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Governors Island design team announced

Governors Island

Governor Eliot Spitzer and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winning design team at Governors Island, and officials talked up the "whimsical" plan, which proposes tearing down the island's barracks and converting them to hills. But the challenges facing the 90-acre project are serious.

Spitzer, Bloomberg and Assembly Speaker Sheldon announced that West 8, a Rotterdam firm with landscape experience from Singapore to Toronto, will lead the design team for the island's western-facing half with a grand 2.2-mile promenade and three public spaces. West 8 and its partners beat four other finalists to convert the harbor's underused jewel over the next two years into what Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff promised could surpass Prospect Park and Central Park for "idyllic" charm and views.

The design competition represents a new phase in the island, which the state bought for $1 from the federal government during the Clinton administration. An earlier request for development ideas underwhelmed the city-state sponsoring agency, the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, leading Doctoroff to more aggressively guide planning efforts.

Doctoroff today spoke of the island as the linchpin in an emerging "Harbor District" connecting Hudson River Park, the under-construction Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the planned esplanade along South Street. That area encompasses waterfront development in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, where residents are paying up for new condos and clamoring for matching new parks.

Perhaps heeding that call, GIPEC required submitters to propose ways to make the island a unique park and downplayed questions of what sorts of permanent facilities could work there. Today, Speaker Silver, whose district includes Lower Manhattan, praised GIPEC for promising to deliver "exactly what residents in Lower Manhattan deserve."

For the next two years, GIPEC will fund environmental impact studies and design work and continue to offer tours and summer programs of the relatively bucolic island. The presumption is that West 8's team -- which also includes one of the High Line's lead designers and the firm that transformed 55 Water Street's roof to a tranquil landscape -- will produce something so enchanting that New Yorkers will continue to visit until a private investor underwrites the roads and sewers the island will need to prosper.

"We've always seen parks as the catalyst for the sensible redevelopment of the island," Doctoroff said, mentioning think tanks and research facilities as possible occupants. Law prohibits residential uses on the island: Bloomberg said that his foundation might answer a request for proposals with a scheme to site a public health center there.

For now, the park planning is all the public can track. On that score, West 8 principal Adriaan Geuze promised to pay attention at public forums and online comments, which GIPEC promised in the coming months.

"Engaging people is very important for a park," Geuze said. "You cannot simply build a park, ship it and bring it." The same holds, more emphatically, for an island.