A Playground for the Arts, With Island Breezes
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
What kind of culture develops on an island? It is a place that requires a special effort to visit and a special effort to leave. It can keep people out or corral them in. It might serve as an escape, or (like Alcatraz) as a prison. It incubates and isolates. And its culture might become both ingrown and wildly experimental, maybe a bit like Manhattan’s.
Or, to pick a more eccentric, surprising and artificial example, like Governors Island’s. Technically part of Manhattan and 800 yards from its shores, Governors Island is peculiar by any measure. It has about 100 buildings, but no residents. It has a high school, but no homes. It has roads, but no passenger cars.
Its 172 acres include empty Victorian houses, imposing forts, a parade ground and ball fields, an artificial beach and an encircling promenade with arresting panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey. And increasingly over the last four years, from May to October — with visitors now riding hourly on weekend ferries from Brooklyn and Manhattan — the island has been shaping a new culture of its own. Its participants include trapeze artists, bicyclists, conceptual artists, D.J.’s, musicians, dancers and dramatists, and its attractions range from views of the New York Harbor to a free miniature-golf course designed by an arts group, where fanciful stations allow players to take metaphorical potshots at a national missile defense shield or putt a ball in support of carbon-neutral footprints.
During the past few weeks I have seen a Dutch theater company perform; heard a festival of club dance music blast over a mock sand beach with a view of Lower Manhattan; watched jitterbugging island hoppers dance to a retro jazz orchestra and surveyed artworks ranging from the stupefyingly banal to the whimsically clever, displayed in some of the island’s empty homes or along the sweeping waterfront. With more events added each summer, cultural offerings have included outdoor dance performances in one of the island’s forts, a mock archaeological dig meant to play with ideas of the island’s past, an African film festival, outdoor Shakespeare and Civil War re-enactments.
In many ways the island is like a toy village, its real buildings drained of function and population. Without visitors it can seem like a purposeless stage set, or like the eerie island village of the 1960s cult television show “The Prisoner.” Whatever happens here now seems to play against that strange setting, putting everything in air quotes. The island is a part of the city that is not-the-city. Bright red Adirondack chairs and hammocks can be moved to comfortable spots on the island’s Picnic Point, where the Statue of Liberty’s face is near enough to be studied. Bicycles can be rented, some designed with bench seats and multiple pedals so entire families can circle the island’s promenade. Free ferries have been disgorging passengers by the thousands each weekend this summer, setting attendance records for the island.
And with the growing crowds — 250,000 so far this season, twice the rate of last year — come other signs that an island is not necessarily the perfect retreat and can also fail at being not-the-city: at one recent event the ferry back to terra firma was delayed nearly an hour as it was commandeered to rush a festivalgoer, who had reportedly overdosed on drugs, to a Brooklyn hospital.
The overall effect, though, can be exhilarating and disorienting, soporific and fanciful. It is as if multiple cultural experiments were happening simultaneously, some blowing up in disarray, others puffing along famously. The variety, artifice and playfulness are by design, guided by the overall strategy of Leslie Koch, the 48-year-old president of the Trust for Governors Island.
When she began leading the island into uncharted waters in 2006, she said, it was a “lonely, improbable place.” There were no bicycles on the island, no free ferry service and no sense of activity. Now, as I accompany her on a bike ride around the island’s perimeter, she is volubly excited about unseen possibilities as much as about what has already taken place.
Governors Island was originally a military base of strategic importance at the heart of New York Harbor. One of Benjamin Franklin’s nephews designed a state-of-the-art fort with eight-foot-thick walls facing the harbor — Castle Williams — that became obsolete soon after its completion in 1811. But Ulysses S. Grant was stationed on the island; so were his son and grandson. And Wilbur Wright made the first plane flight over water in the United States by taking off and landing here.
The island has been variously run by the State of New York, the United States Army and the Coast Guard. Finally, in 1997, the base was shuttered by the federal government. Numerous proposals were submitted, with the Governors Island Alliance conceptually victorious in advocating a civic space. In 2003 22 acres became a National Monument administered by the National Park Service (which offers historical tours and is now restoring Castle Williams), while the rest of the island was sold for $1 to New York City and the State of New York. On July 14 the remaining 150 acres were fully taken over by the city, which administers them through the Trust for Governors Island.
Thirty-three of those acres have been set aside as development zones, which will eventually be the site of as-yet-undetermined uses, adhering to the deed’s requirements of public benefit: a university annex? a conference center? This summer the New York Harbor School opened. Meanwhile, the bulk of the island has been reconceived in a $200 million master plan that will begin its first phase of construction in 2012 and is surveyed in a modest exhibition on the island. Historical areas will be restored, and flat landfill transformed into a landscaped park of hills, harbor vistas and “undulating topography.”
