Part 3: The many pasts of Hunters Point South Park

The main attraction at Hunters Point South Park, for some, is the boardwalk that curves up and out over the East River like the prow of a ship and offers a view of the Manhattan skyline. The park has a number of other amenities like a sports field, a public art installation, meandering walkways and plazas with food trucks. My favorite part of the park, though: it’s the tidal marsh that encircles its southern edge.

The park was designed by architects Weiss/Manfredi and landscape designer Tomas Balsley of SWA. It is this marsh that makes the park “a rare and visionary commitment to environmentally conscious, waterfront resilience.”[1] The marsh is a method of flood protection, with the capacity to absorb the waters that threaten to inundate the peninsula with rising sea levels and larger storm surges.[2] But the park’s designers also see the marsh as part of a general embrace of the site’s past, an homage paid to the landscape that dominated this area before the arrival of industry, of bulkheads that made the coastline rectilinear and stable, of rail barges and piers.[3] At this park, we can see how the aesthetic project of the wild plays out—how the landscape speaks, and tells a certain story about nature and our relationship to it. We’ll start, unsurprisingly, by looking at some old maps.   

The 1767 Ratzer map of New York. Ratzer, Bernard. “Plan of the city of New York in North America : surveyed in the years 1766 & 1767,” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 11, 2020. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-f437-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The 1767 Ratzer map shows New York almost beyond recognition. A small town is cluttered at the end of a long and narrow island. Farms stretch northward, marked will names that will ring bells: Bayard, Delancey, Stuyvesant. A bit of Brooklyn is also shown. Those who know New York geography will be able to recognize the bay that became the Navy Yard, the hook that became Red Rook, and will perhaps be shocked to see a tangle of twisting eddies and streams that was rectified into the Gowanus Canal.

The map doesn’t show much of Queens, the largest of New York’s five boroughs, which at this time was mostly farmland. The neighborhoods of Astoria, Flushing, and Jamaica, now connected by various rail lines and a blanket of gridded streets, were in 1767 just small villages connected by dirt roads and footpaths. But there is one tiny portion of Queens that is indeed shown on the Ratzer map. It is a small peninsula that forms the northern bank of Newtown Inlet. The southern bank looks to be cultivated: a narrow hatch represents rows of crops and orchards. But the peninsula in question is just marsh.

By 1852, most of Brooklyn is still farmland that fades into marsh, but the street grid is beginning to stretch southward. It is not even a century after Ratzer made his map, and the coastlines are straight: the marshes have been filled at Gowanus and Red Hook. Queens has remained relatively undeveloped. Marshes still line most of the coast, and Astoria, Flushing, and Jamaica are all still small villages, though now connected by “plank roads.”

Queens and Brooklyn in 1852. Conner, R. F. O, M Dripps, and Korff Brothers. Map of Kings and part of Queens counties, Long Island N.Y. [N. York New York: Published by M. Dripps, . N.Y. New York: Engraved & printed by Korff Brothers, 1852] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2013593245/.

Eliphalet Nott’s land at what’s today Hunters Point South Park.

But there was a sign of life at Hunter’s Point: a small street grid has been drawn with dotted lines, just five avenues running north from Newtown Inlet, and twelve streets running east-west from East River to a small stream and more marshes to the east. The dotted lines of the last avenue are entirely in the water. The area is owned, it seems, by an Eliphalet Nott, a long-time president of Union College and a prodigious land speculator in the city in the mid-19th Century. Having purchased the land in 1835, Nott had plans to level the small hill that had sat at the middle of the peninsula and to extend the land out into the East River. Following a generous donation from Union College in 1853, the Flushing Railroad Company decided to place the Western terminus of its rail line at Hunters Point, though it was still “low meadow and swamp land, covered with salt grass and dotted with the occasional rock outcroppings."[4] Still, by the middle of the 1860s, the area was bustling with commercial and industrial activity, taking advantage of the passenger and freight train routes that had been established there.  

