" The BPCA's thenchairman, Richard Kahan, turned to the design firm of Cooper, Eckstut Associates to come up with a new master plan. At the time, Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut were unusual in the field of urban design (then riddled with gardencity Utopians hostile to Gotham), because these two partners loved New Yorks density, diversity, and sidewalk vitality. Their notion was to create an area that would feel recognizably New York, by employing familiar materials and street patterns. The Cooper, Eckstut master plan rested on two premises: first, to avoid the usual antiurban design mistakes which had plagued large postwar projects (the superblock, the isolated, monotonously repetitive buildings that stood around like lunar objects, the lack of con textual relationship to the city nearby); and second, to learn from, even the most successful highrise neighborhoods in New York City, such t End Avenue, Riverside Drive, Central Park West, Gramercy Park, Tudor City, and Sutton Place. Key to the plan was street layout. Stanton Eckstut put it this way: "The al design control comes not even from the buildings, it comes from the treet plan The city is set in motion there. Where are the avenues and the squares and esplanades? If I stopped right there, I could influence the shape of the city forever." Eckstut is a thin, proud man with a full head of curly, graying hair, a trim Vandyke beard and mustache, warm, restless eyes, and, like many architects, a selfconscious manner of dress, given to red bow ties and matching striped shirts. His idea was first to create a propedestrian environment in Battery Park City and then have the buildings respond to it. So the master plan laid out a traditional Manhattan grid, extending the eastwest grid of the city's existing streets wherever possible, to knit the project more to its surroundings, and provided one slightly curved boulevard for visual interest. The promenade along the Hudson River would bring the project gracefully onto the water, and provide a place for the public to stroll; the recreational green spaces designed into the plan also would be urbane, rather than trying for an isolated Shangrila. The developers and architects who wished to build in Battery Park City would have to follow Cooper, Eckstut's strict guidelines, which were partly intended to connect the separate buildings visually through shared cues, and partly to reverberate with associations of their dignified forebears. These rules included using stone at the building's base, to give importance and human scale to the street level; brick above the stone base; and an articulated roof of some sort, for a varied skyline effect: in short, the familiar tripartite apartment building of base, shaft, and shaped roof that one sees, for instance, all along West End Avenue. Buildings would have to begin at the street wall and connect to each other in a continuous, unbroken line; cornices, changes in window, corner details, and other ornamental "p , xpression lines" were encouraged, to break up the fagades, particularly w taller buildings.