Newsday from New York, New York • 79

covers tory New Staten Island Ferry terminal is an elegant addition to city's architecture BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON STAFF WRITER I I or 14 years the ferry I ride across the world's most glamorous har- bor has culminated in a trudge through a LJ maze of plywood boards hanging wires and tern porary signs Welcome to Man- hattan Chaos has not been banished yet Workers in hard hats still populate the edges of the building Out front Peter Minuit Plaza which will eventually be embraced by a pair of gracefully curving canopies is a tom- up mess But the bandages have finally come off the bottle-green twisting wedge of the Staten Island new $201-million Whitehall Terminal Ferry riders are already marching through the airy swoop-ceilinged hall as if the place had been there all along Most destination-driven commuters fine-tune their trajectories to spend the minimum number of seconds waiting The architect Frederic Schwartz has helped lubricate their way from water to work and back When I met him in the terminal recently he had just emerged from the subway directly into the hall through a NIWSOAY PHOTOS MUCE GUSUT A view from the Hudson River of the new Whitehall Ferry Temimal nearly complete after 14 years of design and construction NEWSDAY THURSDAY APRIL 14 2005 wwwnyiMWKJaycom pa rtf traffic' patterns Threaded ile subway turnaround that the architects were prohibited from shaking with so much as the murmur of a drilL And every day comes the wave and ebb of Staten Islanders making 65000 trips Putting the ferry out of commission even for an afternoon was never an option even if keeping it open was a Herculean struggle blew an opportunity for architectural bravado in exchange it got a building that ties together a thorny patch of land without screaming for attention or confronting sleepy riders every morning with overeager cuteness The new terminal is an elegant go-between which is a far more difficult thing to design than a lone heroic structure Just finding places to nk the supports required a dexterity All around and be- neath is a ganglion of transit The FDR Drive slices below Out front congregating buses used to hit rushing pedestrians on a regular basis until Schwartz and his design team imposed some rationality on the nament Hie dock became the architectural debate du jour1 until die idea was bludgeoned to death by a posse led by Staten Island borough president Guy M6-linari As the yean dragged on and die budget withered the design team tried to salvage the chance for extravagant statements Instead of the clock they turned the waterfront facade into a giant flag-shaped video screen festooned with digital stan and stripes and messages Molinari knocked that one down too and ordered a plain vanilla glass facade instead Venturi and Scott Brown pulled out in disgust leav- ing Schwartz in charge VV Compromise as creativity The friction of bureaucracy rubbing on bold plans for many yean often yields an architecture of eroded ideas Certainly the final design here splits the difference between postmodern flamboyance and Molinari minimalism The facade that greets the ferries is no longer glass but corrugated steel trimmed with bright orange canopies and LED signs That side flaunts some of the latest gizmos notably a rooftop crest of photovoltaic panels that supply 3 percent of the energy at a cost substantially higher than simply buying it from ConEd The look is sleek postindustrial and dis creet If by drumming out Venturi and Scott Brown New York City to '7 7 ''A 1 i 'V rS- 1 I I r- 'i -i VC V-v ther side will strengthen that feeling of equipoise But symmetry is an illusion The bunding turns and dips as it meets the ferry slips and their century-old machines a comma at the tip of Manhat-tan its tall jutting into the water to eke out every last little patch of liquid real estate Recollections of Roma? In wringing simplicity out of this packed site Schwartz kept in mind the way i and Baroque architects in Rome wrestled with its tangled geogra- phy: by setting a new facade askew to the axis of an existing church by balancing an old tower with a new one or by in-terpreting the curve of an alley' as a sensuously expressive walL 7 From these predecessors he learned how to make a corner of a city look more rational than it is He considered the southern tip of Manhattan as an ancient place shaped not by planners but by the happen- stance of history When the landscaping is complete the Roman homage will be clearer: 'Peter Minuit Plaza will em-' brace harried commuters in its sheltering arms in rough thor- 7 oughly secular imitation of St Square welcoming pil-7 grima The reference may be a little grand for a ferry terminal but sifter all that Staten Island-7 ers have suffered in their com-' mutes they could use a little shot of grandeur a matter of hours He was breathless with the thrilL The view: worth the wait But he has also provided for those who miss their boats or who prefer more leisurely rhythms The panorama of lower Manhattan from the top of the escalators the vast windows framing the Statue of Liberty the upstairs deck with-views of the harbor these are reasons to take shelter here for a little longer than the ferry schedule makes strictly necessary The transit hub has become a destination Time has shaped this building in much the way it does a canyon by wearing it down A fire gutted the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal in 1991 and the process of replying it spun off into an epic of dithering debate redesigns and logistical hurdles 1 Schwartz joined Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown legends of playful architecture to form a team that won the competition to design a replacement Their first proposal featured a harbor-feeing dock so enormous that the barrel-vaulted hall below it seemed like a minor or- The uses of enchantment Schwartz used this gnarled mass of givens as a source of ideas He gave his glass curtain wall the same greenish tint as the copper roof on the gorgeously restored Battery-Maritime Building next door He placed large window panes between the waiting room and the slips' so passengers could watch the boats approach and dock (the marine equivalent to leaning over a subway platform to scan for approaching trains) He tilt- ed the roof so the terminal looks like rising from the water toward the skyscraping colossi across the street Thanks to deft engineering the dense and delicate nervous system is hidden by the quietly kinetic design The high glossy facade and softly glowing neon sign turn hospitably toward Whitehall Street' which pokes into the plaza at an oblique angle The new simulates symmetry and the canopies that will stretch out on ri- The Fred Schwartz-designed building's glass exteriors.