Industry came slowly at first, and then all at once: Standard Oil storage facilities, boiler manufacturers, a sugar refinery, an ink factory, and a metal foundry.[5] The establishment of industry forever changed the landscape of the area: the marsh was filled in and a bulkhead was placed along the shore. A late nineteenth century newspaper article describes Hunters Point as “an ill-smelling neighborhood through which one should pass holding his nose.”[6] Part of the problem was the area’s factory runoff was dumped, along with manure and other refuse, into a tidal creek that, because it had been dammed in the previous century, was no longer regularly flushed out by the East River tides.

Industrial development at Hunters Point. “Queens, V. 2, Double Page Plate No. 1; Part of Long Island City, Ward 1; [Map bounded by 12th St., Ashburn St., Newtown Creek, East River]” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 11, 2020. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8e97b922-2298-8888-e040-e00a1806059f

By 1919, train tunnels had been dug under the East River and their entrances were placed just around the fourth avenue of Nott’s original grid. There was still passenger ferry service from Hunters Point to 34th Street and a rail ferry at Pigeon Street, which allowed rail cars to be ferried across the water. Industrial uses continued to establish themselves along the waterfront and along Newtown Creek until the end of World War II.[7] Part of the area’s stagnation, some urban historians have argued, can be attributed to the 1961 New York City zoning ordinance, which classified the area as “heavy industrial,” and prohibited any residential development. Workers who lived in the area remained, and a strong community flourished, but it was not its once-bustling self.[8] The land at the tip of the peninsula sat vacant, cordoned off, a so-called “no-mans land” until park development activities began in the early 2000s.[9]

Industry, writ large, undoubtedly changed the natural landscape. It polluted for profit. Modern civilization and its industrial activities certainly seem villanous in this light, and triumphant: the marshes were filled, streams dammed, and the stench of industry was fixed by more damming, more filling. Rewilding supposes that it is possible, and good, to return to “the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.”[10] It “represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility,” when in fact, it was we, humans, who leveled the hill, extended the land, filled the swamp.[11]

There is scant physical evidence of the designers’ desire to restore “the legacy of industrial passage and exchange” on the site.[12] In the northern section, there is an “interpretive rail garden” that uses rail tracks as planters, but beyond this, the history of industry has been washed away, replaced with marshes that are “the river’s friend.”[13] [14] Humans, through the imposition of industrial uses, shaped this landscape for over a century, but looking out across the marshes, we’re told a different story. How are we meant to take responsibility for civilization’s past actions when we are no longer reminded of those actions and their effects?

In urban development dynamics, there are many implications of not having reminders of our industrial pasts. It allows us to evade responsibility, but it also blots out important human stories, which are vital to a sense of community in cities.

Hunters Point South Park was unveiled over two phases in 2013 and 2018, but plans for the development of the area stretch all the way back to the early 1990s, with the announcement of Queens West, an enormous development proposal, jointly funded by city, state, and federal money. In 1994, developers were attempting to secure Federal Housing mortgage insurance the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a new apartment tower in the neighborhood. In order to qualify, the developers had to demonstrate that their site, which was then “luxuriant with chest-high weeds and a few sunflowers growing over rubble,” was not “an abandoned industrial wilderness.” So they, and the city and the state, set about creating Hunters Point South Community Park.  

The truss bridge over 48th Avenue. Forgotten New York.

The park was to be built on top of a railway cut on 48th Avenue, just north of today’s Hunters Point South Park (which then sat abandoned). A small truss bridge, a distinctive and quirky remnant of the area’s rail heritage, was set to be demolished to make way for the park. Residents of the area, in response, called for its preservation, describing it as “visually pleasing” and “a symbol of the community.” A development official at the time questioned the community’s wariness of the effect new development would have on the character of the neighborhood, asking “This was manufacturing—how consistent was that with a residential neighborhood?”[15]   

Dan Campo would quibble with this. As a longtime scholar of New York’s abandoned industrial waterfront, he has chronicled the myriad activities that take place in these spaces: sunbathing, skateboarding, painting; nature walks, public art, swimming.[16] Though these spaces are vast, inhospitable, even, they are also full of vitality, human and non-human. People explore, swim, hike, and picnic; spontaneous urban woodlands grow in thick groves alongside abandoned buildings. It is in part, Campo argues, the remnants of industry that give these places life and make them unique. He echoes the sentiments of the residents of Hunters Point: physical fragments of the past help give current residents a shared sense of community. When these physical fragments are taken out, when the villainous industrial development is vanquished and written out of the story, that sense of community can slowly dissipate.

