A 50 Yr Battle to Create Hudson River Park Captured in New Book by Activist Tom Fox

It’s been a mere half century since a repair truck, laden with asphalt, plunged through the elevated West Side Highway on to Gansevoort and Little West 12th street, forty feet below.

That harrowing moment, which came to symbolize the very disintegration of New York in the 1970s, also set in motion an extraordinary struggle over how to replace the collapsing highway and what, more generally, to do with the waterfront along the Hudson River now that most commercial shipping had abandoned it.

Enter Tom Fox, who for most of those fifty years has had a role in the debates as an executive, advocate or just plain local citizen. Now he shares that history in “Creating the Hudson River Park—Environmental and Community Activism, Politics and Greed.”

As the title implies this is a tangled tale, which, he notes, ebbs and flows much as the namesake river flows both ways (as its Lenape name puts it) with the tides.

Indeed, there is a touch of Isaiah Berlin in Tom Fox’s vision of how to get things done in a complex urban setting. The British philosopher was no Jane Jacobs and never weighed in on Manhattan development, as far as is known.

But Fox’s book seems underpinned by one of Berlin’s basic democratic beliefs. Many small ideas are far preferable to one big one. That big idea was Westway, the massive development scheme to use federal highway money to fill in the derelict westside waterfront, run an interstate through the landfill to replace the now collapsed West Side Highway and build housing, offices and parks on top.

Everyone, it seemed, thought this was a grand idea, certainly a very big one. Everyone that is except a small band of environmentalists who managed to overturn the plan because it had not properly considered its impact on the fish who depended on the delicate Hudson River Estuary.

Westway collapsed almost as suddenly as the West Side Highway before it. “Those of us who opposed Westway celebrated in 1985 when the project was defeated,” Fox reminisces as he begins the tale of what happened then. And then. And then.

“Between 1986 and 1998, a new vision for the future of the West Side waterfront was forged through a unique participatory planning process involving all the competing stakeholders.”

This notion of giving everyone’s ideas, large or small, a voice is at the heart of Fox’s narrative. He celebrates the most basic of democratic ideals, that letting everyone be heard will produce both better solutions and more support.

The initial outcome seemed a confirmation of this. Two simple and practical visions coalesced: A tree lined Boulevard at street level, akin to Park Avenue, and between the road and the river a maritime park that would reintroduce New Yorkers to their waterfront. No landfill needed, or permitted.

“The project seemed poised to be a win-win undertaking,” Fox recalls. “In fact, the planning and construction of both projects proceeded smoothly at first.”

This was 1998, when the legislature created the Hudson River Park, 550 acres of land, piers and underwater property running from Battery Park City to 59th street. But saying it doesn’t make it so.

What has followed, in Fox’s telling, has been 25 years of struggle to make right what wasn’t done right to start. Most basically, funding to build and operate the park was never clearly committed, he says.

Meaning that the pressure to allow commercial activity and real estate within the park, to fulfill a misplaced desire for financial self-sufficiency, frequently overwhelmed less profitable missions, he writes.

Fox campaigned, to no avail, for a designated fee on neighboring residences and businesses, whose value skyrocketed as the park grew.

Instead, the park trust, a state agency which runs the park, generated revenue by selling off air rights from several of the piers within the park, increasing density across the roadway and demands on the park, without any increase in ongoing revenue.

“The city and state effectively put a For Sale sign on the park and the trust became a real estate broker,” Fox writes. “There have been many plans for commercial development in Central Park, but none have been implemented. Why should our new generation of urban parks be any different?”

Fox makes clear this is no mere rhetorical question. “The struggle to ensure the Hudson River Park becomes the world-class waterfront park originally envisioned by its creators is far from over.”

A quarter century after its creation, and half a century after the collapse of the West Side Highway, the basic elements of the Hudson River Park are mostly built. But that is not the same as the park being finished, Fox says.

“As the Hudson River Park nears completion,” he explains, “a course correction would help protect the park and increase its benefit to the public.”

First, the management of the park should transition from a state development corporation “into a traditional park entity.” He cites the Central Park Conservancy as a good model. As part of this, the state should turn over to the city and its Parks Department management of the park.

Designating the River Park as city parkland would retard efforts to develop or commercialize park land, he says. As part of this transition, the four-mile-long bike path, perhaps the most visible of all the improvements wrought by the park, should be relinquished by the state transportation department, which is in charge of the adjacent highway, and turned over to the parks department.

While he is at it, Fox also recommends the state take a second try at the road, still called the west side highway by many new Yorkers, perhaps because it never quite became that idyllic urban boulevard envisioned in the earlier plans.

With the city now trying to restrict cars, not encourage them, the highway should be narrowed, a lane could be turned over to e-vehicles and some of the highway right-of-way used to widen the park, he argues.

This rebuilding can incorporate the resiliency measures needed to face climate change, he adds, and be the catalyst for finally creating a long term financing mechanism for the park.

Finally, he returns to his original point, that including the public in deliberations has been the secret sauce all along and should continue to be.

“Embracing community participation and thinking outside the box,” he says, “turned Westway into the Hudson River Park.”