Thinking About Governors Island

Today's Times takes a long look at possible futures for the city's next big thing: Governors Island. The 172-acre island just off the southern tip o' Manhattan, Dan Doctoroff's newest playground, is ready for some serious redevelopment the money for which is finally starting to come in.

And it's about time. Despite the fact that the city and the state took control of the Island from the Federal government in 2003, little has been done for it besides putting a bunch of firefighters out there. A lot of ideas have been put out there though, including: a "theater, plus" concept with a 5,000-seat outdoor concert space and educational facilities, a top of the line conference center (á la Davos), an amusement park, an arts educational complex, and, our favorite "out there" idea, "a walkable, wadeable and even navigable miniature model of New York Harbor from the New Jersey shore to Jones Beach on Long Island."

Whatever goes up there, we're pretty sure it is going to be a long time (and a loud public debate) before it comes to any fruition. After the failure of the 2012 Olympic bid we assume Doctoroff will try this one with a bit more community interaction.

And anyway, before any plans do get though the island needs to be cleaned up a bit first. "Every day that goes by, the infrastructure on the island and the historic buildings deteriorate," Doctoroff told the Times. "The longer it takes to have a plan, the more it's going to cost us."

Photograph by Vincent Laforet for the NY Times

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By Garth Johnston in News on February 5, 2006 3:02 PM

Comments [rss]

Joep de Koning

I am afraid that somehow a typo slipped in the above Letter to the NY Times Editor. The Tolerance Monument as centerpiece of the Tolerance Park Historic New Amsterdam is no higher than 151 feet or 46 meters, the height of a 14 story building. Mr. Johnston and Mr. Littlefield appear rather alarmist, misinformed or wrong by suggesting that money is or may be the issue. The nonprofit Tolerance Park is entirely self-sustaining and the initial funding sources for it had been raised already in 1999 and 2000. Today, the park would have been substantially completed if the fractious political interests hadn't held it up for eight years. By going to www.NationalHeritageTriangle.c... anyone can get a pretty good overview of our project especially when using the various links.

Jen

Actually, from the way things are going so far, it sounds like Doctoroff learned nothing from the 2012 Olympics. He still seems determined to sell Governors Island to the highest bidder behind closed doors. Join the Governors Island Alliance, kids, and help make sure the public will still have access to the island. And go there in the spring to see it for yourself before it's too late...

timbnyc

Doctoroff is so desperate to develop something, anything....

Larry Littlefield

I fear of a triumph of what liberalism has degenerated into -- a cash eating playground that only the affluent can afford to access, which is kept pristine (like Central Park) as library hours continue to be cut, and parks in poor neighborhoods continue to deteriorate.

The only real issue here for 7.5 million of 8.0 million New Yorkers is will it make money or drain money? Including paying back the money that is being put into it up front.

They should have given it to the U.N., move the U.N. and all the embassies there, and put their Manhattan properties back on the tax rolls.

Joep de Koning

Letter to the NY Times Editor:

Mark Caldwell, in the NY Times of February 5, 2006; “Sleeping Beauty, Governors Island, a trove of history”, did your readers a great disfavor by not revealing the island’s momentous national legacy. Namely, America’s primary virtue of tolerance, a dynamic value, was planted as a legal-cultural tradition on Governors Island by the first shiploads of settlers in 1624.

That legacy was the rationale for our proposal which called for a 50-acre historic park-to-tolerance to be complemented by a tolerance monument of third-millennium grandeur. It was first conveyed to the authorities in 1998 and subsequently backed, in the year 2000, by a pledge of one hundred million dollars as well as the historical and cultural support of the peoples of The Netherlands and Belgium.

The park and monument are now integrated. The first is to be named Historic New Amsterdam and the latter is to be a 300 feet high version of Barnett Newman’s sculpture Broken-Obelisk. That sculpture had been dedicated to Martin Luther King and stands in the great hall of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The tolerance monument is envisaged to be of equal height to the Statue of Liberty because religious, ethnic and racial tolerance is the foundation of successful pluralism. Tolerance and liberty are therefore equal partners of American freedom.

Our park would compose the National Heritage Triangle of three primary American values; each one embodied by an island with its own unique contribution to history. The island triad of Governors-, Liberty-, and Ellis Island would thus symbolize tolerance, liberty and welcome.

Not acting upon recognized intolerance affirms that laxity, passivity and apathy are its friends. Tolerance—an active notion—demands. Always a two-way-street, not one-way accommodation, it defines and gives meaning to an otherwise undemanding, generic liberty. Only broad awareness and conscious vigilance of religious, ethnic and racial tolerance as inseparable from liberty will help safeguard and sustain “American” freedom because in an intolerant [disrespecting, discriminatory] society liberty-for-all is not possible.

Cartoons in a Danish newspaper and the recent international reaction thereto prove that understanding of this fundamental human right is far from universal.

In the end, the French role in the delivery of the iconic Statue of Liberty was accepted. Having delivered our plan to the authorities in about three hundred thousand pages of letters and proposals over an eight year period, all we can report is that the silence has been deafening! Mr. Caldwell would or should certainly know that.

Joep de Koning

President@TolerancePark.org

www.NationalHeritageTriangle.c...

139 East 79th Street, 15th floor

New York, NY 10021

Tel: (212) 737-3216

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governors_Island

Tim

Anyone else been to the Rooftop Films screenings on Governor's island the last couple of years?They are a ton of fun, and one of the few times you can go and hang out on the island.