Governors Island
Last Saturday, I made my first visit to Governors Island … what a great place … two more Fridays & Saturdays left to visit …
This Saturday, August 26, 2006, a Revolutionary War re-enactment …
Take the # 6 subway to Chatham for dim-sum, walk to Madison Street for the M-15 bus to the free Governors Island Ferry at the Battery Maritime Building, slip 7… pdf map here (approximately 3 South Street)
Earlier this month, the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation presented a list of 10 plans it was considering in its quest to secure the future of this 172-acre island. The group planned to announce the finalists by mid-September and the winner by the end of the year. But the date for selecting the finalists has been postponed.
In the meantime, here’s a radical idea. How about doing nothing with Governors Island?
Seriously. Such a decision would instantaneously transform the place into a monument of conceptual art. Talk about a found object.
But there are substantive aesthetic reasons for letting it be as well. To appreciate them you have to visit the island. And time is about to run out. As of Sept. 2, the old Coast Guard ferries from Slip 7 in Lower Manhattan, just to the north and west of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, will stop running. Slip 7 is not easy to find because there’s very little in the way of signage, and that’s a promise of what the island itself has to offer.
Not much, and it’s such a relief.
“Let it Be,” by Thomas de Zengotita, Op-Ed, The New York Times, August 20, 2006
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