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This proposal brings awareness to the fact that Gateway is as much water as it is land. The form of the new park at Floyd Bennett Field would reintroduce water into the site quite dramatically, signaling to visitors that they are at an edge, an intersection, a place that is on the border between urban and natural landscapes. A series of new jetties and piers throughout Gateway would bring park visitors into direct contact with marshlands, tides and fluctuating sea levels, educating visitors about the tension that occurs when ecological and human environments intersect. In this proposal, park visitors would be offered the opportunity to occupy land and water simultaneously.
This project creates a highly visible, experiential public infrastructure that responds to the shifting ecosystem of Jamaica Bay and defines a new vision of the relationship between nature and people. Though within New York City, it is a stretch to call this an urban park in the context of Manhattan. Gateway must be made more accessible in terms of its idea.
On a marginal landscape with great biotic diversity, we believe that people should be educated that ecosystems are in necessary flux, a cycle increasingly complex with today’s global climate shifts. Capturing the diversity of Gateway’s ECOTONES, or zones of ecological tension, we propose an urban park that creates a microcosm of shifting habitats, program and landforms. These ecotones then operate at the larger scale of Jamaica Bay’s salt-marshes to reanimate those processes made static by decades of urban dross, fill and dredging.
Great cities have a hard edge, a definite sense of place and identity. This designed strategy of jetties and piers, marshlands, tides and rising sea levels defines where the ecotone line will be drawn – the way people map boundaries and communicate them at a more human scale. In doing so, we establish a sense of place prepared to mark the future of our ‘natural’ environment. We’re approaching the notion of a complex landscape, actively constructed, naturally passive, and which reconceptualizes the national park where urban decay, renewal and refuge can coexist.
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