The hike up to the roof involved Escher-like flights of metal stairs and grated catwalks like high wires, dangling above a spectacular abyss of rusted machinery. The ’60s-era control room, straight out of “Apollo 13,” opened onto a turbine hall the size of the concourse at Grand Central.
I was blown away.
I caught up with Manresa Wilds the other day, in Norwalk, Conn. For an unnamed fortune, a billionaire couple is paying to turn a decommissioned oil-fired electric power plant and its 125-acre brownfield peninsula into a public park, nature retreat and community hub.
Suburban Connecticut is not the Bronx or Brooklyn. But my visit got me thinking about an ongoing quandary: What can be done with America’s obsolete infrastructure?
New York has been trying for years to shutter some of its filthiest power plants. A fleet of “peakers” still plagues some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Peakers are aged gas- and oil-fired facilities costing taxpayers a king’s ransom to operate. They mostly sit idle, waiting for electricity demands to spike during heat waves. Once in operation, they’re notorious polluters, contributing to high asthma rates in communities nearby.
The New York State legislature not long ago ordered the closure of peakers, encouraging a shift to greener technology at the plants or other uses, but the transition is harder and taking longer than neighbors and climate advocates have hoped.
That said, outmoded power facilities, like all technologies, will eventually need to be replaced or repurposed. And obsolescence is always an opportunity for reinvention. The architectural term of art is adaptive reuse.
There are countless examples of successfully converted power stations. The former Bankside Power Station in London, by Giles Gilbert Scott, became the Tate Modern museum. A one-time generating facility in Brooklyn is now Powerhouse Arts. In Paris, a decommissioned plant morphed into part of the Athletes’ Village at last year’s Summer Olympics and now belongs to an emerging neighborhood for mixed-income housing and other development.
From the roof of Manresa’s plant, squinting across the Long Island Sound, I made out the Manhattan skyline through the morning haze. Osprey and deer have colonized the shore and populate a dense waterside birch forest that sprang up where the plant dumped its coal ash before switching to oil during the 1970s. It was all raw and beautiful.
Completed in 1960 by Connecticut Light & Power, with a smoke stack that still towers over the region, the plant outlived its usefulness and shuttered in 2013 after Hurricane Sandy flooded the site. A private equity firm acquired the property to build high-end housing.
As The Times reported last year, the billionaire couple, Austin and Allison McChord, who own a home nearby, had a better idea. They established a nonprofit, bought out the investors and enlisted SCAPE, the fine, innovative New York landscape architecture firm founded by Kate Orff.
She and her colleagues have since been cooking up habitats, beaches, thermal pools and a boat launch for the park.
The McChords also hired the New York office of BIG, the Danish architecture firm headed by Bjarke Ingels — which once installed a ski slope on a power plant in Copenhagen — to reimagine Norwalk’s somnolent plant as a home and hub for the park. BIG is picturing parts of the plant becoming a swimming pool and educational spaces. The firm will release more details in the coming months.
Connecticut’s governor and Norwalk’s mayor are behind the project so far, and no wonder: the McChords aren’t asking for a public dime. They instructed SCAPE to lead community engagement efforts that began in March and by now have solicited feedback from some 3,000 Norwalkers. The site was also partly opened this summer to school groups and others.
The bright, shining future I glimpsed in Connecticut is not a world dependent on beneficent billionaires. That is not a plan.
It was about finding the public promise of nature’s return on a blighted waterfront that was merely seen as another luxury real estate opportunity.
Allison McChord is a registered architect; Austin, a self-described fanboy of old factories. Taking me around the site, they made plain how much they rightly prize the plant as a time capsule of midcentury industrial architecture. The trick will be reconciling the scale of activities they imagine happening there with the concerns neighbors have about traffic and with the vulnerabilities of a flood-prone peninsula.
Manresa’s brownfield remediation won’t start until Connecticut’s Department of Energy & Environmental Protection signs off on the park plan. Various other state and local hoops remain, including a rezoning of the land for a park.
It’s encouraging to see a public-spirited project that hasn’t yet gotten bogged down by red tape or NIMBY opposition. But we’ll see. Since the 1960s, America has edged toward a vetocracy. The McChords are determined to complete the park ASAP, in phases, the first by 2027, the majority by 2031. That’s a brisk timeline by current standards.
The challenge today is not know-how or a lack of imagination, or even necessarily money or generosity, as Manresa suggests.
It’s whether we can get out of our own way.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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