruce Street, and whose fame is such that the developer of that building (one of the tallest residential structures in the Western Hemisphere) changed its name from “Beekman Tower” to “New York by Gehry” to capitalize on the designer’s cachet. In 2007, Mr. Gehry agreed to design his first playground, free of charge, for the Battery Conservancy. At the time, the project was projected to cost $10 million. More recently, the Conservancy circulated a request for qualifications for another firm to implement Mr. Gehry’s design. The deadline for submissions was January 4, and the Conservancy now plans to announce the winning selection on February 27. Ms. Price said, “we had a wonderful response from 17 firms, and we’re thrilled with the teams that were brought together. People are excited about building Frank Gehry’s conceptual and schematic design.” She added that “we’re not going to go public with it until the selected team reviews the design and we have a buildable plan.”

Read the rest and see some great new photos here