Where The

By Bonnie Angelo

Along the waterfront on a sparkling day, languid groups linger over low-cal drinks, sun themselves by the fountains, read and daydream on shaded benches and fantasize about the grand boats tied up at their feet.

This is New York City? Right. Lower Manhattan. Battery Park City. At lunchtime, when the famous New York pace slows to idle, the "suits" from the World Financial Center loosen their ties and go down to the river to join couples, amazed tourists and mothers with strollers. On a sun-splashed October day, this new way-downtown nook hints of the Mediterranean.

"You'd never believe you're in New York," says Irving Cohen. He and his wife Mary come in from suburban Long Island to visit their grandson and enjoy the place. For Nancy Marshall of Kearny, N.J., the scene is a revelation: "I went to school in this neighborhood 30 years ago, and none of this was here. It's so unexpected, so peaceful."

The grand visionary scheme has been more than two decades in the making, but this year it has come into full flower. Almost 30,000 people work in the World Financial Center, four stunning towers that won new laurels for internationally renowned architect Cesar Pelli and Canada-based developers Olympia & York. In the financial district, where the last broker to leave Wall < Street used to put out the cat each night, more than 6,000 residents have settled into the thicket of 19 new apartment buildings, creating a flourishing neighborhood. Upwards of 40 restaurants and glossy shops have followed. This week ferry service from Hoboken, N.J., begins, after a 22-year hiatus, anchored to a handsome glass terminal just north of the World Financial Center.

Battery Park City may be the ultimate in recycling: 24 acres of earth that were scooped out to build the giant World Trade Center a block away were dumped on the marshy edge of the Hudson River, forming the nucleus of a new 92-acre chunk of land. And -- hallelujah! -- the river, which most New Yorkers rarely glimpse, has been given back to the people, as Battery Park City embraces the wide and wonderful Hudson. The shore has been beribboned by a sculpture-studded esplanade, a mile-long stroll leading to the South Cove. There, grasses and boulders are untamed, as the riverbank might have been when Indians apprehensively watched approaching sails. Says Sally-Jane Heit, an actress-writer who was a 1982 "pioneer" in the first apartment tower: "It's a fantasy world, a sculpted cutout. You sit there and listen to the primal sound of the water whooshing."

The heart of the $4 billion development is the plaza, the great outdoor living room for personal pursuits and free performances. The plaza encompasses North Cove Yacht Harbor, which can berth 26 megayachts. "This harbor is ecologically pure," says developer George Nicholson of Watermark Associates. "Until now, berthing a yacht in New York was like parking your Picasso in the cellar."

Instead of producing the usual Manhattan-canyon gloom, the planners have created 25 acres of parks, using space and air as almost tangible materials. The city's most stunning new indoor vista is the Winter Garden, a setting for concerts and gala charity evenings or for noshing and newspaper reading. Its vaulted, steel-ribbed glass roof soars 120 ft., resonant of the crystal-palace splendors of the industrial age. A million-dollar program of entertainment, ranging from rock artists to chamber musicians and sponsored by the corporate giants who occupy the four Financial Center towers, is designed to keep the Garden lively.

Open spaces and rampant luxury come high in New York, suggesting a king-size dent in the public purse. But no, not a penny. Private money and a dozen developers have transformed muck into a showcase, under strict conditions ; demanded by the master planners, architects Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut, and the Battery Park City Authority.

As the venture matured, there was some carping about elitism, since both office and apartment prices are expensive. The rebuttal is crisply cased in dollars: at least $1 billion, from ground (and harbor) leases paid to the state, has been earmarked solely to provide low- and moderate-income housing in other areas of the city. Last month the first families moved into 924 newly renovated units in the South Bronx, and work is under way on 700 apartments in Harlem.

The vision for this monumental project was generated by Governor Nelson Rockefeller back in 1965. The development would be the city's first mixed-use multibuilding complex since his family created Rockefeller Center in the 1930s, and it would give downtown Manhattan a heart. The story goes that Rockefeller dashed off a sketch of what he wanted.

When Governor Mario Cuomo inherited Battery Park City in 1983, he issued a mandate: "Give it social purpose -- and give it a soul." The $1 billion for housing gives purpose, and the soul is flourishing, a lively urban soul that fulfills the two love letters to New York spelled out uniquely in brass letters on the plaza fence. From Walt Whitman: "City of the sea! . . . Proud and passionate city -- mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!" And from the late Frank O'Hara, a somewhat more acerbic poet: "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life." Rest easy, both of you. You would like this place.