Deciding Future of Grand Seaport Space

By Barry Owens
JULY 3, 2006

There are beautiful things right out in the open in this city, easy to locate and love, like art and architecture. Then there are the attractions that are harder to find, but impossible not to fall for once discovered. Like empty space—glorious, yawning, wide-open-with-possibility empty space.

So it is with Peck Slip, a broad, open sea of cobblestone in the South Street Seaport. You will find it one city block below the Brooklyn Bridge, spreading from Pearl Street to South Street and widening as it approaches the East River. Centuries ago, ships moored there. Today it is, of course, a parking lot. But tomorrow, residents in the neighborhood say, it could be a park, a plaza or a piazza. Above all, the residents hope the space remains mostly open.

“We think it is special now to just have nothing there,” said Randy Polumbo, a Seaport resident and owner of DoDo Café on the corner of Peck Slip and South Street. “This is a great open plaza that has been there for a century or so, and we want to make sure that anything that goes in there is worthy.”

The city’s Parks Department is to convert Peck Slip into some sort of public space as part of the redevelopment of the East River waterfront. An idea floated by the department more than a year ago, to put a long pool on the space as a way to re-introduce water to the site, sank under the weight of neighborhood outcry. Such is the level of local concern that the Parks Department is starting over on its plan for Peck Slip, and taking the unusual step of inviting the public to join its design team and consultants for a walk through the space. That tour, which is open to all, is scheduled for July 13 at 10 a.m.

Last month Laurence Mauro, a landscape architect and project manager with the Parks Department, told the Seaport Committee of Community Board 1 that plans for the block so far are spare.

“What we’re thinking of right now is an open space,” Mauro said. But the space will require benches, lighting, and perhaps bollards to keep vehicles from plowing through, he said.

The tour is a chance for designers and residents to decide together where best to put those elements, he said.

Next fall the Department of Transportation will begin rebuilding sidewalks and curbs along Peck Slip, and repairing uneven and gapped spaces in the cobblestones. The agency is also considering closing Front Street where it intersects Peck Slip so that whatever is created there does not need to be divided. Construction of the park space would begin in the spring of 2009.
Many neighborhood residents turned out for the committee meeting to hear about the Parks Department’s plans and to advocate for their own.

“Peck Slip is unlike anywhere else in the city,” said architect Jordan Gruzen, likening it to the sort of urban open spaces one might find in Rome. “Rather than refer to it as a park, I suggest we refer to it as a plaza or a piazza.”
Gary Fagin, a longtime neighborhood resident and activist, cautioned that Peck Slip was no place for a “cookie cutter playground” or “pocket park.”

Harold Reed, a CB1 member and Seaport resident, was one of the few calling for greenery.

“I happen to like flowers and foliage,” he said.

Mauro said he planned to return to the committee this month, after the walking tour, with a more complete sketch of what the future holds for Peck Slip.

“Sometimes,” committee member Joe Lerner said, “an empty space is just what we need.”