Little Island is a bewitching, and utterly New York–y, place. JDavidsonNYC writes
Photo: Dean Kaufman When you’re standing in the middle of Little Island, the new parklet levitating off the coast of Chelsea, it feels bigger and farther than it is. You approach from the shore, where a bouquet of Alice in Wonderland–ish concrete toadstools springs from the Hudson River. Friendly staff members wave you onto the gangway if you have reserved a free, timed ticket or it’s before noon or after 8 p.m. Once there, you’re in a bower that has been designed down to the smallest stamen.
But at Little Island, Heatherwick’s imagination somehow found its moorings. That speaks well of the man footing the bill, Barry Diller, who mixed largesse with vigilance. It speaks even better of the collaboration between Heatherwick Studio and the longtime New York landscape architect Signe Nielsen.
The pathways are long, looping, and gentle, but they are crisscrossed with stairways and rock-clamber shortcuts, like a serene kind of Chutes and Ladders. This gives visitors options and prevents an itinerary from feeling like a one-way march. At times, you almost feel lost in the tiny terrain, cut loose from the nearby shore. Retaining walls are made of sheet pile, a system of folded steel panels that interlock to form quick-and-dirty barriers. Nothing could be less refined.
All these design decisions add up to a rare specificity, an only-here-ness that is absent from so many contemporary places. And those close-up details conduct a conversation with the middle ground. The weathered-steel rods that fence off the island’s edge are tightly enough spaced that not even an underweight toddler could squirm between them. That allows parents to relax, lift their gaze, and register the visual rhyme between the rusty poles and the old wooden piles in the water below.
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