Governors Island in N.Y. due for makeover
Consortium plan adds park areas, recreation space
NEW YORK - It's a priceless piece of real estate largely unknown to New York's 8 million inhabitants. From its shore, visitors can see the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
In the middle of New York Harbor, just a half mile from lower Manhattan, Governors Island is about to undergo an extensive makeover that would turn much of it into parkland and recreational space.
A consortium of five design companies was chosen in December to transform the teardrop-shaped island, turning the flat southern end into a park with manmade hills and a shoreline promenade.
Improvements also are in store for the northern half, a historic district that has 18th- and 19th-century houses, a defunct golf course, and a former Army parade ground.
Planners want to build an amphitheater for outdoor concerts and provide free bicycles for roaming the island, where private cars are banned. Ten concerts are scheduled this year on an existing outdoor stage.
Sold by its original Dutch settlers to the British in 1708, the 172-acre island became an American military base for 202 years - home to soldiers, Confederate prisoners of war, and the Coast Guard, yet off limits to civilians.
"Just the views of the harbor are significant - views that most people in New York have never seen," said Leslie Koch, president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation.
Financed by the city and state, the project will cost upward of $500 million overall. Plans call for a groundbreaking in late 2009, but demolition of old buildings on the southern end may start as early as next month.
The only access to Governors Island is by ferry, a seven-minute trip from lower Manhattan. About 56,000 people visited last year, seven times more than in 2005 when the National Park Service opened its two historic Army forts to the public. Castle Williams and Fort Jay were built just before the War of 1812.
The island's past is studded with famous names: John Peter Zenger, a German who emigrated to New York in 1710, and was quarantined on the island for medical reasons 25 years before he won a libel case that upheld the principle of press freedom; Ulysses S. Grant, whose 1852 Army quarters still stand; the Wright brothers, who flew from its airstrip in 1909; and the Smothers brothers, a music and comedy pair born in a military clinic in the 1930s. A rock on the island's west shore marks where President Reagan and President François Mitterrand of France commemorated the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986.
