PRAISE FOR NEW YORK CITY’S UNIQUE AND BEAUTIFUL RIVERSIDE PARK: BY JAMES RUSSELL
http://www.wsj.com/articles/frederick-law-olmsted-and-robert-mosess-priceless-riverside-park-1438369869
Frederick Law Olmsted and Robert Moses’s Priceless Riverside Park .Riverside Park is a one-of-a-kind piece of infrastructure, seamlessly bringing together park, highway, railway and river.
In 1914 Robert Moses, who would become the park- and highway-building czar of New York City, was taking a ferry across the Hudson River from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As he looked back at the receding shore he could see Riverside Drive, a curving tree-lined boulevard that fronted a sinuous line of grand mansions and stolid apartment houses. Below lay the boulder-strewn slopes of Riverside Park.
It wasn’t much of a park in 1914, rudely gashed by a rail line that ran along the waterfront with clattering trains belching dense coal smoke and carrying reeking livestock to slaughter.
A masterpiece is usually thought the work of a single artistic or design intelligence. But Riverside Park (including Riverside Drive, for they are inseparable as experienced) is the work not only of Moses, but of Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape genius behind Central Park, and the almost unknown Clifton Lloyd, the architectural engineer whom Moses picked to realize his vision.
Americans have gotten used to thinking of highways and railways as blighting nuisances, hacked through neighborhoods, cutting citizens off from parks and rivers. In this extraordinary work of infrastructure, they are seamlessly brought together. Many visitors are only dimly aware of the railroad, and the six-lane parkway is a surprisingly benign presence.
The potential of the Hudson riverfront, with its views to the rocky palisades of New Jersey, caught the imagination of New Yorkers as Central Park spurred the rapid northward growth of Manhattan in the 1860s. Olmsted was the natural choice to draw up plans for a boulevard in the early 1870s. Litigation and city coffers emptied by pervasive corruption delayed opening of the first 3-mile stretch running north from 72nd Street until 1880.
Olmsted edged Manhattan’s rigid city grid with a curving tree-lined boulevard and cobbled promenade that followed the rugged river-edge contours, supporting the road on ramparts of Manhattan schist. The clifflike edge of buildings that would rise along that sinuous line shaped ever-changing vistas of both river and city. He devised narrow tributary roadways separated by sloping lawns where the topography did not allow a direct connection with side streets. It was said to be the most ambitious road-building project in the country.
Later, a lacy, steel-arched bridge spanned low-lying industrial Manhattanville (the western edge of Harlem). By 1918, Riverside Drive was completed, reaching Dyckman Street, near the northern tip of Manhattan. Though many improvements, some dubious, were proposed, posterity was lucky to get the intimate, tree-shaded statue of Joan of Arc (1915, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, John V. Van Pelt), and Grant’s Tomb, a beefy cube topped by a columned rotunda (1897, John H. Duncan). Later came the George Washington Bridge (1931, O.H. Ammann and Cass Gilbert).
Yet no one but Moses seemed to know what to do with a waterfront marred by the railroad, shanties and trash dumps. And by the early 1930s, Moses, who had built roads and parks that no one thought corrupt New York could manage, had the power and political acumen to realize a vision for the park he already had devised when he took that ferry ride, brilliantly documented in Robert Caro’s 1974 biography, “The Power Broker.”
By 1934, he had begun roofing and planting 3 miles of the rail line, knitting the ridge it formed into the patches of Olmsted’s Riverside Park with curved paths and shady swales. He terraced the steep drop from the drive to the river, framing playgrounds and athletic fields with retaining walls and belvederes, many built with granite in half a dozen shades, including honey and pink.
Moses added some 132 acres of fill on the river side of the rail line into which he nestled the Henry Hudson Parkway lined with greenery. Its access and exit ramps descend into the landscape behind berms that damp road noise. The road crosses gently arched, stone-faced overpasses that look as if they had grown out of the park contours.
It was hard to imagine that a public work of such extraordinary complexity, cost and design sensitivity could be completed during the Great Depression, but Moses knew where the government money was and he knew the rules—and how to bend and even break them. Through intimidation and supreme political skill, he prevailed in battles over money and the highway’s route. By 1938, the parkway extended 61/2 miles from 72nd Street to the northern tip of Manhattan.
It remains, an unfinished masterpiece. Only from 72nd to 120th Street did the park get the full $8 million-per-mile Moses treatment. At Manhattanville, the railway emerges from its tunnel and the parkway runs on a utilitarian viaduct. Only a thin, underdeveloped cycling and pedestrian greenway edges the rest of the riverfront.
It’s hard to argue with Mr. Caro’s conclusion that Moses built not a square inch of green in Harlem due to racism. The project also shrank as Moses contended with its staggering expense. Moses took his own estimate that ran as high as $109 million and whittled it down to an official $24 million. The true cost of the park and parkway, Mr. Caro contends, has never been revealed. He calculated it to be as high as $218 million (almost $3.7 billion today).
After Moses finished his work no one with similar vision or power has stepped in to extend the park to Manhattan’s northern tip. The nadir came in the late 1980s, when the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, a 22-acre monstrosity by the engineering firm TAMS (now absorbed into the engineering and construction giant Aecom), rose to blight seven Harlem waterfront blocks.
In 2009, the West Harlem Piers park, by W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, finally brought a narrow slice of Riverside Park through Harlem to the upper Manhattan greenway. Now you can cycle the length of Manhattan on a protected path—a glorious voyage.
No city in America has since successfully fit roads and rails into a park as Moses did because our great ossified bureaucracies are not now permitted to fund such integrated infrastructure and amenity. Later Moses would give up trying to gracefully insert roads into cities, most notoriously in the brutal Cross Bronx Expressway. As with most urban highways, the Henry Hudson Parkway did little to relieve congestion, but the residential value created along Riverside Park has long validated the park’s extraordinary cost. As America’s infrastructure crumbles, learning from Riverside Park could help us rebuild it better.
—Mr. Russell writes on architecture and blogs at www.jamessrussell.net.
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