In this paper, I look at the »career« of a site, a pier on the Manhattan Hudson riverfront in New York City, over a period of 15 years, in order to show that the uses developed by in­habitants, such as rowing and gardening, show a remarkable continuity despite a process of urban renewal that tends to ignore them. Uses appear quite resistant to change, and, in this case, to the enforced transformation of an urban space into a semi-public open space. They show the resilience of another conception of a public space, that of a co-produced common good, where inhabitants are co-hosts together with the city administration.

The career of a site

I borrow the concept of »career« from the sociological tradition of Chicago to identify, describe and analyze two simultaneous but distinct processes of construction of an urban public space, both in the spatial and political sense, in the same location: a former derelict pier on the New York City Hudson riverfront. Officially, the pier was reclaimed from a derelict past as an »open space« managed by a trust put together by the City, the State and private investors. Its renovation benefited from a large community involvement in numerous meetings and other participatory venues. I call this side of the story the institutional career of pier 84 and I equate it with a notion of local democracy infused with the notion of the public sphere, where public matters are ideally discussed in open assemblies ruled by the expression of reasonable opinions. But the pier also bears striking resemblances to its former supposedly abandoned state, when residents used it for gardening, rowing or fishing. It hosts a collectively run community boathouse and a community garden, which were fought for, not only through official participatory channels, but via a relentless advocacy for activities that already existed at the time of the project. I call this part of the story the experiential career of Pier 84. I equate it with another tradition of local democracy more respectful of actual uses than of abstract conception of public space. Although less visible than the institutional career, I contend that the examination of the experiential career is necessary to understand the influence of residents on the final design of this public space and to better understand the two different conceptions of local democracy which guide their action.

Urban interstices and renewal

Urban interstices are pieces of land seemingly abandoned by their landlords for more or less durable periods of time throughout metropolitan areas. They are the varied collection of leftovers and by-products of urban development and decay. As sites temporarily devoid of official function (Tonnelat 2008), they are usually cast aside as land reserve by their owners. They dot the urban fabric of »wastelands«, »brown fields«, »fallow lands«, »embankments« and other administrative and technical ways of describing uselessness. Some of these sites are difficult to reclaim so much they are cluttered with legal and technical constraints. Others are merely waiting to ripen for re-investment after periods of neglect, most often in areas targeted by renovation, gentrification or development.

The career of urban interstices

In many cases, the users’ and the developers’ perspectives are irreconcilable. People are evicted or projects scrapped all together. The history of the site is then identical to a one-sided story narrated by planners. In some situations however, negotiations happen, concessions are granted and perspectives are redefined both at the institutional and at the individual levels. This mutual reworking of perspectives defines the career of a site. In the sociological tradition of Chicago, it encompasses two levels, which Goffman (1961) calls objective, from the point of view of the institutions, and subjective, from the point of view of the individual. In the case of a piece of land, I argue that the subjective side of the career is made out of the successive perspectives built by users over a long period of time, which bridge and overlap the more official stages of the site’s career. I call it the experiential career of the site in order to tie together the physical environment and the practices that users develop there. Whereas the institutional career is made of discrete statuses, clearly identifiable, the experiential career reveals more durable user involvements, activities and projections that sometimes end up bearing a stronger influence on the evolution of the built environment than is usually recognized. In this regard, the concept of career is an interesting tool to make visible singular perceptions otherwise muted. It is also consistent with the conception of urban space as the result of processes that span long periods of time, within which the involvement of many actors can vary and shift. The concept of career is more than a descriptive tool. It also allows researchers to compare perspectives and acquire a more distanced analysis of the question at hand (Darmon 2008). In the case of the career of an urban site, it opens the analysis of inhabitants’ involvement in the transformation of their spatial environment in terms of two distinct conceptions of public space and local democracy, that of an open space and that of a common space.

The official story of Pier 84

Pier 84 is located on the Manhattan Hudson Riverfront in the re-branded Clinton District (previously called Hell’s kitchen), on the West side of Manhattan between 34th street and 57th street. This middle class low-density neighborhood is sought after by developers as the commercial real estate boom in the Times Square area, to the East, and the transformation of the previously industrial waterfront into a leisure-oriented area, contribute to raise the price of residential buildings stuck in the middle.

Without an official function for a long time, Pier 84 was recently renovated and touted as one of the largest open spaces of the new Hudson River Park, along the Manhattan western waterfront. Its official history is written in a few key steps on glossy paper in a brochure printed by the Public Trust, in charge of its maintenance and development. It culminates with the adoption of the bill that created the park and the Trust in the NY State Assembly.

