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

Check out this excerpt from Who Wouldn’t Want to Occupy It? The Emergence of a More Livable Lower Manhattan
New York Magazine, December 11, 2011

Photo by Iwan Baan. Graphic from New York Magazine.

Greenery
Everywhere you look, a new park has popped up.

The year’s most obvious lower-Manhattan news is the reconstruction of the World Trade Center (1) site and the inauguration of Memorial Plaza, which will eventually be joined by 1 World Trade Center, four additional towers, and the Santiago Calatrava–designed World Trade Center Transportation Hub.

For the locals, however, the action is in Battery Park, where an entire acre has been set aside for the Urban Farm (2), composed of 80 plots of farmers’-market-bound organic vegetables, herbs, and flowers, tended by kids from local public schools. Frank Gehry has settled in here, as well, but not to design another blockbuster building. His Battery Playspace (3) (Battery Park, State St.), is set to replace the current, outdated playground in early 2013….Just north of the South Ferry terminal is the revamped and relandscaped Peter Minuit Plaza (9 Battery Park, nr. White Hall Terminal) (7), home to a picnic-ready pavilion designed by Dutch architect Ben van Berkel….

Please read the entire article to see all of the other exciting things that are happening Downtown these days.  We are thrilled to be part of it!

November 10, 2011

King Tide

November 10, 2011

King Tide

November 10, 2011

King Tide

November 10, 2011

Frommer’s slideshow article “New York City’s New Downtown: 10 Years in the Making” highlights the growth of downtown Manhattan since 9/11 and features the Battery’s New Amsterdam Pavilion as a must-see! As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we are reflecting on how much the Battery has changed and grown since that day and are so proud to be part of a vibrant, thriving downtown.