NYC Parks [Archive] - Wired New York Forum

billyblancoNYC

October 1st, 2004, 11:55 AM

In exchange for the right to build a $1.4 billion water filtration plant underground in a large Bronx park, the city offered up $220 million in parks money for the borough. Nice to see, especially the Greenstreets and the waterfront access.

Here's a detailed list of the improvements to come:

http://www.nyc.gov/portal/index.jsp...8&rc=1194&ndi=1

Here's more info:
http://nyc.gov/portal/index.jsp?epi...8&rc=1194&ndi=1

MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG AND GOVERNOR GEORGE E. PATAKI ANNOUNCE OVER $220 MILLION FOR BRONX PARKS

Ratification of Memorandum of Understanding on Croton Filtration Plan Clears Way For Enormous Improvements in Parks Across the Bronx

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Governor George E. Pataki today announced more than $220 million worth of improvements for Bronx Parks will be made over the next five years.

On Tuesday, the City Council approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the State that allows the City to move forward with the construction of a water filtration plant for the Croton Water Supply System under the Mosholu Golf Course in Van Cortlandt Park. As part of the agreement, more than $220 million generated from water and sewer revenue will be spent on improvements to Bronx Parks over the next five years. The agreement represents a rare opportunity to invest more than triple what would be spent on Bronx's parks over the next five years. Joining the Mayor and Governor at the event in Saint James Park in the Bronx were Assembly member Jose Rivera, Council Members Joel Rivera and Madeline Provenzano, Department of Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe and Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Christopher O. Ward.

"This is a great day for the Bronx," said Mayor Bloomberg. "We are making an historic investment into Bronx Parks that generations of New Yorkers will be able to enjoy. Not since the days of the WPA will Bronx see more greening and improvements to its recreational areas. This has been a long tough road and I want to thank everyone who played a part in this important announcement. Particulary I want to express my gratitude to Governor Pataki, Assembly Speaker Silver, Senate Majority Leader Bruno, Council Speaker Miller, and Commissioners Ward & Benepe for their work on this project."

"This multi-million dollar investment in parks projects will give the Bronx the green space that it deserves," said Governor Pataki. "Because of this agreement, recreational facilities will be improved, new waterfront parks will be developed, and neighborhood parks and playgrounds will be renovated throughout the borough. Thanks to a shared commitment with Mayor Bloomberg, the Bronx is receiving a great investment in its parks. By working together, we will continue to provide clean and safe drinking water for the people of New York while creating new and improved park and recreational space for Bronx families."

"It brings me great joy to continue to build and beautify our parks so our children can enjoy them," said Assemblyman Jose Rivera.

"Today marks an historic occasion," said Council Member Joel Rivera. "Bronx parks will receive over $220 million for beautification and restoration projects. Not only will this go a long way in beautifying our borough, it also assures safe, clean, and enjoyable parks for the people of the Bronx both young and old."

The Bronx parks projects were identified after years of input from the community, and were finalized over the past year with the help of community groups, elected officials and Bronx residents. Collaboratively, the Parks Department focused on projects that would be a challenge to fund through the capital budget. The projects fall into five categories and include improving neighborhood parks, renovating regional recreation facilities, developing the Bronx Greenway, improving and expanding access to the Bronx waterfront, building and "greening" the borough. Highlights include:

More than 20 neighborhood parks and playgrounds will be renovated with new play equipment, comfort stations, seating areas, fencing and landscaping. Major work at Story Park will include reconstruction of a playground and comfort station. Tremont Park will receive a new seating area for seniors, as well as a hard court game area.

Regional recreation facilities, including ballfields, running tracks and tennis courts will be reconstructed or built throughout the borough. The Parade Grounds at Van Cortlandt Park will be reconstructed with new athletic fields, sod and drainage. Playgrounds, a track field, senior area and skate park will be reconstructed at Williamsbridge Oval Park.

Waterfront parks will be developed along the Long Island Sound, East River and Harlem River. New waterfront space, including a Greenway link, will be developed at Pelham Bay Park, and environmental work will include the restoration of lagoons and salt marshes at Pugsley Creek Park and Soundview Park.

Major sections of the Bronx Greenway, including the Hutchinson, Bronx River and Soundview to Ferry Point sections, will be completed. Work will include the restoration of existing parkland - including improving pathways and public access to parks and the waterfront - as well as transforming underutilized property into new parkland in areas with little open space. A new pedestrian bridge over the Bronx River Parkway and Bronx River will connect Shoelace Park and Muskrat Cove providing a major link in the Bronx River Greenway.

A comprehensive program to "green" the borough will include the creation of new Greenstreets, improvement and expansion of horticultural plantings in parks and playgrounds, and the addition of street trees in under-served neighborhoods. Parks will also upgrade and expand the Bronx Green House and Nursery.

The State will also establish a comprehensive Urban Forestry Program, administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. The program will further the greening of the Bronx, improve air quality, reduce ambient air temperatures, and help reduce energy costs and heat "island" effect by planting thousands of trees in parks, playgrounds, streets and other targeted areas of the borough.

ZippyTheChimp

October 6th, 2004, 12:56 AM

October 6, 2004

Next Subway Stop, the Wilderness

By JOSEPH BERGER

Who needs Yellowstone and Yosemite?

New York City boasts its own constellation of national parks - all right, natural parks - 48 preserves of emerald tidal marsh, bouldered shoreline, ancient woodlands, gurgling creeks and tranquil kettle ponds where ospreys dive from the sky to snatch unwary fish and shrews stow away for the day under rotting tree trunks.

A few of the sanctuaries are almost as pristine as they were when European explorers first gazed upon them in wonder, and, unlike those explorers, today's visitors can get there by subway.

Four years ago, the 48 preserves were designated "Forever Wild" by the Department of Parks and Recreation to keep them from being turned into ball fields, golf courses, playgrounds and marinas. But officials have realized that New Yorkers who have flown to Yosemite and Yellowstone scarcely know about the wilds of Pelham Bay Park or Marine Park and even a few undomesticated spots in Central Park. And they may not care enough to keep them wild.

So the department has decided to cultivate a constituency that will fight to safeguard its natural treasures.

"Promotion is the greatest protection," said Mike Feller, the department's chief naturalist. "If people know about and come out and use these areas, they will protect them."

On Oct. 16, the department will start a series of hikes and canoe trips through a few of the Forever Wild preserves. (Call 311 or consult www.nyc.gov/foreverwild.) Meanwhile, it has been running advertisements on buses and bus shelters inviting visitors to the preserves. "Wish You Were Here," one advertisement exults over a photograph of an idyllic marsh that looks like a Louisiana bayou, adding at the bottom: "WAIT! You ARE here!"

Getting the preserves known is a matter of survival, parks officials and advocates say. Many New Yorkers prefer ball fields and golf courses instead of terrain fit only for strolling and contemplation, said Maura Lout, research director for New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group. Such a conflict surfaced several years ago in southern Staten Island when borough officials wanted to create ball fields out of a chunk of Bloomingdale Park for residents of new homes sprouting nearby, recalled Henry Stern, a former parks commissioner. With the borough so critical to the mayoral victories of both Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, the Parks Department lost the preservationist argument and ball fields were built.

The 48 natural areas, which total 8,200 acres, almost a third of the city's 29,000 acres of parks, are protected by state law only as parkland, which can leave wiggle room for ball fields and playgrounds. But city officials do not want to try to pass a more stringent law, fearing a gantlet of political scrapes and restrictions on their freedom in unforeseen circumstances.

"It has no legal force - it's a policy - and I suppose a future administration could undo it," said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. "But in addition to a policy, you have a constituency."

Not all the protected natural areas are in their original state. Pretty as it is, Central Park is mostly a glorious fake -fabricated a century and a half ago from shantytowns and swampland. But nature has been allowed to take over some of the artificial handiworks, and now two places, the Hallett Nature Sanctuary and the North Woods ravine and "loch," have been designated Forever Wild.

Much of Marine Park in Brooklyn, a lush expanse of tidal marsh surrounding a saltwater creek, was once landfill, the failed product of a plan to turn the coast of Brooklyn into another port. Now osprey wheel overhead looking to seize the fish that multiply in the briny creek.

