After Three Decades of Rebuilding, Renewal, and Resiliency, Battery Conservancy Founder Eyes Exit
Warrie Price, whose vision and tenacity have revitalized and transformed the Battery (the 25-acre historic park at Manhattan’s southern tip) during a three-decade tenure, is preparing to pass the baton to a successor, the search for whom recently began. “After 30 years, I feel like it is time for a change,” explains Ms. Price, “so we are starting to formulate a succession plan.”
When Ms. Price founded the Battery Conservancy in 1994, “I had just come off an unsuccessful run for the City Council seat representing the Upper East Side,” she recalls. This had been preceded by a stint in the Mayoral agency now known as the Office of Management and Budget, followed by a tenure as chair of the Community Board on the Upper East Side, where she had spearheaded the reconstruction of half a dozen parks in the district, and helped create an entirely new one overlooking the East River at 59th Street. Her friend (and fellow native of San Antonio, Texas), Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who co-founded the Central Park Conservancy in 1980, issued Ms. Price a challenge: “She was appalled by the state of Battery Park, and wanted me to create a similar organization to rescue this historic green space.” Dating from the 1790s, Battery Park is New York’s oldest continually used public space.
In 1994, Battery Park was in ghastly shape. The year that Ms. Price arrived Downtown and began her transformative work, The New York Times wrote, “Battery Park, the first green space in a city cluttered almost from the time the first Dutch settlers arrived in 1625, should be one of the plums of the city. It is more like a shriveled raisin at Manhattan’s southern tip.” Marred by graffiti, litter, mud in place of lawns, and broken equipment, it was avoided by residents and people who worked nearby, and used almost exclusively by tourists boarding ferries to the Statue of Liberty.
“Our first step was to dig out a master plan that had been done in 1986 by architect Philip Winslow,” Ms. Price recalls. “This plan had been paid for by the Battery Park City Authority, but had been sitting in a drawer for almost a decade. None of it had been implemented. That became our first to-do list. The Conservancy took charge of making this happen, because it didn’t look the Parks Department was going to.”
“The Master Plan was very rudimentary,” she remembers. “It didn’t include any gardens or horticulture, no public art or bike path, not even a playground or a role for Castle Clinton. So we knew we weren’t going to limit ourselves to that document. But it became a foundation that we could build on.”
The first goal of the new Battery Conservancy was to rehabilitate the promenade that lines the waterfront. “It was in terrible shape, and it was horrible to think this is the way we presented New York to the millions and millions of people that came from around the world to see that historic harbor,” Ms. Price says.
“We had the advantage that the Conservancy model had already been trail-blazed by Central Park. So government was used to partnerships like this when I came on.” A key to the Battery Conservancy’s credibility and success was its ability to raise prodigious amounts of money that government agencies would otherwise not allocate. “In the beginning,” Ms. Price notes, “we raised several million dollars to begin work on the promenade. For this, I went to the uptown community of donors I already knew. Many of them had worked in the Financial District and were appalled by the condition of Battery Park, but saw the potential for what it could become.”
Once individuals and foundations began contributing, increased funding began to flow from government agencies. Over the years, Ms. Price raised $70 million in private funds, which was the catalyst for more than $100 million in City, State, and federal cash.
Because Ms. Price’s first career was as a teacher, “I wanted to interpret the park’s history,” she explains. “The educational aspect of a public park with this much history was too rich to pass up.” An early example of this impulse was the perimeter railing on the Promenade. “When it needed to be replaced,” Ms. Price says, “I said, ‘gee, why can’t we have some panels here to delineate historic references?’ So we issued a request for proposals, and selected an idea by Wopo Holup, a Lower Manhattan artist.”
The result was “River That Flows Two Ways,” 37 cast-iron and bronze interpretive panels that depict local historical sites, such as Trinity Church, alongside evocations of the nearby ecosystem. This acclaimed 1996 installation became “our first foray into using the Battery’s built environment to educate about its history,” Ms. Price notes.
Once the promenade was complete, the next major step was to beautify the Battery with gardens. “In the site’s many centuries of history,” Ms. Price recalls, “there had never been any horticulture here. In 2002, I travelled to the Netherlands to recruit the renowned garden designer Piet Oudolf.” The result has grown into 240,000 square feet of lush greenery, home to more than 100 varieties of hybrid perennials and native plants. Mr. Oudolf also created the nearby Battery Bosque, a four-acre woodland surrounding a spiral fountain that shoots water sprays upward.
