BY ALEX ULAM
Pier55, Inc./Heatherwick Studio
A federal judge has halted Pier 55 in New York City?s Hudson River Park, a constructed island of 2.75 acres expected to cost $200 million.
Plans for Pier 55, by the British design sensation Thomas Heatherwick and Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architecture, call for a sloping, verdant extravaganza atop hundreds of mushroom-shaped concrete pilings driven into the riverbed. The new parkland was designed to do double duty as performance space and would be largely paid for by the billionaire Barry Diller and his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, who had established a nonprofit to maintain the place and establish programming for the venues.
But now, owing to a lawsuit by the City Club of New York and other opponents, the permit for the Pier 55 has been revoked and the entire project may be scrapped. According to the judge?s ruling, the plans for Pier 55 failed to address key aspects of the Clean Water Act and didn?t comply with the New York State law that created the five-mile long Hudson River Park. The pier?s opponents argue that the new pier would cause unnecessary harm to a government-designated estuarine sanctuary because of the massive amount of liquid concrete required to build hundreds of pilings. Douglas E. Lieb, a lawyer for the City Club, said that the environmental reviews for the project failed to establish whether ?[p]lunking this thing down in the water is worth the environmental harm it is going to cause.?...