At least one preserve demonstrates how wild terrain wants to stay that way, defeating the best intentions to civilize it. In Forest Park in Queens, city officials four decades ago turned a swamp in a park hollow into a baseball field, but players found the field flooded regularly.

Four years ago, officials surrendered to the inevitable and the field has returned to woodland kettle pond, with floating hearts - pads with small yellow flowers - covering much of its surface. King birds swoop low over the pond and toads trill along its edges. It would be hard to know that busy Woodhaven Boulevard is just behind a screen of birch, hickory, oak and maple.

The other day, Mr. Benepe and Mr. Feller showed the pond off, then capered through the reeds like small boys, chasing a toad.

"This is the flip side of 'If you build it, they will come,' which was said about a ball field," Mr. Benepe said. "If you take out the ball field, then toads and dragonflies will come."

But Forever Wild does not mean entirely untamed. In Alley Pond Park in Queens, framed by three highways but rich with peat bogs and black locust forests, workers with buzz saws were cutting down Norway maples, intruders inhospitable to the park's insects and animals. They were also trimming away alien vines strangling native trees.

"You can create wilderness," Mr. Feller said.

Before the Forest Park visit, Mr. Feller took a reporter and photographer on a tour of the Hunter Island preserve in Pelham Bay Park. Peering through binoculars, he spotted an osprey riding a northwest wind.

"They're hugging the shoreline and they'll make a left-hand turn over Westchester and the Bronx," he said. "They have runs of fish over the lagoon and start forming a holding pattern. I don't know of another site on the East Coast that gets that concentration of ospreys in the fall migration."

Hunter Island, a former estate connected to Orchard Beach by landfill, is now largely a forest that slopes down to a shore strewn with boulders. Mr. Feller called it the southernmost example of rocky New England shoreline.

"There are parts of Hunter Island that look pretty much as they would have when Europeans first stepped on the island," Mr. Feller said.

Hiking through a mile-long woodland trail, Mr. Feller, a Brooklyn native who has become a spellbinding encyclopedia of natural facts, pointed out white snakeroot flowers, much like those some historians blame for the death of Lincoln's mother. (She may have died drinking milk from cows that grazed in patches of snakeroot.) He found pokeweed, whose purplish berries, he said, provided the ink for the United States Constitution.

Mr. Feller found clam shells that he said were probably used by Indians and shards of a rose-petaled porcelain teacup that he guessed came from the home of the Hunter family, which conveyed its estate to the city in 1866. He pointed out a forest on the north side of the island that dates to a period before settlers cleared the land for farming.

"Here's where we get roughly 200-year-old trees," Mr. Feller said. "They're very big wide trunks, evenly spaced trees, with a nice herb layer underneath. That's what existed here when there were only native Americans."

When Mr. Feller and company reached the waters of Long Island Sound, there was scarcely a ripple on the blue-gray water and a lone seagull glided overhead. Practically underfoot were luxuriant spreads of salt marsh cordgrass and a few inches higher up salt meadow cordgrass.

Mr. Feller beamed like a parent on graduation day.

"The other reason Hunter Island is much better than the Adirondacks or the Catskills is you can't walk there and come on this," he said.

Mr. Feller recalled the first time his wife, Margot Perron, then an urban park ranger like him, took him out to Hunter Island.

"I had a preconceived notion of a chain-link fence, blacktop and swing sets," he said. "So I was skipping, skipping and jumping, because this completely exceeded any expectations I had about a New York City park."

There were almost no people on the walk, save an immigrant from Ivory Coast sunning himself on a shoreline boulder. But the spot is so lovely that over the years resourceful New Yorkers have carved out redoubts - apparent picnic spots. Mr. Feller pointed out a fortlike alcove where one enchanted improviser had planted a patch of impatiens, and a bench built by an aging World War II steamfitter. The ruins of their labor are still there, protected now within the Forever Wild designation.

"Nothing is forever," Mr. Feller said of all 48 preserves. "But these are not the areas people should be thinking about for recreation. These are the sites whose greatest contribution to the city is leaving them as they are."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

http://nycgovparks.org/sub_about/parks_divisions/nrg/forever_wild/foreverwild_sites.php

billyblancoNYC

October 6th, 2004, 01:39 AM

I've wanted the city to promote this and it's golf courses as destinations for a while now. Finally, someone sees that showing people NYC has it all makes some sense. Nice article.

Edward

October 9th, 2004, 09:23 PM

Installing the art in the Grand Ferry Park (http://wirednewyork.com/parks/grand_ferry_park/). 9 October 2004.

http://wirednewyork.com/images/parks/grand-ferry-park/grand_ferry_williamsburg_9oct04.jpg (http://wirednewyork.com/parks/grand_ferry_park/)

Installing the art in the Grand Ferry Park (http://wirednewyork.com/parks/grand_ferry_park/). 9 October 2004.

http://wirednewyork.com/images/parks/grand-ferry-park/grand_ferry_art_9oct04.jpg (http://wirednewyork.com/parks/grand_ferry_park/)

krulltime

June 22nd, 2005, 03:43 PM

Bx. parks leaf much
to be desired: group

BY JEGO ARMSTRONG and AUSTIN FENNER
DAILY NEWS WRITERS

The Bronx scored poorly on a survey of neighborhood parks by an advocacy group, placing no parks in the top 10 and four in the bottom 10.
Overall, city playgrounds have improved, according to the report card released yesterday by New Yorkers for Parks, a nonprofit parks advocacy organization, but 40% of the city's parks earned scores of Cs, Ds and Fs.

Manhattan has five of the top 10 community parks in the city, which were evaluated on recreational space, passive green space, bathrooms and sitting areas. It also had two in the bottom 10.

University Woods Park in the University Heights section of the Bronx was rated the worst in the city with a dismal 6% score out of a possible 100%.

"It's not a place for people to come and hang out," said Tony Campbell, 47, of Kingsbridge, who was sitting in the Bronx park on a bluff.

A reporter who visited the derelict park yesterday noted the pungent smell of urine along its pathways.

The Bronx park scene is set to change drastically, thanks to a $200 million infusion of cash for its parks the city has agreed to provide in exchange for building an underground water filtration plant for the Croton Water Supply System beneath the Mosholu Golf Course in Van Cortlandt Park.

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión suggested University Woods be turned into an educational nature preserve operated by Urban Park Rangers.

Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, said the Parks Department can improve park quality by stepping up its targeted maintenance program called Operation Releaf/Relief to fix derelict bathrooms and water fountains.

"The mayor and the City Council can address the challenges in caring for neighborhood parks by increasing funding for park maintenance and operation in next year's budget, which is now being negotiated," said DiPalermo.

Bryant Park on W. 42nd St. in Manhattan - with its lush, manicured lawns and flowers - was rated the best small park in the city.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe dismissed the report card as inaccurate.

"We don't agree with the sampling or the conclusion of the report card," said Benepe.

"More New Yorkers enjoy first-class parks and playgrounds than at any time in the last 35 years."

Originally published on June 22, 2005

All contents © 2005 Daily News, L.P.

krulltime

June 22nd, 2005, 08:56 PM

I was just wondering... has anyone here been to University Woods Park? Is it really that bad? Anyone has any photos of the park? I will go there but now I am scared to go alone and take my camera there. :(

TonyO

June 28th, 2005, 12:20 PM

NY Times
June 28, 2005

Making the Brutal F.D.R. Unsentimentally Humane

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/27/arts/water.slide.1.jpg
Rendering of a renovated pier as conceived by the East River esplanade plan. Under the plan, a vibrant panorama would be created without losing the area's rough edges.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/27/arts/water.slide.3.jpg
Although it is still in the earliest stages of design, city officials hope to complete the project, which includes surrounding neighborhoods, within three to five years.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/27/arts/water.slide.2.jpg
For example, the plan proposes that an abandoned median strip running down Allen Street from the East Village to the foot of the Manhattan Bridge would be transformed into a narrow park.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/27/arts/water.slide.4.jpg
The city also plans to redesign the underside of the F.D.R. Drive to compliment the elaborate system of landscaped berms and shelters scattered along the two-mile waterfront.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/27/arts/water.slide.5.jpg
Image of proposed East River esplanade looking toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Few people reminisce longingly about the New York waterfront of the 1970's, with its decrepit piers, graffiti-covered warehouses and tetchy drag queens. But you can say this for it: it had a gritty integrity. The typical riverfront developments of today, with their traditional lampposts and quaint park benches, drip with nostalgia for a city that never was. They have all the charm of an open-air suburban mall.

