The Escalator You Have to Find
Between two wings of 55 Water Street, near the Old Slip end of the Financial District, there is a narrow gap. In the gap there is an escalator. Above a coffee cart, behind a planter, with no signage worth speaking of. The escalator climbs about thirty feet and deposits you onto a deck the size of a football field.
The deck is called the Elevated Acre. It is, in the literal sense, an acre — 38,000 square feet of public lawn, boardwalk, amphitheater, and harbor view, perched above lower Manhattan and operated as a Privately Owned Public Space. POPS, in city jargon. Free, every day, by mandate.
There are about 600 POPS in New York. Most of them are unloved street-level plazas with a few benches. The Elevated Acre is the outlier — a fully designed public park, by the firm Rogers Marvel with landscape by Ken Smith, completed in its current form in 2005. Almost nobody knows it is up there.
How It Got Built
The bones of the space are older than the design. In 1972, when 55 Water Street went up as the largest office building in the world by floor area, the city's 1961 zoning code rewarded the developer with extra floors in exchange for an open public plaza on the property. The plaza got built. It also got, for thirty years, almost no use.
In 2002, the Municipal Art Society and the building's owner ran an international design competition to fix it. Rogers Marvel Architects and the landscape architect Ken Smith won. They replaced the original pair of long escalators with four shorter ones and a flight of stairs, added a Brazilian hardwood boardwalk along the East River edge, planted a sloped lawn, built a seven-tiered amphitheater, and installed a programmable LED beacon at the south end.
The redesign opened in 2005. It has not been redesigned since.
What's Up There
On the boardwalk side, an unobstructed view east: the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge piers, the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn waterfront, and, on a clear day, the harbor opening south toward Governors Island. The view is about thirty feet up — high enough that the FDR Drive passes below you instead of in front of you. The traffic noise is muted.
On the lawn, the seven-tiered amphitheater. In the summer, the River to River Festival runs short performances here — dance, chamber music, sometimes outdoor films. The rest of the year the seats hold office workers eating salads from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. and almost nobody else.
The lawn itself is open to sit on. Dogs are welcome on leash. There is no food on the deck — you bring your own, or stop at the coffee cart by the escalator.
Why It Stays Empty
The escalator is the answer. New Yorkers walking down Water Street do not look up. The escalator's entrance reads, at a glance, as a service entry to the building behind it. There are no signs from Battery Park, no signs from Old Slip, and the building's own wayfinding is half-hearted.
The Municipal Art Society has spent years lobbying the building's owners to put up better signage. The owners have, on principle, done very little. The result is that the Elevated Acre stays the way most New Yorkers prefer their secret places: technically findable, practically secret.
It is also, by the standards of the Financial District, generously enforced as a public space. The original POPS agreement requires it to be open at minimum from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. daily. The actual hours are longer. The building's security staff are pleasant. Photography is allowed.
When to Go
The best hour is the one before sunset. The harbor light turns the bridges copper. The crowd is, on most weekday evenings, a handful of off-shift Financial District workers and the occasional couple who came up on purpose. The amphitheater faces west, so the sun lands across the lawn.
The second-best hour is the lunch hour on a Thursday in May. You will share the lawn with maybe forty people, almost all of them eating from the same three salad places on Pearl Street. The whole thing has the air of a private corporate park that someone forgot to lock.
The worst hour is, paradoxically, on a Friday night during an event. The Acre rents out for weddings and corporate parties. When it is rented, the public access shrinks to a corridor. Check the building's calendar before climbing the escalator on a weekend evening.
The Larger Point About Privately Owned Public Spaces
The POPS program is one of New York's quietest gifts to itself. About 3.5 million square feet of public space, much of it underused, all of it required by law to be open to anyone. The catalog is maintained by the Municipal Art Society at apops.mas.org, and it is worth a slow read.
Most of the entries on that list are mediocre. A few — Trump Tower's atrium, the Sony Plaza arcade, the public seats inside the Ford Foundation — are extraordinary. The Elevated Acre is in that second category, and probably the one with the best view.
It is also, in a city where every other square foot is for sale, a useful reminder that not every square foot has to be.
Practical notes
- Address: 55 Water Street, New York, NY 10041. Escalator entrance on Water Street, between Hanover Square and Old Slip.
- Getting there: Subway to Wall Street (2/3 or 4/5), then walk five minutes east. Or the South Ferry/Whitehall station.
- Hours: Minimum 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, often longer. Check for private events on Friday/Saturday evenings.
- Admission: Free. POPS by law.
- Don't miss: The boardwalk along the East River edge, the LED beacon at sunset, the amphitheater.
- Pairs well with: Stone Street for dinner, the Fraunces Tavern, or the 4:30 p.m. Staten Island Ferry for the harbor at golden hour.
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Sources consulted: Municipal Art Society APOPS · Rogers Marvel Architects · Ken Smith Landscape · Untapped New York · Atlas Obscura
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