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The Battery |
The beginning of the 19th Century piqued robust development for the Battery as well as the historic coastline of Lower Manhattan to grow into the body of today’s bustling metropolis. The factors that stimulated its growth depend on various pressures of either local, national, or international scale. Most fundamentally being the gateway to the new country, where the bustling metropolis of today originated from, the Battery’s expansions were provided to mediate and protect the new city’s identity as a port city. By this time, the European settlers have implemented piling strategies that reduced the waterfront to a binary condition, a hard city edge snapped to a swelling harbor to fulfill their needs of import/export. Larger moments of landmass acquisition include the southwest expansion of the Battery which was completed in 1811 by landfill. The point advanced in views of both the Hudson and East Rivers. In a different instance that reacted to a more international scale, the Battery expands during the War of 1812 to protect the Buttermilk Channel in the East River. The British never attacked Manhattan during this war, which in New England was regarded as President Madison’s War, a useless war that was brought on by the War Hawks legislature that was prevalent in America’s youth as a freshly independent country.
On a more local scale, the Battery adds a waterborne satellite to its commanding position on the island. Originally meant to provide an arsenal in times of battle, Castle Clinton is constructed from stone in 1807. The manmade island was connected to Manhattan by a wooden bridge and was never used for combat. In 1824 the fortress was converted to a gala space and the now Castle Garden hosts extravagant events for close to a quarter of a century. A huge fountain is installed in the interior of the space in 1843 which is at the time the city’s largest indoor concert hall. In 1855, the palace is joined by fill to Manhattan and given over to the state to become transformed into a temporary station where immigrants first arrive to the island.
In its original condition, as the Europeans would have found it in their first expeditions to the continent, the Battery extended in sandy beaches up to 34th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. The marine-water habitat at the Battery was very diverse because its bottom topography could have been inhabited by many different organisms, one of them being the oyster which famously formed extensive beds in the Harbor, naturally protecting the island from storm surge and rising tides. Because the Battery has been progressively constructed and reconstructed at the edge, thereby erasing the beach landscape and rich marine-water habitat, to fit the demands of the growing city, the coastline today is highly engineered to contain the lower part of the island and sustain its demanding accumulation of human intervention. Facing dramatic and fluctuating weather conditions throughout history in its various experiences of land usage, the Battery is defined by an innate resiliency that demands fortification whatever the time period. In its history as part of the new nation, the Battery has witnessed conditions as extreme as winters so cold that the New York Harbor froze over as during the Revolutionary War or as agreeable summers that fair well with its unique identity as Manhattan’s early beaches. Today the Battery is a key turning point in plans to retrofit a resiliency infrastructure along the coast of lower Manhattan. The Big U, designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group, encompasses a wide mile stretch of the historic waterfront in reaction to the unprecedented damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. The new development will wrap around the edge and install itself stealthily as a new urban program in already existing waterfront programming.