Sink or swim. (David Shankbone)

When Sandy swept into the town almost two months ago, Hudson River Park—as its name might suggest—was among the places inundated by the swelling sea under more than a dozen feet of water.

The surge washed over the historic piers and brand-new lawns, filling skate parks, swamping ball fields, submerging mini golf holes and surrounding the merry-go-round. Yet much of the park, in the traditional sense, came through fine."I think we lost only five trees and a few plants,” Madelyn Wils, president and CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust, said at a post-Sandy conference last Thursday.

It was the more manmade features, the development that undergirds the park and pays for its upkeep, that struggled to weather the storm.“The buildings, however, did not fare quite as well," Ms. Wils explains. "We’re still without power, because we are on our own grid, and we’ve had to work on our own to restore that.”

This is only the latest, and in some ways the least, of the troubles on the waterfront, where a bitter disagreement between Ms. Wils and the park's biggest backer, developer Douglas Durst, reveals cracks in the public-private model by which the city’s parks are so often built and maintained these days. These partnerships are both sustainer and straightjacket, leading to the creation of more parks in a generation, but also limited means to keep them up and running. Call them libertarian parks.

On October 29, the very night Sandy hit, Mr. Durst, the iconoclastic developer, was scheduled to appear before Community Board 2 to present a study he had recently paid for out of pocket on the dilapidated Pier 40, the earliest centerpiece of the park.

The 14-acre pier, built just off Spring Street in 1964 as the New York base for the Holland America Line, has more than  2,000 parking spaces along with two massive ball fields. Also home to a kayak launch, two harbor cruises and the New York Trapeze School, the pier is not only an asset for the community, but also for Hudson River Park itself, as it generates some $6 million a year in revenues for the park trust.

But the pier has slowly become a drag on the park, its roof starting to crumble—leading to the closing of a rooftop soccer field and a number of parking spots—and the nearly 4,000 pilings holding up the two-story structure starting to give.

While Ms. Wils and the trust estimate the price of repairing everything to be as much as $125 million, Mr. Durst had planned to go before the community board and argue that the repairs could be made for only $30 million, and that they should be paid for as soon as possible with the trust’s money.

The meeting was rained out, and now Mr. Durst pegs his plan at $44 million, because he believes the central ball fields, along with some other important pieces of the pier’s infrastructure, should be elevated out of the floodplain post-Sandy.

Mr. Durst has long been a staunch advocate for the park, serving since 2002as chairman of the board of Friends of Hudson River Park, an affiliated group that acts as both a fund-raiser and watchdog for the trust that operates the park. He was also its largest donor, giving a total of $2.3 million over that span and frequently buying the biggest tables at the annual fund-raising gala.

Since the summer, Mr. Durst began to float an idea that the pier should be fixed up as soon as possible, with the parking consolidated to the lower floor, and the upper areas turned into office space for tech firms and art galleries. The ball fields and other facilities would remain intact.

Meanwhile Ms. Wils and other Friends board members have been pushing for an approach in which a private developer would come in and pay for the repairs, along with what is expected to be a transformation of the pier. It would no doubt be a grander project, but also a more expensive one, and probably a more privatized one too.

Housing has been bandied about as a sort of panacea—ever since Richard Meier built his Perry Street “lofts,” who wouldn’t want to live on the Hudson River waterfront?—but locals also hate the idea of allowing the park to become some millionaire’s backyard.

That is why Mr. Durst has been pushing his plan for adaptive reuse on his own. It is also why Mr. Durst quit the Friends board last week. His name has already been wiped from the advocacy group's website, along with that of vice-chair Ben Korman, who used to run the parking at Pier 40 and also quit the board in protest.

“There was a difference of opinion of the direction that the park should go in,” Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Mr. Durst, told The Observer on Friday. “Douglas is still deeply committed to the park, but given his difference of opinion from the leadership of the park, it became impractical for him to continue with the trust and with Friends.”

One person close to the situation said this amounted to “a pissing match” between Mr. Durst and Ms. Wils, who was appointed president and CEO of the trust in June 2011. “He’s taking his ball and going home,” said the source.

But in many ways, the pair, who both share a passion for the park and its future, would not even be having this fight if Hudson River Park were not so desperate for funds, a conundrum that is at the very foundation of the park's creation.

It goes without saying that every open space needs money coming in, but for Hudson River Park, it is especially crucial. This is, after all, one of the first public-private, or “self-sustaining,” parks created in the city. Championed by Governor Pataki and launched through an act of the Legislature in 1998, Hudson River Park has become a popular model for fostering new parks, particularly for the Bloomberg administration.

