Waterside Plaza, a revolutionary waterfront development, celebrates its 40th anniversary

For such a big place in big city, it really feels like a small town

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, January 3, 2014, 6:00 AM

BY MATT CHABAN

The Waterside Plaza complex is marking its 40th anniversary this year. It awakened the city to the possibility of living on the shore in a mixed-income community.

Rosemary Rogers spent the spring of 1974 looking for an apartment with her fiancé and his two sons. They wanted to stay on the Upper West Side, but one night in April they went out for a dinner in Chinatown and came away with a lot more than lo mein and fried rice.

On the drive home up the FDR, at a crook in the East River in the 20s, they discovered their new home.
“We saw these string of towers, and I said, ‘Wow! What’s that?” Rogers says. “It’s unlike anything we’d ever seen.”

But Rogers wasn’t the only one who was awestruck by the Waterside Plaza complex, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. When it was built, it was pretty much unlike anything anyone had ever seen in the city.

Built on platforms over the water, the four rough beige brick towers contains 1,470 apartments. Each building tapered toward the ground, almost as if they were constructed backward, 37-story lawn darts sticking out from a 6-acre concrete plaza.

Rogers and her husband found a two-bedroom apartment on the 28th floor with breathtaking views of the river and Queens. The rent was $850 — pricey, but with three months free and no brokers fee, they took it.
Rogers had a daughter, got divorced, remarried and changed apartments, but she’s never left Waterside.

“We’ve got it all, right outside our door,” she says.

Today, Waterside Plaza may not look like much — just another sprawling collection of towers along the city’s 520-mile shore — but Waterside broke the rules about riverfront development, affordable housing and apartment architecture. From Battery Park City to the shores of Queens up to a revitalized South Bronx and across the city, hundreds of developments can trace their lineage back to this bend in the river.

Not that it was easy.

On a bright day in the spring of 1961, Richard Ravitch, a simple contractor yet to become a political titan, and his friend Lew Davis, a young architect not yet one of the most prolific designers in the city, were having one of their brown bag lunches.

When it opened in 1974, Waterside Plaza was unlike any development the city had seen. It embraced the formerly working waterfront and provided a mix of low- and middle-income housing mixed with market-rate apartments.

Sitting at the end of a parking-garage pier Ravitch had just built on E. 23rd St., they were discussing an article in that day’s paper about a desperate need for housing for workers at the United Nations. Ravitch looked just up the shore, at the glistening U.N. Building, and turned to Davis.

“I told him, ‘How about we build it right here?’” Ravitch recounts.

The UN was supportive, but the city wasn’t.

New leadership took over at the Planning Department, which was eager to undo some of Robert Moses’ waterfront mistakes like highways cutting off New Yorkers from the river.

Rosemary Rogers moved into Waterside Plaza when it first opened. She has called the same two-bedroom home for 40 years, and now shares it with husband Robert Downey.

Also, in those days, developments were either low-income public housing or market-rate luxury, but Ravitch and the city now wanted to mix them up.

“This was all my fantasy,” Ravitch says. “This was going to be the most densely integrated, dynamically designed development in the whole city.”

The Army Corps of Engineers wasn’t big on fantasies. Technically, the little corner of the city on which Ravitch and Davis wanted to build was part of a navigable waterway and couldn’t be blocked.

It took an act of Congress — relying on a War of 1812-era law — for the feds to seize waterfront property. The city then leased it to Ravitch for 99 years, though that sweet deal was almost scuttled by warring factions at the Board of Estimate in 1966.

Breathtaking view of harbor from Waterside Plaza.

The banks were the least eager of all to get behind the project.

“They didn’t like all the social experimentation,” Ravitch says.

He finally convinced Chase to back the project, but only if every other major bank in the city would, too. “We had to shlep this huge model to all 11 major banks,” Ravitch says.

The state and the feds would back the project only so much, as well, so Ravitch convinced then-Mayor John Lindsay to create a housing financier of its own: the New York Housing Development Corp. The agency may be Waterside’s greatest legacy, as it remains the largest public backer of affordable housing in the country.

