Riverside Park South

It's been quite some time since we visited Riverside Park for this blog, and we never actually hit the section called Riverside Park South. It has been developed quite a bit in recent years anyway, in parallel with neighborhoods on Midtown's western fringe.

Hudson River Park hits its northernmost border at 59th Street or thereabouts. Walk past the huge Sanitation Department pier at 59th and you enter Riverside Park South.

Looking south at the sanitation pier

Several blocks further north, Mrs. Odyssey takes a break.

Looking north along Riverside Park South
Looking north along Riverside Park South

Public art stands out in this landscape, including two new sculptures.

"Life Dance" by Susan Markowitz Meredith

The next photo, of Helen Draves' Hope, doesn't do the ugly thing full justice because you can't see the birds evolving from the small surgical masks that comprise the monstrous giant surgical mask. (There's a better photo at the link in the previous paragraph.) Not surprisingly, the piece is a reflection on the pandemic.

"Hope" by Helen Draves

The most striking piece of public art here is Private Passage, a giant wine bottle laid on its side. Inside is a representation of a stateroom from the Queen Mary.

In the background you can see the equally striking, pyramidal Via 57 West development.

Generally speaking, though, I find the hand of humankind can't match the aesthetic splendor of nature. (Not that this gigantic willow tree wasn't planted by human hands, but you get the point.)

Another majestic willow view shows another side of the conundrum that is New York City today. In this shot you see evidence of the terrible homeless problem we're experiencing in the era of Mayor Eric Adams and the migrant crisis.

On a more positive note, I love when waterfront designers build walkways over the river.

This one reminds me of West Harlem Piers Park, further north along the very same riverside.

But then, as everywhere along the more than 500 miles (!) of New York City waterfront, we also see remains of what went before.

Something else that went before – and now has come to a complete stop – is a retired 60-year-old locomotive, the focus of a play area within the park. It's being refurbished and almost completely obscured at present, so I have no photo, but you can have a peek via Atlas Obscura.

And so Mrs. Odyssey and friends say goodbye for now from from Riverside Park South.

All photos © Oren Hope

Gansevoort Peninsula Sand Bluff

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

Pier 57 Rooftop Park

Exhausted from a jostle through the tourist-thronged Little Island? You'd never know it, but right next door is a quiet new oasis with great views and far fewer people.

As of this writing, to reach Pier 57 Rooftop Park you have to follow crude signs a long way around to the side of huge Pier 57.

Privately financed by arrangement with Hudson River Park, the pier's redevelopment is to result in "a mixed-use development with retail, office and public open space, among other uses."

Google's new offices are already here. City Winery has settled in. And perched atop it all is a weird new two-acre park.

Not too much green space up here. But folks are colonizing what there is.

Not a lot of shade either.

A few springs of color liven the place up.

But it's mostly a place from which to look at the river, the lower Manhattan skyline...

and Little Island.

You could definitely get in your stair-climbing exercise here. (There are elevators to the main level, though.)

Pier 57 is a huge blocky building with, to my amateur eye, no redeeming architectural value. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, however. In the 1950s it was the terminal for the Grace Line's ocean liners and cruise ships. Later the Transit Authority used it, but it was closed up in 2003. It's nice to see places like this come to life again.

Pier 26, Hudson River Park

Recent visits to Steeplechase Pier in Coney Island and the brand-new Little Island in Hudson River Park reminded me that I hadn't talked about another notable new development along the Hudson: Pier 26.

This ecological park, jutting far out into the river off Hudson River Park, opened in September 2020. It endeavors to give an inkling of the natural ecology of the riverbank as Henry Hudson would have encountered it 400 years ago, before European settlement and centuries of industrial development turned the lower banks of the great estuary into a mostly artificial environment.

A walk down the pier takes you through five ecological zones: woodland forest, coastal grassland, maritime scrub, rocky tidal zone, and the river itself.

These environments are not reproduced, but suggested with native plants and infrastructure.

For example, planting a full-fledged woodland forest might not have been practical, but there are some nice young trees among the multitudinous vegetation.

The pier is designed for active visits, leisurely walks – and just plain leisure.

The Tide Deck at the far end of the pier was designed to flood with the daily tide. (Remember, the Hudson River is actually an estuary, not a river.) So you can only visit it on a guided tour.

But you can walk over it and look down.

A look south offers a familiar sight:

Across the river to the west rises the skyline of Jersey City. Most of these buildings didn't exist when I lived there in the 1980s.

When you're finished exploring Pier 26, you could relax at another new New York City attraction, City Vineyard. I haven't been there, but I have fond memories of its late cousin, the old location of NYC's City Winery. (At the new one, live music is back, unlike when I took these photos back in October 2020.)

Or take a walk down my favorite part of Hudson River Park, the sort-of-hidden Tribeca Native Boardwalk, which winds among gardens of native plants. Can you spot the humans secluding themselves in the next two images?

Educational goals aside, Pier 26 is handsomely laid out and landscaped, a beautiful addition to Hudson River Park.

All photos © Critical Lens Media