Staten Island Ferry

[hilldweller]

In my opinion, the return of cars on the ferry is ill-advised.

On the one hand, we have three new ferries that are designed to carry cars.

On the other hand, in the post-9/11 world, I assume that vehicles on the ferry are going to be continue to be considered very high risk, and that instituting security measures that would allow vehicles is going to be a very low priority, given the cost vs. the number of vehicles served. So I don't imagine vehicles will be returing to the ferry anytime soon.

But I have to say, that as a Staten Islander (who is vehemently pro-mass transit, and anti-cars in Manhattan; but also a pragmatist) I disagree. Anybody who is going to drive into Manhattan is going to drive, regardless. All that the ferry option did was keep some cars off of the Gowanus, BQE, and tunnels/bridges, as I mentioned.

The traffic in Lower Manhattan would inevitably be the same, regardless. The problems with boarding vehicles could easily be ameliorated with proper planning and execution. And I don't remember vehicles carrying vehicles being any more delayed than non-vehicle ferries.

On the very rare occasions that I used to ferry to take my vehicle into Manhattan (Sundays and evenings!) I not only saved vehicle and my psyche the wear and tear of driving through Brooklyn, but I lessened the amount of pollution I was contributing by letting the ferry do the driving!

[ZippyTheChimp]

As I said, the small number of cars involved do not make this an overall traffic volume problem. The Gowanus, BQE, bridges and tunnels are already a mess. The added traffic will make no difference on these routes, but these few cars have a multiplying effect at the tip of Manhattan.

The problem will get worse in the next few years, as tour buses start visiting the WTC, and construction begins on whatever is decided for West St and the East River waterfront.

This is planning in the wrong direction, and the city paid more money for it. They could have purchased smaller boats.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Whitehall Terminal is almost complete. Besides the third slip, minor work remains. The plaza willl remain a mess for a few years, due to construction of the new 1/9 subway station.

The view of the city through the glass wall is nice. I would have taken a photo, but guards and dogs and level 1 security signs - I didn't want to confront the police state. Maybe on the weekend I'll pretend I'm a tourist who doesn't speak English.

[NewYorkYankee]

What day was that photo taken?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Photos are delivered daily, fresh from the oven.

[NewYorkYankee]

lol, okay, thank you. I was just wondering if there was actually STILL snow from that blizzard. wow...

[Edward]

Staten Island Ferry, Statue of Liberty, and Goldman Sachs Tower.




Staten Island Ferry and downtown Manhattan skyline.

[NewYorkYankee]

Great pics! Taken from another ferry?

[Kris]

New ferry terminal unveiled

BY GLENN THRUSH
STAFF WRITER

February 8, 2005, 7:20 PM EST

The city unveiled a soaring new Staten Island Ferry terminal at Whitehall in lower Manhattan Tuesday, two years late and about $50 million over budget.

The terminal, which replaces an outdated facility that was heavily damaged by a 1991 fire, features five new escalators and a 75-foot-tall, glass-enclosed entry hall with views of the skyline.

The cost of the project, originally budgeted at $150 million when it was first bid out in 2000, climbed to to $201 million by the time the facility was finished last month, said Andrew Alper, president of the city's Economic Development Corp., which oversaw the construction.

The increases were due to greater-than-anticipated construction costs and skyrocketing insurance and security expenses that were "9/11-related," Alper added.

The terminal's waiting room, which is expected to accommodate 65,000 passengers a day, is about twice the size of the structure it replaced, at about 19,000 square feet. The four-story building will also house about 200,000 square feet of office space and a solar- powered floor that will be heated on cold days.

"In the winter your tootsies will be warm," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a lone pigeon winged overhead in the cavernous terminal.

Bloomberg has also presided over the purchase of three new ferry boats, including one named after former Staten island Borough President Guy Molinari, a fellow Republican and political ally of Bloomberg's. Reconstruction of the St. George terminal on the State Island side will be completed later this year.

"These enhancements are an important part of our commitment to giving New Yorkers first class transportation facilities," said Bloomberg, adding that, "The projects have been complicated and time-consuming." The original Whitehall Terminal was built in 1907 and enlarged in 1954.

The Whitehall project, which began in late 2000, was plagued by troubles with contractors that may have contributed to delays, according to published accounts.

The president of the largest subcontractor on the project pleaded guilty to bribery in connection with work on a Brooklyn post office. In November, the New York Sun uncovered an internal memo from general contractor Barney Skanska, saying that the case created the potential for "very serious delays to work."

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

[NewYorkYankee]

The connecting subway station is already u/c correct?

[TonyO]

This is the slideshow from the link I originally posted. Kris, please do not delete my posts.http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/...eadlines-trans

[Kris]

You posted a link to the article. Newsday links don't last, and neither do its crummy slide shows. If you can't bother to paste the full article, don't complain if I delete your post.

[NewYorkYankee]

Looks nice, thanks for the link.

[krulltime]

At last, 'Welcome to Manhattan'
New Staten Island Ferry terminal is an elegant addition to city's architecture


PhotoSlideShow:
http://www.newsday.com/mynews/nyc-fe...3.photogallery

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER
April 14, 2005

For 14 years, the ferry ride across the world's most glamorous harbor has culminated in a trudge through a maze of plywood boards, hanging wires and temporary signs. Welcome to Manhattan.