The master plan for an East River esplanade, which was unveiled last month by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is a welcome reprieve from that New York cliché. Covering a two-mile stretch of waterfront from Battery Park to East River Park in Lower Manhattan, the project will transform a series of abandoned piers and derelict corners beneath the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive into a vibrant urban panorama without sacrificing the rough edges.

But the master plan is more than a blunt criticism of misplaced sentimentality. Even as it celebrates the city's underbelly, it weaves it into the surrounding neighborhoods with remarkable sensitivity. The plan shows how a series of small interventions, when thoughtfully conceived, can have a more meaningful impact on daily life than an unwieldy urban development scheme.

Although it is still in the earliest stages of design, city officials hope to complete the esplanade within three to five years. (The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has allotted $150 million toward the project, which has a relatively modest projected cost of $200 million.) Aspects of the plan still must be approved by a number of city, state and federal agencies.Commissioned by the city's Department of City Planning and the Economic Development Corporation, the design sprang from a collaboration among architectural generations: Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects, based here, the Richard Rogers Partnership in London and the landscape architect Ken Smith. Mr. Rogers, the co-designer of the Pompidou Center (1977) in Paris, is best known for creating a high-tech Pop Art aesthetic whose roots lie in the progressive values of the 1960's. Mr. Pasquarelli, 40, who like many in his generation, is warier of Modernism's mission, is less a social rebel than an astute social observer.

Both find beauty in the large-scale public works projects that were a prominent feature of the 20th-century American landscape. Originally conceived in the late 1930's by Robert Moses, the city's imperious planner, the F.D.R. Drive - then called East River Drive - is usually considered an example of the brutal approach for which Moses later became infamous. It slices callously through the city, cutting a series of East Side neighborhoods off from the waterfront. The area underneath, which still sometimes reeks of rotting fish - a memory of the former fish markets - exudes a seedy noir spirit.

Mr. Pasquarelli and Mr. Rogers do not moralize about that past. Initially they considered lowering parts of the elevated freeway to ground level, but the cost was prohibitive. Eventually the team decided that the F.D.R.'s aggressive form could be used to imbue the site with energy. To that end, the crude steel I-beams that support the freeway would be clad in contoured metal or concrete panels. Bands of fluorescent light strips, vaguely reminiscent of a Dan Flavin light installation, extend along the freeway's underside, their arrangement echoing the cars flowing by above.

Such artistic touches would mesh well with an elaborate system of landscaped berms and shelters to be scattered along the two-mile waterfront. Planted with colorful shrubs and wild grasses, the berms rise right out of the pavement's surface. A series of glass pavilions would be scattered underneath the freeway; they may house restaurants, flower shops or some kind of public services.

Most of these architectural components are place markers; they have yet to be fully designed. Even so the idea is to create a seamless, contemplative environment along the waterfront that embraces both the fine-grained scale of the surrounding communities and the monumental scale of the freeway. In doing so, the architects shrug off the conflict between Modernists and historicists that absurdly still defines so many urban planning debates in New York.

That schism dates from the 1960's, when the activist Jane Jacobs challenged Moses' megalomaniacal plans, but it has little relevance today. For architects like Mr. Pasquarelli, the suburban promise embodied in Moses' freeway and park projects represent, for better or worse, a part of our collective memory. Their task, as they see it, is to salvage the corners of unexpected beauty from those childhood landscapes and give them new meaning. It is an approach that is far more relevant to contemporary life than Jacobs's - and every bit as humane. The outcome in the waterfront master plan is a project that craftily weaves together a remarkable range of scales. To offer relief from the uniformity of the esplanade, for example, the architects have suggested transforming a number of piers into more eco-friendly structures, sprinkled with public gardens. The surface of one of the piers peels up as it projects out toward the water, forming a viewing platform as well as allowing light to flow down to the water's surface.

Conceived as little oases, the piers relate to a grander, and still incomplete, vision: the plans for the greening of the waterfront across the river in Brooklyn and on Governors Island just to the south. Extending like fingers out into the river, they help weave these disparate vistas into a cohesive whole.

That same surgical approach is used to stitch the project into the surrounding communities. An abandoned median strip running down Allen Street from the East Village to the foot of the Manhattan Bridge would be transformed into a narrow park. Set diagonally to the bridge, it is gently sloped, so that it seems to accelerate as it approaches the waterfront, creating a wonderful forced perspective that pulls the neighborhood down toward the esplanade. Other interventions are more sedate: a sequence of reflecting pools along Peck Street are meant to conjure the street's past as a boat slip.

SHoP and Rogers have yet to sign a contract with the city to complete the final design. In theory, they could be dropped in favor of another architectural firm. But even at this early stage, the esplanade is one of the few current projects to give voice to a young generation of architects intent on redefining our vision of the contemporary Metropolis.

Along with the High Line - which transforms a section of gritty elevated tracks in downtown into a public garden - it represents a clear and much-needed break from the quaint Jane Jacobs-inspired vision of New York that is threatening to transform Manhattan into a theme park version of itself, a place virtually devoid of urban tension. It proves that there are still some in the city who are culturally daring, even if their numbers at times seem to be dwindling.

NewYorkYankee

June 28th, 2005, 08:02 PM

This is a great project, I look forward to it being implemented.

sfenn1117

June 28th, 2005, 10:34 PM

Sunset Park in Brooklyn was in the movie "The Honeymooners." Awesome park, terrible movie. There's awesome brownstones and rowhouses near the park too, and a MASSIVE pool. I think it holds 1500 people, built during the depression.

I'm always in Owls Head Park, it's just 2 blocks down on my street (68th). There's a new 9/11 memorial on the 69th street pier that's lit up every night between 9 and 11 PM. It's really nice.

Cannonball Park next to Ft Hamilton gives an amazing view of the Verrazanno.

Manhattan Beach Park is nice, a great beach.

Dyker Beach Park is alright. I hear the golf course is pretty good.

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade is amazing. Oh to live in a brownstone with a backyard on the promenade, but realistically..............

I love Battery Park City, it's nice and modern and the Winter Garden is awesome. I hope I can live there one day. Seriously. It is my dream neighborhood. By the time I'll be able to move in there, after college, the new World Trade Center will hopefully be built.

pianoman11686

July 7th, 2005, 12:52 AM

Parks Even the Parks Dept. Won't Claim

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Published: July 6, 2005

At University Woods, a city park high above the Harlem River in the Bronx, hypodermic needles, feces and used condoms littered the grounds on a recent day. Several large trees lay across the main pathway. Broken animal bones that some said bore traces of Santeria rituals were visible.

The 3.3-acre municipal park, whose grounds have long been a hideaway for drug users and prostitutes, was named the city's worst small park last month, for the third year in a row, by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe says city parks are in better condition now than they have been in nearly 40 years. He added, however, that a small percentage of the parkland the city owns - including University Woods - is not conducive to being actively maintained by gardeners, and that to do so would be "a waste of money."

"That park is not a park," Mr. Benepe said, referring to University Woods. "That park is a vestigial landscape on the side of a hill. It has a series of paths that lead nowhere. It's a cliff side. It will never be a park." He added, "Just because something is in our inventory doesn't mean it's worth taking care of."

New York City has acquired almost 300 acres of parkland since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002. But critics say that the city started neglecting some existing parks - most in poor neighborhoods - long before Mr. Bloomberg named Mr. Benepe parks commissioner shortly after taking office.

Mr. Benepe bristles at the suggestion that the Parks Department favors certain areas of the city over others. "The reality is that across the city in every neighborhood, the parks are better," he said. And while he says there is no formal two-tier system when it comes to maintaining city parks, he acknowledges that some are better cared for than others.

Just how many of the city's 1,700 public parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities are not actively maintained is not clear, but Mr. Benepe said that a limited number of city parks would "never be great parks" because they are on land unsuitable to be developed as parkland, or because they are in neighborhoods that are no longer significantly residential.

