From Manhattan’s West Side Highway, the “Little Island” looks like a cluster of giant white flower buds sprouting from the Hudson River. But the 2.4-acre park—conceived and mostly paid for by billionaire Barry Diller through his Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation—is actually an undulating platform of grass, trees, and winding pathways mounted on concrete piles where Pier 54 used to be.
When it opens to the public on Friday, May 21, visitors will be able to enter from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. year-round via two, boardwalk-sized bridges that connect the structure to the Hudson River Greenway and roughly correspond to 14th and 13th streets. The most dramatic approach is from the southern entrance through an arch covered in plants and trees.
Once visitors cross the water and come inside, they’ll discover that Little Island was designed for exploration, novelty, and discovery. “That’s a really thoughtful aspect of the design,” says Trish Santini, executive director of Little Island. “There are different views of the city, views of the water, views of people, and views of the landscape. You’re digesting a different element of the experience” as you move through the space.
The origins of the project date to 2013, when Diller, the chairman of IAC, became involved in fixing up Pier 54, which had fallen into disrepair. Instead of rebuilding the pier, Diller and his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, commissioned architect Thomas Heatherwick—designer of the infamous Vessel in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards—and the landscape architecture firm MNLA to design an entirely new structure.
The result was a sprawling layout intended to evoke a “leaf floating on water.”
That doesn’t quite come across, but the island’s base is an undeniable showstopper: the 132 concrete “tulips” that make up the park’s structure.
Every concrete tulip is unique, fabricated by Fort Miller Co. in Greenwich, N.Y., trucked to a location on the Hudson River, assembled on land, “and then each tulip was lifted by a crane onto a barge,” says Santini.
“We floated four at a time down the Hudson to come to the site. So that’s just one example of how complex the work was.”
The designers used the flexibility of the piles’ various heights to create an almost mountainous topography. The result is that, even though the park is comparatively small, multiple discreet spaces feel separate from the rest.
Visitors will first encounter a sort of courtyard area called the Play Ground.