Just in the past couple of years the West Village/Chelsea section of Hudson River Park has absorbed the additions of Little Island and Pier 57 Rooftop Park. Now this part of Manhattan has yet another option for outdoor culture: the Gansevoort Peninsula Sand Bluff, a pier off Gansevoort Street with a sand "beach."
This square-ish pier has plenty of seating for picnics, space for the sand-averse, and good views up and down the Hudson.
Maybe the coolest thing here is invisible: an underwater oyster habitat on the north side, seeded in 2022 with 20 million juvenile oysters – part of the Billion Oyster Project.
There are boardwalks, a lawn, a picnic area, and an "ecological salt marsh" (where the oysters live, I presume). My favorite part is the boardwalk-promenade, where you can seek out a bit of quiet. It made me think a little bit of the promenades at the Central Park Conservatory Garden.
There's art too, courtesy of the neighboring Whitney Museum of American Art. I assumed Day's End was a remnant or incomplete piece of infrastructure. But this installation is, according to the good folks at the Hudson River Park Trust, a "ghost monument" to an earlier work by Gordon Matta-Clark that once stood on another pier.
It "allud[es] to the changing history of New York’s waterfront with an open, skeletal structure that precisely follows the outline, dimensions and location of the original structure" – a structure which no one who sees this will have been aware of. So what exactly is the point? If we are to have public art, whether site-specific or not, shouldn't it be something new and original?
Anyway, while it may officially be the Gansevoort Peninsula Sand Bluff, people are sure to be calling this new amenity a beach. But it's not really a beach. You can't swim here, or even wade. (You're not supposed to, anyway.)
The south side of the pier does sport some ocean-like spray that I was not expecting.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this place.
On the one hand, the more nice open space in the city, the better. Despite centuries of development, long stretches of the West Side waterfront remain beautiful enough to suggest what the early European explorers and settlers found so appealing about the sparkling waterways and green, island-studded harbor that became New Amsterdam and then New York. We can and should enjoy this wondrous facet of our city.
On the other hand, this wealthy part of town already has the whole of Hudson River Park itself, with its various protuberances as bonuses. Wouldn't resources be better spent developing and improving green or waterfront space in sections of the city not so lucky and well-heeled? Like, for example, the East River waterfront across town? (Yes, the rebuilding of places like East River Park and Stuyvesant Cove to defend against sea level rise is underway, but this is mostly to preserve what was already there.)
Rich neighborhoods almost always get what they want. When I attended the 2019 opening of Chelsea Green, for example, I didn't know that that weird new little kids' park/playground on West 20th Street had been born of a struggle between forces that wanted to develop affordable housing on the lot and NIMBYers who blocked it and got this unneeded parklet instead.
Dedication of Chelsea Green, 25 July 2019
Walk west to the river and there's a very nice playground on Pier 51. Walk east a couple of blocks and there's the playground at Union Square. (Oh, but maybe too many poor kids play there...)
But back to the matter at hand.
Designed by Field Operations, the firm behind the High Line and Domino Park, the new Gansevoort Peninsula development resulted from a collaboration between New York City and New York State. The site had been a Department of Sanitation parking lot, but long before, in the late 19th century, it was part of a stretch of landfill that was to be 13th Avenue.
13th Avenue never manifested. But we inherited this squarish pier which the powers that be decided to call a peninsula, because why not?
I have mixed feelings about sand, too – to me it's little more than a necessary evil you have to deal with to experience the ocean. So a patch like this is kind of a tease. And most of the people enjoying it when I visited were actually sitting on the Adirondack chairs.
Look at that tiny kid in the lower right of the following picture, though. I guess it's worth it just for him.
All photos © Oren Hope
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