There is no list, no formal process leading to a park being written off. But it is clear that some parks, over a period of decades, have simply fallen out of favor with the Parks Department, which says that every park is supposed to be cleaned at least once a day.

The department, which decides how often horticulturists visit each park and what capital projects to pursue, has seen its operating budget increase to $201 million in fiscal 2005 from $152 million in fiscal 1997, and the department's capital budget in the current fiscal year alone is $850 million, up from $550 million last year. Much of that amount will be spent on developing recently acquired parkland and on parks along the waterfront, according to Parks Department figures.

Despite their unkempt pockets, some parks, like Aqueduct Walk Park in the Bronx, are heavily used. Many others, however, are similar to University Woods, and attract few visitors. Large swaths of Highbridge and Fort Washington Parks in Upper Manhattan, Soundview, Ferry Point and Pelham Bay Parks in the Bronx, Highland Park on the Brooklyn-Queens border and Idlewild Park in Queens, among others, have been designated natural areas by the Parks Department, to preserve wetlands and other natural habitats. Such areas require less rigorous maintenance than others. Some of these are now impassable for all but the most determined parkgoer due to overgrown trails, poison ivy, homeless encampments and garbage. Abandoned cars and boats have been left in some of the parks.

What these parks have in common is that they rely almost exclusively on city money, while the city's best-maintained parks - Central Park, Bryant Park and Prospect Park among them - are managed in part by private conservancies that raise money and hire workers independent of the Parks Department. The neglected parks also lack the community support and involvement present in the neighborhoods around the city's most successful green spaces.

"It is completely outrageous that poor communities are given this type of service when other parks are given adequate service," said Geoffrey M. Croft, president of New York City Park Advocates. "Having prostitutes and drug users fill a park when a community needs parks, goes against everything government is supposed to do in terms of providing services and protecting people."

The Police Department, not the Parks Department, is responsible for tackling serious crime in city parks. But Mr. Croft said that unmaintained areas provided a natural shelter for criminals.

Mr. Benepe said that any problems that exist are isolated, and that the department has a rigorous inspection process. "This is a big system and you can't address every little problem," he said. Mr. Benepe said a lack of resources was not an issue either. "The challenge is how to spend all the money we've been given," he said.

In all, the Parks Department's 28,800 acres take up about 14 percent of the total land mass in the city's five boroughs. About 12,000 acres of parkland have been designated natural areas, though some, like Central Park's Ramble, are well maintained and free of the trash and invasive species that plague the natural areas of other parks.

University Woods, for instance, has failed the Park Department's own cleanliness and general condition inspections for the past three years, and if its current circumstances are any indication, it has little hope of ever being a haven for anyone seeking a respite from city life. The last capital project in the park - which involved repairing fences and walkways that are again in disrepair - took place in 1997.

On a recent weekend in University Woods, in University Heights, a man and woman were seen having sex against a tree. Encampments for homeless people were scattered in the underbrush. Several areas had been littered with hypodermic needles, used condoms, needle cleaning kits and wrappers for "Savage" and "TKO" brands of heroin. And piles of feces could be seen on staircases.

The only evidence of the park's benches were rivet holes in the ground. There were no garbage cans, lights, restrooms or staff workers. Visitors have reported seeing a dead goat and the skulls of various animals, apparently after they had been sacrificed.

Julio Calderon, 31, who was walking a large pit bull outside the park, said he never stepped inside University Woods, though he lives nearby. "The park is dangerous," Mr. Calderon said in Spanish. "People who are in there do things I don't want to see."

The parks commissioner said he would like to trade University Woods to a developer for more suitable park property, or to fence it off. "You have to be pragmatic about these things," Mr. Benepe said.

The Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carríon Jr., agreed but called the park's current neglect a "disgrace."

"University Woods cannot continue to be what it is," he said.

Not far away, in Highbridge Park, which stretches for two miles across Upper Manhattan, the scene was even more grim on a recent weekend. Huge sections of the 119-acre park set aside as natural areas have been taken over by homeless people who have built permanent shacks made of sheet metal and steel pipes driven into the earth. One of the park's residents is a heroin addict and prostitute who would give her name only as Joanne. Her makeshift house has a bed and a nightstand. She said she had lived there for 13 years. Men smoked crack cocaine a few feet from where a youth baseball game was being played.

Kelvin, who would not provide a surname, lives in the park underneath a Harlem River Drive entrance ramp. He lifted his shirt to show his heavily bandaged chest, where he said he had been stabbed the week before. He tapped a Bible on his nightstand, which lay atop some pornographic magazines. "I almost died," he said in Spanish. "God was with me." On a concrete wall, someone has scrawled graffiti: "This might be the only place where New York is still New York."

Mr. Benepe said that while Highbridge Park is "much better than it was 10 years ago," it had been ruined decades ago when freeway ramps were built across it.

Mr. Benepe, who expressed both skepticism and surprise at the park's condition when told about it, said the city's plan was: "Let nature take its course." "Trees are growing, insects are buzzing, oxygen is being produced, and there's nothing wrong with that," he said.

Mr. Croft, the parks advocacy group president, said, "Having prostitutes, drug dealers and drug users in parks is not going back to nature."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

NY_Yankees_1979

July 8th, 2005, 02:43 AM

I like the views from Sunset Park in Brooklyn the best. But my favorite park in the city is Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx.

ZippyTheChimp

July 8th, 2005, 08:26 AM

Sunset Park (http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/sunset_park)

Joyce Kilmer Park
http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/image/20410749
http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/image/20411056

BrooklynRider

July 8th, 2005, 10:39 AM

The Bosque at Battery Park has been very nicely renovated. Some sections are open. The night lighting is very pretty. The fountain area is still roped off and the carousel is yet to come.

NY_Yankees_1979

July 8th, 2005, 04:42 PM

The pic from Sunset Park of the Manhattan skyline is my favorite. I go to a lot of Yankees games during the season and stop by Joyce Kilmer Park on my 16 block hike to the stadium.

Schadenfrau

July 8th, 2005, 04:46 PM

Have you been to Franz Sigel Park? It's just a few blocks south and is actually much nicer.

NY_Yankees_1979

July 8th, 2005, 04:51 PM

Have you been to Franz Sigel Park? It's just a few blocks south and is actually much nicer. Yeah I've been there too, it's a nice park and much bigger than Joyce Kilmer. I like sitting in Joyce Kilmer before Yankees games.

NY_Yankees_1979

July 8th, 2005, 04:55 PM

Another Bronx park that I like is St. Mary's Park (which is about 12 blocks due south of where I live).

bohemian rhapsody

July 10th, 2005, 05:36 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/nyregion/06parks.html

July 6, 2005
Parks Even the Parks Dept. Won't Claim

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=TIMOTHY WILLIAMS&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=TIMOTHY WILLIAMS&inline=nyt-per)
At University Woods, a city park high above the Harlem River in the Bronx, hypodermic needles, feces and used condoms littered the grounds on a recent day. Several large trees lay across the main pathway. Broken animal bones that some said bore traces of Santeria rituals were visible.

The 3.3-acre municipal park, whose grounds have long been a hideaway for drug users and prostitutes, was named the city's worst small park last month, for the third year in a row, by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe says city parks are in better condition now than they have been in nearly 40 years. He added, however, that a small percentage of the parkland the city owns - including University Woods - is not conducive to being actively maintained by gardeners, and that to do so would be "a waste of money."

"That park is not a park," Mr. Benepe said, referring to University Woods. "That park is a vestigial landscape on the side of a hill. It has a series of paths that lead nowhere. It's a cliff side. It will never be a park." He added, "Just because something is in our inventory doesn't mean it's worth taking care of."

New York City has acquired almost 300 acres of parkland since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002. But critics say that the city started neglecting some existing parks - most in poor neighborhoods - long before Mr. Bloomberg named Mr. Benepe parks commissioner shortly after taking office.

Mr. Benepe bristles at the suggestion that the Parks Department favors certain areas of the city over others. "The reality is that across the city in every neighborhood, the parks are better," he said. And while he says there is no formal two-tier system when it comes to maintaining city parks, he acknowledges that some are better cared for than others.

Just how many of the city's 1,700 public parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities are not actively maintained is not clear, but Mr. Benepe said that a limited number of city parks would "never be great parks" because they are on land unsuitable to be developed as parkland, or because they are in neighborhoods that are no longer significantly residential.

