^ The gondola plan hasn't been finalized yet.
http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/12/2...ernors-island/
City’s First Bike Share Planned for Governors Island
It ain't the Velib, but yesterday it was announced that Dutch team West 8 would design a 40-acre park for Governors Island, which will include a fleet of 3,000 wooden bicycles free for use by island visitors.
The Post, which says the Governors Island Gondola could also become reality, had a somewhat dispiriting quote from Mayor Bloomberg on the bike share feature, particularly when juxtaposed with designer Adriaan Geuze's comments.
Quote:
Adriaan Geuze, founder of West 8, said the company's Dutch background made including bicycles in the plan a no-brainer.
"I am from Holland, where bicycles are an important part of street life, and everybody bikes," he said. "You could never walk the entire island, but the bikes will help get people to experience more of the island and go anywhere they want to."
Bloomberg said he was particularly impressed by the bike theme, joking "it's a great idea; you don't have to worry about them being stolen" because "you can't take them anyplace" off the island.
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curbed.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/ar...in&oref=slogin
A Landscape’s Isolation Is Turned Into a Virtue
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
December 20, 2007
The winning design for a 40-acre park that would unfold across the southern half of Governors Island is not the kind of grand public-works project the city once championed. But in an age when developers regularly usurp the government’s planning role, it reflects the kind of imaginative, civic-minded thinking that can restore our faith in city and state leaders.
The park’s informal landscape of undulating hills and voluptuous marshes is a refreshing departure from the crass commercialism that infects so many public projects today. At the same time, the designers have avoided tired period elements like cobblestone paths and bishop’s crook lampposts.
Although still in the early design stages, it could well become the most inspired public park built here in generations.
It’s hard to imagine a more gorgeous site, and the design team — Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Rogers Marvel Architects, West 8, Quennell Rothschild & Partners and SMWM — wisely capitalized on its advantages.
The 172-acre Governors Island in New York Harbor is now framed by the vanishing shipping cranes and warehouses of the Brooklyn waterfront on one side, and the Statue of Liberty on the other. Roughly a half-mile to the north is the dense cluster of Wall Street towers, Manhattan’s answer to the entrance of the Grand Canal in Venice.
City officials have worried that the island’s isolation might prevent it from drawing enough visitors to make it economically self-sustaining.
Yet the design makes the island’s isolation a virtue. Divided into four major sectors, the plan is anchored by a great lawn, a gently rolling carpet of grass that could be used for informal cultural events, with the harbor as a backdrop. A tree-lined promenade will trace the edge of the island so visitors can take in the stunning views.
The design’s most seductive feature, however, is an intriguing mix of natural and created landscapes.
The architects envision a lush saltwater marsh at the island’s southern tip, an effort to recapture the natural beauty that was partly lost when the Coast Guard built housing after assuming control of the island in 1966.
As the promenade approaches the marsh, it morphs into a network of sinuous pedestrian bridges that loop over a fairy tale landscape of shrubs, grasses and willow trees. Visitors will feel as if they were suddenly hovering between the rough harbor waters and more stable ground.
To the north, in the center of the park, an artificial “mountain range” will be created from the rubble of the demolished barracks. Cutting diagonally across the island, the steep hills will create a skyline of sorts visible from the city, and frame vistas of the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The architects envision, in a later phase, more hills, which conceivably could house museums or commercial spaces buried deep in their cores.
Leslie Koch, the president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, says the project could unfold in several stages.
A free bicycle program could be in place by next summer, encouraging New Yorkers to familiarize themselves with the island and its haunting beauty. A final design and environmental review won’t be ready until the end of 2009, and the project may take five years to complete.
Yet this is an instance in which slow, incremental steps offer comfort. Given that the money for large-scale public development dried up long ago, the current strategy in most American cities today with projects of this scale is essentially to hand them over to developers and watch what happens.
The Governors Island plan, by comparison, is humble in scale but big on ambition. What is more, by developing the island bit by bit, the city is enabling the public to appreciate what it has gained, which could help prevent overdevelopment.
How refreshing to see government not only take back some responsibility for the public realm, but also to do so with such care.