In addition to goals achieved, there were dangers averted. The following year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to build a new South Ferry subway station within the Battery’s forested woodland, a scheme that would have obliterated fully one-fourth of the park. The Conservancy led the charge against this plan. “We were prepared to litigate all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Ms. Price says, but in the end, the coalition she built to oppose the initiative persuaded then-Governor George Pataki to order the MTA to relocate the new subway station to a site adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.
“When you’re in the public realm and money is so difficult to raise,” Ms. Price says, “and you have to go through the capital-project process and deal with bureaucracy, people answer ideas with ‘no, you don’t need to do that.’ And I would say, ‘yes, we do, and I’ll raise the money for it.’” An illustration of this dynamic is the Sea Glass Carousel, a stunning variation on a traditional merry-go-round, designed to take riders through an undersea garden as they ride on giant, luminous fish.
“It began with landscape architect Laura Starr,” Ms. Price recalls, “who has supported the Conservancy from the beginning. She provided the visionary continuity to keep saying we can do it better, so let’s push for it.”
“In 2007, we were discussing how to create a source of light that would draw people in from the street, and make them want to come into the park. And Laura asked, ‘what about a carousel?’” The $16-million project opened in 2015.
In 2011, Ms. Price remembers, “eight moms from Millennium High School called and asked me for space to create a vegetable garden. We had just been through seven years of subway construction, so we decided to take that scar and turn it into something meaningful. We built the garden in the shape of our beloved Zelda,” a wild turkey that lived in the Battery until she was hit by a car in 2014. With almost an acre of tillable, producible landscape, the Battery Urban Farm now hosts more than 5,000 public school students each year who their own organic food.
By 2015, the City granted a longstanding personal wish of Ms. Price’s, when the Parks Department officially dropped the label “Battery Park,” and instead reverted to the space’s historic name, “the Battery.” The next year, the Conservancy debuted the Battery Oval, 90,000 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass and tall fescue, ringed by 38 old-growth trees. (This space was created by consolidating half a dozen smaller lawns that were once separated by paved walkways.) Twelve months later, the newly built Battery Bikeway (connecting the Hudson River Park to the East River Esplanade) opened.
Ms. Price presided in 2021 over the ribbon-cutting of the Battery Playscape, a 1.5-acre children’s recreation space divided into five ecology zones: a bluff with five granite slides; a riverbed and marsh with salt-tolerant gardens; elevated tree houses; a sand/water play area; and a dune and meadow that includes ShowBox, an improv/puppet theater.
Along the way, each of these projects was designed as one piece of larger mosaic, focused on resiliency. “Going forward, the Battery has to function like a sponge, absorbing water from extreme-weather events and sea-level rise, and then expelling it,” Ms. Price explains. “Every aspect of each of these plans, from plantings to structures, has been conceived with that in mind.” She notes that spending on resiliency plans both within the Battery (where the wharf is being raised by five feet) and nearby (along Battery Place, where the Battery Park City Authority will erect a berm extending to Bowling Green) comes to another $400 million. “Between that and the money we’ve raised to rebuild the Battery, the whole investment is more than half a billion dollars.” With the Battery Coastal Resilience project slated for completion in 2026, she says, “we’ve gone from shoreline forts, like Castle Clinton, protecting New York from foreign navies, to the Battery defending New York from the sea itself.”
“We’ve reached a point where all the boxes are now checked in the Conservancy’s original list of goals,” Ms. Price says. “The park is totally rebuilt, and I feel great about how it will move forward, having assembled a really strong organization to continue the work.” That said, there are further aspirations left for her successor. “We need to get the security screening tent for the Statue of Liberty off the waterfront and ideally into Pier A,” Ms. Price says. “This would reduce wait times and reopen the shoreline for public use.” Pushing the City to address the ongoing nuisance of ticket hawkers selling fraudulent passes to the Statue will be another goal for the next Conservancy chief. Ms. Price adds that the Coast Guard office building adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal “has to go. We would be able to utilize that space as another park on the waterfront.”
“So many things have been thrown at us, from September 11 to Superstorm Sandy,” she reflects. “And we just kept going. Whoever comes next will inherit a wonderful team to work with, but it’s time for a new voice, new blood, and new ideas.”
In the meantime, she says, “when I walk by the Playscape and see small children scurrying up to the slides, surrounded by acres of flowers coming into bloom, my heart just soars with appreciation.” Asked what advice she would offer to whoever next leads the Conservancy, Ms. Price says, “never, ever, under any circumstances, give up.”