" The Greenwich Village community was mollified, to some extent, by the Westway team's agreement to limit the height of proposed new housing. In 1976 the selection of the innovative architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, to provide a design for the new park, won over much of the architectural set. The elegant, userfriendly plan they executed for the elongated Hudson River shoreline, much of which was to be created through landfill, redesigned the whole waterfront area as a public domain. An esplanade, running along the course of the shoreline, would be sunken in relation to the green park strip; there would be a bikeway and a Promenade; and a wall would separate the park from the adjacent street, making for a much more enclosed, contemplative park experience, buffed from the clamor of the metropolis, than the current Hudson River st"P would be linked directly to the street network of private comme , shape to the city. e grid, and divided, in its entirety, into a series of smaller and larger  parks, each of which would reflect the specific nature of the district be dering it. The Venturi, Scott Brown plan, improving on the best ideas Olmsted and Moses, offered the chance for a great new piece of cit making to cap the end of the twentieth century. A WATERFRONT PARK WAS ONE THING; but from whence came the landfill impetus? Nathan Silver, in his 1967 necropolis of a picture book, Lost New York, put the matter astutely: The New York Regional Plan of 192931, a proposal that was not timid about its new highway plans for Manhattan, nevertheless roundly disowned the West Side Highway. The planners found fault with it because its location cut people off from the Hudson River and made the development of new riverfront recreation facilities most difficult. The influence of the Regional Plan Association's comment was presumably modest, because the alignment of the new East River Drive soon repeated the mistake on the other side of the island. Since the pennywise New York commissioners who laid out the 1811 grid of streets had reasoned that the City did not need many parks because of New York's healthful relationship with its river edges, one finds that official planning has, in its history, both turned people toward the water and then stopped them from getting there. This double bind may one day have to be resolved by means of expensive landfill and development. Besides the statement's elegant terseness, what stands out today is that Silver, a champion of New York tradition and preservation, accepted without hesitation the solution of landfill. After all, Manhattan had grown physically, from the 1700s on, largely as a result of landfill: it had added Front, West, Water Streets, and more; it had connected the Battery and Castle Clinton, once surrounded by the water, to Downtown; it had filled in swamps and marshlands to support rail tracks and highways; it had rounded out shavings of land to the north; and, more recently, it had added nearly a hundred acres to make Battery Park City.