Teardrop Park

From CollabLandWiki

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LOCATION: River Terrance between Warren and Murry streets in lower Manhattan, New York City.

Battery Park City, a neighborhood of 9,000 people on the west side of Lower Manhattan, has a new two-acre children's park built on landfill and bordered by tall apartment towers that makes dramatic use of bluestone granite. The name “Teardrop” is descriptive of the park's shape. The small park, built for $17 million, packs in almost 66,000 plants, including flowering helleborus and halesia trees. Teardrop Park is in the north end of Battery Park City, hidden between four apartment buildings just off the Hudson River. The park had been informally named Teardrop, after the shape of the space, before September 11. Though it sounds a little maudlin, the name was made official afterwards, the only explicit reference to the memorial function it is well-formed to take on.

Teardrop Park is not the first impromptu memorial space in Battery Park City. The Irish Hunger Memorial has become an unofficial part of each year’s anniversary of September 11, as people walk to its promontory to see the Statue of Liberty in the distance. And while Matthew Urbanski, principle at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which designed Teardrop Park, said the wall was not designed as a memorial, he was not surprised that it could play that role. “It’s happenstance, but that’s one of the functions that the public landscape is supposed to serve.” Battery Park City has long been presented as Exhibit A to demonstrate how public money has been used to make the city a playground for the rich. Rather than paying taxes like the rest of the city, BPC revenue pays for its parks, and whatever’s left over goes to the city. And there’s no doubt that most neighborhoods couldn’t spend $17 million on a neighborhood park. Just the computer controlled, rooftop mirrors that redirect sunlight down to the park cost $350,000. But Teardrop shows critics got part of the story about BPC wrong. The problem isn’t that BPC isn’t gritty like much of the rest of the city, it’s that the rest of the city doesn’t get such good treatment. And while critics say BPC was designed to be a private playground, Teardrop is just the opposite: plans originally called for four private courtyards for the surrounding buildings, which the state authority replaced with plans for the public park. With the gentrification of Manhattan nearly complete, there’s no one left to privatize from.

• DESIGNER

- Teardrop Park, designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, features many different kinds of landscapes, including its focal point, a 27-foot bluestone wall meant to imitate a mountainside. The wall will develop water on its jagged rock face during the summer, and icicles during the winter. It also has a portal in its center made of limestone for visitors to pass through to the other side.

PROGRAM

• to relax on the lawn

• explore a small wetland

• climb a rocky outcropping

• stroll around a smooth path

• children can slide down slide

• children can play in sandbox

• north facing wall alive with moss and water in summer, ice in the winter

• STRENGTHS

- Makes best use of available sunlight for the benefit of plants and people

- Provides a park section tailor-made for young children at their scale

- Provides a rich, highly concentrated, and diverse pallet of plant materials

- Concentrates a sense of nature's presence by sculpting elements like rock outcroppings using NY state rock

- Provides a place where people will want to and will actually gather, linger, and enjoy.

- It is shaded by the tall buildings.

- The extra long slide, the huge sand pit, and the water area is unique and fun.

- The fact that it is sheltered and kind of hidden is a positive.

- NYC doesn't have many places to enjoy that have that feeling of being in a different kind of space.

- The slide is an activity generator where children climb rocks, stairs, or numerous other pathways to get back up to the top.

• WEAKNESSES

- The park is somewhat hard to find, and it is surrounded by non-descript residential towers.

- It functions mostly as a private park for nearby building residents.

- Some people feel the spaces feel threatened by the jagged rock that somewhat pops out at you.

. - Most complaints come from the building residents, who complain that they cannot walk their dogs there.

- Somewhat unfriendly to navigate.

FEELINGS AND THOUGHTS

"I wanted to provide children with an oppertunnity to come to a place that leads them to another place."

"tension between built and natural keep the site from feeling like a fake countryside."