From PlanPhilly
Governor's Island, New York City
An “urban-planning Rorschach.” Wish we had thought of it first, regarding the re-do of Penn’s Landing. But here we’re referring to Nutten Island, a.k.a. Governors Island, a 172-acre anomaly in the mouth of New York Harbor profiled in the Aug. 31 issue of The New Yorker by writer Nick Paumgarten.
The place sounds less like our Petty’s Island than our Navy Yard, with its former off-limits-to-the-public nature, its stately old residences, ghost town ambiance, military bearing and location at the foot of the city between two rivers. It is a seven-minute ferry ride from the South Street Seaport or from Brooklyn – about the same amount of time it would take you to drive from Washington Avenue straight down Broad and into the Navy Yard.
Paumgarten has some interesting things to say about the designs in waiting, and the zeitgeist marrying green ambition with urban re-use, “the kinds that involve the clever transformation of dilapidated postindustrial wastelands or garbage dumps into useful and conscience-easing recreational space.”
