Book Review: Transforming the Hudson Waterfront

By Daniel Katzive

Once upon a time, the Hudson River waterfront was a busy seaport, with passenger ships docking along its length and barges shuttling rail cars heading for warehouses across West Street while overhead traffic zipped by on the elevated West Side Highway. 

By the 1970s maritime and rail activity had moved elsewhere, and the Hudson piers deteriorated. Some were repurposed as parking lots or storage for municipal agencies; one even hosted a barge used as a jail. The decrepit highway was closed to traffic but still loomed over the streets in places, casting shadows. The few dilapidated piers that remained accessible became havens for anglers, sunbathers, and a gathering place for the Greenwich Village gay community.

The transformation of that post-industrial landscape into the verdant parkland that is now Hudson River Park, stretching from Battery Park City to West 59th Street, was far from a foregone conclusion. It happened thanks to persistent advocacy from community-based groups and proponents of open space, a story told in great, behind-the-scenes detail by Tom Fox in his new book, “Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed.” 

As with most land use battles in New York City, the process pitted commercial development interests against environmental concerns and recreation advocacy, with the outcome a product of hard-fought compromise that left all sides not fully satisfied. The book is far from a celebratory victory lap but rather a critical analysis of the successes and shortcomings of the resource we enjoy today. 

Tom Fox had a front row seat for this story from the very beginning. He was a leader of the community opposition that helped doom the massive Westway project in the mid-1980s. That plan would have transformed the waterfront south of 36th Street by building an interstate highway and residential space on decks over the river.  In the aftermath of Westway’s defeat, Governor Mario Cuomo sought community input to determine what would come instead.

Cuomo appointed Fox to the task force charged with coming up with a plan. Consensus coalesced around an urban estuary park running alongside a tree-lined boulevard and bike path. That recommendation formed the basis for the Hudson River Park we know today.

Fox tells the story in first person, weaving his personal experience into an historical account with extensive footnotes. Some of the other characters in this saga will no doubt disagree with his take on their motivations and actions, but this is Tom Fox’s story, not the detached analysis of a neutral historian.

Fox grew up in working-class Brooklyn, joined the Navy out of high school, and served two tours in Vietnam. Returning to New York after his military service, he enrolled in college and later found work as a park ranger in the newly formed Gateway National Recreation Area on Jamaica Bay, also becoming involved in advocacy for community gardens in the many vacant lots of 1970s New York. The former sailor found himself drawn to the waterfront — and eventually to the grassroots efforts to stop Westway.

After Fox’s work on the West Side Task Force, Cuomo appointed him as the first president of the newly formed Hudson River Park Conservancy, predecessor to the Hudson River Park Trust that runs the park today. Fox found himself often on the outs with some of his former environmentalist allies who wanted the shoreline left alone, to revert to a more natural state. In his acknowledgements, he says of those former comrades in arms: “my positions would have seemed quite extreme if it were not for their positions being even more so.”

Fox left the presidency after three years in 1995 with the arrival of a new governor in Albany. While he developed other interests on the Brooklyn waterfront and started the commercial enterprise New York Water Taxi, Fox has kept a close eye on the park’s progress and served with a succession of groups advocating for the park, often in conflict with the trust management, commercial interests, and various city and state officials.

One key theme which runs through the book is Fox’s frustration with a lack of sufficient dedicated funding for the park. The trust takes in revenue from various commercial enterprises operating on the waterfront, but this has apparently proved to be somewhat of a double-edged sword, often an excuse for elected officials to not provide additional financing. And, in Fox’s view, the shortfalls then also increase pressure on the trust to allow more commercial development. Efforts to secure revenues from nearby properties that have appreciated in value as the waterfront has transformed have so far proved elusive. 

The author is particularly critical of Little Island, the “floating park” with green space and outdoor theaters. While the project has drawn many appreciative visitors, the design was conceived and funded by wealthy donors with little community involvement. The structure also foreclosed the possibility of docking space for visiting historical or educational ships there, something Fox thinks the park should make more effort to accommodate.  

The book flows in chronological order, which necessarily involves jumping around geographically quite a bit. Some readers might feel they are getting lost among the piers as they plow through, and even those with deep familiarity with the estuary may benefit from having a Google satellite map open as they progress.

But those with a particular interest in how the park came to be what it is today will relish the detail and unique perspective. Moreover, the final chapter could stand alone as an essay summarizing the park’s successes and its shortcomings and offering Fox’s views on what might – and what should – come next. “A lot has gone right,” he says. “But a lot has gone wrong,” he adds, noting that “progress in completing the park has ebbed and flowed like its namesake river.”

“Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed,” is available in hardcover from Rutgers University Press.

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