Battery Park

The Daily Plant : Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Peter Minuit Plaza And New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion Open

Photo by Malcolm Pinckney

On May 12, Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe joined Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Capital Construction President Michael Horodniceanu, Battery Conservancy President Warrie Price, State Senator Daniel Squadron, City Council Member Margaret Chin, Dutch Ambassador for International Cultural Cooperation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Margriet Leemhuis, Downtown Alliance Chairman Robert R. Douglass and President Elizabeth H. Berger, and Community Board 1 Chair Julie Menin to celebrate the opening of Peter Minuit Plaza and the dedication of the New Amsterdam Plein and Pavilion, located in front of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal at State Street and Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan.

This rare park/transit meeting ground defines a new era in public space design and construction. Designed by Gail Wittwer-Laird of NYC Parks, Peter Minuit Plaza weaves together trees, gardens, art, food and information with ferries, subways, buses, bikes and pedestrians.

NYC DOT and MTA identified $22.1 million to raise the quality of the plaza to the standard that this major transportation hub deserves. DOT also obtained an additional $1.4 million in U.S. Department of Homeland Security funds for improved ferry terminal security and partnered with NYC Parks on overall design development and construction oversight.

The new 1.3 acre park has a stunning granite and quartz stone plaza with NYC Parks’ standard-setting design, architecture, and horticulture to create a unique public space. Intermodal like no other transit hub in New York, it seamlessly connects NYC DOT's Staten Island Ferry Terminal, MTA NYC Transit's M15 Select Bus Service and #1 and R subways, and NYC Parks' Battery Bikeway and pedestrian pathways. A new taxi stand was added along the eastern edge of the plaza. The design is showcased with the bus loop's serpentine steel canopy, the bikeway's native trees and shrubs, expansive paths lined with ever-blooming perennials, and a bronze relief map of New Amsterdam from 1660.

Anchoring the north end of the plaza is the award-winning New Amsterdam Plein and Pavilion. This historic $2.3 million gift from the Kingdom of the Netherlands on the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival into New York Harbor honors four centuries of Dutch-American friendship and a mutual passion for the values of innovation and creativity, diversity and openness, entrepreneurship and progress.

The Plein and Pavilion was conceived by the Battery Conservancy to create an extraordinary outdoor living room for spontaneous and scheduled activities, public markets, seating and shade, and a gleaming white, iconic, state-of-the-art pavilion, designed by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio, Amsterdam. UNStudio incorporated DuPont™ Corian®, a flexible and innovative design material, to create the exceptionally daring horizontal and vertical surfaces that contribute to the Pavilion’s iconic impact. Handel Architects LLP, New York served as associate architect, working in collaboration with UNStudio.

The design for New Amsterdam Plein and Pavilion creates a 5,000-square-foot programmed space housing regional organic food by Merchants Market, as well as the Alliance for Downtown New York’s Visitor Information Booth.

NYC Parks designed a stone-paved civic platform - plein, in Dutch - with walkways featuring engraved quotations from Russell Shorto's acclaimed book, The Island at the Center of the World. A carved bronze map of Castello's 1660 plan for New Amsterdam by renowned sculptor Simon Verity and his partner, architect Martha Finney, marks the entrance to the Plein and provides a glimpse of the historic evolution of Lower Manhattan. The Plein also feature berms and perennial garden planting beds, designed by NYC Parks using the color palette of Piet Oudolf, who created The Battery Bosque Gardens and The Battery's Gardens of Remembrance.

Every night at 12:00, the New Amsterdam Pavilion will glow with an array of colors in tribute to Peter Minuit whose name translates to 'midnight.' Minuit was the enterprising director of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam who, tradition has it, in 1626 purchased Manhattan Island from a group of Lenape Indians for the trade goods valued by the Dutch at 60 guilders (about what a Dutch soldier then earned in six months), or 24 dollars. He consolidated the dispersed and defenseless Dutch settlements into what would become the New York City we know today.

QUOTATION FOR THE DAY

“I find television very educating.
Every time somebody turns on the set,
I go into the other room and read a book.”

Groucho Marx
(1890 - 1977)