Situated between the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum and the well-traveled Circle Line and World Yacht Cruise ships, Hudson River Park’s Pier 84 has a long history. Prior to falling into disrepair in the 1980’s, when it was used by the City as a parking lot, Pier 84 was one of the Cunard Line’s passenger ship piers, making it the arrival place for thousands of immigrants to the U.S. in the early 20th Century. From there they were shuttled by ferry boat to Ellis Island for processing. In the 1990s a group of community activists created the Friends of Pier 84 to advocate for its reopening to the public as open space and for incorporation into the Hudson River Park plan. As a result, the Pier was designated a new public park pier in the Hudson River Park Act in 1998. (Hudson River Park brochure 2007)

The institutional career

This short official story sketches the institutional career of Pier 84. Much like the moral career of a person affected by a malady, made up of specific stages going from pre-patient, to patient to post-patient (Goffman 1961), the official history of Pier 84 is presented as a succession of generic statuses going from a functional port, to abandonment, to a space functional again. Of course, this simple story masks the economic stakes of the operation, as the renovation of the pier with public money promises to spur the gentrification of the neighborhood and evict residents who were users of the derelict pier. It does this by enrolling the residents in its narration of renewal.

The enrollment of residents into the planning of an open space

In 1994, a group of residents in Hell’s kitchen got together to oppose the taking over of a derelict pier on the Hudson waterfront by a heliport boat, the Guadalcanal, moored perpendicular to the aircraft carrier known as the Intrepid Museum. The residents eventually won the fight, which led to the creation of a local grassroots, Friends of Pier 84 (FOP84). They opened the pier to a host of activities such as gardening, rowing, fishing, dog running and more. These uses made the pier a known new public space in the neighborhood and transformed the grassroots into a recognized interlocutor of the City and State administrations. The leaders of the grassroots then enrolled their group in an official participatory process, which allowed them to advocate for the pier as a »public space« in the future Hudson River Park project. For this however, they had to format their discourse and actions to make them compatible with the planning process.

Three steps can be distinguished in this institutional career. First, FOP84 enlarged its original goal, of using the pier, to defending its accessibility for the whole neighborhood. This step required a reframing of its arguments in terms of public access that allowed it to gain a new legitimacy. Second, FOP84 became a member of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a not for profit organization created to support the larger Hudson River Park Project. At its meetings, FOP84 had to find a vocabulary of advocating for a public pier, shared with environmental organizations ranging from regional to national in their scope. This step led to a dilution of their demands into an abstract conception of the park and the pier that prevented them from defending actually existing uses.

Finally, the leaders were enrolled to stand on several public stages next to elected officials and park defenders. The most notable one saw them, in April 1998, on the pier itself, contrasting its derelict state with a gleaming project on a prospectus (see Figure 1).

»We are now calling the governor and the mayor to join us in what will be a marvelous waterfront which will stop the rotten piers, the derelict waterfront and will give us the Hudson River Park.«
(President of Friends of Pier 84, April 1998)

These successive steps enrolled FOP84 into a specific vision of public debate and public space as guaranteed by a social contract with State and private intermediate institutions in charge of their maintenance.

How the residents lost the pier

Coincidentally, the vote of the Hudson River Park Act, which officially marked the return of the pier to official life after years of dimmed existence, also corresponded to a closing of its physical space well before reconstruction. City officials announced that worms, called marine borers, were chewing up the wooden piles, and that the pier was in danger of collapse. It was a matter of public safety. It was quickly closed and fenced off to neighborhood residents and activists. The leaders of Friends of Pier 84 were powerless. They had won the fight to preserve the pier from commercial development, but they had lost the use of the actual space. They cancelled all summer activities and reverted to a sustained push for a public pier, although then only on paper. They found refuge in an imagined space, a new design, that they advocated in the participatory process put together by the Hudson River Park Conservancy to insure community input. They thus moved from a users’ and manager’s perspective to a planner’s perspective. Their role was indeed instrumental in bringing grassroots support to the plan and bringing both the Governor and the Mayor to put their signature on the Bill.

In 2006, another 8 years later, the rebuilt pier finally opened as one of the main »open spaces« of the new Hudson River Park. It is since then managed as a quasi-public space (Mitchell & Staeheli 2006) by a public authority, which periodically rents it out for private parties aimed at financing the facility. A café and a souvenir and bike rental shop also bring revenues to the park conservancy. FOP84 is a defunct organization. The residents have never regained the influence they had built over the pier, its activities, its maintenance and its social order. A contested history of the site was erased and a new design unfolded on a supposedly clean slate. The words of its leader, back in 1998 when the pier was closed, still ring true: »We have a park pier, but we have no pier!« Indeed, former FOP84 members are now no more than guests in the very site they contributed to save and maintain.

