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Islands Lapped by Tides of Change

Islands Lapped by Tides of Change
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November 12, 1995, Section 9, Page 1Buy Reprints
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NOLAN PARK is so quiet you can hear a squirrel's footfall in the golden leaves. Now that late autumn has come, sunlight pierces the heavy canopy of sycamore, oak and maple. It warms the eggnog-yellow clapboard houses around the park, with their gabled rooftops and curlicue woodwork. It dapples the red-brick sidewalks and deep front porches, festooned with American flags. It glints off the World Trade Center nearby.

Nolan Park is not just an uncommonly pretty neighborhood. It is less than 10 minutes from lower Manhattan.

Small wonder that developers and urbanists began dreaming last month when it was announced that Nolan Park and the rest of Governors Island, which has been off-limits to civilians since it was garrisoned by the Army in 1794, would become available in 1998, after the Coast Guard closes its base there.

It is a rare day indeed when the opportunity arises to incorporate an entire new island into the civic fabric.

But New York is a city of many islands -- only the Bronx is attached to the mainland -- and much else is happening on this insular real estate.

A master plan is to be prepared for Randalls and Wards Islands, where officials envision a much improved sports and recreation center. On Ellis Island, the enormous Baggage and Dormitory Building may be restored. A 600-bed addition to the West Facility at Rikers Island was recently completed. Landlords on City Island are requesting new commercial zoning. The Parks Department has its eye on North Brother Island (the Bronx), South Brother Island (Queens) and the Island of Meadows (Staten Island) as part of a five-island rookery.

And Roosevelt Island played host last month to 85 builders, financiers, designers, planners and officials from around the nation. Their mission, in a daylong workshop, was to recommend development scenarios to the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which is trying to decide how to resume construction after six becalmed years.

"There is an urgent need to build out the island to a critical mass," said Jean Lerman, president and chief operating officer of the corporation. "The tram could handle more riders. The garage could handle more cars. The stores could clearly use more business. What is buildable that could enhance the island?"

The question of what is buildable is also being asked on City Island, where some landlords want the city to change the M1 manufacturing zoning -- a throwback to the vanished boat-building industry, they say -- to C3 commercial zoning, which permits residential development.

"We feel M1 is archaic and restricts our potential," said Herbert A. Hild, president of Hild Sails, who owns about 2.5 acres on the east side of the island, between Pelham Cemetery and the slip for the Harts Island ferry. Mr. Hild has been in the sailmaking business for 50 years. "It's not that we're going to turn around and build condos," he said. "It's just that we feel we're in an obsolete type of zoning."

Such tensions reflect the changing way in which New Yorkers will be using the islands around them. "Are islands going to be viewed as enclaves?" asked Joseph B. Rose, chairman of the City Planning Commission. "Are they refuges for the people who live there, or tourist attractions, or recreational and wildlife space, or places where you isolate and dump as many undesirable land uses as you can?"

Roosevelt Island served for most of its existence as a place where the city isolated the poor, the criminal, the insane and the diseased. For 20 years, it has slowly been transformed into a residential quarter. There are now some 8,200 people living in 3,248 units in 18 apartment buildings. In 1989, the operating corporation solicited proposals for a 2,000-unit residential project on a 19-acre parcel called Southtown, between the existing towers and the Queensboro Bridge, which would have added 4,400 residents to the island.

DEVELOPERS didn't bite at the time, but that reluctance may be changing.

"There was a great deal of interest in pursuing Southtown," said Alyce M. Russo, director of planning and development at Roosevelt Island, as she described the workshop. "That exceeded our expectations -- pleasantly." Among its strong points, Southtown has both the tram terminal and a subway station, served by B and Q trains.

One of the most difficult questions will be whether to preserve the existing mix of low- , middle- and upper-income residents or lift the 25 percent ceiling on market-rate housing, thereby permitting proportionally more higher-priced units and making the economics more enticing to developers.

One participant in favor of lifting the cap was Nathan Leventhal, the president of Lincoln Center, who is a former New York City Housing Commissioner and Deputy Mayor. "It's not realistic from a housing finance standpoint to assume anything but market-rate housing," he said, "which, on Roosevelt Island, is middle class."

Alexander Cooper, of Cooper, Robertson & Partners, who was co-architect of the master plan of Battery Park City, said it would be helpful to waive the current mix and modify the master plan.

