Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (27 page)

That controversy came about because New York's city and state governments, concluding that they needed to do something to clean up the harbor's polluted waterways, decided to site a sewage treatment plant in West Harlem, after several other Manhattan communities had successfully resisted it. The Harlem community was understandably up in arms against what seemed a blatant instance of environmental injustice; already taxed with more than its share of noxious bus depots and waste-transfer stations, and suffering some of the highest asthma rates in the country, it looked askance at the threat of more harmful chemicals released into the air. The state offered a compromise, or rather a consolation prize: to build a spacious park on the roof of the pollution treatment plant. At first community leaders fought the offer, thinking that if they could stop the park they could stop the sewage treatment plant. When residents realized it was too late to derail the plant, they became resigned to accepting both—though they were prodded again to outrage once it opened. Especially in its first years, there was this stench; but the
state sank millions of dollars into solving the problem, and now it seems to have gone away, though some say there are still offensive odors. (I have never smelled anything untoward in my visits, but then my perennially sinusitic nostrils are not the sharpest). No concentrations of harmful chemicals have been found in the air nearby. On balance, the North River Sewage Treatment Plant has done so much good for the city's aquatic environment that it would be hard to second-guess its existence. And the neighborhood now loves the park, which draws close to 4 million visitors a year, thanks in part to Richard Dattner's tactful yet jaunty design.

Dattner is committed to what he calls “civil architecture”: public design that will have a “civilizing force” on communal behavior. His childhood refugee background, fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland with his parents in 1940, and bouncing around from Italy to Cuba to the United States, influenced his determination to produce welcoming, ordered, cosmopolitan public urban spaces responsive to the communities in which they are sited. Certainly no other architect has worked so often at, or in close proximity to, the New York waterfront in our era. Dattner's projects near the Manhattan waterfront, besides Riverbank State Park, include the award-winning public school, P.S. 234, on Chambers Street and Greenwich Avenue, near Battery Park City; the Asphalt Green AquaCenter, beside the FDR Drive in the East Nineties; the Marine Transfer Station on West 59th Street; Columbia University's football stadium in Inwood; the Children's Services Center, at First Avenue near 29th Street; and the Con Edison Service Building, a curved curtain wall of green glass at East 16th Street and the FDR Drive. He has also designed a number of treatment plants along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts.

Though he has worked for corporate clients outside New York, he is essentially a local architect who specializes in municipal projects, understands the city's maddeningly fractured community politics, feels comfortable with its layered, multicultural viewpoint (he speaks Spanish fluently), and has the patience to withstand its tormentingly slow public review process. “Any architect willing to endure the often brutal process of working for a government agency deserves a Purple Heart,” the
Times
's critic Herbert Muschamp has written. “An architect like Richard Dattner,
who has been through the process repeatedly and nonetheless sustained a level of quality as high as that shown by his designs for Riverbank State Park, sewage treatment plans and public school buildings, should be given a ticker tape parade up Broadway.”

Notwithstanding this accolade, Dattner has received little recognition from the architectural press, given how successfully he has molded parts of New York's public environment. He is not a superstar architect who gets written about constantly; his style is pleasing and charming, but he does not do “signature” buildings (and the client be damned). Rather, he adjusts pragmatically to each site's specific rules and budget restrictions. Certain stylistic motifs run through his work—an uncluttered clarity, with colored panels, curved canopies, and patterned brick bands by way of ornament—but the pizzazz is discreetly and tastefully meted out. In truth, while I really admire his work, I have to admit he is a not a master. Nothing he does bowls you over; but it is
so
superlatively adequate and user-friendly that it makes you wonder why there is not more of an enthusiasm for the quintessentially gifted minor architect, as there is for the minor writer or minor independent filmmaker.