The public-private model has taken hold everywhere from Governors Island to the High Line to Brooklyn Bridge Park, the idea being that the government pays the up-front costs of getting the parks built, but after that it is up to quasi-public agencies to keep them up and running, usually through a mix of commercial activities and fund-raising.

It is a controversial arrangement, since it can often mean that what was once public space must now be given over, at least in part, to private interests. But many supporters of the model, especially in this age of fiscal austerity, argue that without such arrangements, the parks would never get built at all. Those privatizers are winning for now.

On Monday, Brooklyn Bridge Park announced it was seeking developers for the third apartment complex to be built on public land on John Street, within the waterfront park, while a competition earlier this year to develop housing at Pier 1 attracted some of the city’s top builders. On Wednesday, prospective tenants for historic buildings on Governors Island, ranging from local chefs to national chains, will tour the island, hoping to open up shop in one of the 48 pre-Civil War structures. And when the third section of the High Line broke ground in September, nearly one-third of the construction funds came from the Related Companies and Oxford Properties, which are developing the Hudson Yards project the elevated park will surround. All of them are hoping to cash in on the parks, which will benefit the public too, but the question remains: who benefits more?

This is not how it always was. Look at the original urban park, Central Park, which was developed in part to buoy real estate values uptown, but was largely paid for and maintained by the public, as a public benefit that subsequently paid for itself through rising property values.

The Bloomberg administration last year touted the $2 billion boom that resulted from its $150 million investment in the High Line. But the city contributes almost nothing to the ongoing operations of the park—easily the most expensive for a park of its size, with a $9 million annual budget.

In 2008, The Regional Plan Association did a study that found the Greenwich Village segment of Hudson River Park had generated $200 million in economic development while only costing $75 million to build up to that point. Yet very little of that money was reinvested in the park. Meanwhile, capital funds from the city have fallen from a high of $42 million in 2008 to only $7 million this year, due to recessionary cuts at City Hall. Operating expenses for the park are roughly $14 million a year, almost all of it coming from the trust.

“The biggest thing that concerns me is that Hudson River Park was the first in this new, quote-unquote sustainable park model,” Holly Leicht, executive director of advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, said in an interview. “What we’re seeing right now is not very reassuring for this model.”

This debate is at the heart of the fight between Mr. Durst and the rest of the park’s leadership. He wanted up-front investments to protect the park, while other board members wanted the private sector to pay—perhaps rightly so, since the park could barely afford even the $30 million-to-$44 million tab Mr. Durst had touted.

“If it was up to me, not one more dime goes into Pier 40,” Diana Taylor declared at a recent board meeting. “Period.” (In addition to being a Friends board member, Ms. Taylor is, of course, Mayor Bloomberg’s girlfriend and in some ways his surrogate.)

The problem is that the legislation that created the park—by virtue of it being the first—is the most restrictive of the public-private parks in the city. It limits residential and certain other types of development and caps leases at 29 years. In comparison, more than 1,000 apartments will be built as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, with leases up to 99 years.

The trust has been lobbying Albany for years now to relax the restrictions, often to fierce outcry from locals, who oppose most forms of new development. (It’s the Village and Soho, after all.) So far, everything from an outpost of Cirque du Soleil to a Major League Soccer stadium has been proposed, but all have been sunk by neighbors.

The trust insists it does not favor housing, it simply wants that as one of the options on the table. “The community needs to understand that if they want a park, they need to be willing to do what it takes to maintain a park,” Ms. Wils told Crain’s in May, when she unveiled plans for a 115-room hotel and 800 apartments on the pier—but with expanded open space as well, a palliative to all that development.

“It’s never what you want to do, for sure,” said Rob Pirani, a vice president at the Regional Plan Association and member of the Governors Island Alliance, that park’s watchdog. “It’s the difference between a real estate project and building a neighborhood.” But he also conceded that without the public-private partnerships, public officials might not have agreed to underwrite these parks in the first place.

Meanwhile, the entertainment complex Chelsea Piers, the other big money-maker for the trust, has sued, alleging two decades of deferred maintenance on its piles. The repair costs have been estimated at $100 million, a price the trust could hardly afford. (The fact that there is an expensive place for people to rock climb, ice skate and drive golf balls on what is ostensibly public land, meanwhile, gets at the heart of the problems with this type of park. It’s a nice amenity for the neighborhood, but only for those who can afford it.)

