New York 22
But then I remember: I would miss the city too much.
The greatest obstacle standing between Battery Park City and the rest of Manhattan is West Street. Hardly just a street, this eight to tenlane roadway used to be the tailbone of the West Side Highway. At the moment, West Street is a carchoked, potholehappy immensity, risky to cross on foot. As I waited for a clearing in traffic, a doorman warned me, "You gotta be careful, you get run over. You better run like hell!"
You can cross West Street by taking overhead pedestrian bridges, but this is an inconvenient hassle: raised walkways between buildings are unnatural for New Yorkers and break the pattern of pedestrian wandering. Getting across West Street might be worth the nuisance if you had an extensive neighborhood to explore; but Battery Park City is a thin finger of land, two or three blocks deep at most.
The strongest incentive for making that effort is to enjoy Battery Park City's extraordinary suite of waterfront parks and promenades, from the Beaux Arts order of the Esplanade, to the grand plaza of the World Financial Center, to the familyfriendly Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, with its children's playground and volleyball court, which curves behind Stuyvesant High School. Starting at the southernmost end, next to the Battery, is the Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, with its broad lawns. A
"Though it is not exactly a park, I would also like to mention the miraculously strange Irish Hunger Memorial: a replica of a bleak Hibernian hut and hill, perfect for seeing on a drizzly day, located in Battery Park City's Vesey Street and North End Avenue.
ther stiff, monumental brick arch holds a cafe, restrooms, and a staircase that leads to a viewing platform that faces dramatically, across the bay, the Statue of Liberty. These Battery Park City parks frame, in as many different ways as possible, the Lady of the Harbor. The Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park also holds the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Living Memorial to the Holocaust, with its Mayanpyramidlike stepped roof by Kevin Roche. (An outscaled new wing is presently under construction.) I was initially dubious about the necessity for this Museum of Jewish Heritage, given that the city already has a Jewish Museum uptown; but I found the exhibits informative and moving. The large, bare, upper loft space with its myriad riverview windows is the place to be on a sunny day.
The next park moving north, South Cove, is to me the jewel of the complex. There is something mysterious and, above all, intimate about South Cove, with its haunting blueglassed lanterns and wooden bridges that creak underfoot. Leaning over the wooden bridge, with waves slapping against the algaecovered pilings, you have the sense of being much closer to the water than at the nearby Esplanade. Alongside the bridge, the arrangement of rocks suggests a Japanese rock garden, while the wild rushes and other plantings present a rugged scene that might have been glimpsed by the first Dutch settlers.