ABOVE How the Seaport might look in the future. BELOW The view from above the South Street Seaport.
THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT IS GETTING ready for a complete makeover. The windblown historical area along the East River in Lower Manhattan has dropped to the bottom of the mustvisit list for both tourists and jaded New Yorkers. While the “Bodies” exhibition has drawn in crowds with its fascinatingly macabre display of preserved bodies and body parts from China, the Seaport itself often feels like an appendage preserved with the wrong spirits. The shops and restaurants are tired and boring, and even destination store Abercrombie & Fitch finally opened another outpost on Fifth Avenue. Wall Streeters don’t even bother to eat lunch here, the cobblestones roll up by 10 P.M., and when outdoor entertainment is featured on the piers, it can sometimes get rowdy.
Enter General Growth Properties. The publicly traded company took over the original developer, the Rouse Company, in 2004. Since then it’s been working on plans to revitalize the center. “We had to look at ways the Seaport could regain its relevance in the post-9/11 environment,” says Michael McNaughton of GGP, who conceived the scheme. The plans now include brazenly razing the most prominent Pier 17 building and moving a ramshackle but historical warehouse from a dark edge of the FDR highway to the very end of that pier, adding a low-rise hotel and a dramatic 495-foot-tall hotel/residential project, and leaving much of the rest as public open space and park.
A green market is already starting to take shape, using long, unused stalls by the highway, to provide some new vitality at affordable prices for the community. Eventually the project will encompass 423,815 feet of retail, 176,575 feet of residential, 280,310 feet of luxury hotel, and a 32,000-squarefoot community space, leaving 247,950 feet of open area that will also provide new view corridors of the Brooklyn Bridge to the north.
Shop Architects, the Tribeca-based group that had won the East River Waterfront Esplanade assignment, was tapped to continue the walkway and engage the Seaport for the new century. “We looked at dry docks, piers, boat hulls, anchor and water patterns, netting and cabling, and rigging to inspire us,” says Gregg Pasquarelli of Shop. “No one project can cure the lack of progress, but this project will be a monumental step in the creation of a true neighborhood that doesn’t exist today,” adds McNaughton.
City Planning is expected to certify the project for the start of the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure in October. Ideally, McNaughton says, the project will advance to physical construction stages in the later part of 2010, with completion by 2014.