There is some hope on the horizon, as the park’s third major commercial project, Pier 57, is finally getting underway after years of delays. Young Woo, a hip downtown developer, has teamed up with designers Lot-Ek, known for building with shipping containers, to transform the pier into an artisanal market. Cute, but again, commercial. There will be a public walkway around the pier and expansive open space on the 1.6-acre roof—but there would be even more public space without those stores. The proposal was just approved by the Community Board last week, the first step in the months-long public approval process.

“Despite these and other challenges, including the recent impact of Superstorm Sandy, the Friends and the trust remain wholly committed to working together to secure resources for the park and sustaining its future,” Ms. Wils and Friends executive director A.J. Pietrantone said in a statement released after Mr. Durst’s departure.

Ms. Leicht hopes they can pull it off. “I do think getting it right here is essential before we continue to forge ahead on these types of parks,” she said.

Adrift. (HRP Trust)

Even before Hurricane Sandy buried it under more than a dozen feet of water, Hudson River Park was struggling to stay afloat.

The past decade had seen substantial progress on the long-planned park, made possible by the demolition of the old West Side Highway (which provided some of the initial funding) and the realization New Yorkers actually wanted to return to the waterfront (which provided the drive). By last year, more than 70 percent of the park had been completed, including many of the piers, transformed from places of work into ones for play, and the generous esplanade connecting them all, running from the Battery all the way up to Riverside Park.

But the grass is not always greener in a new park. Like so many other open spaces created in recent years, Hudson River Park receives limited public funding. Instead, it is expected to generate its own revenue through not only fundraising but also development within the bounds of the park, everything from floating restaurants to parking garages. Everything from rock climbers at Chelsea Piers to the tourists taking Circle Line cruises contributes in its own way.

At one time, Pier 40 was the park's biggest single source of funds, but increasingly, it has become a drag on the park, and a dispute over its future has led to the departure of one of its biggest backers.

Built in 1958 as an air marine terminal for the Holland America Line, Pier 40 is actually one of the younger protrusions from the park, and also the biggest, at 14 acres. But unlike its predecessors, Pier 40 has not been substantially rebuilt to accommodate its new uses, chiefly as a parking garage but also as a popular downtown ballfield (one of the few) as well as being home to a few harbor cruisers (Affairs Afloat and the Hornblower), a dog run, a kayaking company and a trapeze school. The parking alone brought in $5 million a year.

That was before the pier began to crumble. There has been growing concern over the piles holding up the pier, which have only been intermittently repaired over the years, and part of the roof has begun to collapse, closing one of the three ball fields. The Hudson River Park Trust, which runs the parks, pegs the cost of fixing the pier at $125 million, at least $80 million for just the piles. This is money the trust argues it can hardly afford to spend, and it wants to foster some new type of development, most likely housing, to help offset the cost.

Pier 40, located between Spring and LeRoy streets in the Village, has gone from a buoy to a concrete boot dragging the park down.

But Douglas Durst, chairman of Friends of Hudson River Park, a booster group affiliated with the trust, believes the cost of preserving the peer has been greatly exaggerated, and he has been pushing his own plans for the pier for months now, to shore up the piles and then adaptively reuse the structure, adding offices for tech firms to the mix of parking and sports, providing fresh funds and space for a booming Silicon Alley downtown. He has also proposed gallery space.

Mr. Durst even went so far as to pay for a study of the costs of repairing the piles, which was revealed this week in The Villager, where the developer pegs the cost at only $30 million, or as much as $44 million if money is spent to raise the ball fields, which he believes should be the case following Hurricane Sandy. (Ironically, his study was completed just four days before the storm hit, and Mr. Durst had been poised to present it to the local community board on October 29, the day Sandy made landfall in New York.)

Without support for his plan either at the trust or Friends of Hudson River Park, late last week, Mr. Durst left the group, stepping down as chairman. Already his name has been scrubbed from the Friends' site, as has that of Ben Korman, a vice-chair who also stepped down. Mr. Korman used to run the parking operation on the pier and supported Mr. Durst's plan.

"There was a difference of opinion of the direction that the park should go in," Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Mr. Durst, told The Observer on Friday. "Douglas is still deeply committed to the park, but given his difference of opinion from the leadership of the park, it became impractical for him to continue with the trust and with Friends."

Justin Sadrian, a Friends board member and managing director at private equity outfit Warburg Pincus, was named acting chairman in the wake of Mr. Durst's departure, a promotion already reflected online.

