[NYguy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/arts/design/17governors-island-climate-change.html

A Climate Center on Governors Island? Could Be a Game Changer
A rezoning proposal that has been floating around is finally up for city review. This kind of development is just what New York needs now.


By Michael Kimmelman
Sept. 17, 2020

Rumors of New York’s demise are exaggerated. The other day more than 160 business leaders wrote Mayor Bill de Blasio about “widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other quality-of-life issues.” The city is in many ways back to life.

But City Hall had been running low on leadership and good ideas before the pandemic. New York needs them both now.

So it was, in a sense, good news that the nonprofit Trust for Governors Island released a proposal on Monday to rezone disused parts of the island, long set aside for economic redevelopment.

I’ve seen renderings by WXY, the excellent New York architecture firm. They’re rosy advertisements for hypothetical construction. But they give a sense of the scale and potential of the concept, which in this case could entail as much as four or five million square feet of new development.

According to Clare Newman, the president and chief executive officer of the trust, the prospective climate center would offer public programs, offices for green tech companies and architecture and engineering firms, and be anchored by a university or research institute that would build and pay for its part of the campus.

The city has invested some $400 million so far. Like Brooklyn Bridge Park and other Bloomberg-era public-private ventures, the understanding has always been that Governors Island should eventually pay for itself. According to Ms. Newman, it still depends on the city to cover about three-fourths of a $20 million annual operating budget. With tax revenues cratering, who knows how long that will last.

Of course many universities are also facing a cash crunch because of the pandemic. Not many may be looking to expand at this moment.

But history can be useful here. Rockefeller Center broke ground at the start of the Depression; Lincoln Center, when thousands of New Yorkers were fleeing to the suburbs. The obvious precedent to the Governors Island proposal, the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, was hatched during the last recession.

And, after all, it was in the wake of 9/11, when doomsayers predicted the end of tall buildings and the abandonment of New York by big businesses, that city leaders plotted an economic turnaround, which precipitated an unprecedented boom in skyscraper construction.

There’s a clear climate risk to building a climate research center on the waterfront. The trust counters that the island is, in fact, an ideal petri dish and laboratory for climate adaptation. It’s an argument. Part of the ingenuity of West 8’s design was to strategize protections that worked during Hurricane Sandy.

Alicia Glen, a former deputy mayor, who now chairs the Governors Island Trust, cites the hopeful case of Robert Moses. Three-quarters of a century ago he helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in the city. That coup ensured New York would be at the center of the conversation about humanity and survival in the postwar era. It also brought economic development to the city.

These days any new development is a call to the barricades for many New Yorkers. Those who love Governors Island as it is now may well ask whether even a do-good project is really necessary. A better question might be: Will whatever gets built there — if anything does — live up to the design standards of the changes so far?

To judge from West 8’s master plan and WXY’s renderings, the good news is that existing parkland can be integrated with mostly low-rise development to preserve open spaces, repurpose historic buildings and turn the island into a kind of green Epcot, with a campus that could serve as both a research hub and a showcase for the latest resilient technologies and materials.

Architecturally speaking, everything will come down to the details — and the as-yet-undetermined tenant(s).

Meanwhile, here’s hoping the rezoning passes city muster. Planning the future of New York is what we need now. It involves many steps. This is a small but useful one. We need more.