Dattner's office is on West 57th Street, down the block from Carnegie Hall, in an elegant, Gilded Age, bay-windowed building with double windows for artists' studios, which was once home to the likes of William Dean Howells and Childe Hassam. On first meeting him, one is struck by his gentle, non-hornblowing manner, rare among architects, who tend to be even more egomaniacal than writers. A lean, good-looking man in his mid-sixties with a shock of white hair, a prominent beaked nose, and a warm, skeptical smile, who speaks with the slightest trace of a European accent, he seems, like his buildings, modest, friendly, approachable, cultivated. He wears glasses on a chain, which, when he puts them on, give him a nannyish look. After a while you realize that he is not without satiric judgments or competitive ego. He might wish he was more celebrated for what he does best; but if it is not to be, so okay, he will continue executing commissions, assisted by his partners and a staff of forty.

Asked whether he works differently near the waterfront than inland, he says that each time he has faced different challenges. In addition to the community's dubiousness about Riverbank State Park, he needed to build
very lightly, to “put the architecture on a diet,” as he says, because of the limited load-bearing capacity of the plant's roof. So he came up with “a quasi-Japanese look, the light panels functioning like shoji screens.” The platform was also six hundred feet out from the mainland; it was like being on the deck of an aircraft carrier,
*
which created its own set of aesthetic problems.

With Asphalt Green, at East 91st Street and the FDR Drive, the challenge was to create a building that had sufficient presence to be seen from across the river, while still deferring to the older icon next to it, the Asphalt Plant (a 1940s loop of exposed concrete over a parabolic, arched steel frame that has become a kind of beloved found object to design modernists). Dattner had to wedge a community athletic facility next to it, and this structure had to house a large pool on a fairly small site. The resulting Aquacenter is a sensuous building, with a wavy façade of alternating tan brick and green windows that recalls swimming in ocean waves; it looks smashing, especially lit up at night.

With P.S. 234, he wanted to convey the point that the water's edge used to be at Greenwich Street, before landfill extended the island. So he put in a form at the corner of the schoolyard that is both lighthouse and bell tower. Each day a different schoolchild rings the bell. The artist Donna Dennis's fence, with its lighters and tugboats, makes manifest the site's maritime history, and her porcelain medallions evoke the old Washington Market that used to be there.

How do you get a successful social mix, I ask, at a place like Riverbank or Asphalt Green, so that these public spaces are not seen as just for one class or ethnic group? He replies, “You try to nurture as many activities as you can: basketball for the Dominican teenagers, swimming classes for the old Jewish ladies, and so on. And you provide enough security so that it
feels safe.” Still, he worries that the Internet and cell phones will further erode the civility of public space. People are losing their sense of place-ness, he feels, and as they become attached to these virtual spaces they will pass through the real ones without taking notice. (Although in the main an optimist, he does have this high-minded, cultured-European, grouchy side.)

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The North River Sewage Treatment Plant marked the last time that a major structure could be built above on the water on piles, without assessing its impact as a sort of landfill. Because the plant was under development in the late 1960s, it was not subject to the environmental laws passed in the 1970s which prevented waterfront construction from impacting negatively on marine habitat (i.e., the controversy regarding shadows cast on striped bass, which undermined Westway). It seems ironic that such an environmentally positive project as the Sewage Treatment Plant should have been the last to cause a shrinkage of striped bass habitat; but in retrospect it was a logical tradeoff.

Dattner and his wife live in Washington Heights, on Cabrini Boulevard, where they enjoy great views of the Hudson, he says. “I live on the river and always will. On summer nights my wife and I go up on the roof and watch the sunsets. Fabulous.”

His preoccupation with the Manhattan waterfront goes back a long way. In 1967 he headed up a team of seventy architects that came up with a Hudson River plan. He wonders whether there is still a copy of it somewhere. “I've always been fascinated with the conjunction of buildings, river, and park. I like folding buildings into a park.” Now he has returned to the West Side waterfront, having been given the commission to design a segment of the Hudson River Park, from 26th Street to 59th Street. Dattner's first design proposal for his section of the park called for steps leading down to the water, such as exist in Paris; it was rejected on the grounds that seals might waddle up the steps and be fed the wrong kind of food! He shrugs; he is used to compromise. He invites me to attend an upcoming public meeting of the local West Side Community Planning Board, which will be discussing his latest Hudson River Park design.