Pier 40, flooded during Sandy. (HRPT/Flickr)

Mr. Durst believed that his expertise in matters of development was being ignored, and he had openly questioned the desire to build housing on the pier, which he told The Villager "doesn't work." Part of the problem, Mr. Durst argued, was that additional development would add to the cost of shoring up the piers—the more built up top, the more that must go down below to hold it up. He wanted the trust to spend money now to protect it, but other board members insisted there was no funds for such work.

“If it was up to me, not one more dime goes into Pier 40," Diana Taylor declared at a recent board meeting. "Period.”

One person close to the situation said this amounted to "a pissing match" between Mr. Durst and Madelyn Wils, who was appointed president and CEO of the trust in July 2011. "He's taking his ball and going home," said the source.

In a statement, Ms. Wils and Friends executive director A.J. Pietrantone said: "The Friends of Hudson River Park and the Hudson River Park Trust are extremely grateful for the many contributions of Douglas Durst and the Durst Organization to Hudson River Park  His philanthropy and advocacy for the waterfront and this distinct New York City amenity have had a profound effect on the quality of life for countless New Yorkers."

Mr. Barowitz said that Mr. Durst, who has not only provided his time to the Friends group but also his money as its biggest donor, would still continue to advocate for the park as a private citizen. Mr. Korman, who could not be reached by The Observer, will attempt the same, as he told Capital New York, which also reported the split.

"With the recent organizational changes made to the Friends, and my growing discomfort with regards to the Trust’s management, I felt that my advocacy would be more effective outside the Friends framework," Mr. Korman wrote in an email.

Losing two well-to-do backers seems like it could cause a serious blow to the park at a time that it is already desperate for funding, but another Friends board member said it should not have a material impact on the day-to-day operations of the Trust.

In many ways, this is a debate about the nature of how parks get built, maintained and funded in the city. New York has seen a number of public-private parks pop up in the past decade, from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the High Line. The city or state will help pay to build these grand edifices, but unlike Central Park or Prospect Park before them, the city takes little role in the new parks ongoing upkeep. Instead the parks are left to fend for themselves.

(Granted, most ever major open space from Central Park to Bryant Park now has some sort of conservancy, friends group or business improvement district that helps pay a good chunk of the costs for running it, ever since the city began divesting itself of this responsibility in the bankrupt 1970s.)

The argument over who should pay what is playing itself out here, as well. Mr. Durst and Mr. Korman believed the park should front the money to fix Pier 40, and then bring in new tenants to help cover those costs and add to the maintenance kitty going forward. But the bulk of the park's leadership insists it cannot pay for these fixes up front, and instead wants a private developer to come in and cover them.

In the past, there has been flirtations with everything from building schools here to an outpost for Circ de Soleil, all of which have been defeated for one reason or another, most usually through public outcry. Earlier this year the MLS had even considered it as a possible site for a soccer stadium, but transportation and crowding concerns from the surrounding community quickly stymied that idea.

Among the options the trust would like to see on the table is housing development, currently forbidden by the Hudson River Park Act of 1998, and SHoP Architects was even hired to make a compelling case for such a model earlier this year. The trust insists it is agnostic on which approach would be most suitable, and while housing would probably be the most lucrative—this is housing on the Hudson River waterfront, after all—locals tend to hate residential development, particularly on waterfront plots within public parkland (see: Brooklyn Bridge Park).

The trust has been working for the past year with lawmakers in Albany to try and revise the park act to allow for more types of development. Beyond restricting housing, the legislation limits leases to 29 years, which is seen as too short a time frame to attract a developer who would shoulder the costs of fixing up the pier as part of a larger development package.

But this may be the least of the park's problems at the moment. It remains without power six weeks after the Sandy storm surge washed over much of the park, including totally flooding Pier 40. "Most of our plants are O.K.," Ms. Wils said during a panel at a post-Sandy conference hosted by the Municipal Art Socity and Columbia on Thursday. "They're made to survive underwater, well not underwater, but they can put up with some flooding. I think we lost only five trees and a few plants."

"The buildings, however, did not fare quite as well," she said. "We're still without power, because we are on our own grid, and we've had to work on our own to restore that."

Meanwhile, there is some positive development news, as Pier 57, a cultural and shopping hub also long in the works at 15th Street, won approval from the local community board earlier this month. It will offer activities and access to the pier, as well as desperately needed funds to the park.

Whether something similar will get built at Pier 40, especially before the structure should deteriorate beyond repair, remains to be seen.

"Despite these and other challenges, including the recent impact of Superstorm Sandy, the Friends and the Trust remain wholly committed to working together to secure resources for the Park and sustaining its future," Ms. Wils and Mr. Pietrantone concluded their statement.

