“This was a parking lot 10 years ago,” said Leslie Koch as she scanned the new rolling hills of Governors Island, a 172-acre plot of land just below the southern tip of Manhattan. For the past decade, Koch had served as the president and chief executive officer of the Trust for Governors Island, which was for centuries an Army base or Coast Guard base, until 1996. It had since been dismissed as a string of dilapidated buildings that blocked views of the water, little more than a curious and quaint chapter in New York history. Koch stepped down from her post last month, but not before seeing the completion of her most ambitious project: to make the island as messy and vibrant as the city itself.

When she opened up the challenge to international landscape architects, Adriaan Geuze of the Netherlands firm West 8 suggested rethinking the topography. Three years after they first broke ground, Koch and I stood atop a grassy knoll with sweeping vistas of the Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn coast and the Statue of Liberty. In his design of the new 30-acre park, Geuze included a maze of hedges, four cascading slides and four summits composed largely of debris from the buildings that were torn down to make room for them (the highest of the perches is 70 feet above sea level). He also repurposed blocks from the 1905 sea wall to create a stone scramble that is meant to feel, he said, “like a pyramid climb” — all of which contributes to the island’s newfound sense of exploration and fun.

There is, however, one slice of history that Koch wanted to preserve: its lack of cars, which provides a welcome bit of calm from the congestion of the city. In visiting this reimagined island, Geuze hopes people will feel as if they’re in “a moment of journey, of being reborn.”