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Duncan and Julia Brine and the Brine Garden

The Right Price Put Piet in Place in Battery Park

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The Wall Street Journal Online – Leisure & Arts Annotated

Warrie Price is a tireless advocate for Battery Park and its 23 acres of historic waterfront land with stunning views of the Harbor and Statue of Liberty.

Betsy Barlow, then president of the Central Park Conservancy, suggested that Warrie replicate the private-public partnership model so successful at Central Park and establish a similar Conservancy for Battery Park.

The Battery comes under the jurisdiction of the city, state and federal governments, unlike Central Park, where the conservancy’s only partner is the city.

When Warrie arrived on the scene, Battery Park was little more than a pass-through route to reach the embarkation point for the ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

Her masterstroke perhaps has been hiring Piet Oudolf, the acclaimed Dutch garden designer–winner of the international competition to landscape the Lurie Garden of Chicago’s new Millennium Park–to design and implement a horticultural master plan for Battery Park.

It involves natural-looking gardens and swathes of grasses mixed with drifts of perennials chosen for their shape, color and hardiness. He designs beds that have yearlong interest and project broad sweeps of color and rhythmic structure. “I don’t want to copy nature but to give a feeling of nature,” he says.

 

 

 

If It’s Not Lit You Don’t See It: Fireflies Illuminate Piet’s Battery Bosque

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TILLETT LIGHTING DESIGN INC. :: THE BATTERY BOSQUE

 

 

 

The Battery Bosque
New York, New York (In our 20’s, Linnea and I were in summer theater together.) Top Honor Award 2006, The Waterfront Center. Honor Award 2006, American Society of Landscape Architects, New York Chapter

Piet Oudolf, garden designer
The Saratoga Associates, landscape architect
New York City Parks and Recreation Department and The Battery Conservancy, client

Located on the southern tip of Manhattan, just blocks from the World Trade Center site, The Battery is one of New York’s oldest public open spaces. At the forefront of the post-9/11 renewal of lower Manhattan is the revival of The Battery Bosque, a “park-within-a-park”, for quiet recreation and public art, with unrivaled views of New York Harbor. Key to the redesign is a lighting plan that facilitates park use after dark by commuters, residents and tourists.

Adding a crucial extra level of aesthetic sophistication to the Bosque’s design is subtle illumination conceived by consultant Linnaea Tillett. With only a handful of custom bollards and an array of fountain uplights, she and her colleagues have “cast light up through the water of the fountain, and riffed off the play of harbor lights cascading along the Hudson River,” she says. Technically proficient as it is deceptively simple—the lighting helps to create a “ ‘living-room-style’ rest area of sorts for the local community,” according to project client Warrie Price, director of the Battery Conservancy. “Local citizens with children have never felt safer or more content coming over to this zone at night,” she affirms.

–Architectural Record, February 2007. “Battery Bosque”.

Linnaea Tillett…created bronze “firefly lights” to tuck among the plants, illuminating the grove for evening strolls. –The New York Times