"Now with Douglas out of the way, the trust can start to work cohesively on fixing this pier," said the park source. The trust just has to convince Albany, and its angry neighbors, of the same thing.

Correction:A previous version of this story said the new acting board chair was Jason Sadrian, not Justin Sadrian. The Observer regrets the error.

“Oh, yeah. Let me guess. Was the Tribeca Film Institute one of them?”

“Uh, yeah. How’d you know?”

“Well, the C.E.O., Madelyn Wils is an L.M.D.C. board member, and the Institute already received $3 million back before there was any formal process for applying for funds, according to this Good Jobs New York report.”

“Well, yeah. They got another $600,000 today, for a free outdoor film series.”

“And how about the Alliance for Downtown New York ? Its chairman, William Douglass, just got appointed to the L.M.D.C. board, and its former president, Carl Weisbrod, has been on the board for a long time. The Alliance has received $4.8 million already for things like the River-to-River Festival.”

“Yes, them too, but they needed another million to do more cultural programming. They’re not going to keep that much of it, maybe nothing at all, just pass it on to other cultural institutions that are already receiving funding support from the L.M.D.C."

“Oh, I see.”

“But don’t worry. There is no conflict of interest here because there was an advisory team that vetted these 100-plus applications before they even got to the board and Wils and Weisbrod recused themselves from the vote this morning.”

“Oh, well, what was the vote?”

“Nine-zero. But, really, the Tribeca Film Institute has brought $50 million into the local economy and the Downtown Alliance has done all sorts of great things with its money, like putting in bollards and other security devices. Really, these investments are going to help everybody downtown.”

“Everyone except those who work for groups that got nothing.”

“Yeah, well, there’s about $6 million that the L.M.D.C. hasn’t given out yet. Maybe they should try for that.”

-Matthew Schuerman

Symptom of Larger Problem?

In the wake of Sept. 11, residents of Battery Park City have contended with serious disruptions in their daily lives: damaged buildings, contaminated apartments and the destruction of nearby public-transportation hubs, to name just a few. They've had to negotiate rent abatements, residential cleanups and repairs, rerouted neighborhood buses, and the construction of a footbridge to restore their connection to the rest of downtown.

But there's one lingering issue that Battery Park City residents have not been able to resolve since September: where to put a permanent dog run. The matter has aroused passions usually reserved for the likes of toxic-waste dumps and nuclear-power plants. Residents have accused community-board members of favoritism and conflicts of interest, of dictatorial methods and covert operations. At Board 1's May 21 public meeting, some residents protesting the dog run repeatedly spoke out of turn and even hurled the occasional obscenity. One resident threatened to sue the entire board. Chairwoman Madelyn Wils more than once threatened to call security. "I've never been at a board meeting where there's such disrespect!" Ms. Wils told the crowd.

But flaring tempers didn't help win over board members, who voted to approve plans for a permanent 3,000-square-foot dog run just north of Gateway Plaza, a complex of six large residential buildings near the World Financial Center. The site, called Kowsky Plaza, sits atop the World Trade Center's pumping station and is currently occupied by an abandoned "tot lot." The playground will be expanded and rebuilt in the bosque, a 3,500-square-foot wooded area adjacent to the dog-run site that overlooks the marina.

Some residents object to the run's location by the placid harbor; some oppose its proximity to a police memorial. Others worry about the children's safety, or feel that the yapping of excited dogs would violate the sanctity of nearby St. Joseph's Church and Battery Park Synagogue. Most, however, simply object to the dog run's proximity to their own apartments. "The closer to home you strike, the more passion is aroused," district manager Paul Goldstein told The Observer . But some think there's more to the vehement opposition than a perceived inconvenience. On Sept. 11, B.P.C. residents were confronted head-on with a striking example of how external forces can make controlling one's environment-even the highly controlled environment of Battery Park City-impossible. Are they reacting to this terrible truth by exerting whatever influence they can muster?

"People have been exposed to so much, and they're still dealing with all of the stress," B.P.C. committee chairman Anthony Notaro, who favors a permanent dog run, told The Observer . "Another change in the environment is something they'll react strongly to." Many Gateway Plaza residents are only now returning to their apartments. And the plans to rebuild lower Manhattan have proceeded with what some charge has been only token input from downtown residents. "I have to believe the energy focused on the dog run is a symptom of something else, of the voicelessness we've felt since 9/11," said Dolores D'Agostino, a dog-run supporter who lives in Gateway. "We have to live with some things we don't like. We have to get a grip on what's important."

