One time, wandering around Battery Park City, I realized I was going to be late for my next appointment across town, and had started scheming how many blocks east I would have to walk before I met a cab, when an unoccupied taxi pulled into the culdesac alongside me. I had not imagined that ordinary yellow cabs could penetrate the theoretical shield that surrounds Battery Park City and cruise its pretend boulevards. BATTERY PARK CITY occupies a narrow strip of landfill, ninetytwo acres long, extending from just north of Pier A, near the southern tip of Manhattan, to Chambers Street. It was built at a cost of $4 billion (a late 1980s figure). There are three zones, for purposes of discussion, into which Battery Park City should be divided: the residential blocks, the commercial highrises that constitute the World Financial Center, and the Parks and squares that form its public spaces. I will begin with the residential area, because there is where the grand experiment of urban design took place. But to explain what I mean, I will need to provide some historical background. The idea for the complex first surfaced in the early sixties, under overnor Nelson Rockefeller's administration. The language of his ary 1, 1966, message suggests that the project was sold as one that would avoid the brutalities of previous urban renewals: "Because space is at a premium in Manhattan, replacement usually requires displacement. To make room for progress, people's lives are uprooted and beauty is often bulldozed. . . . Now the opportunity exists to add to Manhattan's distinctive locales without making any such sacrifices. The development of Battery Park City adjoining the new World Trade Center presents an opportunity unique for Manhattan: the creation, literally from the ground up, of a large scale, imaginatively planned community comprising residential, business light industry, and recreational facilities." The lightindustry component quickly got scrapped, and the promised inclusion of lowincome or "affordable housing" was put indefinitely on hold, but the landfill began. For thirteen years the project remained nothing but a sandy white beach (some may remember sunbathing there or visiting the annual "Art on the Beach" exhibitions), stalled by complexities of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, and New York's fiscal crisis in the 1970s. "It sat like the Sahara off lower Manhattan," remarked Robert Wagner Jr., then a city councilman. Meanwhile, many noted architects, from Philip Johnson on down, took their crack at proposing futurist, spacestation plans, Corbusian in their disdain for the typical New York streetscape. The original plan called for superblocks (those seemingly unending sidewalks) punctuated by apartment towers, our very own Brasilia. The first of these bland edifices, Gateway Towers, did go up. The rest of the complex remained in limbo. Faced with bankruptcy in the dire bondmarket days of 1979, the Battery Park City Authority decided to alter its course and, in their words, "look at the site afresh.