An interesting framing process of the inhabitants’ mobilization is thus highlighted by the concept of institutional career. It was observable through the successive actions of the leaders of FOP84 on different public stages, where they each time aligned their own discourse, used to motivate members, with the institutional vision defended by the Hudson River Park Conservancy. The leaders of the group were thus brought to redefine the pier and their own relation to it in a way that lead to the erasure of the interim years of informal uses and progressively changed the users into guests or consumers of a space open to them by a public authority. This process, bringing together the representation of space of the planners and the representational space of the users into a new design and practices (Lefebvre 1974), denotes the important work provided by developers to recycle the interstitial years of the pier and its users into the definition of a new space that erases conflicts and builds an apparent consensus between elected officials, local residents, and developers.

The result of this process is an »open space« managed by semi-public administrations and open to guests. Their conception of local democracy lies in the hands of power brokers in charge of carrying the input of citizens to the right institution.

The experiential career and public space as a common good

Not everybody was sold to the participatory process put together by public authorities and developers. Missing from the institutional career are the users, people who actually engaged with the built environment on a daily basis. Their influence on design, maintenance and management, despite being quite real, is commonly ignored or even erased in order to make way for institutional visions.

Although credit was only given to FOP84 for saving the pier from dereliction, the layout of the pier today bears intriguing resemblance to the wasteland years. A community boathouse, a community garden and a dog run shelter activities that all predate the park and mark a strong continuity with the interstitial years of official abandonment. How did they re-surface and how did they manage to find place in the new design? The institutional career cannot explain how they were able to find a home on the pier, despite plans that originally did not include them. This is where the concept of the experiential career sheds a different light on the renovation process.

It helps trace the history of the pier as it was narrated through definitions of the situations expressed by residents not involved in the official participatory planning process, but more concerned with actual activities on the pier. These users relied on a different conception of space, one less easily co-opted by dominant views and, more importantly, one that resisted the closing of the pier in 1998. The plants and the boats were transferred to nearby land areas and other sites in the city, where the same body movements kept the uses alive and reenacted the space of the pier (Low 2009).

Subsequently, these users were able to defend their vision for a boathouse and a garden in a variety of local political arenas using arguments based on actual shared experience, and not just on future projects. This letter by the leader of a rowing group illustrates this point well.

As most of you know, through personal experience, grape vine or the press, community volunteers working with Floating the Apple (FTA) have been building Whitehall boats, of a type traditional to NY Harbor. […] Some of you rowed during the past two summers with FTA’s fee-free community rowing program. Those who have frequented Pier 84 since last June, have seen the temporary boat-housing comprised of 40-foot cargo containers. (Open letter to Members of Clinton’s Block Associations, February 1998)

Their fight, detached from the grassroots’ own defense of an abstract public space, was supported by a continuing practice of gardening and rowing that they were able to present neither as a projection of future needs, nor as an expression of public reason, but as already existing activities, and this despite the lack of a physical location from spring 1998 to 2006. The local and national press ran stories about these activities, which made them known beyond the neighborhood. The support that they managed to gain locally and beyond largely explains the presence of these amenities today.

Two conceptions of public space and democracy

The experiential career is tied to the institutional career. The official stages of a site’s career are marked by events that bring together the main institutional players and local users. The closing of the pier in 1998 was one of these defining moments, imposed from up top, forcing local residents to reconsider their involvement with the site, while it pushed the grassroots organization to ally with the planners.

The career is a concept that helps identify both perspectives, each one corresponding to a different conception of public space in the same physical site. On the one hand, an »open space« is managed by public authorities and made accessible to a generic public, who has no control over the site. On the other hand, the boathouse and the community garden are amenities run by and for residents of the neighborhood and open to visitors. Their public is made of users who become co-hosts of a place regarded as a common good.

The two sides of the career of Pier 84 are illustrative of two ways of thinking about public participation in urban design. The dominant one is predicated on public participation. It has been slowly integrated into the laws and practices regarding the design of public spaces. I contend that it contributes to marginalize users’ initiatives and experience in profit of an abstract and in fine economically driven conception of space. The second is based on the defense of actual uses via a transmission of their experience to a wider public. This perspective is not well accepted today in the planning world, as are not well accepted the boathouse and the garden on Pier 84. These two resources are coveted by the Park Conservancy and private organizations, which would gladly turn them into more controlled and profitable businesses. Considering these rather ignored modes of mobilization revealed by the experiential career explains the resilience of these activities over time and enriches the analysis that the social sciences develop about local democracy and political participation in urban projects. It can also help urbanites better understand the advantages and limits of their own positions within urban renewal processes. They could be more wary of the dominant rhetoric of participation and more confident in their ability to defend already existing uses.


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