But quality of life is important, insist others. Gateway occupants pay a premium to escape the noise endemic to the rest of the city, 10-year resident Judith Fox-Miller told The Observer , and to look out over a tranquil marina, not a noisy dog run. "I have received only one complaint about noise in the 13 years we've had temporary dog runs," countered Tessa Huxley, executive director of the B.P.C. Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that maintains the community's parks. "That's why I feel this is a bit of a red herring."

Nevertheless, the Battery Park City Authority plans to beef up the area's greenery in order to muffle the racket. The B.P.C. Parks Conservancy has pledged to maintain the run by washing it down twice a day. If the B.P.C. Authority's board accepts the community board's recommendations, construction of the facility will likely begin this fall.

Sandra Otero, Gateway resident, Port Authority employee and Tower 1 escapee, plans to get a dog this summer that she intends to exercise at the new run. She said that after being displaced to the East Village for several months following the attacks, her daughter was comforted by the dogs in Union Square Park. Ms. Otero told the board she welcomes the run as an opportunity to engage the healing power of animals, calling dogs a "rich resource" for trauma victims. Others, like 10-year Gateway resident Linda Burns, whose apartment overlooks Kowsky Plaza, see the run in an entirely different light. "There's a bigger message," she told The Observer . "It's God's way of telling me to leave the city."

-Megan Costello

June 4: Board 7, Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, Pope Auditorium, 7 p.m., 362-4008.

the city has erected a viewing platform for the benefit of ground-zero

tourists; and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has already outlined his vision for

a grand monument at the site.

It has become a point of pride for leaders of the city, the state

and the nation, determined to put a brave face on things, that the scene of the

Sept. 11 attack has become an almost normal part of the New York landscape.

But many of the elected officials who represent the areas hit

most heavily by the events of Sept. 11, as well as some experts who were

charged with examining the fallout, have been urging just about anyone who will

listen to take a closer look at what is happening in lower Manhattan. They say

that the understandable quest for normalcy carries the risk of papering over

potentially hazardous problems, including contamination by asbestos and a

potentially toxic cocktail of materials thrown together after the collapse of

the towers. In addition, several scientists who researched the contamination

issue called into question some of the conclusions reached by the government

about the environmental safety of areas around the World Trade Center.

"We've been urging the governmental agencies to do more

environmental testing on the sites, but they really haven't listened to local

officials on that," said Representative Jerrold Nadler, whose district includes

the World Trade Center site. "They still haven't done the breadth of testing

necessary to allay people's rational fears."

In the weeks following Sept. 11, hundreds of tests were done by

governmental agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the

state Department of Health and the city Office of Emergency Management. The

results showed that, for the most part, levels of asbestos and other

potentially harmful materials were below levels that posed an immediate or

long-term risk. While there's no reason to believe that those numbers are

inaccurate, some scientists say that far more research is necessary before

deciding that the health risks are minimal.

"Sometimes it looks to me that the E.P.A. and city agencies are

more concerned with keeping people from panicking than they are with providing

any meaningful data," said one scientist who works for

afederallyfundedresearch-and-development center involved with one of the

studies of contaminants downtown. "They're saying that there's nothing to worry

about, but there's no way they've been able to test every spot where studies

have indicated that there might be dangerous asbestos or other materials."

Other scientists involved with researching the potential hazards

expressed unease with one of the central premises of the agencies' conclusions

that everything is all right-namely that asbestos and other potentially

hazardous materials are only dangerous if airborne. "The presence of asbestos

in dust is not necessarily a significant health hazard," reads the E.P.A. Web

site. "The dust must become airborne and be inhaled for it to cause significant

health problems."

The dust-which was spread not only over outdoor surfaces in lower

Manhattan, but also into cars, apartments and nooks in building exteriors-is in

fact harmless as long as it lays dormant. The problem, according to some

experts, is that such dust is made airborne quite easily when disturbed by

anything from a gust of wind to a well-meaning building superintendent with a

broom. "Certainly asbestos is not an issue if it remains in the surface dust,"

said Roger Clark, a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey who oversaw a

study commissioned by the E.P.A. that detected pockets of asbestos and other

materials. "The concern is about whether you hit a patch of asbestos and might

get a lot of it airborne quickly and breathe that in, or if you use some other

method that could concentrate the dust, like stirring it up with an ordinary

vacuum cleaner. The dust would have to be cleaned up with appropriate

protective measures."

