NEWS: Peck Slip re-design?
from the Tribeca Trib: http://www.tribecatrib.com/newsjuly06/peckslip.htm
Deciding Future of Grand Seaport Space
By Barry Owens
JULY 3, 2006
There are beautiful things right out in the open in this city, easy to locate and love, like art and architecture. Then there are the attractions that are harder to find, but impossible not to fall for once discovered. Like empty space—glorious, yawning, wide-open-with-possibility empty space.
So it is with Peck Slip, a broad, open sea of cobblestone in the South Street Seaport. You will find it one city block below the Brooklyn Bridge, spreading from Pearl Street to South Street and widening as it approaches the East River. Centuries ago, ships moored there. Today it is, of course, a parking lot. But tomorrow, residents in the neighborhood say, it could be a park, a plaza or a piazza. Above all, the residents hope the space remains mostly open.
“We think it is special now to just have nothing there,” said Randy Polumbo, a Seaport resident and owner of DoDo Café on the corner of Peck Slip and South Street. “This is a great open plaza that has been there for a century or so, and we want to make sure that anything that goes in there is worthy.”
The city’s Parks Department is to convert Peck Slip into some sort of public space as part of the redevelopment of the East River waterfront. An idea floated by the department more than a year ago, to put a long pool on the space as a way to re-introduce water to the site, sank under the weight of neighborhood outcry. Such is the level of local concern that the Parks Department is starting over on its plan for Peck Slip, and taking the unusual step of inviting the public to join its design team and consultants for a walk through the space.