Chaos has not been banished yet. Workers in hard hats still populate the edges of the building. Out front, Peter Minuit Plaza, which will eventually be embraced by a pair of gracefully curving canopies, is a torn-up mess.

But the bandages have finally come off the bottle-green, twisting wedge of the Staten Island Ferry's new $201-million Whitehall Terminal. Ferry riders are already marching through the airy, swoop-ceilinged hall as if the place had been there all along.

Most destination-driven commuters fine-tune their trajectories to spend the minimum number of seconds waiting.

The architect Frederic Schwartz has helped lubricate their way from water to work and back. When I met him in the terminal recently, he had just emerged from the subway directly into the hall, through a passageway that had been open for a matter of hours. He was breathless with the thrill.


The view: worth the wait

But he has also provided for those who miss their boats, or who prefer more leisurely rhythms.

The panorama of lower Manhattan from the top of the escalators, the vast windows framing the Statue of Liberty, the upstairs deck with views of the harbor - these are reasons to take shelter here for a little longer than the ferry schedule makes strictly necessary. The transit hub has become a destination.

Time has shaped this building, in much the way it does a canyon, by wearing it down.

A fire gutted the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal in 1991, and the process of replacing it spun off into an epic of dithering, debate, redesigns and logistical hurdles.

Schwartz joined Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, legends of playful architecture, to form a team that won the competition to design a replacement.

Their first proposal featured a harbor-facing clock so enormous that the barrel-vaulted hall below it seemed like a minor ornament. The clock became the architectural debate du jour, until the idea was bludgeoned to death by a posse led by Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari.

As the years dragged on and the budget withered, the design team tried to salvage the chance for extravagant statements. Instead of the clock, they turned the waterfront facade into a giant flag-shaped video screen festooned with digital stars and stripes and messages.

Molinari knocked that one down, too, and ordered a plain vanilla glass facade instead. Venturi and Scott Brown pulled out in disgust, leaving Schwartz in charge.


Compromise as creativity

The friction of bureaucracy rubbing on bold plans for many years often yields an architecture of eroded ideas.

Certainly, the final design here splits the difference between postmodern flamboyance and Molinari minimalism. The facade that greets the ferries is no longer glass, but corrugated steel, trimmed with bright orange canopies and LED signs.

That side flaunts some of the latest "green" gizmos, notably a rooftop crest of photovoltaic panels that supply 3 percent of the building's energy at a cost substantially higher than simply buying it from ConEd. The look is sleek, postindustrial and discreet.

If by drumming out Venturi and Scott Brown New York City blew an opportunity for architectural bravado, in exchange it got a building that ties together a thorny patch of land, without screaming for attention or confronting sleepy riders every morning with overeager cuteness.

The new terminal is an elegant go-between, which is a far more difficult thing to design than a lone, heroic structure.

Just finding places to sink the supports required a contortionist's dexterity. All around and beneath is a ganglion of transit.

The FDR Drive slices below. Out front, congregating buses used to hit rushing pedestrians on a regular basis, until Schwartz and his design team imposed some rationality on the traffic patterns.

Threaded through the foundations is a fragile subway turnaround that the architects were prohibited from shaking with so much as the murmur of a drill.

And every day comes the wave and ebb of Staten Islanders, making 65,000 trips. Putting the ferry out of commission, even for an afternoon, was never an option, even if keeping it open was a Herculean struggle.


The uses of enchantment

Schwartz used this gnarled mass of givens as a source of ideas.

He gave his glass curtain wall the same greenish tint as the copper roof on the gorgeously restored Battery-Maritime Building next door.

He placed large window panes between the waiting room and the slips, so passengers could watch the boats approach and dock (the marine equivalent to leaning over a subway platform to scan for approaching trains).

He tilted the roof so the terminal looks like it's rising from the water toward the skyscraping colossi across the street.

Thanks to deft engineering, the city's dense and delicate nervous system is hidden by the terminal's quietly kinetic design.

The high, glossy facade and softly glowing neon sign turn hospitably toward Whitehall Street, which pokes into the plaza at an oblique angle.

The view simulates symmetry, and the canopies that will stretch out on either side will strengthen that feeling of equipoise.

But symmetry is an illusion. The building turns and dips as it meets the ferry slips and their century-old machines. It's a comma at the tip of Manhattan, its tail jutting into the water to eke out every last little patch of liquid real estate.


Recollections of Rome?

In wringing simplicity out of this packed site, Schwartz kept in mind the way Renaissance and Baroque architects in Rome wrestled with its tangled geography: by setting a new facade askew to the axis of an existing church, by balancing an old tower with a new one, or by interpreting the curve of an alley as a sensuously expressive wall.

From these predecessors, he learned how to make a corner of a city look more rational than it is.

He considered the southern tip of Manhattan as an ancient place shaped not by planners but by the happenstance of history.

When the landscaping is complete, the Roman homage will be clearer: Peter Minuit Plaza will embrace harried commuters in its sheltering arms, in rough, thoroughly secular imitation of St. Peter's Square welcoming pilgrims.

The reference may be a little grand for a ferry terminal, but, after all that Staten Islanders have suffered in their commutes, they could use a little shot of grandeur.


Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Despite official ceremonies, the ferry terminal is not complete, just all closed-in. The side facing South St is boarded up, the public deck is not finished, as is the trimwork. And right now, it's the N ISLAND FERRY.