Pier renovation becomes battle of billionaires
NEW YORK — A battle between two New York billionaires has been holding up a plan to replace a crumbling pier on Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront with an avant-garde park on pilings rising above the riverbed.
Now, that years-long fight could be entering another round — or finally headed to detente.
Proponents and opponents of the $250 million project plan to meet Monday to try and reach a settlement that would avoid more legal action in a conflict that has pitted media mogul Barry Diller and his wife, fashion maven Diane von Furstenberg, against Douglas Durst, the real estate developer and skyscraper baron.
Diller helped hatch the idea for the park and has promised, with his wife, to pay for it through a family charitable foundation. He said he didn’t plan to attend the meeting but hoped the negotiations would be successful.
Durst, who has funded lawsuits opposing the park, declined to be interviewed. But Richard Emery, a lawyer for the project opponents, confirmed the meeting.
“There’s a lot of anxiety that Diller won’t follow through if this is further delayed,” Emery said.
The plan to tear down the old, deteriorating Pier 54 on the Manhattan waterfront and replace it with a new structure, Pier 55, seemed like a fait accompli when it was first announced in 2014.
The design calls for an undulating 2.4-acre landscape of trees and fields rising over a cluster of mushroom-like pillars. It would have three venues for dance, theater and musical performances and would be accessible via two walkways out over the water. The press dubbed it “Diller Island” after Diller and von Furstenberg promised to fund the project.
It would be built on a stretch of Hudson River waterfront that has been transformed over many years from a long-faded port district into a green string of popular recreational piers and esplanades known as the Hudson River Park.
Opposition emerged, though, partly based on environmental concerns about the pier’s impact on aquatic life, and partly rooted in complaints from some over the way in which the project had been planned without broader public input.
“The way they’ve operated is like moving plants around their personal backyard,” said Emery, a civil rights attorney representing the nonprofit City Club of New York, a civic group fueling the contrarian position.