New York Magazine / Little Island
May 21, 2021
Just out in New York Magazine’s Curbed. Portrait of Barry Diller on Little island which opens today to the public. Repost / Here comes news that something else has happened while we’ve been in lockdown: Construction has been completed on Barry Diller’s long-gestating, once-declared-dead-but-soon-resurrected “floating island” on the West Side, and it officially opened to the public today. For eight years now, the media mogul has planned it, pushed it, and paid for most of it, and is so closely associated with it that, for a while, many people nicknamed it Diller Island (it’s officially called Little Island). Designed by architect Thomas Heatherwick and landscape architect Signe Nielsen, the park consists of a 2.4-acre faux hillock, mixing green space, plazas, performance areas, and scenic overlooks, hoisted above the Hudson on a cluster of podlike concrete pedestals. “Look, it doesn’t cure cancer,” he says. “But it’ll make people happy.”