Botanical Garden Visitor Center
April 24, 2004
Seeing the Garden From the Trees
By GLENN COLLINS
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Work continues on the visitor center at the New York Botanical Garden, where the new main gate, lower left, will open next Saturday. The garden in the Bronx is protecting the historic trees during the project.
They were absolutely forbidden to chop down the trees. So they had to build around them.
That's because these trees are living museum exhibits, part of the country's largest collection of historic conifers. But the century-old pines, spruces and firs occupied the same rolling Bronx landscape where the New York Botanical Garden planned to construct a grand gateway for visitors to its 250 acres.
"We aren't about the buildings, we're about the landscape,'' said Gregory Long, president of the garden. Therefore the solution was to cherish the trees and carefully situate a series of asymmetrical, low, minimalist buildings on an irregular three-and-a-half acre site that would frame sweeping views of the famous conifers without harming them - or obscuring them.
Next Saturday, after years of planning and construction, this new $21 million main entrance will open, surrounding an outdoor plaza and a reflecting pool. There is to be a new cafe, a bookstore, a garden shop, a ticket desk, rest rooms and an orientation center.
Gov. George E. Pataki said in an interview this week that the new complex, called the Leon Levy Visitor Center, "will allow people to have a better orientation to the garden.'' (Mr. Pataki and his wife, Libby, have been frequent visitors to the garden for years.)
The structures were designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. As he inspected the construction site on a recent afternoon, Hugh Hardy, the architectural firm's founding partner, said the new entrance "will act as a buffer from the streetscape to the idyllic green space of the garden.''
Not since the 1890's has the botanical garden witnessed such a ferment of construction, Mr. Long said. The institution is hurtling toward the close of a 14-year, $500 million program of restoration and development scheduled to be completed in 2007, the largest and most costly redevelopment ever mounted by a botanical garden, he said.
The garden had more than 600,000 visitors in 2003, and attendance has been up by 30 percent over the last seven years since the restored Enid A. Haupt Conservatory reopened. Increasingly the mile-long garden, a national historic landmark, is expected to fulfill multiple roles as a tourist magnet, an educational resource, a research center, a neighborhood park and a library open to the public.
To Mr. Long, the institution's 48 gardens and living plant collections - including its celebrated 50-acre forest containing the last remaining stand of native oaks, maples and hemlocks in New York City, some of them more than 300 years old - are "a public museum without a roof.''
In 2002, the garden completed a $100 million reconstruction of its Beaux-Arts library building and the opening of its International Plant Science Center, housing the garden's 775,000-item library collection and its 6.5 million plant specimens in an extension designed by the firm of Polshek Partnership Architects.
During the next three years, the garden hopes to complete a number of major building, landscaping and infrastructure projects, including the multimillion-dollar restoration of the conifer collection, to be formally named the Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum on Thursday.
It is the new visitor center, however, that is likely to make the greatest impact on garden-goers, who have been amenity-challenged at the current entrance, Conservatory Gate. The majority of its $21 million cost, about $11 million, was allocated by the state, principally the Empire State Development Corporation; the remaining $10 million came from private donations.
"One hundred years ago some foresighted New Yorkers created the garden, and we have an obligation to build on what others did,'' Mr. Pataki said. "Now, with the renovation of the conservatory and the opening of the visitor center, we are doing our part for future generations.''
But all this regeneration is occurring at a time when the amount of support that the garden receives from New York City for its operating budget of $41 million in 2004 is down by 18 percent since the Sept. 11 terror attack of the World Trade Center in 2001. And since then the garden's full-time staff of 440 is 8 percent smaller because of attrition and layoffs.
The Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., said he has fought for increased operational financing for the garden and other Bronx institutions. But for now at the garden, he said, the visitor center "is the best investment that could be made, to ensure that this is a more user-friendly place.'' Mr. Carrión added that the shops and new cafe "will encourage tourists to linger longer, so they just don't parachute in."
But plans for visitor buildings at Conservatory Gate conflicted with the arboretum, the garden's 40-acre forest of 250 venerable trees. The collection includes a rare century-old Himalayan white pine and other heirlooms called specimen trees, some of which, according to Dr. Kim Tripp, senior vice president for horticulture at the garden, "are endangered in their natural habitats.''
Given their place in the conifer arboretum, the visitor-center buildings "had to be unobtrusive, an extension of the landscape,'' Mr. Hardy said.
The original classic Edwardian structures of the 113-year-old institution conform to the grand, elitist European tradition of garden architecture, said Mr. Hardy, who has helped plan the garden's redevelopment since 1989.
But instead of competing with such garden palaces, Mr. Hardy and his firm sought invisibility by using glass, steel and stone. The four visitors' structures have signature, skylighted gull-winged roofs of Western red cedar that mimic the sloping hills of the property.
During some of his construction visits, Mr. Hardy supervised six masons as they worked with bluestone from the Helderberg Mountains south of Albany, creating rustic walls "that look like they have always been here,'' he said.
Within the buildings' low stone walls is a surprisingly large total of enclosed space: 27,500 square feet. The pavilions' siting was "especially challenging," Dr. Tripp said, "because the roots of mature trees go out 20 or 30 feet, and you can't monkey around with the roots of century-old conifers.'' So Mr. Hardy's firm used a computer mapping system to make sure that construction would not disturb tree roots.
In addition to offering "all the hardware of arrival,'' as Mr. Hardy put it, the visitor buildings will have an orientation center since patrons "have long had the need for more information here,'' he said. The ticketing desk will admit adults for $6, and children for $3. (Admission is free on Saturdays until noon and all day Wednesdays.)
And the 450-foot-long path between the visitor buildings and the arboretum is also made of bluestone: a new promenade that matches existing 1890's paving elsewhere in the garden. "Stone," Mr. Long said, "of the kind that formed the sidewalks of New York.''
But even that new walkway is an adaptive disguise, since it happens to be installed over the Croton Reservoir pipeline, which had to be reconstructed before the stone could be newly placed. "We've made sure,'' Mr. Long said, "that the bluestone can be removed some time in the great unspecified future.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Hugh Hardy states, “The Leon Levy Visitor Center represents a fusion of architecture and landscape that uses stone, steel, and glass to create a new, simply stated environment. It is public architecture that is free of associations with wealth and privilege, instead defining a place of discovery and delight for all the diverse populations of New York and beyond.”
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