Waiting For A Future
By September 1996 the Coast Guard had relocated all functions and residential personnel to offices and bases in Rhode Island and Virginia. The Coast Guard left a caretaker detachment to maintain the island along with the General Services Administration (GSA) while its future was determined.
The disposal of the island as excess federal property was outlined in the Budget Reduction Act of 1996. The legislation set a deadline and directed that the island be sold at a fair market value by GSA by 2002, but gave the city and state of New York the right of first refusal, a provision that was inserted into the legislation by New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who envisioned the island with great potential as a public and civic resource.
With the announcement of the Coast Guard base closure and departure, city and state officials along with private developers and civic planners began to offer opinions and ideas on the island's future that included housing, parks, education and private development.
In 1996, Van Alen Institute hosted an ideas competition called "Public Property" which asked designers "to consider the urban potential of Governors Island in terms of spatial adjacencies and experiential overlaps between a range of actions, actors, events, and ecologies... to acknowledge the physical reality of cities and their historic programmatic complexity as fundamental to the survival of a vital public realm." The competition was open to anyone who registered. More than 200 entries from students, faculty, and landscape architects in 14 different countries were received. The jury members included: Andrea Kahn, Christine Boyer, Miriam Gusevich, Judith Henitz, Carlos Jimenez, and Enric Miralles.
A proposal to adaptively reuse Castle Williams for a New Globe Theater, designed by architect Norman Foster. The non-profit organization worked in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London to develop a proposal and seek backing for a cultural center and performance space in the Castle. With the completion of a National Park Service general management plan for Castle Williams and Fort Jay in 2009, it was determined that the proposed use of the Castle for the theater was not congruous with its historical significance.
Read more about this topic: Governors Island
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“Within the university ... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It’s perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.”
—Jacques Derrida (b. 1930)
“What are we waiting for, gathered in the market-place?
The barbarians are to arrive today.”
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“Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)
“It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)