There is no list, no formal process leading to a park being written off. But it is clear that some parks, over a period of decades, have simply fallen out of favor with the Parks Department, which says that every park is supposed to be cleaned at least once a day.

The department, which decides how often horticulturists visit each park and what capital projects to pursue, has seen its operating budget increase to $201 million in fiscal 2005 from $152 million in fiscal 1997, and the department's capital budget in the current fiscal year alone is $850 million, up from $550 million last year. Much of that amount will be spent on developing recently acquired parkland and on parks along the waterfront, according to Parks Department figures.

Despite their unkempt pockets, some parks, like Aqueduct Walk Park in the Bronx, are heavily used. Many others, however, are similar to University Woods, and attract few visitors. Large swaths of Highbridge and Fort Washington Parks in Upper Manhattan, Soundview, Ferry Point and Pelham Bay Parks in the Bronx, Highland Park on the Brooklyn-Queens border and Idlewild Park in Queens, among others, have been designated natural areas by the Parks Department, to preserve wetlands and other natural habitats. Such areas require less rigorous maintenance than others. Some of these are now impassable for all but the most determined parkgoer due to overgrown trails, poison ivy, homeless encampments and garbage. Abandoned cars and boats have been left in some of the parks.

What these parks have in common is that they rely almost exclusively on city money, while the city's best-maintained parks - Central Park, Bryant Park and Prospect Park among them - are managed in part by private conservancies that raise money and hire workers independent of the Parks Department. The neglected parks also lack the community support and involvement present in the neighborhoods around the city's most successful green spaces.

"It is completely outrageous that poor communities are given this type of service when other parks are given adequate service," said Geoffrey M. Croft, president of New York City Park Advocates. "Having prostitutes and drug users fill a park when a community needs parks, goes against everything government is supposed to do in terms of providing services and protecting people."

The Police Department, not the Parks Department, is responsible for tackling serious crime in city parks. But Mr. Croft said that unmaintained areas provided a natural shelter for criminals.

Mr. Benepe said that any problems that exist are isolated, and that the department has a rigorous inspection process. "This is a big system and you can't address every little problem," he said. Mr. Benepe said a lack of resources was not an issue either. "The challenge is how to spend all the money we've been given," he said.

In all, the Parks Department's 28,800 acres take up about 14 percent of the total land mass in the city's five boroughs. About 12,000 acres of parkland have been designated natural areas, though some, like Central Park's Ramble, are well maintained and free of the trash and invasive species that plague the natural areas of other parks.

University Woods, for instance, has failed the Park Department's own cleanliness and general condition inspections for the past three years, and if its current circumstances are any indication, it has little hope of ever being a haven for anyone seeking a respite from city life. The last capital project in the park - which involved repairing fences and walkways that are again in disrepair - took place in 1997.

On a recent weekend in University Woods, in University Heights, a man and woman were seen having sex against a tree. Encampments for homeless people were scattered in the underbrush. Several areas had been littered with hypodermic needles, used condoms, needle cleaning kits and wrappers for "Savage" and "TKO" brands of heroin. And piles of feces could be seen on staircases.

The only evidence of the park's benches were rivet holes in the ground. There were no garbage cans, lights, restrooms or staff workers. Visitors have reported seeing a dead goat and the skulls of various animals, apparently after they had been sacrificed.

Julio Calderon, 31, who was walking a large pit bull outside the park, said he never stepped inside University Woods, though he lives nearby. "The park is dangerous," Mr. Calderon said in Spanish. "People who are in there do things I don't want to see."

The parks commissioner said he would like to trade University Woods to a developer for more suitable park property, or to fence it off. "You have to be pragmatic about these things," Mr. Benepe said.

The Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carríon Jr., agreed but called the park's current neglect a "disgrace."

"University Woods cannot continue to be what it is," he said.

Not far away, in Highbridge Park, which stretches for two miles across Upper Manhattan, the scene was even more grim on a recent weekend. Huge sections of the 119-acre park set aside as natural areas have been taken over by homeless people who have built permanent shacks made of sheet metal and steel pipes driven into the earth. One of the park's residents is a heroin addict and prostitute who would give her name only as Joanne. Her makeshift house has a bed and a nightstand. She said she had lived there for 13 years. Men smoked crack cocaine a few feet from where a youth baseball game was being played.

Kelvin, who would not provide a surname, lives in the park underneath a Harlem River Drive entrance ramp. He lifted his shirt to show his heavily bandaged chest, where he said he had been stabbed the week before. He tapped a Bible on his nightstand, which lay atop some pornographic magazines. "I almost died," he said in Spanish. "God was with me." On a concrete wall, someone has scrawled graffiti: "This might be the only place where New York is still New York."

Mr. Benepe said that while Highbridge Park is "much better than it was 10 years ago," it had been ruined decades ago when freeway ramps were built across it.

Mr. Benepe, who expressed both skepticism and surprise at the park's condition when told about it, said the city's plan was: "Let nature take its course." "Trees are growing, insects are buzzing, oxygen is being produced, and there's nothing wrong with that," he said.

Mr. Croft, the parks advocacy group president, said, "Having prostitutes, drug dealers and drug users in parks is not going back to nature."

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

bohemian rhapsody

July 10th, 2005, 05:40 AM

I think it is insane that in this day and age, a New York City park can be let go like that... permanent shacks?! People who have lived there for over a decade? wow.

I just realized that perhaps I should have started a new thread for this, rather than muddying up a nice discussion of New York's very pleasant parks.

My apologies...

ZippyTheChimp

July 10th, 2005, 06:38 AM

Actually, it's in the right place.

lofter1

July 22nd, 2005, 10:02 AM

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_115/tribecashudsonpark.html

Tribeca’s Hudson Park construction to begin this fall

By Ellen Keohane

Demolition of Piers 25 and 26 along the Tribeca segment of Hudson River Park could be begin this fall with reconstruction of Pier 25 starting in May, followed by Pier 26 next summer, Hudson River Park Trust president Connie Fishman said Monday.

Work on the Tribeca section of the park can finally move forward now that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has granted the Hudson River Park Trust $70 million in post-9/11 funds for the project. However, it will probably take four to six months of paperwork before the Trust actually receives the money, Fishman said at a Community Board 1 Waterfront Committee meeting July 18. And the entire process may take more than three years, she said.

The $70 million will be able to fund most of the Trust’s plans for the Tribeca segment of the park, but Fishman said she was confident that they will be able to get whatever additional money that might be needed.

Some of that money could come from the Water Resources Development Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives on July 14. The proposed legislation, which still needs to be approved by the Senate, includes an authorization for $5 million in funding for the Hudson River Park.

It’s up to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Hudson River Park Trust to determine exactly what the money can be used for, said Reid Cherlin, press secretary for U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who pushed for the legislation. One possible use is a proposed bird sanctuary — “eco-pier” near Canal St. The sanctuary at the Pier 32 site would be visible from the land.

At Monday night’s committee meeting, Fishman and landscape architect Andrew Lavallee presented the newest version of the plan for the Tribeca segment of the park. Fishman called the new design “60 to 100 percent final.” It will involve rebuilding and extending Piers 25 and 26, which are currently deteriorating.

The Tribeca-based landscape architecture film, Mathews Nielson, took over the project from the Boston and San Francisco-based firm Sasaki Associates, Inc. For financial reasons, it makes more sense to work with a local firm, Fishman said.

“After living in Tribeca for 30 years and working on the master plan for the park from 1993-1997, it is a great pleasure to build a part of the park now,” Signe Nielsen, a principal of the Mathews Nielson firm, said in a telephone interview. Nielsen’s firm designed Duane Park in Tribeca as well as the landscaping adjacent to the Hudson River Park along Route 9A.

The design presented on Monday night included a few changes from what C.B. 1 committee members had seen before. More trees, for example, were added to the design based on public feedback requesting more shade, Fishman said.

The trapeze school and batting cages are not part of the new design. The trapeze school will have to move, as commercial venues are not allowed on the park’s premises, Fishman said. It may be relocated to Pier 40.

The Trust owns the batting cages, but Chris Martin, the Trust’s spokesperson, said he did not know of any plans to place them anywhere else in the park.

