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In the News: Slamming Pier 25
••• Tom Goodkind lobbed a stinkbomb at the new Pier 25 in Downtown Express: “Is having a ‘community approved design’ enough to allow a group using our tax dollars to rip the cool out of a neighborhood? This would never have stood in Coney Island, which thankfully will not be replaced with a Six Flags. I am quite frankly surprised that it happened here Downtown, where we have such a bright and active community. Welcome to Disney Tribeca. Pier 25 was the heart of our neighborhood. It was perfect or imperfectly perfect the way it was. I have no sympathy for those who destroyed our pier and then tried to recreate it. My sympathy goes out to our wonderful community, which has lost this fantastic space forever.” He also wrote: “Many of our reporters, who typically don’t live in this neighborhood, are new and have no memory of this Tribeca icon,” which I take umbrage at: I live here, and I remember the old Pier 25 very well. It was great! But the old Pier 25 was 40 percent shorter than the new one, and the sheer number of kids who live around here need a place to play, which in my opinion trumps the coolness that was lost.
••• CB1’s Landmarks committee rejected the design for the “Ed Hardy Building” at 187 Franklin. Click on the link to see why Curbed called it that. (DNAinfo)
••• The New York Times explains Kim Kardashian, who has been living in the Smyth lately. Best line: “Sean Sweeney, the director of the Soho Alliance, was quoted in The Villager describing [her] fans as ‘a generation of classless, tasteless and clueless sheep.'”
••• “The city’s 11-member Design Commission took just fifteen minutes on Monday morning to unanimously approve the Department of Sanitation’s design of the enclosed salt shed to be built in connection with the D.S.N.Y. three-district Spring Street garage.” (Downtown Express)
••• The Battery Park City Authority and the Department of Transportation are arguing over the lawn at ill-fated West Thames Park. (Broadsheet Daily)
••• “David Burke has just signed on to do the restaurant in the James New York, a new hotel at Grand Street and Avenue of the Americas in SoHo. It is expected to open in February on a site, 32 Grand Street, that is essentially where the Moonstruck Diner used to be […]. Mr. Burke, most of whose restaurants are on the Upper East Side, and who is also the consultant for the new Bowlmor complex in Times Square, opening next week, so you know he’s a class act, said he was very happy to have a downtown restaurant. “It will be rustic American, with an emphasis on local ingredients,” he said. The 130-seat place [will have] a big garden and a rooftop bar.” (New York Times)
••• The Broadsheet Daily profiles the New York City Dads Group, which was co-founded by Matt Schneider.
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I thought the old pier was just fine and I’m a little concerned about the money spent, as well.
But Mr. Goodkind is kidding himself. I moved here 12 years ago, and even back then, this was already “Disney Tribeca.”
I stayed anyway. It’s nice here.
The name of the diner was the Moondance, not Moonstruck….as for Mr. Burke, he would have been well served to have eaten at the now destroyed Moondance, perhaps he could have maintained some semblance of the true “Rustic American” fare once served there.
Slowly the neighborhood dies.
Kids in the 3-12 year old range love the new pier. They don’t have a sense of what was lost, and so it goes. The new pier has no “character” granted, but nothing new does. It is big and spacious and provides lots of opportunities to play and explore. It is expensive and frankly I feel a bit guilty that we have so many amazing outdoor spaces down here and so many other neighborhoods in the city have nothing at all or crappy little dusty playgrounds.
The old pier was the old Tribeca – creative, imaginative, a little rough around the edges (remember the recycled, community built mini-golf). The new pier is the new Tribeca – fancy, safe and soul-less.
The comments made by Bec re: the new pier vs. the old pier can be used to describe the old community vs. the new community-creative, imaginative, a little rough around the edges & now, fancy, safe & soul-less.
i miss the more ‘rough around the edges’ Tribeca, and certainly miss the old Tribeca prices, but I also love the new Wholefoods and love walking at night along the river, in the upgraded and safe walking path. It’s natural for a city to grow and change, and what I would like to do is give some of the newcomers the ‘old tribeca’ groove, and make us a little less fancy, and a liite more imaginative again…
I couldn’t help reading Mr. Goodkind’s piece in The Downtown Express without channeling the voice of Dana Carvey’s ‘grumpy old man’ character from SNL: “In my day…we didn’t have PLAYGROUNDS on our Pier! We played on the street and got hit by cars and we LIKED IT!”
The old pier was funky…but a ‘fantastic space’? Nah. True, it was ‘informal’ and had its share of ‘spontaneity’…but then, so do a lot of vacant lots near Shea Stadium—it doesn’t mean I want to live near one.
Let’s call the old Pier what it was: tattered and full of mostly unrealized potential. Ask the people using the current Pier (as opposed to shaking their fists at it) and I bet few would choose to jackhammer the lovely native grass planters and playgrounds in order to bring back the prior windswept ‘funky’ version. And their numbers will surely decrease once the burger joint, proper bathrooms, beach volleyball, mini golf and more amenities come online.
Sure the new Pier was expensive. But must all our new parks and revived piers on the Hudson succumb to the Red State, ‘government can’t and shouldn’t do anything’ mindset? Funny how few complaints we hear about the high cost of the highway that runs past the new Pier. Happily, we have a new lovely, free, open-to-the-public Pier 25 and not a walled off garden for Citibank employees or a rotting monument to Tribeca’s days as a working port. I feel like kissing the bureaucrats who made it happen.
To all the 1970’s nostalgists who long for the ‘good old days’ of unchecked urban entropym may I suggest a one-way bus ticket to Detroit.
Funny, soulless is the exact word that came to mind when I first saw the new pier. It’s brand new, clean, bigger, with more space, more “stuff”, but nothing that wouldn’t feel right at home anywhere else along the Hudson in the Village or Chelsea or the Upper West Side.
Maybe over time it will feel familiar, maybe if there are ships docked, or familiar faces are again running the snack bar & miniature golf, or maybe on a hot summer night, surrounded by kids voices, watching the sunset over the Hudson, it will again feel like part of the neighborhood…maybe.
Trouble is, everyone has a different idea of what constitutes “character” or “soul” (let’s be honest, to those who call it souless, could anyone really agree on how to design a pier with soul?). Clean, safe, sturdy and useable is perhaps not ideal but I think the people and events which will fill it up will give it all the character it needs.