The ongoing renaissance of the Battery, the 25 acre history park located south of Battery Park City, will gather speed this summer, and appears poised to continue for years to come. On the last weekend in June, the Battery Fair will celebrate the long-awaited opening the Battery Oval, 87,000 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass, surrounded by 38 trees. (The sod on the magnificent lawn was laid in 2015, but needed a year to take root.) The lawn will also be equipped with 300 chairs, shaped like flowers. In the years ahead, the Battery Conservancy (the non-profit organization that is overseeing the park’s revitalization) hopes to host concerts there, with audiences that will number in the thousands. The fair (on June 25 and 26) will also welcome a two-day marketplace that will feature more than 100 vendors selling organic produce, much of it locally sourced.
Later this year, work is slated to begin on the Playscape, a new playground near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, featuring climbing nets, a slide mountain, and a puppet theater. The design for the playground will incorporate raised sea walls, and other storm-surge barriers, part of a larger resiliency effort to strengthen the park (and the surrounding neighborhoods) against future extreme weather events. The Playscape is scheduled to begin construction before the close of 2016 and is expected to take approximately 18 months to complete.
Looking further into the future, the Conservancy hopes to rebuild Castle Clinton (the historic artillery emplacement from which the Battery takes its name) as a multi-purpose facility that will serves as a transportation hub for the growing heritage tourism and recreational use of New York Harbor, a venue for performing arts, and a new interpretive center that educate visitors about the park as a whole.
Use as a performance venue will return Castle Clinton to its previous life as an opera house, concert hall, and theater in the nineteenth century. (It also once served, somewhat improbably, as the home of the New York City Aquarium.) The project to rebuild Castle Clinton is still in the preliminary, fund-raising and design phase.
For more information about the Battery Fair, and other upcoming events at the Battery, please browse www.thebattery.org.