The remnants of the Pigeon Street rail barge. Nathan Kensinger, Curbed.

Designers understand that there is aesthetic appeal of formerly industrial sites and their crumbling structures. Thomas Balsley, one of the designers of Hunters Point South Park, also designed Gantry Plaza State Park. The most striking feature of this latter park is two enormous gantries, which used to hoist rail cars onto barges. The maintenance of these structures pays respect to the industrial past, and the people for whom this past fosters community.[17] At the beginning of the Hunter’s Point South Park project, Balsley suggested that he wanted to keep the Pigeon Street railroad barge, which sat crumbling and half-submerged in the East River. But are the designers’ best intentions thwarted by the aesthetic power of a heroic nature?

The cove at Pigeon Street—now a marsh. Albert Vecerka/ESTO.

I ask because in the cove where that barge once sat, there’s now a marsh.

Projects like Hunters Point South Park expose the need for a new kind of development paradigm, in which pasts are not erased and other pasts are reestablished. Instead, we need to fundamentally reexamine how we engage with the space around us—our history in it, its history apart from us, and the non-human experiences and processes that take place within it. It has to be possible to imagine futures that engage with the past without seeking to recreate it. And as planners and designers, we should be excited to accept the challenge that this poses. Landscapes contain multitudes. City spaces are complicated amalgams of past and present, of smells and sounds that might at first sound complicated and discordant. Cicadas beep, trucks chirp, boats’ wakes splash, waves roll over the edges of whistling marsh grasses. Perhaps a train horn bleats somewhere off to the east. We want to simplify, to quiet these sounds or to silence some so others can be louder. Instead, we should be quiet, in order to hear them all.  

[1] Evan Nicole Brown, “This Public Park Is a Model for Urban Design in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Fast Company, September 23, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90402599/this-small-public-park-is-model-for-the-water-logged-cities-of-the-future.

[2] “Park Features,” Hunters Point Parks Conservancy, accessed May 11, 2020, https://www.hunterspointparks.org/resiliency. Karim Doumar, “How an Expanding Park in Queens Can Withstand Any Storm,” CityLab, October 24, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/10/storm-resilient-park-queens/573661/.

[3] Svenja Binz, “From Wasteland to Highlight | Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park in NYC,” Topos (blog), November 12, 2018, https://www.toposmagazine.com/hunters-point-south-waterfront-park/.

[4] Jennifer Brisbane, “Historical Relationships between Land Elevation and Socioeconomic Status in New York City: A Mixed Methods GIS Approach,” Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 2014, 109, quoting Seyfried, 1963.

[5] Ibid, 113ff.

[6] Ibid,116, citing Seyfried, 1984, 91.

[7] Ibid, 117.

[8] Ibid, 119.

[9] Helene Stapinski, “On the Resilient Waterfront,” The New York Times, May 31, 2018, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/nyregion/on-the-resilient-waterfront.html.

[10] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 7 – 28, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059, 16.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Elizabeth Fazzare, “Hunter’s Point South Park Is a Model for Urban Flood Resiliency,” Architectural Digest, June 27, 2018, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/hunters-point-south-park-urban-flood-resiliency.

[13] “Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park,” SWA/Balsley (blog), accessed May 10, 2020, https://swabalsley.com/projects/hunters-point-south-waterfront-park/.

[14] Karim Doumar, “How an Expanding Park in Queens Can Withstand Any Storm,” CityLab, October 24, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/10/storm-resilient-park-queens/573661/.

[15] David W. Dunlap, “Queens West Begins With a Park,” The New York Times, September 18, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/18/realestate/queens-west-begins-with-a-park.html.

[16] Daniel Campo, “Brooklyn’s Vernacular Waterfront,” Journal of Urban Design 7, no. 2 (June 2002): 171–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/1357480022000012221.

[17] Dunlap.