|
Despite years of assurances that the rebuilt waterfront at the Battery would increase the amount of publicly accessible space, the newly reopened waterfront at the southern tip of Manhattan has been almost entirely commandeered by the National Park Service for security screening for ferries to Ellis and Liberty Islands.
At the March 16 meeting of the Environmental Protection Committee of Community Board 1, chair Tammy Meltzer compared a rendering of what the rebuilt Battery promenade was expected to look like, with recent photos of new, tall fencing that blocks public access to the waterfront. “This is nowhere near what the public was promised,” she said.
Grace Tang, a program director at the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation, said, “this is not what we want. We want waterfront access for the public. We have been working closely with all the parties involved, including the Battery Conservancy, the NYPD, and U.S. Parks Police. We’re in discussions with all the parties to try to come to some kind of compromise. We know security is needed for the ferry service, but we absolutely do not want this is blocking the entire waterfront.”
The next evening, at CB1’s Waterfront Committee meeting, Battery Conservancy president Paula Recart told CB1 members, “we were planning a community party to celebrate the reopening, which we had thought of calling, ‘the View Is Back.’ And when we actually saw how they were planning to fence the place for security reasons, we realized we couldn’t call it ‘the View Is Back,’ because the view is not back.”
Ms. Recart noted that her staff had met recently with counterterrorism officials from the NYPD, “who said this was going to be very easy to fix in a way that would both address security concerns and public access to the waterfront. But the National Park Service and the U.S. Park Police declined to join the meeting.”
Hope Cohen, the Conservancy’s chief operating officer, said, “it is our view that there are provisions in the contract between New York City Parks and the ferry operator for dockage rights that should enable New York City to insist that the concessionaire interfere less with public use of this public space.”
| 
.png)
