Monday, Nov. 21, 1988

New York City Coney Island On the Hudson

By JONATHAN ROSENBLUM

Barges and ferryboats float along one side while automobile traffic skitters by on the other. Just past Grant's Tomb on the Hudson it looms: seven city blocks of arched white concrete with miles of pretzeling pipes and a sprouting of cylindrical smokestacks. This is the North River Water Pollution Control Plant, processor for a billion gallons of sewage a week and a monument in its own right. For decades, pols, bureaucrats and engineers here tangled over how to deal with so many people flushing and washing and whatnot. While they jawed, everything went straight into the Hudson River raw. Now, as the last charcoal cleansing filters are installed inside this state-of-the-art box, an apparition has appeared on the outside, in full view of thousands of neighbors, riverside commuters and pleasure-boat tourists.

Like some misplaced country gazebo, a carrousel has gone up on the outhouse roof. Exclaims Kevin Walsh, the ironworkers' beefy crew chief: "It's gonna be like Coney Island out here. Lots of kids riding the horsies and pulling the golden ring."

Step right up, boys and girls, there's more to come. There will be, among other things, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a skating rink, a restaurant, trees, an amphitheater, a track, two softball diamonds and not to be left off an expanse more than seven football fields long a football field. A group of West Harlem community gardeners wants to grow corn up there. In all, it is an engineer's multiple-use fantasy, 28 acres big. The Japanese pioneered this kind of architecture, building their own tea garden and baseball diamond on top of a treatment plant. But this will almost certainly be the largest such structure in the world, says Joseph Coppola of New York City's Richard Dattner Architects, the project's design firm. One day soon every slurp of a West Side drain will bring residents a bit closer to what officials have already named Riverbank State Park.

At West 139th Street a path points toward this looking-glass world. It leads first past the West Harlem community garden, where Julio Benitez and Stephen Gallagher work the flower beds and watch for mockingbirds. Of the new park Gallagher says, "We're negotiating with the state right now. If they're going to have trees and grass up there, they could let us grow some vegetables." He isn't making any predictions yet about the impact of the park, though he's quite pleased with this season's chard. Just ahead, a road crew plants pilings for one of the access bridges that will connect the rooftop park and Riverside Drive. The foreman says, "The state thinks it's building a park up there? They're crazy. Go have a look." A left turn leads to the dock, where garbage barges are piled high each day and sent off to the trash heap of history. Take a right and slip into the big box itself.

There are pipes everywhere. All kinds: thin pipes no bigger across than a key ring; vast pipes of the type that sewer monsters crawl out of; and pipes with red, white or blue elbows curving the effluent to some brighter future. A dull hum emanates from sludge pumps deep within. A sign says WARNING: EXPLOSIVE GAS, one among very few hints that you are in the midst of a digestive process. It is surprisingly dry here, just a few puddles, and they're very much inert. "We've got activated aeration with the digestion of this captured sludge," says Nicholas Ilijic, the deputy director for design of the bureau of heavy construction of the New York City department of environmental protection. Like his title, Ilijic moves in cautiously on the subject. Says he: "We've had some turbulence in a wet well that could have caused some odor. But we've gone in and treated the suspect areas with activated carbon and liquid scrubbers. It's a natural process, it's not chemical. This is the process. When it's all totally and completely in place, we'll have off-air under control."

A skeptical West Harlem community awaits the fulfillment of this promise. In fact, the environmentalist and ex-presidential candidate Barry Commoner has warned not only of dangerous fumes but also of the threat of explosion from methane gas. Ilijic rejects all naysayers, maintaining that the plant has extensive safety features. Visitors, he says, as many as 10,000 a day, "could be on top of a golf course. This will be the focal point of New York City in a few years. This will be the place. If you're not seen here, you're nowhere."

On, then, to the roof. A crane lifts machinery off a barge and onto the deck. Ready for this delivery stands the "raisin' gang," a team of sun-dried ironworkers who are raising the carrousel, restaurant and the rest of it. Kevin Walsh, raisin' gang chief and Technicolor rooftop troll, wears a union hat with a green ceramic four-leaf clover on it. The carrousel, he says, is a rare assignment in a world that is otherwise biased toward macho structures. Tall buildings and bridges, he says, bring out the ironworkers who know how to "walk the top flange" or "straddle the beams" balance themselves at great heights. This job has him thinking about carved Italian horses and golden rings.

Walsh has most of the carrousel numbers memorized: 36 ft. in diameter, eight pie-shaped sections, each made with one ton of tubular steel. Separate welded top; a stout gazebo indeed. The mechanical gang, he says, will put in the "horsies." But Walsh is not yet aware of one problem, and a state official explains later. The cost of horsies has stymied planners. "Now they break 'em up horse by horse," says the state's associate park engineer, John Bagley. "Our carrousel expert says it would cost some $290,000 for the actual guts of the carrousel." Even in a rooftop construction budget of more than $100 million, there isn't enough for that kind of luxury. "We've still got two years. We're just hoping to attract some kind of private or corporate donation," says Bagley.

At 4:30 p.m., the path home in this enclave of mostly Dominican families is strewn with recreating children. There are ball games pressed between a playground and Riverside Drive; about 20 kids squeeze into swings, Jungle Gyms and monkey bars in the playground at West 142nd Street. Giuseppe DiLoreto, a 57-year-old public school teacher with flowing white-and-blond hair and a bit of a paunch bulging from his shirt, sits on one of the benches. He is, for the moment, an air-traffic controller, watching the children dip and soar on the equipment and sometimes right into his arms. They call him "Mr. Di." In Italy, he says, he was an anarchist, rejecting all forms of authority. Now he's a Riverside Drive Pied Piper, watching over West Harlem kids as a teacher and supervisor for the past 20 years. Lately, he laments, the number of kids has been climbing while the space seems to have shrunk. Says Mr. Di: "The Italians say judge a society by what it does for children and old people." (He pauses here. "Understand: I'm mostly still an anarchist, but I'm talking as a sociable character, O.K.?") Then, looking out at the park-plant, he says, "Here you have mixed the useful with the beautiful. The psychological impact will be to make the children feel like king. They'll be on top of the Hudson and looking out at the George Washington Bridge." He pauses. "You know," he says as if conjuring up some glowing anarchic vision, "I once had a house on the sea, and above the cesspool I built a deck and planted flowers."