Cuny Institute For Sustainable Cities

Session 1: Wed. Feb. 24, 2010: "Opening Out Towards the Water"– The Big Picture Moderator: Dr. William Solecki, Director, CISC Speakers/Panelists Dr. Rutherford H. Platt, Senior Fellow, CISC Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association Linda Cox, Executive Director, Bronx River Alliance Wilbur L. Woods, Director, Waterfront and Open Space Planning, New York City Department of City Planning Roland Lewis, CEO, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance In 1609, New York’s future waterfront was an arcadian shore of forests, wetlands, beaches, and sand bars, according to Eric Sanderson's book Mannahatta. That landscape is lost forever, but visions of a post-industrial, neo-natural waterfront are longstanding. In 1944, futurists Paul and Percival Goodman proposed that Manhattan "open out toward the water,” lining its gritty waterfront with new parks. They were prescient: today the water’s edge of Manhattan is evolving from a "no-man's-land" into a "highly desirable zone of parks," in the words of writer Ph