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Today the meatpacking district is barely holding on, invaded as it is by boutiques and bistros. Meanwhile, the Greenwich Village waterfront is being transformed into a civic place, Hudson River Park. The Hudson River Park Trust is admirably, even radically, attempting to push forward a new public work along the water, from TriBeCa to 59th Street, a task every bit as difficult as building Central Park or Riverside Park-more so actually, because it does not have landscape architects of genius like Olmsted and Vaux to oversee its design, or a powerful official like Robert Moses to cut through the red tape. It has only the conviction that New Yorkers want to get to the water, and that it is the city's manifest destiny to do so.
The former West Side Highway, now known as Route 9A, has been reconfigured as an "urban boulevard"-the model most often cited for it is Park Avenue-with traffic lights every three blocks and plantings in the middle. No longer a tenlane, sixtyfivemilesperhour speedway, now it is to be a more "diminutive," eightlane, optimally 25 mph glide. But it still looks and feels like a highway, not a boulevard. Nor does it resemble, in any way but the timing of its traffic lights, Park Avenue.
As I walk along the West Village section of the Hudson River Park, I find myself thinking: One of the best things you can do at the water's edge of a city is to make a street.
Preferably a narrow street, providing only one carlane apiece in each direction, so that it does not become another highspeed traffic corridor, but invites strolling, with fairly lowrise buildings that house shops on the ground floor, thereby bringing the vitality of the city to the edge. A promenade, be it in a beachside resort or a waterfront district, becomes energized when the walker can go from looking at the water to ducking into a shop or cafe on the street side (as in all those fatalistic French 1930s films, where Jean Gabin wanders down to the port to cast longing eyes at a ship leaving for foreign shores, then backs into a bar for a shot of vin ordinaire). If you look at photographs of the Manhattan dockside in the early decades of the twentieth century, what you see-a nd it comes as a shock-is a real street, with automobiles parked two feet from the drink.
I suppose we must concede that West Street is technically a street, just
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not a very inviting, welldesigned one. Certainly much of the success of the Hudson River Park, at least around SoHo and Greenwich Village, will hinge on what happens across the way, on the building side of West Street. At present it is a ragtag collection of holdingpattern uses: auto parts and garage repair shops, Xrated video stalls, printing firms on their way out, meatpacking plants in their twilight hour, next to boardedup storefronts. The park will be served greatly if the street across from it becomes a lively area, with cafes and mixed uses and a steady stream of strollers.