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[cap­tion id=“attachment_1175” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“The south­ern tip of Gov­er­nors Island in 1934. It’s flat.”][/​caption]

A few weeks back we blogged about the new hills West 8 is design­ing on the south­ern end of the Island. Those hills are part of a larg­er strat­e­gy that will use sub­tle shifts in topog­ra­phy to trans­form what are now acres of crab­grass and asphalt into an allur­ing, intrigu­ing park that peo­ple will want to explore. This ​“trans­for­ma­tive topog­ra­phy” is a key ele­ment of West 8’s design, but we’ve been strug­gling with how we com­mu­ni­cate its impor­tance to the future suc­cess of the park and the Island. Who wakes up in the morn­ing and thinks, ​“I’d real­ly like to go some­where with awe­some topog­ra­phy today”? But that’s part­ly what mil­lions of peo­ple are doing each year when they decide to vis­it Cen­tral Park or Prospect Park. Before being trans­formed into parks, those areas were wide swaths of crag­gy, most­ly flat, large­ly defor­est­ed land. Cen­tral Park had some schist out­crop­pings, but it was­n’t the wind­ing, undu­lat­ing, lush park we love today. 

It’s also hard for peo­ple to visu­al­ize the extreme flat­ness of the Island, espe­cial­ly since most peo­ple have only expe­ri­enced the love­ly rolling land­scape of the his­toric north­ern half of the Island (though this will change this sum­mer when we open Pic­nic Point). We hope you come out this sum­mer and see for your­self; in the mean­time, check out some great his­toric pho­tographs that real­ly show off the Island’s flat south­ern half (see above and below).

[cap­tion id=”” align=“aligncenter” width=“296” caption=“Governors Island in 1951. It’s still flat.”][/​caption]