Diller: Fools killed park for no reason
Barry Diller is livid. The media mogul says he blew “way more than $40 million” on a vision to transform a decrepit Hudson River pier into a 2.7-acre public park with grassy fields, paved walkways and three performance spaces.
And now he has absolutely nothing to show for it.
“It’s a huge amount of money. It’s totally wasted. It will go toward nothing,” Diller told The Post Thursday, less than 24 hours after he pulled his $100 million offer to build the West Side oasis.
“Here’s the great victory for the public they achieved,” a fuming Diller said about the opponents.
“In return for not having a park and entertainment center that would have been used by millions of people, potentially, they achieved the following: They made it so the American eel, a fish, would not be endangered in the 2.7-acre coverage of our pier,” the IAC chairman said, also noting that opponents managed to save that same small portion of the Hudson for kayakers.
“What they have gained is pathetic — and not in the public interest,” he seethed.
Diller said the tens of millions of dollars he spent on the project went not to construction but largely on defending himself against a volley of lawsuits by environmental activists, as well as on planning.
The sum amounts to nearly half of the funding he and his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, had pledged.
The project, announced in 2014, earned the nickname “Hollywood on the Hudson” for the involvement of movie producer Scott Rudin, who planned to curate shows at the West 13th Street park.
To detractors, it became known as “Diller Island.”
In announcing his pullout Wednesday, Diller cited “huge escalating costs” related to ongoing federal litigation and delayed construction.
Diller is no stranger to bold projects — he and von Furstenberg supported the High Line — but he was shocked by the leverage his opponents gained in court over the pier project.
“Public projects of this kind are always a risk and there’s always going to be somebody criticizing it,” he said.
“It’s whether those critics can use the legal process to make their wildly tiny minority rule.”
Tom Fox and Rob Buchanan, of the City Club of New York, quietly funded by real-estate billionaire Douglas Durst, filed the first of two lawsuits in 2014, shortly after Diller announced his gift to the Big Apple.
“There were two issues,” Buchanan told The Post. “Are decisions about public parks going to be made by the public, or are they going to be made by rich donors? The second issue is, does the river matter?”
But the project had the support of the community board, Mayor de Blasio, Gov. Cuomo and Sen. Charles Schumer.
On Thursday, the mayor blasted project opponents over the loss of what he called Diller’s “very generous” plan.
“The efforts to stop it were a mistake. We had a chance here to have someone else’s money pay for a public park in a world where we don’t have enough money in the public sector,” the mayor said.
[$40 million is] a huge amount of money. It’s totally wasted. . — Barry Diller
Consider it a beautiful gift squandered. Billionaire Barry Diller and his fashionmogul wife, Diane von Furstenberg, just gave up on the Pier 55 project: They won’t be spending and raising millions to build a 2.4-acre greenspace and performance center along the Hudson.
New Yorkers who would’ve enjoyed the park can blame the tiny band of cranks over at The City Club of New York, who brought endless rounds of litigation, and the real-estate giant who funded them, Douglas Durst.
The group’s chief claim was that the pier would harm the river’s ecology and wildlife, despite vast evidence to the contrary: Pier 55 was OK’d by multiple agencies, including the Department of Environmental Conser- vation and the Army Corps of Engineers.
And several similar pier-parks already sit along the river, with no harm to the fishies.
But the endless delays — and soaring costs — inflicted by the legal war prompted Diller to call it quits and find some other good work to sponsor.
All in all, it’s a reminder of how anti-development New York law has become: A halfdozen well-funded malcontents can kill a popular public park project — enthusiastically backed by the local community board, Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo.
If you wonder why new construction’s so expensive in this town, it’s because the system badly favors the naysayers and the blackmailers.