DREAMSCAPING
I made the trek to Governors Island this summer, for the first time, with high hopes for the recent redevelopment. I had entered the original design ideas competition over a decade ago, followed news of the final competition, and applauded the National Parks Service for selecting and implementing a master plan by the audacious Dutch firm West8. The heart of their scheme is a park called The Hills, a verdant, rolling landscape that teases and refines views across New York Harbor to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Manhattan. Their intitial competition renderings didn’t look like renderings for a city park. They had a kooky golden glow, and showed idiotically smiling New Yorkers roaming through green fields and valleys, carpeted with grass, flowers and shady trees.
So I was surprised to find, instead, a flat field, cut through with a network of bizarrely curving walkways, and punctuated by four scrubby piles of dirt. Lookout Hill, the tallest at 70-feet, has a pile of artfully piled stone blocks along its steep north slope, that leads visitors to a sloping peak from where, behind one, the lower Manhattan skyline is beautifully revealed. From this point one can also see the nineteenth century barracks and forts at the north of the island, maintenance buildings to the east, and the three other hills. Slide Hill features four long metal slides, Grassy Hill features gently sloping fields, and Discovery Hill features richly varied plantings and, at its peak, a Rachel Whiteread sculpture.
Perhaps it’s unfair to judge the park only a month after it’s opened, before its plantings have taken hold and filled the ground. Even my less critical, more botanically-literate companions had trouble imagining what the final groves and fields will feel like. But the design of the park seems severely cerebral, without any of the warmth and weirdness of the renderings, which promised a lush, enveloping ground. It was blisteringly hot during our visit and there were, throughout The Hills, no shaded ground, no permanent water fountains, no permanent restrooms, and only a handful of seats. The Hills doesn’t yet have the grace of the city’s loveliest parks, or the amenities of its roughest.