Again, a bit far afield, but my logic: when our local park adds 5.6 acres of green space — even if it’s one and a half miles away — we will use it.

The Hudson River Park Trust rolled out the latest renderings from the design team for the Gansevoort Peninsula at a public meeting last night — the work of landscape architects at James Corner Field Operations, collaborating with nArchitects for the buildings along the eastern edge. Since I am on the Trust board, of course I am biased, but the design is really exciting, full of potential and quite gorgeous. All the local leagues lobbied hard for more field space, but the designers tried to make sure the park would mean more to more people. (Don’t take this the wrong way, but I always say it’s like 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. There’s never enough square acreage to do everything every park user wants or even needs. Alas, this is life in the big city.)

What the park will have is a beach along most of the southern edge, a kayak launch, a dog run, a U-13 turf soccer field and baseball field (this uses up about 1.6 acres of the peninsula), a west-facing reflective area with benches along the entire stretch of what is actually a mapped 13th Avenue, and a lovely plaza/playspace and boulevard along what is the mapped Bloomfield Street on the peninsula’s northern edge. This last piece is a clever design to mitigate the fact that FDNY needs to be able to get its biggest trucks down to the fireboat house at the northwestern corner of the peninsula.

Of course running along the southern edge of the peninsula, hovering over the beach, is David Hammons’ piece of genius: the ghost outline of the original pier, planned and funded by the Whitney, which overlooks the park. The name: Day’s End.

Construction should take one and a half years, starting in late 2020.