Defending the existing master plan and the economic mix was Edward J. Logue, the former president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, who is regarded as the father of the Roosevelt Island project. He traveled to the workshop from another island, Martha's Vineyard, where he now lives.

Mr. Logue conceded that it was difficult, if not impossible, to build affordable housing at a time when Government subsidies have dried up, but he did not think that was a reason to abandon the vision of economically integrated communities.

"To restore the social health to our cities, we've got to have this mix," Mr. Logue said. Mr. Cooper suggested that co-op owners be permitted to make a profit when reselling their units and that the density on the island be increased to 6,000 or 7,000 units.

Con Howe, Director of Planning for the City of Los Angeles, urged care in apportioning development sites. "If you don't preserve lots of the island as completely open space," he said, "you'd lose one of the fundamental reasons anyone would want to live there."

Mr. Howe was once executive director of the New York City Planning Department. He was disappointed by his return to Main Street, which serves as the spine of Roosevelt Island's residential area. "The architecture hasn't weathered well," he said, "and you don't feel connections either to open space or to the waterfront."

Some teams at the workshop focused on details like the five mini-schools that have been empty since 1992, when a new grammar and intermediate school opened. "We would take them all down," Mr. Leventhal said. "To have prime waterfront space taken up by vacant schools is something we didn't want to sit still for another moment."

P ARTICIPANTS also looked more generally at the governance of the island. Robert Davis, the founder and president of the Seaside Community Development Corporation, which created the new town of Seaside in Florida, said a stronger governing body was needed -- "something like the Battery Park City Authority, with that kind of entrepreneurial initiative and degree of control."

"Ed Logue had that kind of wheeling and dealing power and then some," he added.

For his part, Mr. Logue said, "My solution is that the island ought to have self-rule; make a compact with the State of New York and just let them go."

Whatever happens on Roosevelt Island, it is almost certain to occur long before the redevelopment of Governors Island. "What makes Roosevelt Island different is that it has a subway stop -- that's fundamental," said Alexander Garvin, a member of the City Planning Commission and the author of a book, "The American City: What Works, What Doesn't." He and Bethami Probst coordinated the Oct. 17 workshop.

Roosevelt Island also has a tram and, like City Island and Randalls Island, a bridge to the rest of the city. "You'd have to go a long way to produce the same result on Governors Island," Mr. Garvin said. "We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a bridge."

"Also, you're beginning with a vision in the case of Roosevelt and Randalls Islands that you can build on," he said. "You've got a long time before you can come up with anything like that for Governors Island."

That is not to say there haven't been visions. Proposals have ranged from the prosaic -- a residential enclave -- to the fantastic: a Disney theme park, an ecology park and convention center, a movie studio complex or a site for the city's sex businesses and a casino.

City officials have tried to dampen any speculative discussion, however.

"It's very, very premature," said Deputy Mayor Fran Reiter, who heads the Governors Island task force for the Giuliani administration and was given a tour by Coast Guard officers last Monday. "We don't even know yet under what circumstances the property is going to be conveyed."

The Coast Guard will begin moving next spring and plans to turn the island over to the General Services Administration. But it is not clear how the Government will then dispose of the island, to whom, under what circumstances and at what price (although an estimate of $500 million was advanced by the Congressional Budget Office).

Mr. Rose said his more immediate concern was the transferring of many Coast Guard operations to New Jersey, Virginia and South Carolina, along with a $70 million annual payroll.

For now, Governors Island is a small town of about 4,000 residents, to which 1,800 commuters travel daily. There are some 800 housing units over its 170 acres. Much of the residential stock is modern and unremarkable. There is an array of two-story town houses on the east side, a cluster of 10 three-story apartment houses on the southern tip and, overlooking the harbor, a trio of seven-story buildings and a T-shaped 10-story structure that is the island's skyscraper.

What gives Governors Island its exceptional character are the historic structures. The frame houses of Nolan Park are for senior officers, as are the sturdy brick homes along Colonels' Row, which got its name before the Army turned the island over to the Coast Guard in 1966, after which the captains moved in.

