The New Yorker goes to Governors Island

A couple of weeks ago Nick Paumgarten published an article on Governors Island in The New Yorker that nicely captures the strange appeal of the place, and the difficulties involved in figuring out what to do with it. (The full text is available only to subscribers, but an abstract and video tour are available).

The fortunate few who were permitted on the island after the Coast Guard left—park rangers, ferry crews, architects, city dignitaries and their guests—discovered a time capsule, with the beguiling anachronisms of Havana and the eerie emptiness of Chernobyl, minus the tyranny and the radiation. Reports came back of spectacular views, shady lanes, weird buildings, ocean breezes, and a wealth of oddball archeology.

That ghost-town feeling is a large part of what has drawn me to the island over the last few summers. But as of this year the place has definitely been discovered, with long lines at the ferry building and Time Out publishing a supplement on how Governors Island is a hip new getaway. I would prefer it to stay sleepy and undiscovered, but as Paumgarten explains, that isn’t a viable option.

The island can’t remain whatever it is now, in spite of its charms. To stay open to the public, it needs remunerative tenants and regular constituents. It needs someone to need it. The cost of maintaining the island (so that roof tiles and tree limbs don’t kill people), and of operating the ferry, is fourteen million dollars a year, enough to give anyone in the executive or the legislative branch of local government pause, especially in an era of severely straitened public finances.