A plan to connect Brooklyn and lower Manhattan to a proposed tourist Mecca
on Governors Island via an aerial cable car earned a nod of approval from
city and state planners Tuesday, but the vote didn’t come without
hard questions on the pie-in-the-sky proposition.
“What it will cost to build [a gondola] that can withstand the elements
and accommodate maritime needs of the harbor?” asked James Gill,
chairman of the Battery Park City Authority and a member of the Governors
Island Preservation and Education Corp., a state- and city-appointed board
that is transforming the former Army and Coast Guard base across Buttermilk
Channel from Red Hook into a 92-acre public space.
A quarter-mile of water separates Governors Island from Brooklyn. Currently,
the only way to reach the island — unless you want to crawl through
a 14-inch sewer main — is by ferry from Lower Manhattan.
The gondolas are a small piece of the redevelopment plan — but the
tram’s potential to bring Brooklyn residents to the island could
become an essential lure for investors in the project, planners said this
week.
“Accessibility is a major issue for development and the [gondolas]
certainly could make the connection simpler,” Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff
said.
Next month, the Governors Island board will request proposals from developers
willing to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into building on the island.
The project depends on finding a partner with deep enough pockets to support
the massive project.
Governors Island, like the Brooklyn Bridge Park development, is mandated
to be self-financing.
State officials have told developers that they will provide the necessary
infrastructure to get people to whatever attractions developers put there.
“We have to see what people are interested in doing,” said Doctoroff.
“It could become a major attraction. We have to wait and see.”
In the past, planners discussed linking Brooklyn to the island with a
costly bridge, as well as a regular ferry service connecting Lower Manhattan,
Governors Island and the Brooklyn waterfront.
Doctoroff wants to see the gondolas built in order to secure his vision
of the waterfront as the “world’s greatest harbor district,”
he said.
He imagines a cable car system with stations at Brooklyn Bridge Park,
the East River Waterfront Park in Lower Manhattan and on the north end
of Governors Island. The system would resemble a ski lift with six- to
eight-seat cars that run quickly and frequently between the newly landscaped
greenspaces, each with their own public esplanades and private recreational
offerings.
But other city officials wondered just how the flighty attraction would
jibe with other activity on the waterfront, including the arrival of large
cruise ships beginning in April in Red Hook, which is also a working container
port.
“How high do you have to go so you don’t interfere with shipping?”
Gill asked at Tuesday’s vote. “The higher you go the more expensive
it becomes.”
Planners of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, where Doctoroff would site one of
his gondola stations, were absent from Tuesday’s meeting. A state
official working on the waterfront “park” project told The Brooklyn
Papers that he had no idea that his Governors Island counterparts were
planning to put a gondola station in or near Brooklyn Bridge Park until
he read a story in the New York Post on Monday.
Community members who have criticized the state’s plan for Pier 6
— which will host a hotel, condominiums and a landscaped lawn —
said they welcomed the cable car terminal.
“We’ve been saying for a long time that this kind of public
connection should be on the pier,” said Cobble Hill Association President
Roy Sloane.
But Sloane wondered if the plan for the airborne public transit wasn’t
a case of missed signals.
“My first reaction is to wonder if the left hand knows what the right
hand is doing,” he said. “It’s hard for me to imagine that
residents of Brooklyn Bridge Park are going to appreciate having a cable
car operation in their front yard.”
The gondola would be Brooklyn’s first. The only other aerial transit
system in the city is the much-larger Roosevelt Island tramway, which
carries 2,000 passengers a day and operates at a loss..
