Barry Diller unveils controversial $260m man-made island off Manhattan

Little Island, a new public park floating in the Hudson River on the west side of New York City, will open to the public on 21 May.

Media mogul Barry Diller conceived of the park and live performance venue, supplying $260m to get it built.

It took almost a decade of pitches, public pushback, negotiations, and a final intervention by Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2017 to finally settle the fate of the project.

“Given how many revolutions this went through, from starting to dying and starting again, I was actually awestruck when I could actually look up and see it,” Mr Diller told the Wall Street Journal. “I walked on and felt pure, actual joy, which is not something I can say happens very often.”

Mr Diller, 79, became the chairman of Paramount Pictures at 32 years old, and later served as chairman and CEO of Fox Studios and in the same positions at QVC in the 1990s. He currently serves as chairman of holding company IAC and Expedia Group.

Mr Diller has a foundation along with his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, 74, which donated tens of millions of dollars to restore the High Line, a public park built on a disused railway, which opened in 2009.

Mr Diller says the foundation has donated another $260m to build Little Island and has pledged another $120m over the next decade for upkeep and performances. New York City pitched in $17m while the state put forward $4m for the project.

The park has been built where pier 54 used to be and includes walking paths, lawns, and plenty of trees. It also has three stages for live performances in addition to what Mr Diller calls “an outdoor nightclub”.

Around 500 events are supposed to take place between 15 June and the end of September.

“This is only for people’s pleasure. It has no other purpose,” Mr Diller told the Wall Street Journal. “For me, if you walk up that bridge and you leave New York behind, and you enter our little Oz, and it brings you pleasure, it was all worthwhile. It’s not cancer-curing, but it’s pretty good for the spirit of life.”

The meeting to get the project started in 2012 took place on the day New York City was first pummelled by Hurricane Sandy. The project was subsequently cancelled in 2017 but was later brought back to life.

“We went through years of saying, ‘Can we even build this f****** thing?’” Mr Diller told the outlet.

He added that “it took one whole year” for an architect “to configure the engineering for an individual vessel to be large enough to contain the dirt to house tree[s] of that size. So, just the design process took a long time. Then, we got sued”.

Starting in 2015, a group led by The City Club of New York claimed in multiple lawsuits that the Hudson River Park Trust and the State Department of Environmental Conservation didn’t properly evaluate the environmental impact of the project and weren’t sufficiently transparent.

These claims were rejected and the lawsuits in the New York State Supreme and Appellate Courts have been dismissed. But in a separate lawsuit in 2017, a US District Court judge instead ruled in favour of the group and the project was ordered to stop.

Mr Diller told the Wall Street Journal: “On the day we were supposed to order $80 million worth of cement, our lawyers said [the opposing group] could get an injunction. Not only would I have all this cement sitting around with nowhere to put it, whatever else I’d done so far would have to be undone too. We already invested $45m. I thought ‘this is crazy’. Diane and the children said, ‘Stop this. Go where you’re wanted.’”

“Interestingly enough, when we said we weren’t going to do it, more people suddenly thought it was a good idea. One of them was Cuomo,” Mr Diller continued, adding that the New York governor called him and said: “I know you feel this way now, but I’m not going to forget this. Just pin it in the back of your head and I’ll ask you again later.”

Mr Diller added: “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ and I hung up. A month later, and I’m grateful for this, he called and said, ‘I think I can solve this. I can get this lawsuit dropped and give you the moral support … if it’s not too late.’ We had given everyone their severance, we cancelled all the contracts. I had to go back and ask if we could get this thing back together. I gave the team 10 days and, ultimately, everyone was great about coming back.”

The City Club of New York agreed to end its legal proceedings against the project in October 2017.