The cages are not well used and Mark Costello, vice president of the Downtown Little League, said although they do get some use by the league, they don’t open until the end of the season, they’re too expensive, and the pitches are too fast for many players.

Several Tribeca residents who attended the committee meeting expressed their collective concern that the “beloved” community feel of Pier 25 will be lost when it is rebuilt.

“There was always a desire to retain an informality and a spontaneity on Pier 25,” said Nielson in a phone interview following Monday’s meeting. “We’re going to take that very seriously and apply ourselves to achieve that. I plan to go there this weekend and just hang out and absorb it all.”

Pier 25 will retain many of its current amenities, including a playground, a mini golf course with nine holes and three practice tees, a snack bar and a landing for water taxis. The pier will also have an artificial turf, multipurpose playing field and three sand volleyball courts, said Lavallee, while pointing to a scale drawing of the current park design at Monday’s meeting.

The plans for Pier 26, in contrast, are still largely undetermined, said Fishman. The Trust is still waiting for the design of the marine life center, which needs to be moved further down the pier to allow for vessel access to the facility. A boathouse with a floating pier for kayaks will also be located on Pier 26. The River Project and the Downtown Boathouse, the pier’s current tenants, are likely candidates to return to the pier.

The Tribeca segment of the park will also include a basketball court, various seating areas, a skate park, a 65 by 120 foot dog run, a 1,200 square foot dance floor, a restaurant and tennis courts—which have already been built. A building at North Moore St. will house public restrooms as well as skate concession and maintenance facilities. There will also be a mooring field for boats south of Pier 25.

BrooklynRider

July 22nd, 2005, 11:36 AM

....a restaurant and tennis courts—which have already been built...

What restaurant was built? I haven't seen it. Is that hamburger shack a "restaurant"?

NYatKNIGHT

July 22nd, 2005, 12:45 PM

I think they mean just the tennis courts have already been built. The restaurant, dance floor and etc are to come.

Too bad the trapeze school has to move, it's a hit with spectators.

ablarc

August 1st, 2005, 01:05 AM

There was an Indian reservation in Inwood Hill Park as recently as the 1930's, when it had a population of about 300. Does anyone know why the Indians moved out, and when?

ZippyTheChimp

August 12th, 2005, 09:06 AM

August 12, 2005
Heralded as Parks, but Looking More Like Dumps

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/12/nyregion/12park.xlarge1.jpg
At Pugsley Creek Park in the Bronx, some abandoned cars are prominent. Others are hidden in high weeds.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/12/nyregion/12parks.1.jpg
A padlocked fence surrounds a trash-strewn lot on Hoe Avenue in the Bronx.

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=TIMOTHY WILLIAMS&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=TIMOTHY WILLIAMS&inline=nyt-per)
A few months after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the family of Dr. Ronald E. McNair, one of the seven astronauts killed, stood with Mayor Edward I. Koch in East Harlem to announce the construction of a new park in Dr. McNair's honor.

There were refreshments, balloons and solemn words about how Dr. McNair, who grew up visiting his father's auto repair shop in East Harlem, would have treasured a tiny green oasis in the middle of the embattled neighborhood.

Nearly 20 years later, McNair Park is a trash-filled vacant lot. No trees have been planted, no swings have been put up and no one seeks respite among the weeds and garbage there.

McNair Park is just one of dozens of undeveloped plots of land that have been dedicated as public parks across the city, often with great fanfare, but then never actually developed. Every year, the city buys plots of land from developers, or takes over unused municipal plots, intending to create parks.

But in scores of cases, nothing happens. Many of the undeveloped plots, which are often in densely populated, poor communities with limited green spaces, exist as de facto garbage dumps and occasional crime scenes.

Indeed, land that was once maintained by private developers can become worse after the Parks Department takes it over, advocates for parkland say, because the city fails to take care of it, and it becomes littered with abandoned cars, hypodermic needles and the occasional discarded stove.

Rafael Lebron, 34, who lives across the street from undeveloped parkland in the Clason Point section of the Bronx, said it was little more than a wasteland. Twice, he said, rats from the park have nested in the engine well of his car and chewed through electrical wires, costing him $2,000 in repairs.

At dusk, he says, he calls his three children inside because of wandering rats. "We don't know what's inside the park, but we know what's coming out," he said. The history of New York City is littered with broken municipal promises and deferred plans. Every mayoral administration proposes plans for new streetscapes, retail hubs and apartment complexes that never come to fruition, and dreams about stadiums that never rise.

But the failure of the city to develop its promised parks - a problem that predates the Bloomberg administration - is particularly galling to residents of neighborhoods with few green patches, particularly as asthma and obesity rates continue to rise among their children.

"These are communities that are desperate for parks and open space, and this is what they get," said Geoffrey Croft, president of New York City Parks Advocates. "Parks are supposed to be a asset to a community, not a liability."

Parks Department officials said parks had not been developed for various reasons, including lack of money and insufficient community support. Often the parcels of land are bought by the city with no concrete plans for a park, in anticipation of future opportunities.

"The city continually grows and changes in ways we can't immediately respond to," said Liam Kavanagh, the Parks Department's first deputy commissioner. "Sometimes it takes us years to put together the money and the support from the community, but usually it is worth the wait."

But often, grand plans are foiled by money problems. At McNair Park, for instance, the city planned a space-themed park honoring the astronaut's life but then dropped the plan in the late 1980's, a time of budget cuts in the Parks Department, Mr. Kavanagh said.

Several attempts to jump-start the project have since failed, but Mr. Kavanagh said the department hoped to start work on the park by the end of the year.

Ronald McNair's brother, Carl McNair Jr., said in a telephone interview from Atlanta that he had no idea the park had never been completed. "I was under the impression that they were building a park," he said. "We're getting near 20 years. I'm surprised it's not there." (There is a monument to Dr. McNair in a Brooklyn park.)

The Bloomberg administration has made acquiring new parkland a priority. Since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002, the city has added nearly 300 acres, much of it along the city's waterfront. Almost every day, the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, opens a new playground, and the city's capital budget for parks has almost tripled on Mr. Bloomberg's watch.

But plenty of plots await the shovels. Some are small, like a pack of unnamed parcels in the Rockaways, vacant for decades. Some are larger and overcome by weeds, like Rocks and Roots Park in the South Bronx, Railroad Park in Queens and Clove's Tail Park on Staten Island. Others, like the 78-acre Pugsley Creek Park in the Bronx - a park in name only, it seems - are neighborhood blights.

On a recent weekday afternoon at Pugsley Creek Park, which sits along the East River near the end of Soundview Avenue, wild pheasants and rabbits were in evidence. But there were also at least 18 abandoned cars and two abandoned boats.

The Parks Department said it planned to build a small playground and restore a small salt marsh there. But there were no plans to conduct a basic cleaning or weed cutting until officials were told that the park had become a dumping ground for boats, cars, washing machines and construction material. Invasive species like mugwort and Japanese knot weed have grown as tall as 14 feet in some places, making the park virtually impassible.

Henry J. Stern, who ran the department as parks commissioner for 15 years, said that parks filled with wrecked cars and other debris attracted criminal activity.

"You can't let it get to that point," said Mr. Stern, who left the department in 2001. "It takes a long time to dump a car in there, but when people see one, before long, you have many cars dumped there."

Many of the cars have been in the park since at least 1999, however - during Mr. Stern's tenure as commissioner - according to dates that have been written on the vehicles by Parks Department employees. Some are so badly rusted that they are hard to identify by make and model.

After being informed about the abandoned cars, the Parks Department began removing some vehicles, but officials said workers were unable to find others in the tall weeds.

The problems at Pugsley Creek Park are not new, according to a June 1998 Parks Department memo. While visiting the park to determine whether to build a bridge there, city workers could barely penetrate the park. "Due to overgrown mugwort, the group could not reach the area where this proposed bridge might be located," the memo reads. Instead of cutting the weeds, the Parks Department relied on aerial photographs. The bridge was never built.

Linda Mills, 49, who lives across the street from the park, said it would be nice for neighborhood children to have a safe place to "burn off a little energy."

"A lot of people have little kids with nothing to do," she said. "That's how they get in trouble."