At the last moment, I decide to go. It is midsummer, still broiling in the early evening. As usual, the community planning board meets in a hospital conference room, which they can use for free. (It does give these meetings a clinical, medicinal air.) Before the meeting even starts, I hear the insiders at the back of the room plotting their strategies and attacks. “How can you put a little hill on that pier? It will cut off sightlines to the water.” “You bring that up. I'll bring up the point about the highway ramp—.”

The meeting starts at six-thirty, and Dattner makes a low-key presentation. The moment he has ended, audience members line up at the microphone and begin zestfully nitpicking it apart. One half of me is thinking,
What a display of democracy in action! It's wonderful how involved and how committed these neighborhood people are to improving the design of their surroundings.
The other half thinks,
A bunch of petty wannabe architects—why don't they get a life?
I'm wondering how a nice fellow like Dattner can take this public abuse year after year; he must have a masochistic side. To my surprise, he walks out of the meeting after an hour, leaving his associate to field the audience's gripes. Either he's less patient and open than I'd thought, or he had a prior dinner engagement. Maybe he just wanted to take in one last summer sunset with his wife, from their roof in Washington Heights.

ON MOST HOT WEEKEND NIGHTS during the summer, and even into the fall, there is a section of Riverside Park that gets turned into a giant salsa party. I've passed it by automobile many times, intrigued by that blur of carnival clangor along the Hudson River, wondering what it would feel like to stand in the middle of it. One August night I plucked up my courage enough to try.

You take the Number 1 train to 145th Street and Broadway, head in the direction of the water, and follow the pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway into Riverbank State Park. If you pause on that overpass, looking down, you'll see giddy convoys hurtling into or out of the city. I happened to arrive around 7:30 P
.
M., when a clouded-over, indigo sky was smeared with a pink arc over New Jersey, and the nearby George Washington Bridge was already styling a dowager choker of lights. Riverbank Park beckoned, but this time I was determined to get to the salsa party below. I could hear the invitation of blaring trumpets, and see the cars parked thickly below highway girders, and the revelers milling around.

A long, twisting metal staircase extends from Riverbank Park's upper platform to the ground below; and because this part of the Riverside Park is cut off by highway, it is the only practical way you can get to the water by foot. In daytime, when the park below is usually deserted, I don't mind admitting I feel a bit nervous going down that staircase alone. But tonight families wander up and down, and the scene is completely benign. At the bottom, a man and two boys wait patiently with bikes for an elevator to take them up; I do not stay long enough to find out if the elevator is out of service or arrives eventually.

On the lawn near the base of the stairs, there's a dark-skinned Latino father pitching to his preteen daughter, in a family baseball game of three against three, and cheering her as she smacks one and rounds the bases, her long braid flapping, as if she were Sammy Sosa. Close by, a fenced-in playground holds kids racing around playing tag, letting off steam. Some teenage boys kick a soccer ball. Some lucky families have commandeered benches and are setting out mountains of food and coolers. What strikes me immediately is that, although it's nightfall, this Latin American community has no compunction about bringing little kids to the park at this hour, letting the bigger ones run free around the swings and slides, while dandling the infants up and down to the salsa rhythm. Because it is a genuine community, children and grandparents belong to the bacchanal. On the one hand, it's a family outing, a chance to picnic, play catch, loll about on a Sunday night, before the soul-sapping work week begins. On the other hand, it's a massive, sexually heated
paseo
for people to scrutinize, flirt, dance, pick each other up.

I am headed down a footpath of trees toward the booming sound, the center of life. To my left is the river, and I wonder what its presence means to those gathered here. Is this the re-creation of waterside picnics in Santo Domingo or smaller villages? Or is it only the large public space that matters, the park itself, and the river but an incidental throw-in of mise-en-scène? Some teenage girls sit by the rocks, talking quietly. A motorboat approaches. For the most part, however, people stand with their backs to the river, seemingly ignoring it. No doubt they've subliminally registered its presence, and are glad it's there, but they're not “communing” with the river god. They're here for the salsa party, that huge roofless nightclub under the stars.