Greenport Gambles On The Waterfront

So much of the history of architecture has been about making space into something meaningful and explicit - having the answer, the logical solution.

This used to be the role of the "master planner" - someone who stood above it all and saw the mistakes of the past with the eye of a hawk, a Le Corbusier or Robert Moses, who called for a clean slate, a tabula rasa, and who pointed the way toward a new kind of well-scrubbed utopia.

Which brings me to the little village of Greenport, and the not-so-little competition held this year to design a new waterfront park there.

Mayor David Kapell, who has been called the Mitterand of Greenport, had a vision for this North Fork village of 2,065 souls. The concept was announced in the fall of 1996: an open competition to design a $2.5 million revitalization project that would include a park, a "harborwalk," and a marina.

Five Hundred Entries

The site is an oddly shaped 3.4-acre lot that lies between Front Street to the north and Sterling Harbor to the south. It was previously the location of Mitchell's Marina and Restaurant, which was destroyed by fire in 1978. Since then the property has fallen into a dilapidated state.

A big old schooner, the Regina Maris, would be berthed at the marina, and accommodation had to be designed for an antique carousel bequeathed to the village by Northrop Grumman, the aircraft company.

The entries were staggering in number and effort: 500 from all over the world, including many from Europe. Why such an outpouring for such a small place?

Diverse Challenges

It might have been because there have been so few competitions of this kind in America. It may also have been because of the overlapping challenges involved, dealing not only with architecture but town planning, landscape design, and environmental issues.

How often does a designer get the chance to address the convergence of a traditional main street, a railroad line, a working waterfront, a tourist center, and a car ferry? It went beyond restoration. It became a forum about community and what people envision for the place they live in.

Some of the entries addressed the problem from a purely landscape perspective, with open parks, circular pavilions, and long alleys or spiraling ramps. Others proposed architectural extravagances that, for the most part, seem grandiose and out of scale for the setting.

Designers tend to overdo it in this kind of competition. Some, especially the entries from Europe, are positively urban in scale, resulting perhaps from unfamiliarity with the locale. This, after all, is not Antwerp. This is Greenport.

Whenever I take the ferry from the well-ordered landscapes of Shelter Island and the South Fork, I am always relieved to arrive in a place that is still so unpretentiously rough around the edges. The retinal pressure is off. Abandoned docks lie alongside working fishing boats, with the old brick train station and the ferry dock and all of those undefined, ragged parts in between.

Front Street is a mix of the old and the new: saltwater taffy, Art Deco movie house, Greek Revival, stick style, faux mansard, and Victorian, all interspersed with plain funky. It is what keeps Greenport out of Ye Olde Harbor theme-park style and keeps it from being lumped together with its cousins on the South Fork.

This is definitely not the Hamptons.

Members Of The Jury

Fortunately, Mayor Kapell and his professional adviser, Wendy Evans Joseph, were very wise and selected a top-notch jury that could see through most of the thunder and bluff of the 500 entries.

The jury included two architects, Billie Tsien and James Stewart Polshek; a sculptor/installation artist, Mary Miss; a landscape architect, Nicholas Quennell; an urban planner, Sandro Marpillero, and an environmentalist, Erik Kriviat. All of them are well known and highly respected in their fields.

It is easy to see what stood out in the jury's collective eye: simplicity. Eighty of the entries were exhibited at the Van Alen Institute in New York City. Those of the three finalists - James Corner of Philadelphia, the winner; Guillaume, Mathiaut and Harden of Paris, and Sharples Design of New York City - were set apart on a single wall, but they would stand out from the rest of the pack anyway.

Low-Key Was Key

They all share an unpretentious, low-key approach, and, in their different ways, acknowledge the casual, unresolved nature of the site. None of them are beating a drum. None are proposing drastic changes to the Greenport we all know and love. No big statements. No cleansed slates.

James Corner, the first-place finalist (though not necessarily the winner) is a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His presentation, "Absent Occupancies," is conspicuous among all the other entries for its very lack of certainty, and I am amazed that the jury was even able to notice it among all those frills, and pull it, like a needle, out of the haystack of 500.