At the ceremonial opening of another undeveloped park in June 1997, Vernam Barbadoes Preserve in Queens, Mr. Stern, who is known for his love of theatrics, dressed in a helmet and fatigues, a la Gen. George Patton, rode in on a boat and planted a Parks Department flag there, ceremonially claiming it as Parks Department property. Since then, according to a list of Parks Department projects, the 21-acre park has not received any work.

Former Mayor Koch, who presided over the October 1986 ceremony at McNair Park, said he did not understand why a proper park had not been built. "I can't explain the oversight and the failure to do it," he said. "It would behoove the city of New York to take immediate action."

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

NYatKNIGHT

August 15th, 2005, 04:16 PM

Beyond Lady Liberty

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

August 15, 2005

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/15/nyregion/burks.rang.184.1.650.jpg
The first commissioner of the National Parks of New York Harbor, Maria Burks, 53, near her office at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, oversees 26,000 acres in 22 parks in New York City and northern New Jersey.

Maria Burks has proved she can corral unruly hordes of nature lovers on Cape Cod. For her next trick, she will try to herd history buffs onto boats in New York Harbor.

Ms. Burks is the first commissioner of the National Parks of New York Harbor, and her mission is to draw attention to the parks and beaches beyond the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. She wants people spotting herons in Jamaica Bay, spiraling up the nation's oldest lighthouse at Sandy Hook, N.J., and climbing around the cannons of Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. The solution to getting them there, she believes, is ferries.
"These parks have been, in the past, divided by the water," said Ms. Burks, sitting outside her office at Fort Wadsworth. "We're saying now we're going to connect them by the water."

After nine years as the superintendent of the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts, Ms. Burks, 53, now oversees the largest collection of land on New York Harbor - 26,000 acres in 22 national parks spread around New York City and northern New Jersey. Along with Liberty, Ellis and part of Governors Islands, as well as some landlocked historic sites like the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt, the park service owns Gateway National Recreation Area, which stretches from the Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge to Sandy Hook.

Ms. Burks's ferry dreams were stoked in October when New York Water Taxi began the first harbor tours sanctioned by the National Park Service. Then, last month Congress included $5 million in the federal transportation bill for ferry docks and other improvements on Governors Island and at Sandy Hook.

Next, Ms. Burks hopes to pry some money from New York State's ferryboat fund to create new landings at Fort Wadsworth and at Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway, Queens. But before docks can be built and boats leased, there is the rather large task of building awareness.

Practically everyone who visits New York knows about the Statue of Liberty, and many are also aware of Ellis Island. About three million people are expected to visit Liberty and Ellis Islands this year, the most since before 9/11, Ms. Burks said. The challenge is drawing people to places like Fort Wadsworth, where there was not a single visitor in sight on a recent sunny afternoon.

Ms. Burks's appointment came after a trial run as acting commissioner that lasted more than a year. The parks she supervises employ 650 people and have a combined annual budget of $52 million. Still, the scope of the operation is not reflected in her trappings. Her office is tiny, with just enough room for a desk and two armless steel chairs, tucked in the corner of a larger suite above the fort's bookstore, a beer bottle's throw from the upper span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. On a sweltering midsummer day, Ms. Burks is decked out in her drab-green Class A dress uniform, complete with stiff-brim hat, which she wears on formal occasions. She calls the uniform a tool that can help in certain situations but can stiffen up people in others. "It's an honor to wear, but it's not always fun and it's not always comfortable," she said.

She rarely wore it during her years at the Cape Cod National Seashore. On the Cape, where Ms. Burks still owns a home, she had to navigate the shoals between the claims of the New England traditionalists and the demands of the sun-worshiping masses. She negotiated with local leaders over everything from water rights to driving on the beaches to public nudity in Provincetown.

"On Cape Cod, we had some very troubled relationships with our local communities," Ms. Burks said. In most of the cases, she said referring to the uniform, "I felt it wasn't helpful to look different from everyone else."

Brenda J. Boleyn, a longtime member of the National Seashore's advisory commission, said that Ms. Burks melted some of the opposition to the park service's way of doing things by being "very open and candid" in discussing their differences.

"She's one of the most remarkable administrators I have ever known," she said. "She can create consensus for what she wants to accomplish." But, Ms. Boleyn added, "she would never back down on the regulations of the National Park Service."

This steadfast defender of the realm fell into the job almost by chance 30 years ago. After receiving an undergraduate degree in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Burks took the advice of her father, a history professor, and applied for work with the park service. "It was that or substitute teaching," she said.

She landed a 90-day gig leading tours of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and, she recalled, fell in love.

"I loved the buildings and the sense of understanding something and being able to explain it so that others could appreciate it," she said. "One of the best things about this job is you never know what the day is going to bring."

Some of those early days were quite heady. When Queen Elizabeth was visiting Philadelphia during the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the park service did not want to buy gloves for all of its female employees who would be shaking hands with the queen, Ms. Burks recalled. So she was assigned to peel gloves off those who had greeted the queen and rush them to others farther along the receiving line.

On the night the Liberty Bell was being moved, at the stroke of midnight, to a new pavilion across the street, Ms. Burks's role was to hide out of view of the throng of onlookers and cue the action by whispering into a two-way radio, "Move the bell."

Since then, Ms. Burks has held almost every type of job in the park service that does not require a sidearm. Raised as a Quaker, she said, she was never attracted to the law enforcement aspects of the service and never sought a commission to carry a gun.

These days, she is likely to tote a briefcase and a calculator, as she tries to arrange partnerships with companies that can handle the business end of transporting and accommodating visitors. But that approach is fraught with resistance.

Already, the park service is tangled in litigation with a group called Friends of Sandy Hook over plans to lease dilapidated buildings at Fort Hancock to a development company that wants to turn them into offices and, possibly, a bed-and-breakfast. Representative Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat from Long Branch, N.J., has tried to stop the project, calling it inconsistent with the park service's mission.

The going has been smoother on the water. Tom Fox, the president of New York Water Taxi and a onetime ranger at Sandy Hook, said he was impressed by how quickly Ms. Burks helped pull together the groups involved in the harbor tour. Launched from the South Street Seaport, it circles counterclockwise past the Statue of Liberty and around Governors Island, showing off the forts and batteries that protected the harbor from naval invaders.

The tour is a production of the two-year-old National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy, a nonprofit group, because the park service is prohibited from operating business ventures of its own. Mr. Fox, whose company provides the boats and pilots, and sells the $12 tickets, said it was drawing about 10,000 riders a month this summer.

"She gets everybody working as a team," he said. "That's the kind of thing the National Park Service here really needed."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/15/nyregion/20050815.burks.graphic.gif

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/15/nyregion/burks.lib.184.1.650.jpg
Students from John Muir Middle School in San Jose, Calif., visiting the Statue of Liberty last year.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/08/15/nyregion/burks.184.1.650.birds.jpg
The commissioner hopes to get a boat landing built at Jacob Riis Park, above, in Rockaway, Queens.

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

RedNucleus

August 16th, 2005, 04:18 PM

just wondering ... has the small, triangular "Canal Park" at the western end of Canal St reopened yet ?

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/lmr/images/canal.pdf

Also, what is the - rather odd looking - building seen in the back in the picture on

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_110/treesgrowoncanal.html

TLOZ Link5

August 16th, 2005, 04:36 PM

The building in the rear of the picture is a ventilation tower for the Holland Tunnel. There's another of the same design at the end of the pier on the other side of West Street, and at least one more on the other side of the river in Jersey City.

NYatKNIGHT

August 16th, 2005, 06:18 PM

And yes, Canal Park is now open.

http://www.pbase.com/image/47794926.jpg

krulltime

August 16th, 2005, 06:52 PM

And yes, Canal Park is now open.

http://www.pbase.com/image/47794926.jpg

^ Oh nice... I have to go see it!

Now whats that I see... Oh man! Child's Graffiti already!

TonyO

August 23rd, 2005, 08:18 PM

The Real Deal

City to start building second biggest park

August 22, 3:11 pm
The city has taken its first step toward building the city's second largest park, The Real Deal has learned. Plans for a $6 million, 28-acre park, dubbed Owl Hollow Fields, were announced Monday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. They mark the initial step toward developing a 2,200-acre, $100 million park over the former Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. Fresh Kills Park will be second only to the Bronx's Pelham Bay Park in area, and nearly two and a half times the size of Central Park. Construction on the Owl Hollow Fields site will begin in the spring of 2006 and be completed in the fall of 2007.

