A massive 40-year-old art sculpture is being demolished in Battery Park City to make way for the controversial North/West Battery Park City Resiliency (NWBPCR) project.
The sculpture, titled Upper Room, by artist Ned Smyth, is a 20-column court featuring an elongated table with inlaid chessboards. The colonnade recalls ancient architecture and offered a public reprieve for New Yorkers. Commissioned in 1986, it was Battery Park City’s first public art piece.
Just last year the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) released a video contextualizing the artist and sculpture within the New York landscape.
On Wednesday, crews began tearing down the sculpture as part of a larger resiliency plan to integrate a coastal flood barrier management system to better protect against natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which caused $310 million in damage in Battery Park City. It will run along the Hudson River waterfront from First Place to Chambers Street.
The project will also shut down the city’s most expensive harbor North Cove Marina for five years, which, the New York Post reported, has been met with mixed reviews among local sailors.
Smyth, whose sculpture was previously appraised by the BPCA at $1.5 million, along with nearby residents, also expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome.
“I’ve lived in Battery Park City for 31 years, and in those 31 years, not one drop of water from the Hudson River has come within ten feet of the base of that unit, so the notion that that art piece has to be demolished for flood prevention is preposterous,” John Dellaportas, the Vice President of The Battery Alliance, told the New York Post.
The ground beneath Upper Room is expected to become a tidal gate. It is the only commissioned public artwork slated to be demolished to make way for the NWBPCR project.
Though Smyth was reportedly alerted about the pending demolition by the BPCA two years ago and reportedly wondered why the sculpture couldn’t be relocated, the BPCA had claimed that the sculpture showed signs of deterioration and would have been too difficult to move.
“Unfortunately, Upper Room must be removed for flood mitigation work necessary to protect lives and property in Battery Park City and beyond. While we have communicated this to the community and Mr. Smyth for over a year, we understand that the piece has been an indelible part of Battery Park City’s history, and, as its first public art piece, a foundational work in a collection that now includes 19 pieces by more than 20 artists throughout BPC,” a spokesperson for BPCA said in a statement.
In addition to Smyth’s sculpture, hundreds of trees are set to be razed.
This kind of construction, foregoing the old for the new, is not unique to New York. A similar fate beheld another famed statue recently in San Francisco, which saw the brutalist Vaillancourt Fountain dismantled as part of the renovation of Embarcadero Plaza.