Dorene Watkins (right) loved Waterside so much, she convinced her mom to sell her Long Island home and move into an apartment in the same building.

The deal closed New Year’s Eve 1970, and construction of piers, platforms and towers commenced within days. The entire complex was done by 1974.

“Waterside is trend-setting for New York in every sense of the term,” noted architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote when the complex opened. “It is an urban concept that utilizes the waterfront for housing and recreation in a distinctly urban way.”

Dorene Watkins had followed much of the saga in the papers, hoping to find a comfortable place to live that she could afford on her teacher’s salary. Like Rogers, she was among the first 1,400 families, and she’s among the handful who are still there.

“For such a big place in the big city, it really feels like a small town,” Watkins says. “Everybody knows everybody.”

From this 28th floor apartment, residents enjoy views all the way downtown.

Like a small town, Waterside has most everything a community could need, all housed in a row of shops facing the plaza. There’s a grocery store and cafe, a bank, a rec center, even a massage therapist where the old liquor store used to be.

Watkins loved it so much, she even convinced her parents to sell their Long Island home when they retired in the 1990s and move in to an apartment in her building. She also met her second husband here, during the annual Fourth of July celebrations that jammed the plaza with residents and outsiders.

But such crowds are a rarity — something that’s still attracting residents to Waterside even though rents now range from a $2,100-a-month studio to $5,000 for a high-floor three bedroom.

“It’s very secluded; you almost feel like you’re living in the middle of the river, but a couple minutes on the bus or on foot and you’re in the middle of all the action,” says Taylor Tremonte, who moved into a one-bedroom with a friend in September. “It sure beats the frat scene in Murray Hill, where I used to live.”

The innovative architecture was more than skin deep.

Ravitch still runs Waterside, with the help of Lew Davis’ son Peter, and a number of United Nations workers still call the place home. Their ranks have been bolstered by med students from the booming hospitals.

“Thirty-five hundred a month for a one-bed isn’t cheap, but the views of the river make it worth it,” says Vathsa Boraiah, an orthopedic fellow at NYU Langone Medical Center, echoing almost every resident.

Rogers complains that many of the new residents don’t stay as long, which has eroded the community to some degree, but Waterside throws regular parties and events to try and bring residents together.

“It seems like every person in the elevator is in scrubs,” she jokes.

A two-acre plaza at the heart of the complex is lined with a row of shops. It also hosts regular events, and in warmer months, playful kids and sunbathing adults.

Still, even with all the unfamiliar faces, Rogers is staying put.

“I never imagined I’d live in the same place for so long,” she says. “I’ve got friends who have moved a dozen times. But looking back, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

SIDEBAR: WATERSIDE'S LASTING LEGACY

Waterside Plaza inspired many subsequent developments in the city:

Battery Park City
Far larger and better known than Waterside, it includes many of the same hallmarks, including open space on the water and secluded living on the other side of a highway. The project also provided for affordable housing, but through a seed fund rather than on-site.

Queens West
This massive and still-growing complex is across the East River from Waterside, and each share a good view of the other. Queens West, begun in the 1980s by the state, showed that even families outside of Manhattan were eager to call the waterfront home.

Williamsburg Waterfront
The Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning of 2005 allowed towers to begin to sprout along the formerly industrial shore. These buildings are still transforming the neighborhood (some say for the worse).

Via Verde
Lew Davis eschewed simple brick buildings at this South Bronx development, which opened two years ago. The project, like thousands, was also financed by the NYC Housing Development Corp., a nonprofit financier created for the sake of Waterside.

LOCATION

20 Waterside Plaza #28d, New York, NY 10010, EE. UU.

WATERSIDE PLAZA

Completed in 1974, Waterside Plaza is a community of four residential towers overlooking the East River. Recognized as a model of urban design, the complex offers 1400 residential units, a health club and large plaza, shopping, dining and parking.

Originally designed as a mixed-use residential complex that offered a sense of familiar community within the large city of Manhattan, it's now one of the most diverse communities in Manhattan. Waterside attracts residents from all over the country and the world. Many work or study at the United Nations, area hospitals and medical schools, international schools, and other East Side organizations and institutions.