Here is the daring of the jury. They had the nerve to award the prize to such an ambiguous scheme. It seems sketchy and open-ended, but these are the very qualities that make it successful.

"Absent Occupancies"

Mr. Corner's entry honors Greenport's working character, recognizing the site for what it is and proposing a series of design "interventions."

Alongside his drawings, he presents his philosophy, with all the pathos of an un-manifesto: "[Greenport] is more a place of Absent Occupancies (both lost and potential) than it is of leisure, entertainment, and consumption."

". . . . This proposal is about mediation between a range of absent occupancies, some gone forever, others yet to occur . . . the project is largely open - space is generous to allow for flexible use and interpretation; the project is incomplete - undefined areas are available for more precise definitions from others, later. . . ."

"Tourists will come to Greenport on its own terms. Greenport will resist all attempts to 'beautify' and 'scape.' "

Pebble-Beach Connection

One of the most inventive "insertions" in Mr. Corner's plan is how he connects the waterfront to Front Street with a long, narrow, pebble "beach" that would extend all the way from the real beach right to the street and invite entry.

Instead of the fussy architectural contraptions proposed by many architects, he suggests a most modest, yet appropriate, shed-roof structure to cover the Northrop Grumman carousel.

The second-place entry, by Guillaume, Mathiaut and Harden of Paris, captures the vernacular feel of Greenport's waterfront but misses the boat with a series of stick-built belvederes - little wooden perches, pitch-roofed and raised high on pylons, that are supposed to hang above a beach of rugged rocks.

A broad esplanade of wooden planks would snake along the water's edge while farther inland would be a series of gardens planted with different kinds of indigenous vegetation. This offering from France seems the loveliest in theory but would, I imagine, be problematic in execution and high in maintenance costs.

Scheme Of Choice

The partners in Sharples Design, the jury's third-place finalist, are Christopher Sharples, his brother and sister-in-law, William and Coren Sharples, and Leo Chang. They are all former architecture students at Columbia University.

As of Jan. 29, theirs is the scheme of choice. It was selected by the Mitchell Park Advisory Committee, a group of 23 Greenporters organized by Mayor Kapell to help ease the Mitchell Park vision through to realization.

At this point, the advisory committee has recommended that the Sharples team be invited to further define their scheme, provide cost estimates, and submit a scale model to help the citizens of Greenport visualize the proposal. The Village Trustees will cast the final vote of approval, sometime in the spring.

Connecting Boardwalk

The Sharples plan calls for a long, irregular boardwalk to be used as a connecting path that links all the points of arrival and stretches out along the water, with an open amphitheater for summer concerts. The carousel would be placed near the center of the site.

All the architectural structures are very simple: open pavilions covered by translucent nylon scrim stretched into floating planes. These would cover a series of open-air market stalls.

There is a simple clapboard structure for the dock master, with lockers and bathrooms for the marina, administrative offices, and an orientation center.

The boardwalk, as drawn, is made of wood planks, but the designers are considering the possibility of using different kinds of materials as well, like panels of glass with photographic images printed on them and lighted from beneath.

The Sharples entry, like the other two finalists, is noninvasive and sketchy. The designers admitted to me that they entered the competition late and had only two weeks to prepare their presentation. This probably accounts for some of the scheme's sketchiness, which, as it turns out, may have helped to match the prevailing mood of the jury.

One of the distinguishing marks of the late 20th century - for lack of any other distinguishing marks in this millennial backwash - may be the recognition of "unfinishedness" and uncertainty. Boundaries may not be as clear as they were when our built environment was largely determined by a small group of elite white males who held the power of decision over our streets, our cities, our parks and public buildings.

The shift has been happening gradually. Pluralism brings uncertainty. No single point of view stands unchallenged. No one even dares make the kind of sweeping, absolute gestures that once went down as great architecture.

This attitude may never produce the kind of recognizable monuments we once expected, but on the other hand, it accepts the unpredictability of the moment.