What the firms proposed was a series of neighborhoods, each with its own bay. They also persuaded the city to use the material from the excavations for the Twin Towers to build out the southwestern tip of Manhattan, rather than dumping it into the sea.
Built on this new landmass beginning in 1980, Battery Park City had its own designers and urban planners, but retains the feel of much of that earlier plan. And, wrote Mr. Willen on his website, it improved it. There’s a bay, lots of greenery, and what Mr. Willen described as a “softer, incremental housing system based on the city grid”, rather than the rather hulking buildings his report had called for (which were part of the modernist aesthetic of his day). ).
In 1980, Mr. Willen teamed up with urban reformer John Belle, a director of the architecture and planning firm Beyer Blinder Belle, to design an alternative to Westway, the failed proposal to bury the West Side Highway south of 40th Street. . Mr. Willen and Mr. Belle’s plan, which they called River Road, was a one-level highway bordered by parks and recreation space. Officials called it too expensive and too disruptive.
While the entire effort to improve the West Side Highway got stuck in a social stalemate for decades (other designers also presented plans, none of which came to fruition), it is noteworthy that what was eventually built, at least under the Western 30s, no different from Mr. Will and mr. Belle’s proposed River Road.
Mr. Willen’s latest project was an alternative to the 500-foot escarpment planned by the Central Park Conservancy to build the recently restored Belvedere Castle, the 19th-century Romanesque Revival structure sprouting from a crag above the Turtle Pond of Central Park, accessible to all. Conservationists felt the long slope would destroy the park’s character. Mr. Willen, who had mobility issues in later life and used a wheelchair, collaborated with Mr. Gutman and Theodore Grunewald, an advocate for historic preservation, on an elevator design.
“Paul had an inventive itch,” said Kent L. Barwick, a former president of the Municipal Art Society, “and he couldn’t leave a bad situation alone.”