From Vacant Lots to Vast Parkland: Tom Fox’s Four-Decade Crusade to Transform the West Side Waterfront

Photographing Hudson River Park elder statesman Tom Fox at Pier 76 earlier this year, it’s hard to imagine him in the mid-1980s as a member of the newly formed West Side Task Force turning up to a meeting at the American Stock Exchange in a T-shirt proclaiming “Urban Gardeners Do It In Vacant Lots.”

His anecdote from the occasion, in his new book Creating The Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics and Greed, is an appropriate illustration of more than 40 years of pushing through every level of New York City power to deliver public space. On that day, after he locked his bike to a parking meter in front of the Exchange, he rode the elevator to the boardroom with a well-dressed man who had arrived in a Lincoln Town Car.

Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the Task Force, met the two men outside the elevator and introduced Tom to his fellow rider, Tom Maguire, President of Local 15 of the International Union of Operating Engineers. 

Arthur then turned and said, “Tom Maguire, this is Tom Fox…” But before Arthur could mention his affiliation, Maguire interrupted, looking Fox in the eye. “You’re one of those wacko environmentalists from Greenwich Village. I can’t stand your guts.” Fox replied, “It’s a pleasure to meet you too, Mr Maguire.”

Spoiler alert: The two Toms went on to become allies during several significant stages in the development of the Hudson River Park. By 1991, Maguire was asking Fox to speak to 50,000 construction workers at a rally in City Hall Park, and used his union’s lobbying power to help in Albany.

Fox’s book goes into enormous detail, cross-referenced with academic precision, to outline the journey of derelict dockland and condemned West Side Highway prized by developers to the nearly finished Hudson River Park we see along the West Side today.

His first connection with the far West Side came, like many, with a visit to the NYPD Tow Pound at Pier 76 to retrieve his car in the middle of the night “where it was hauled after a victorious Knicks playoff game in 1970.” However, his passion for the waterfront really started when he moved to Bank Street in 1979. “That visit, in the light of day, was a shock!” he recalls. “Two former World War II Liberty ships were docked at the foot of Christopher Street and served as a maritime high school. Other than that, the ships that once lined the waterfront had disappeared. Many of the pier sheds had been marred by fires and were abandoned, while the usable piers housed bus garages, sanitation facilities, tow pounds, concrete plants and parking lots. Many of the remaining abandoned piers were home to drug dealing, prostitution and makeshift homeless encampments.”

Fox’s journey charts over 40 years, from being a young activist successfully scuppering plans for the Westway (a mega-development project to fill in the Hudson River shoreline from Chambers Street to W36th Street and cover it with three million square feet of residential and commercial development) — to being chosen in 1986 to serve on the West Side Task Force by the Governor to “be on the inside of the tent pissing out” rather “than on the outside pissing in”. 

In 1992, he was appointed as the first President and CEO of the Hudson River Park Conservancy — when some former fellow activists were convinced he had “gone over to the dark side”. By 1995, as Governors changed, he “got whacked” by the incoming George Pataki administration. “I was stunned. I had worked on the project for 10 years with Cuomo and Koch and survived the transition to Guliani,” he said. “The next day, Pataki appointed my replacement, Peter Keough, a corporate real estate manager with zero public park experience. Apparently, his bona fides were that his son had married the daughter of incoming state Parks Commissioner Bernadette Castro, and Keough needed a job. Politics again.”

At the time, Chelsea Clinton News reported on concerns the new governance of the park was taking, concerned that they could “relegate what could have been a park similar to Central Park to nondescript patches of greenery between nodules of commercial development.” 

Since then, Fox has undertaken roles inside and outside the tent, as the various iterations of Hudson River Park governance have meandered between Trusts, Friends, Alliances and Advisory Councils. Add to that the ever-changing politics between State Governors and City Mayors — and it makes for quite a complex and intriguing story.

The book’s two key threads follow the battle between a philosophy cultivated around Central Park — that public places should be paid for out of the public purse (or those who benefit most, the neighbors) — and the drive of New York’s developers to use every spot of land they can find to build and make money.

Hudson River Park is the largest park built in Manhattan since Central Park opened over 150 years ago. 

Fox’s idealistic vision of a park for the people can seem a fantasy, until you take a look at Central Park and wonder how the hell, in this City where every square foot means money, it has remained unspoiled (even if it has been surrounded by supertall skyscrapers in recent times). 

Fox has worked tirelessly to maintain that vision, even when influential New Yorkers like David Rockefeller responded to his pitch by saying, “That’s a nice idea, but it will never happen.” The book also makes clear that the development of the park above Chelsea up through Hell’s Kitchen to W59th Street has always been a battleground. 

From helicopters, when in the mid-1990s, “there was consensus on one issue: everyone wanted the 30th Street Heliport removed from the future park” — to Pier 97 being the last significant development in the park that is slated to open this spring. The use of the park as a staging post for the Midtown Ferry Terminal buses at Pier 79 is an ongoing dispute — and even though Pier 94 was originally marked for public use, it has most recently been handed to developer Vornado by the city to become a TV Studio.

A full book could probably be written about Pier 76, which was finally snatched back from being an NYPD compound by Governor Andrew Cuomo during the COVID-19 pandemic, calling it “the most expensive parking lot in the world.”  Fox has made it a crusade to ensure that Hudson River Park lives up to its commitment to fighting for parkland and not striking deals with developers. This continues for Pier 76, both in the book and in a recent Op-Ed published by W42ST.

The book serves as a very timely reminder that proper scrutiny and public engagement are an important part when using land to benefit the public. The four-mile-long, 550-acre Hudson River Park is seen as an opportunity for developers, and Fox criticizes the Trust for both not fighting harder for public dollars — and not setting the Trust up to receive funds from adjoining properties, like Hudson Yards, that get benefits from the park. Fox describes Hudson Yards as a “vastly out-of-scale development project” that reminds him of “Dubai — on the Hudson”.

Fox says in the introduction to his book.“The community leaders, environmentalists and civic leaders who worked with the government to plan the park and begin construction were replaced by real estate developers, attorneys, investment bankers and consultants. The city and state effectively put a For Sale sign on the park, and the trust became a real estate broker.” 

His other criticism is the Trust’s lack of transparency, describing various “stealth projects”, from signing key leases with the Intrepid Museum to Chelsea Piers to plonking concerts or corporate ferry docks on piers with limited community consultation. Chapters such as “Going from Bad to Worse (2009-2012)”, “The Trust Goes over to the Dark Side (2013-2014)” and “Will the Incoming Tide Return (2019-2023)” detail his concerns.

However, overall, the book glows with pride for the achievement made by Fox and the many characters who have orchestrated a beautiful but imperfect urban park — the final chapter “Hope Springs Eternal (2024 and Beyond)” is a nice summary. Fox hopes that “Hudson River Park will be officially designated as city parkland to provide the most effective long-term protection”. In the meantime, he will keep on campaigning for everything from a safer bike path, to historic ships docked on the piers, to cleaner water.

“I believe that a successful community organizer is like a grain of sand ingested by an oyster — rough enough to be irritating but not destructive,” he says. “To stop the irritation, the oyster coats the grain with layers of secretions that create a pearl.”

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