Park Activist Invites Downtowners to Pier 25 Party Tonight
A Lower Manhattan civic champion is inviting the community to a free, outdoor party tonight (Thursday, May 9, from 5pm to 7:30pm) at Pier 25 in Hudson River Park. Tom Fox, who helped create the park, will celebrate both the signature public space on Manhattan’s West Side and the book he has written about it: Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed.
Mr. Fox, who will read from his book and lead tours of an exhibition of his photography aboard the historic steam-powered buoy tender Lilac (moored at Pier 25), has been an advocate for parks and public open spaces for more than 50 years. This serendipitous career began in the 1970s, after he returned from serving two combat tours in Vietnam and signed up as a ranger for the National Parks Service, assigned to the newly created Gateway National Recreation Area, which straddles the border of Queens and Brooklyn on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.
Living in the West Village and attending Pace University, he became transfixed by the decrepit piers that lined the Hudson River waterfront in Lower Manhattan, and he began compiling a haunting photographic record of decay and eventual rebirth. Within a few years, armed with his freshly minted degrees in biology and botany, Mr. Fox went AWOL from the National Park Service and helped found Green Guerillas, a Lower Manhattan community group that took over vacant lots, turning them into gardens and parks. “We had evidence showing that the average community garden cost $5 per square foot to maintain, while the equivalent figure for a City park was $50,” he recalls.
From there, he joined a fledgling effort by community activists to transform a set of decaying cargo piers on the waterfront beneath Brooklyn Heights into a public park. Decades of battles with the Port Authority, which controlled the land and wanted to develop it, eventually resulted in the creation of what is now Brooklyn Bridge Park.
By this point, he says, “I had discovered my passion. I came back from Vietnam wanting to make the world a better place. And it was clear that parks were the way for me to do it. Parks are the one surviving melting pot, where people of all backgrounds mix with one another.”
After a brief detour, during which he helped design the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway (40 miles of biking and pedestrian paths from Coney Island on the Atlantic Ocean to Fort Totten on Long Island Sound that connect 13 parks, along with botanic gardens, lakes, museums, and cemeteries), he heard about a plan to commandeer the Lower Manhattan waterfront that had enchanted him a few years earlier.
“It was called ‘Westway,’” he remembers. “Politicians wanted to fill in part of the river, create more than 200 acres of new land to enable millions of square feet of commercial development, and bury a six-lane highway underneath.”
Mr. Fox, by then working on advanced environmental studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, was spurred to action. “We mobilized public opinion and large protests, we filed lawsuits, but the developers argued that the project had to be built,” he recalls, “because the federal government had already contributed $85 million to purchase the underwater land that was going to be filled in. They said that if Westway wasn’t completed, the City would have to pay that money back.”
Poring over the federal legislation that authorized Westway, he found a clause that said, “the preservation and enhancement of scenic areas directly adjacent to federally aided highways are an allowable expense of federal highway funding.” This meant that the roadway could be moved onto land (now West Street), and the federal money could be used instead for the park he was beginning to imagine along the waterfront.
Mr. Fox’s leadership in the decade-long fight against Westway—the project was finally canceled, on environmental grounds, in 1985—earned him an appointment by then-Governor Mario Cuomo to a commission charged with figuring out what to do with the Hudson waterfront instead of landfill and development.
“We came up with a plan to capture, through taxes, some of the increased property value that would be created by the presence of the Hudson River Park, as adjacent neighborhoods like Tribeca and Soho were developed,” he remembers.
“But that formula was repeatedly hijacked by economic development advocates, who were appointed to run the park by a succession of mayors and governors,” Mr. Fox says. “First, they pushed for development inside the park. Then they ‘discovered’ air rights on the piers that could be transferred across West Street and sold to the highest bidders.”
“So the idea I was advocating for was turned on its head,” he says, “and now the development was justified as ‘saving’ the park. They rezoned the entire West Side of Lower Manhattan and created billions of dollars in value for developers. Hudson Yards, Hudson Square, and the Meatpacking District all were made possible by the Hudson River Park, but have been required to contribute nothing to it.”
In his spare time, Mr. Fox co-founded New York Water Taxi in 2002, to bring recreation and sightseeing back to New York Harbor. “We grew it to more than 200 employees and more than a dozen boats,” he says proudly. The company was later sold to New York Cruise Lines, which operates the Circle Line fleet.
“I’ve won some and lost some,” he acknowledges. “The Hudson River Park today is not exactly what I envisioned all those years ago. But when you factor everything in, it’s a huge value and win for the community. All the effort and fighting have been more than worth it.
“I have always seen myself as a grain of sand ingested by an oyster,” Mr. Fox says. “I am just irritating enough to provoke the oyster into creating a pearl, to protect itself, and the result of that process is a beautiful treasure. This is what a community advocate does.”
Admission to this evening’s party on Pier 25 is free and all are welcome to gather for the views, the miniature golf, two playgrounds, beach volleyball, tours of Lilac, and Mr. Fox’s book launch.