In early 2021, Sergey Kadinsky profiled Waterline Square, the final piece in the Riverside South development, which opened for luxury units in 2019. Its usual compliment of glass-fronted towers, designed by “starchitechts” and “starchitectural” firms Rafael Viñoly, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Richard Meier, seem to me to be a more user-friendly version of Hudson Yards further south, also in view of the Hudson River.
Riverside South was originally conceived by six civic associations along with one Donald Trump, who wanted to build what he termed “Television City” or “Trump City,”atop the old NY Central railyards. It would be a collection of tall towers that included a 150-story building that would be NYC’s tallest. Various plans went back and forth over the years with the north end of the development going under construction in the 1990s. Trump eventually sold off his interests, and the last of the 1990s buildings to bear the Trump name removed it in 2019.
Looking south on Freedom Place South at East 60th Street, with the ancient Interborough Rapid Transit Company Powerhouse, completed in 1905, in view; the massive structure helped power the NYC’s first subway. To its rear is the twisting pyramidical VIA West 57th Street. I enjoy new buildings, but they have to be imaginative as well as esthetic; Hudson Yards, with the possible exception of “The Shed,” isn’t.
The original Freedom Place, several blocks north, was built along with the first iteration of Riverside North in the early 1970s and was given a name that was supposed to evoke memories of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were in Mississippi assisting in registering African Americans to vote when they were murdered by the KKK in 1964, a case dramatized in the “Mississippi Burning” motion picture. Freedom Place South was built from West 59th to West 64th in the mid-2010s, one of NYC’s newest major routes along with Riverside Boulevard. It takes a curving path that seems to have been conceived on the whim of the developers, since there are no hills or bodies of water to take a curving road around here.
In the title image above you see a pair of guy wired streetlamps, along with a more familiar Type A park lamp. East 60th Street and Freedom Place South between West 59th and West 61st Streets employ this style, which can be found nowhere else in NYC for streetlamps.
A guy-wire, guy-line, guy-rope, or stay, also called simply a guy, is a tensioned cable designed to add stability to a free-standing structure. In this case, they support the lamppost mast. This style has been used since the 1950s for the massive stoplight structures seen at major intersections, but haven’t been used for streetlamps till now; I’ve seen them in photos taken in Los Angeles and New Jersey, but not there.
I imagine that Riverside South’s streets are considered semiprivate and so the developers designed their own streetlamps when the streets were constructed. Other semiprivate developments around town also have “proprietary” lamps. North of West 61st, Riverside South’s streets are lit with Type B park poles, whose design was first introduced in 1912.
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2/4/23