Quarters 1 is the designation of the Admiral's House, a 155-year-old, 27-room mansion overlooking Buttermilk Channel, with two-story-high Tuscan colonnades front and rear. Quarters 2, home to the base commander, is a more modest brick house nearby. It has been much altered over the years but may have been begun in 1708 as the home of the provincial governor and is known as the Governor's House.

The most unusual housing on the island is undoubtedly the quadrangle within the walls of Fort Jay, a five-pointed, star-shaped fortification that was completed in 1798 and rebuilt in 1803. The apartments are reached by crossing a dry moat. Surrounding the fort is a nine-hole golf course.

F ORT JAY is one of three fortifications on the island. Castle Williams, on the north shore, is a semicircular structure that was completed in 1811 along with Castle Clinton in Manhattan to protect New York from a British invasion. The South Battery of 1812 is the officers' club.

Across the harbor is another island laden with landmarks. Although the reopening of Ellis Island in 1990 attracted worldwide attention, there are many structures beside the Main Building, with its cavernous Registry Hall, that have yet to be restored.

"It's not over yet," said Michael Adlerstein, associate field director of the National Park Service's northeast area.

The largest unrestored structure is the 87-year-old Baggage and Dormitory Building, which adjoins the Main Building and once housed 5,000 immigrants at a time, usually those who had arrived too late of an evening to be processed. Later used by the Navy as a brig, it was abandoned in 1954. The 125,000-square-foot building has only three stories, but each floor is 20 feet high. Because it has a flat roof, it has been subject to considerable weather damage.

"It will be wonderful if we can save it," Mr. Adlerstein said. Discussions are under way, he said, with the private Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which has raised money for the restoration projects.

Underneath the Triborough Bridge, another foundation has a role in determining the future of another set of islands. The Randalls Island Sports Foundation is a semi-public organization formed in 1992 to help the Parks and Recreation Department maintain, operate and improve the 400-acre Randalls and Wards Islands Parks. (Although now a single land mass at the confluence of the East and Harlem Rivers, Randalls and Wards were separated until the 1940's by the Little Hell Gate Channel.)

Aimee Boden, the director of the parks, said the foundation hopes to get $800,000 from City Hall for a master plan that would look at ways to improve access to the island and create new sports installations that could be financially self-sustaining.

SOME possibilities include ferry and bus service, roadway improvements and parking expansion, the reconstruction or replacement of the 21,000-seat Downing Stadium and a new field house with 4,000 to 6,000 seats.

Although the islands have 27 softball and baseball fields, 11 tennis courts, 7 soccer and football fields, a golf driving range and a 400-meter running track, Ms. Boden conceded that "you would not know you were in a park -- it doesn't look like a park, feel like a park or smell like a park." In part, that is because the islands are also home to the Triborough toll plazas, the Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital, a waste-water treatment plant and the Fire Department's training academy, among other things.

"There's got to be a way to look at all this mixed institutional use and make the park a cohesive facility," Ms. Boden said.

The Parks Department's involvement with islands does not stop at Randalls and Wards. During Henry J. Stern's first term as Parks Commissioner, in 1984, the agency acquired jurisdiction over Pralls Island, an 80-acre salt meadow and heron rookery in the Arthur Kill off Staten Island. In 1993, an agreement was reached to turn the 50-acre Shooter's Island, also off Staten Island, in the Kill Van Kull, into a wildlife sanctuary.

Now, the department would like to add the North and South Brother Islands and the Island of Meadows. "The combination of these five islands represents more than 2,000 breeding pairs of wading birds," said Marc A. Matsil, chief of the natural resources group. He said there were seven species of herons, egrets and ibises, representing roughly 20 percent of the entire breeding population in New England.

In addition to acquiring islands, Mr. Stern has actually added to the city's collection.

During the reconstruction six years ago of the Harlem Meer in Central Park, he saw to it that a 30-by-40-foot island was created. He named it Duck Island.

Now, Mr. Stern is at it again. As part of the reconstruction of the Great Lawn in Central Park, Turtle Pond is to be dredged and expanded by about 50 percent. An island will be built in the middle.

The reconfigured shoreline will include a new promontory that may be known as Turtle Neck, Mr. Stern said. Or, because it would be made of earth, it could be called Terra Peninsula.

If that were the case, the name of New York City's newest island would quickly suggest itself: Terrapin Insula.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 9, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Islands Lapped by Tides of Change. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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