Battery Park City - Geography

Geography

Battery Park City is bounded on the east by West Street, which separates the area from the Financial District of downtown Manhattan. To the west, north and south, the area is surrounded by the tidal estuary of the Hudson River.

The development consists of roughly five major sections. Traveling north to south, the first neighborhood, the "North Residential Neighborhood", has high-rise residential buildings, a large hotel, Stuyvesant High School, a movie theater and a modern branch of the New York Public Library. Existing restaurants located in the hotel have been closed following a take over of the property by Goldman Sachs with new development planned for "...a trio of restaurants run by Danny Meyer – the New York City restaurant wunderkind – as well as a new ballroom and conference centre, attached to the hotel which will be upgraded. In addition, the bank plans 5,000 square feet of retail units". Former undeveloped lots in the area have been developed into high-rise buildings. Goldman Sachs has completed building a new headquarters at 200 West Street.

Immediately to the south lies the World Financial Center, a complex of several commercial buildings occupied by tenants including American Express, Dow Jones & Company, Merrill Lynch, Nomura Holdings, RBC Capital Markets, and Deloitte & Touche. The World Financial Center's ground floor and portions of the second floor are occupied by a mall; its center point is a steel-and-glass atrium known as the Winter Garden. Outside of the Winter Garden lies a sizeable yacht harbor on the Hudson known as North Cove.

South of the World Financial Center lies the majority of Battery Park City's residential areas, in three sections: "Gateway Plaza", a high-rise building complex; the "Rector Place Residential Neighborhood" and the "Battery Place Residential Neighborhood". These neighborhoods contain most of the area's residential buildings, along with park space and various types of supporting businesses (supermarkets, restaurants, movie theaters.) Construction of residential buildings began north of the World Financial Center in the late 1990s and completion of the final lots scheduled to be completed by spring 2011.