Flesh v. Machine

For years, New York City--like almost every other metropolis--has spread relentlessly into the surrounding countryside. Meanwhile 167 valuable acres of land were all but going to waste right in the heart of the city. Last week a plan to devote that space to a new kind of big-city better living was put before New Yorkers. Perhaps nothing will ever make New York truly livable until the streets are gardens and the traffic is subterranean, but the new plan offers a realistic promise of traffic-free isolation in at least one area. The scheme: transform the all but deserted Welfare Island into a development where, as Architect Victor Gruen says, "all that is disturbing in modern-day city life is placed underground."

On a Platform. A two-mile-long, cigar-shaped strip in the East River, north of the U.N., between Long Island and Manhattan, Welfare Island was once a penitentiary, now is occupied by nurses' homes, hospitals for the aged and poor, and homes for wayward girls. Apart from the institutions, the island is a ramshackle glob of decrepit buildings, weeds and trash. The plan, sponsored by wealthy Real Estate Operator Roger L. Stevens and Financier Frederick Richmond, is to tear down everything on the island except one hospital and to build a concrete platform, 22 feet high, over most of the land. On top of the platform would go both slablike 50-story buildings and serpentine structures of middle-income apartments and town houses for 70,000 people.

Beneath the platform would be service areas, shops, a concourse, schools. There would be a road on the island, but all motor vehicles, except for fire and police use, would be banned; residents would either walk or take a "Carveyer"--a below-level train. A subway station, bridge and ferry service would provide access to the island. Estimated cost of turning city-owned Welfare Island into "East Island": $450 million, including an undetermined amount for leasing the island.

20th Century City. Architect Gruen, famed for spacious shopping centers (Eastland in Detroit) and a well-publicized zeal for turning downtown areas into car-free malls (Kalamazoo, Mich.), designed the slab-shaped buildings slim and high to take advantage of the island's Manhattan view and allow for landscaping. The lower buildings, varying in height and snaking along the island's length, would be topped with gardens and windbreaks for recreational facilities. The air-conditioned pedestrian concourse below would be sunlit (through glassed holes in the roof) and undulating to kill the monotony of long straight corridors.

East Island has a long way to go toward city approval and financing. But says Gruen: "It's not just a big housing project, it's the first 20th century city. We would really integrate housing with other facilities, avoiding the intermingling of transportation. It would mean unscrambling the melee of flesh and machine."

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