Despite such concerns, however, much of the removal of

potentially hazardous dust is being handled in an amateurish and haphazard way,

according to downtown community leaders. "There has been a completely

uncoordinated effort to clean up a lot of the dust that settled on windowsills

and roofs and apartments," said Madelyn Wils, chair of Community Board 1.

"Basically we have had thousands of people who still haven't cleaned their

apartments properly, when we know that there was asbestos and other materials among

the initial debris. Becausepeople haven'tgotten enough direction on how to deal

with this, they've gone around brushing off their canopies and sweepingtheir

roofs, putting this dust right back into the air, onto cars, and back into

people'sapartments through air filters. Even people who cleaned their

apartments or businesses are having to re-clean."

Ms. Wils was among a group of local officials that commissioned

an independent gathering of dust samples from residential areas downtown. They

came up with some disturbing results. Testing inside three randomly selected

apartments, for example, revealed that carpets and curtains were inundated with

dust that was laden with copious amounts of asbestos and other unpleasant

materials. Because many residents and business owners have not hired

professional asbestos-abatement services to do their cleanup, it is not

unlikely that manyindoorsurfacesarestill contaminated.

Another independent study-this one commissioned by the board of

directors of a small park in Tribeca-found dangerously high levels of asbestos

coating the playground, prompting embarrassed government officials to close it

down after children had been playing there for days.

Fears Not Abated

According to Ms. Wils, residents are far from convinced that the

peril has passed. "People have gotten sick from this, getting headaches," said

Ms. Wils. "We should be making a much greater effort to find out what this all

means." The unease has only grown since the late December revelation that a

quarter of the 6,500 firefighters who did rescue work at ground zero have

fallen ill with  respiratory ailments.

Judging by the numbers, however, the results of the research that

has been made available to the public is largely encouraging. In the areas the

E.P.A. tested, for example, levels are consistently below governmentally

dictated danger levels of asbestos. And the more that time passes, the more

those levels are likely to diminish. An E.P.A. spokeswoman, Mary Helen

Cervantes, pointed out that the agency continues to test for a wide range of

pollutants in and around ground zero, and said that the E.P.A. has gone to

great lengths to put the public at ease about potential dangers. "A significant

piece of our involvement has been providing that information to the public,"

said Ms. Cervantes. "A lot of it is on the Web, and we also go to a lot of

tenant meetings to speak directly to them."

However useful a broader collection of data might be, elected

officials and others say that they've had problems addressing the glut of

information already available, much of which is also in the public domain. Mr.

Nadler, Ms. Wils and other officials plan to assemble their own team of

researchers to pore over the data that has already been gathered, and to offer

an analysis independent of those offered by

government agencies.

In the meantime, Mr. Nadler

remains skeptical of the assurances offered to downtown residents. "People in

authority are always going to tell people that things are safe, and to move

back and not to worry about anything," he said. "You can never say that

anything is perfectly safe. This is an unprecedented event and an unprecedented

tragedy, and it is  clear that there are

limitations to what science can tell us right now."

Citibank's plan for the site it owns at the northeast corner of 91st Street and Madison Avenue was originally presented to the board's landmarks committee in January 2000, when bank representatives submitted sketches for a new 15-story building that would house a Citibank branch on the ground floor and a residential complex with two penthouses above.

The notoriously finicky residents of Carnegie Hill, who had disliked the plan since it first surfaced in January 1999, opposed the project, saying the building was completely inappropriate both in style and size for a landmarked block of three-to five-story townhouses. Board 8 members agreed, siding with the residents and rejecting the bank's plan.

A June 2000 meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Commission handed residents a further victory as the Commission unanimously upheld the board's decision. The plan's architects were sent home with a laundry list of demands, including reduction of the building's height and numerous alterations to the plan for the building's façade that were more in keeping with the existing prewar styles on the block.

But as the March 21 meeting proved, Citibank sitting on a valuable piece of property has remained undaunted. Represented by architect Paul Byard of Platt Byard Dovell and Bob Davis, an attorney for Tamarkin Company, the site's developer, the development team presented the board with a revised design, one that incorporates the existing one-story Citibank building now on the site into a 10-story tan-brick 127-foot apartment building. With the inclusion of a mechanical bulkhead on the roof as well as a water tower, the overall height of the building would reach 142 feet.

Faced with a design proposal that towered over the remainder of the block, where the average building height is approximately 50 feet, board members and residents once again condemned the plan.

"First they gave us a skyscraper. Now they give us a big, hulking, looming box with no grace and with no relationship to the townhouses in the north and east," said one community resident one of about two dozen neighbors and elected officials to step up to the microphone.

