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STILL HERE NEARLY THREE DECADES AFTER IT OPENED IN NEW YORK’S BATTERY PARK CITY, THIS SMALL SITE CONTINUES TO SPREAD ITS INFLUENCE—AND BRING PEOPLE JOY. BY JANE MARGOLIES / PHOTOGRAPHY BY LEXI VAN VALKENBURGH 102 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2016 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2016 / 103 rom Mary Miss’s home and studio, it’s Today much of New York’s waterfront has been civic purpose—something she has continued to a couple blocks south, then west, to developed with attractive and popular parks and pursue with the nonprofit she founded, City as reach Battery Park City, the landmark public spaces like this one. But South Cove— Living Laboratory. residential and commercial develop- conceived at a time when the shoreline was a Fment built on landfill just off Lower Manhattan. no-man’s-land, cut off from the rest of the city “To work on something on this scale—something Miss, an artist, is a walker, and when her dog by roadways and railroad tracks, and dotted with permanent that would affect the lives of New Yorkers was young and spry, they used to make the trek derelict warehouses—helped spark New York’s —that was an amazing experience,” she says. together regularly, wending their way down to ABOVE rediscovery of its waterfront. It gave those who The landfill area— South Cove, the small park along the Hudson still mostly undeveloped lived and worked in Manhattan a toehold on The three of them had never worked together River she designed with the landscape architect when this photograph the river. It pioneered technical innovations and before the Battery Park City Authority’s ambitious Susan Child, FASLA, and the architect Stanton was taken—added 92 design features that influenced the development Fine Arts Program assigned them to the site, locat- Eckstut; it opened in 1988. On any given day, acres in the Hudson of parks and waterfront spaces up and down the ed at the southern terminus of South End Avenue. people stroll through the honey locust grove, bask River just off Lower Hudson and indeed all around New York. “It was a shotgun wedding,” says Eckstut. The arts in the sun on benches facing the water, and climb Manhattan. program sought to redefine the role of the artist ABOVE to the top of a lookout tower that resembles the LEFT And it also boosted the careers of its creators. in the creation of public spaces, involving them Statue of Liberty’s crown, while children clamber South Cove is the The pilings in the river Child, whose Boston-based firm, Child Associ- from the outset in the design of the spaces, rather over the boulders that separate the upper and smaller of two coves are grouped to mirror ates, was not well known before her work on than merely commissioning them to add a piece lower levels of the site. that were part of the form of the planting South Cove, would go on to other high-profile of sculpture after the spaces were developed. Each and boulder edge. Battery Park City’s projects such as restoration of the gardens at member of the team brought essential expertise 1979 design. Beloved by locals and admired by landscape archi- TOP RIGHT Edith Wharton’s The Mount in Lenox, Mas- and a unique point of view to the project. tects, South Cove, however, remains little known as Amanda Burden, then sachusetts. Eckstut has worked on large-scale an entity unto itself—there are no ta-da! gestures vice president for projects all over the world and is today senior Eckstut was the ultimate insider. He and the archi- marking its boundaries, no signs with glittering planning and design of principal at the New York-based Ehrenkrantz tect Alex Cooper, then his partner in Cooper Eckstut letters differentiating it from the other waterfront the Battery Park City Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, a division of Perkins Associates, had drawn up the 1979 master plan for Authority, with Mary areas in Battery Park City, which flow from one to Miss; Douglas Reed, Eastman. For Miss, the project was an early Battery Park City, which set aside an extraordinarily the next. But it deserves wider recognition. FASLA; and Susan chance to step out into the public realm, whet- generous third of the total 92 acres for public space. COOPER ROBERTSON, LEFT; COURTESY PERKINS EASTMAN, RIGHT EASTMAN, PERKINS COURTESY LEFT; ROBERTSON, COOPER RIGHT ALFORD, DUNCAN LEFT; PAYNE, CYMIE Child, FASLA. ting her appetite for installations that served a He’d also worked with the landscape architects 104 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2016 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2016 / 105 N work that received considerable press coverage Hanna/Olin on the design of Battery Park City’s at Vassar College, marrying, and raising a family. titled Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, consisting waterfront