If fully financed and realized, the plan could make Governors Island the most significant addition to New York’s parks since Olmsted and Vaux designed Central and Prospect Parks. But a key to all this, Ms. Koch has argued, is the creation of an island culture. She has called the island “New York’s newest playground for the arts.” She has argued that if it could house arts programs that were not happening elsewhere and that justified the trip, the island would thrive. But while culture is being placed at the center of her project, she also insists that she is neither an impresario nor a curator. Her annual $12.5 million budget includes no line for programming.
“We try to stand back and be the venue,” Ms. Koch explained, suggesting that she simply seeks to find new and untried things. In coming weeks, for example, there will be a unicycle festival, free kayaking and a display of vintage Volkswagens. Such events have a vaguely countercultural feel, mixing a hint of retro quaintness with playful enthusiasm; air quotes seem to hover around these events, a bit like the way the island itself must be regarded. The island’s brand, Ms. Koch suggested, is “summer vacation with irony.”
This aesthetic is already leaving its mark, even though right now arrangements are as changeable as the weather, Ms. Koch stressed. She said she was prepared to try anything. And no properly submitted proposal has been turned away. But she also influences which organizations present exhibitions and events, sometimes, as with the group Figment, for return visits. Figment’s artists designed the miniature-golf course and created a nearby sculpture garden, where objects range from an enormous plastic cicada mounted on a tree to billowing and bulbousinflated tubes and cubes.
Nearly all the objects and events have a populist slant; aesthetic democracy is the crux of the island’s culture. All participating groups obtain the same permit and must get their financing elsewhere. Longer-term arrangements include a five-year contract with Water Taxi Beach, which operates a concession on the island’s artificial beach (with plenty of sand but no water access) and presents concerts for a fee, including theD.J. festival I sampled. There is also a five-year arrangement with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which offers studios to artists and mounts exhibitions in a building near the main ferry landing.
The emphasis is not just on diversity of entertainment, but also on diversity in demographics. “We are very passionate about attracting a broad array of people,” Ms. Koch said. On the days I visited, the effect was evident, the ferries seeming to sample the city’s various age groups, ethnicities and tastes. Visitors included everyone from the pneumatically pumped-up dancers on Water Taxi Beach to the more staid listeners at a ranger talk about Castle Williams.
The culture of democratic play: that is the island culture. But there is also something else worth considering. The island could succeed simply as a parklike retreat, but because of the expenses involved, and the place’s unusual character, something more should be expected. And if cultural activities are, as Ms. Koch suggested, the lure around which the park will take shape, the populist emphasis could ultimately become too restrictive.
There is, for example, no amphitheater or concert hall to host orchestral music, opera or chamber ensembles comfortably, even though in Europe the notion of a pastoral retreat for the experience of culture began with festivals celebrating those arts. The New York Philharmonic was supposed to play on the parade ground in 2008, but canceled because of weather; that would still have been a program like any other outdoor park concert in the city. If, on the other hand, a structure as handsome and acoustically versatile as Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall were built here, an entire universe of new performance possibilities would open to New Yorkers. Pilgrimages are inspired by more than sound systems and harbor breezes.
This would involve another order of cultural budget. And such expansion would not guarantee success. Many who attended the recent stultifying theatrical production of “Teorema” presented on the island as part of the Lincoln Center Festival must have recognized a disadvantage of an island retreat: there is no escape.
But at the very least, perhaps the embrace of proposed projects might become more judicious without becoming less diverse. Many empty houses along the island’s Colonels Row have become galleries filled with site-specific sculpture, all part of an exhibition called “The Sixth Borough,” created by the arts group No Longer Empty. The works vary so widely in quality that in many cases emptiness begins to seem unjustly undervalued.
One installation, for example, mounts photographs of the Nazi hand salute in a room with an American flag, asserting a crude association that reappears in other forms in a so-called interactive tutorial exhibition, also run by No Longer Empty. The tutorials, alluding to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the surrounding harbor, are meant to engage visitors in exploring the idea of citizenship.
But the great hopes once inspired in immigrants by those sights are attacked by one artist as a “triumphalist mythology”; he cheers its transgression. “I look at an American flag,” writes another tutor, “and see nothing but imperialism and military intervention.” And a third seems to admire “anarcho-Islam and the founding of Al Qaeda,” while attacking the American “racist Orientalist fantasy” of Islamic terror.
These tutorials are, no doubt, meant to rub polemically against the grain of the former military site and its geographical centrality, but their contorted perspectives gave a sour taste to the harbor breezes. Not enough, though, to diminish the sense that outside that conceptually empty house, all around the island, in the leisure ventures of diverse visitors, the traditional promises of the harbor were finding new forms of restless fruition.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 14, 2010
An article on Friday about cultural life on Governors Island referred imprecisely in some editions to the role that the Trust for Governors Island plays in bringing exhibitions and events to the island. While the trust and its president, Leslie Koch, influence which organizations come to the island, they do not select them. (Groups that meet permit requirements are eligible to hold events on the island.)
