Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

Framing Pier 55: negotiated resilience and contested waterfronts Katherine Fink 1 + Michael Finewood 2 + Leanna Molnar 2 Published online: 18 December 2018 © AESS 2018 Abstract e ways news stories are framed influences public opinion and public action. As such stories develop, framing may lead to a lack of public awareness about issues affecting communities and the overall rejection of specific ideas. is paper explores the use of framing in news coverage as it relates to a proposed floating park, Pier 55, which would sit above the Hudson River near NYC's Chelsea neighborhood. Based on a content analysis of 211 news articles written from November 2014 to September 2017, this study finds that issue-based frames, including those related to resilience, recreation, public-private partnerships, design, and transparency, were as common in initial news coverage of Pier 55 as game frames, which focused on conflicts among the project's supporters and critics. However, aer a lawsuit was filed against the project, stories were much more likely to use a game frame that focused on the legal dispute rather than issues articulated by the park's boosters and critics. ese findings suggest that the Pier 55 story became more rigidly game framed over time, wresting control of the narrative from those who wanted to debate its merits, and ultimately dooming the proposal in its original form. We conclude by drawing out the implications of these findings for a negotiated environmental health and urban resilience. Keywords Waterfront development • Framing • Parks • Environmental health • Resilience • Communication Contested waterfronts In November 2014, local media began circulating ren- derings for a proposed "floating park" on one of NYC's Chelsea Piers (Clarke 2014). Pier 55—so named be- cause of its location next to the degraded Pier 54, at the terminus of 13th Street on the Hudson River—would be a 2.7-acre public park and entertainment space, endowed with an amphitheater built into constructed rolling hills standing between 30 and 62 above the water (Ayala 2015). e project was designed, pro- posed, and supported through a public-private part- nership between media mogul Barry Diller, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, and the Hudson Riv- er Park Trust. e park's features were oen framed as bringing various 'goods' to local communities, includ- ing coastal resilience and public recreation opportuni- ties, but would also likely add to the transformation of the already gentrifying, post-industrial Chelsea neigh- borhood by increasing tourism and residential devel- opment (Reichl 2016). In this paper, we explore the way news cov- erage of Pier 55 shied from issue-based framing to game framing, moving the conversation from import- ant debates about project costs and benefits—such as resilience, recreation, public-private partnerships, de- sign, and transparency—to a story focused on conflicts among the personalities involved. Cities like NYC are busy trying to figure out how to be more resilient and projects that utilize public-private partnerships to pro- duce multi-use urban environmental space are oen framed as win-wins through various social, ecological, and market benefits (Schilling and Logan 2008). e Pier 55 proposal, however, provided an opportunity for a diverse set of constituent groups—including en- vironmentalists, nearby community members, non- profits, etc.—to debate the potential inequity of new- ly created urban greenspace (Dooling 2009; Checker 2011). Nonetheless, the growing dominance of game framed coverage sidelined these discussions in favor of stories about winners and losers. We suggest this shi in coverage disrupted substantive discussions about resilience from the Pier 55 narrative, ultimately con- tributing to the proposal's withdrawal.1 We draw specifically from the resilience liter- 1 Department of Media, Communications and Visual Arts, Pace Univeresity, 861 Bedford Rd., Pleasantville, NY 10570, USA 2 Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Pace University, 861 Bedford Rd., Pleasantville, NY 10570, USA 1 e project's on-again, off-again nature means that it could be revised at any time aer this writing. 58

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