Residents also refuted the developer's argument for the appropriateness of its design on the grounds that there are already high-rise buildings on the other three corners of the 91st Street and Madison Avenue intersection, saying that these buildings are located on significantly larger lots than the Citibank site.

Josh Stein, whose family has lived on Carnegie Hill for generations, echoed another common sentiment, saying, "Just because the neighborhood has made mistakes in the past doesn't mean we should make one now."

Even film director Woody Allen, a resident of Carnegie Hill who has been vocal in the fight against encroaching developers in the past and who made a persuasive case against Citibank before the Landmarks Preservation Commission last year spoke before the board.

"I've combed every inch of the city," he said, "and I've always filmed in Carnegie Hill because it's one of the great small neighborhoods in the city, and every building like this is an encroachment. We'd welcome them [the developer] with open arms if they'd just follow the recommendations of everyone who has made recommendations on this, including the Landmarks Preservation Commission, to give us seven stories …. They'd make a nice profit with seven stories; my accountant would be glad to show them how to do it."

The board ultimately voted to no one's surprise to uphold its landmarks committee's March 13 resolution rejecting Citibank's proposal. The bank and local residents will next square off at the April 3 Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting, which has final say on the matter.

Petra Bartosiewicz

New Life (and Color) For Maritime Building

One of the icons of New York's waterfront will soon get a second lease on life.

Down on the docks of South Street, upstream from the Staten Island ferry, the lime-green Battery Maritime Building sits decaying, its crumbling roof shrouded by a black protective net, its piers rotting in the East River waves.

The old ferry terminal, at the base of South Street by the Whitehall N and R subway station, is the last of the terminals that once lined the East River waterfront.

"It's a beautiful, beautiful building," says Yvonne Morrow, director of constituent services for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. "And if they don't do something soon, it will fall apart."

"Soon" is now little more than a month away, when the city's Economic Development Corporation will start spending $36 million to recreate the terminal's original-exterior yellow-orange stucco and a mosaic of green, yellow and cobalt-blue tiles that the architect promises will stun passers-by.

Richard Pieper, the project director for Jan Hird Pokorny Associates Inc., said design work starts in May. The entire restoration will take three years to complete.

During that time, the development corporation has to decide what to put inside the building, which now holds the offices of the city's Department of Transportation. Just south of the planned spot for the new Guggenheim Museum and the traditional gateway to Governors Island, the Battery Maritime Building could become prime real estate.

The vocal neighborhood activists who make up Board 1 hope to have a say in the city's decision. At the March 20 meeting of Board 1, chairwoman Madelyn Wils encouraged board members to attend the board's waterfront committee meeting on March 28.

"I was wondering if this should be something cultural maybe some theater, maybe a sports center," Ms. Wils told The Observer. "I don't want to see a shopping mall there."

Whatever the use of the rehabbed space, it will be quite different from that of a century ago, when the Municipal Ferry crisscrossed the East River between South Street and 39th Street in Brooklyn.

Richard Walker and Charles Morris designed the station as a Beaux Arts testament to New York's industrial might 40-foot columns and Guastavino tile vaults made from rolled steel and cast iron. But soon after the terminal's completion, ferry traffic dwindled. By 1920 the terminal lost money, and in 1938 the ferry stopped running. The Coast Guard took control of the terminal along with Governors Island in 1966. Somewhere along the line, someone got the idea of painting the entire thing lime green.

Mr. Pieper, the architect, has waited to get his hands on the project since 1979, when he and his then-future wife, Merrill Hesch, first started walking along the waterfront and he said to her, "I want to work on that one."

On the morning of Friday, March 16, Mr. Pieper and E.D.C. planners made members of Board 1 "walk the plank" to see what he's so excited about.

"We actually climbed up into the broken-down inside of the pier so we could look at the south side of the building," Ms. Wils said. "It was very dangerous. And I had to go to a hearing after that, so I was wearing high heels and a short skirt, which was very impressive, I must say."

What kind of shoes? The Observer asked.

"Peter Fox, green suede. My heel just kept falling in between the planks, but I didn't break it. That's the big story: I didn't tear my stockings, I didn't tear my skirt."

Isaiah Wilner

April 3: Board 7, location to be determined, 7 p.m., 362-4008.

April 4: Board 4, St. Luke's Hospital, 1000 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th streets, 6 p.m., 736-4536; Board 10, Harlem State Office Building, 163 West 125th Street, second floor, 6 p.m., 749-3105.