Sugarzine : Citysights

Citysights : Gateway

By Elsa Lam

Bet’cha didn’t know that New York has its own National Park. Bridging boroughs in and around Jamaica Bay, Gateway is a sprawling 13,000 acre site – the largest natural open space in the city. Problem is, Gateway has a bit of an identity crisis. Part of the issue is its site – or, rather, multiple sites.

The park is comprised of territory in and around Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn and Queens, fields and forts on Staten Island, and the Sandy Hook beaches and lighthouse on the Jersey shore. The other problem is deeper: it doesn’t look anything like a National Park. The first time I visited Gateway was on a holiday Monday. It was a sunny, carefree day; perfect for exploring a new territory by bicycle with a friend. The pilgrimage took us down to Coney Island then across to Floyd Bennett Field, following a scenic bike trail and rumors that the Concorde was stationed in a field somewhere out there. Floyd Bennett Field – a hefty chunk of Gateway - is a collage of old airstrips built over former salt marshes, which were filled in with water-bottom sand.

The city’s first municipal airport, Floyd Bennett was once a contender for being NYC’s main airport. Mayor LaGuardia envisaged passengers being transported to and from the terminal by flying boats. But Newark won out, and commercial activities at the airfield eventually declined. Now, the site boasts a collection of historic aircraft in an old hanger at one end, and a brand new recreational centre with ice rinks and a giant climbing wall at the other. In the parking lot of the rec centre, the Concorde sits rather incongruently. It’s been moved here temporarily while the battleship Intrepid, its regular home, is away from its Hudson River moorings getting refurbished. You can tramp around the supersonic jet, and even reach into its turbines to give the fans a spin. The famous aircraft is surprisingly tiny. Although the Concorde is grounded, just about everything else in the park is on the move. On a runway in the site’s far reaches, a bunch of teenagers race their decked-out compact cars. One guy revs a white Acura down the tarmac, making a tight, screeching turn at the end – it seems miraculous that a wheel doesn’t pop, and the car doesn’t flip.

Not far away, a group of kids pilot model planes, swooping and nose-diving them through the sky by remote control. Sighted on another runway: a guy in a home-crafted vehicle, made from a triangular aluminum frame fitted with wheels below and expansive sails above. In a gust of wind, the contraption picks up speed, outpacing our bikes. It’s not the usual scene at a national park, which we tend to think of as unsullied areas of pure wilderness. But in reality, most natural areas are intertwined with human history. The first national parks, Yosemite and Yellowstone, were formed to centralize and control tourism, rather than to protect the areas from human intervention. Early visitors were encouraged to throw random objects into the geysers – soap would make them‘sick’ with bubbles, and clothing would be spit back steam-cleaned, but shrunken.

Before the European arrival, Native Americans also used Yellowstone actively, setting controlled burns to clear the ground for new growth, which helped to attract animals for the hunt. When the desire to restore a ‘natural’ environment in Yellowstone put an end to this practice, dead tree branches accumulated in the forests, and in 1988, exceptionally fierce fires fed by this fuel devastated a third of the park. The Adirondacks are also profoundly shaped by human action. The area was intensely logged in the nineteenth century – to a point where declaring the territory a park became necessary to protect the quality of water that traveled through it, to cities downstream. Practically all of the current Adirondacks is second-growth forest.

In New York City, the iconic Central Park is all a product of human design, which involved moving thousands of tons of earth and planting as many trees. On Staten Island, Fresh Kills is being transformed into a park – the seeming polar opposite of its previous life as a notorious landfill. So how about Gateway? It’s a collage of beaches, places of historic import, old industrial sites like the defunct airport. It’s not really ‘natural’, but then again, few national parks truly are. Instead, it has a potentially much more interesting mix of places that are part of the city’s history, in flux between human constructions and natural environments.

A recent design competition to re-envisage Gateway brought forward entries that played up the intertwining of nature and construction in Gateway, rebuilding Floyd Bennett’s runways as natural berms, or running strips of ecological development through the site. For my part: I’d love to see LaGuardia’s flying boats realized, shuttling visitors between the various sites of Gateway in and around the New York harbor.