Esplanade, which opened in 1986 and She was already in her 40s when she planted an of five installations spread over four acres serves as the backbone of the development. Eckstut immense vegetable garden edged with flowers at the Nassau County Museum on Long knew Battery Park City’s backstory (the proposal to and crisscrossed with walking paths at her wa- Island. It involved a square pit cut into a build a new town in town was first put forth in the terfront house in Westport, Massachusetts—after field that people climbed down into. “I early 1960s, the project came under state control which her interest in landscape design took off. ABOVE was interested in engaging people in the The design bridges in 1968—and then nearly tanked during New York She got a certificate in landscape and environ- water and land with experience of a place,” she says. City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s). He saw the big mental design from the Radcliffe Institute and pilings that lead to a picture. Above all, he wanted to make sure South worked for the City of Boston in a program that wooden edge, then to With South Cove, Miss’s goal was to Cove would be successfully stitched together with converted empty lots into community gardens, boulders and plantings engage people with the river. She had the rest of the development. before returning to school to get an MLA from that step up the site. lived just a couple blocks from the Harvard’s GSD. She and the landscape archi- Hudson since the late 1960s but had al- OPPOSITE Child was the plants person in the group. And she tect Peter Hornbeck formed a firm that evolved Drawings by Mary Miss ways felt frustrated that she wasn’t able was, indeed, “a genius with plants,” says the land- into Child Associates, and Doug Reed, FASLA, show circular forms to get close to the water. The elevated scape architect Anita Berrizbeitia, ASLA, a profes- joined the staff, becoming project manager for and undulating edges esplanade provided a spectacular vantage sor and the chair of the department of landscape South Cove and, eventually, a principal. Although that soften the point for looking out at the water; for architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate their firm was not a local outfit, they came to the rectilinear form South Cove, she wanted to get people right School of Design (GSD). Berrizbeitia, who worked attention of the Fine Arts Program’s selection of the cove. down next to the water, and out onto it—so for Child for several years, says admiringly, “Out of committee, and Child and Reed “went all out” in they could “see it, feel it, smell it,” she says. four plants she could make a work of art.” submitting their qualifications for the job, recalls If they got splashed at high tide, all the better. Reed, who later cofounded Reed Hilderbrand. But Child brought considerably more than horti- The site to which the trio was assigned already cultural expertise to the project. A strong concep- For her part, Miss brought vision—and glamour— had the rough outlines of a cove from the master tual designer, she’d come to the field of landscape to the group. Just prior to the South Cove project, plan—south of the esplanade, the landfill edge architecture late in life, after studying art history the artist, a native of New York, had completed a MISS MARY cut inland, then continued in a straight line south 106 / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2016 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE JUNE 2016 / 107 RIGHT The urban coastline of New Jersey can be seen across the Hudson. before jutting out into the water again. The apart- ment buildings to the east of the site had yet to be built; south of it there was no development whatsoever at the time—just barren landfill down to historic Battery Park. Miss, Child, and Eckstut’s site was essentially a blank slate. The landfill material—much of it taken from the excavation of the nearby World Trade Center site—was laid on a relieving platform that al- lowed river water to flow underneath it. The fact that they would not be building on solid ground but on a structure cantilevered over the Hudson forced the designers to carefully consider the weight of anything added to the site. Child and Reed experimented with blocks of structural foam, and they carefully calibrated the soil mix (by the soil scientist Philip Craul) laid on top— techniques used all the time today that were pioneered at South Cove. Although the engineered structure of the platform presented challenges to the landscape architects, the artifice of it all was intriguing to Miss. She became interested in “how to reveal the fake infrastructure that was supporting the fake land.” Beginning in 1985 there were marathon planning sessions over a four-month design period, during which every- one batted around ideas.

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