Ninjahedge

August 24th, 2005, 09:49 AM

New York City paaaaarks,
New York City paaaaarks,
New York City paaaaarks....They ain't to briiiight.

;)

BigMac

October 21st, 2005, 01:32 PM

New York Times
October 21, 2005

An Oasis Beckons in a Spot Once Used by Trash Trucks

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

http://www.gothamist.com/attachments/Jen%20Chung/2005_10_canalpakdrawing.jpg
(Gothamist)

http://www.gothamist.com/attachments/Jen%20Chung/2005_10_canalpark.jpg
(Gothamist)

The idea of seeking solace in the middle of the usual traffic mess outside the Holland Tunnel may seem perverse, but an arrow-shaped sliver of land on the Manhattan side, once used as a parking lot for garbage trucks, will be dedicated today as the city's newest park.

The park, at the corner of Canal and West Streets in TriBeCa, has actually been a public space of some sort since King James II of England ceded the parcel to the city in 1686, one year after his coronation. After many incarnations - public square, public market, a viewing garden - the space was designated a park in 1870 and redesigned in 1888 by Calvert Vaux, a designer of Central Park, and Samuel Parsons Jr.

The latest version of the park, called Canal Park, borrows elements from the 19th century design, which shunned straight lines. These features include Mr. Vaux's S-curved central walkway, an ornate black wrought-iron fence and lush green plantings.

"This is great because it is one of the city's oldest parks, and it had disappeared for virtually a century," said Adrian Benepe, the city parks commissioner. "You don't often get a chance to get back a park."

The dedication of the park, which has been open to the public for about two months, includes a concert tonight featuring Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.

The revival of one of the city's oldest parks is the story of ghosts, a fight over widening Canal Street and a group of neighbors who by virtue of thousands of hours of research pushed the city and state governments to relent to their demands.

The leaders of the effort to re-establish the lost park, Carole De Saram, Richard Barrett and Jana Haimsohn, were members of local community organizations who met while opposing the Canal Street plan and bonded over the idea of restoring Canal Park.

All the while during their efforts, they wondered about the strange little asphalt triangle where garbage trucks parked for as long as they could remember.

Ms. De Saram said the group came to believe that a ghost was trying to get their attention. "Every time I walked by, there was always a presence there, something you knew that was there," she said.

Eventually, Mr. Barrett found several old maps showing that the triangle had once been a park. But when he and his two allies brought their discovery to the city, they were told that without a deed they had no legal proof that the plot had been a park.

So Ms. Haimsohn scoured numerous libraries for evidence, sorting through reams of city government microfilm. One day, while she was trying to operate a stubborn microfilm reading machine at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library, microfilm started wildly spewing out. Then the machine suddenly stopped.

When Ms. Haimsohn looked at the screen, it showed exactly what she had been searching for: the 1870 dedication of Canal Park, when it was called St. John's Square.

The group swears it was the ghost that led them to their discovery.

In 1921, the city lent the triangle to the agency that was building the Holland Tunnel. The parcel was to be returned to the Parks Department after four years. It never was. Instead, it was turned over to Julius Miller, then the Manhattan borough president. Eventually, the Sanitation Department began storing trucks there.

After several fruitless meetings with state and city agencies, Ms. De Saram, Mr. Barrett and Ms. Haimsohn sued the federal, state and city governments, contending that removal of the park had been illegal because no one had obtained the State Legislature's approval, which is required for converting parkland to other uses.

The opposing sides reached a settlement in which the state agreed to pay the $2.7 million cost of restoring the park to its past glory. The park's size has also been doubled to about two-thirds of an acre.

Mr. Barrett said he is confident that Canal Park will be well used, even though it is so close to the Holland Tunnel. "It's a funny area, and there is definitely rush-hour congestion," he said.

Mr. Benepe said: "But people will come. You'd be surprised how a piece of greenery can be a sort of psychic oasis despite traffic rushing around you."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

nycbound

November 6th, 2005, 02:45 PM

Are pets allowed at all parks in the city or are there restrictions?

ZippyTheChimp

January 12th, 2006, 09:39 AM

Brooklyn’s Salt Marsh Center Is January’s ‘Park of the Month’

MARINE PARK — Brooklyn’s Salt Marsh Nature Center in Marine Park hosts some of the Parks Department’s most innovative community outreach programs. For the unparalleled beauty of its surroundings in Marine Park and for its work with high school interns and after-school programming, the Salt Marsh Nature Center has been chosen as January’s Park of the Month.

“The Salt Marsh Nature Center has taken great steps to introduce Brooklynites to the nearly 800 acres of precious marshland in Marine Park,” said Brooklyn Borough Commissioner Julius Spiegel. “From the Ranger Conservation Corps to its new Afterschool program, it has become an important center for youth environmental education in Brooklyn.”

The Ranger Conservation Corps, an urban environmental internship for high school students, was started in 2001. Since then, scores of students have participated, many of them returning year after to year. Participants get school credit for their involvement and often find mentors in the Urban Park Rangers who run the center. The Rangers Corps takes part in wildlife management, creates interpretive displays, performs trail maintenance, and gets preference when applying for Parks Conservation Corps, a paid summer internship opportunity.

This past fall, the Corps created a Community Composting site at the Salt Marsh Nature Center. The Corps’ goal was to encourage community members to bring organic material to the nature center to be made into rich compost. So far, the Corps has collected nearly 300 pounds of leaves, food scraps, and grass cuttings from the community. The spring project for this group is an ongoing pollinator survey, which involves the planting of native wildflowers and incorporates the nature center’s indoor and outdoor beehives.

This fall, Parks also began its first after-school program based in a nature center. The Salt Marsh Nature Center Afterschool program is unique in its focus on an environmental curriculum. Geared towards students of middle school age, it accommodates 20 children and is held three days a week. Weather permitting, the group takes walks on the nature trail and will be doing trail restoration work in the spring. Given appropriate funding, this program will be expanded to all of the City’s nature centers. And, as with all after-school programs, it’s free.

The Salt Marsh Nature Center is located near the intersection of East 33rd Street and Avenue U in Brooklyn and is open daily, from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. during the winter (closed on Wednesday).

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2006
Main Office 718 422 7400

ZippyTheChimp

April 25th, 2006, 09:37 AM

otham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/parks/20060425/14/1830

Parks Budget For 2007

by Anne Schwartz
25 Apr 2006

In recent years, the city’s parks have become greener and cleaner as a result of a substantial increase in capital spending for park renovation, as well as the growth of park groups that raise private funding for maintenance and provide volunteer labor. Many new parks, large and small, are in the works, including the High Line, Fresh Kills, and a new six-acre park on the Keyspan site in Queens.

At the same time, however, city allocations to maintain the parks and provide recreational programs, cut repeatedly over the last two decades, have not been restored. The parks department has made effective use of the resources it has, including temporary workers in various welfare-to-work programs funded by the Human Resources Agency. Its internal inspection ratings of park conditions are at an all-time high, according to Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. But a comparison of the beautifully maintained plantings and trees, lush lawns, and green ball fields in privately funded Central Park with the scraggly grass, dirt fields, and trees in need of pruning in, say, Queensbridge Park, illustrates how more horticultural attention could improve many parks.

The city’s annual budget process works against any significant increase in funding to care for the parks. Typically, the mayor proposes a baseline that is lower than the previous year’s adopted budget, and the City Council adds back in most or all of the items that were cut. This keeps the focus on restoring programs instead of adding funding.

This year, the mayor’s preliminary budget eliminates $14 million for 600 seasonal park employees, the entire street tree pruning effort, and an after-school program at the recreation centers. It also cuts the one major new budget item from last year, the 50 new Park Enforcement Patrol officers added amid concern about crime in the parks, which had increased the force to 110. In early April, three of the newly hired PEP officers stopped an attempted rape in Forest Park in Queens.

“Saving lives shouldn’t be part of a budget dance,” said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, the citywide parks advocacy group. “I think that we should all just agree these are necessary programs and they should be funded. More energy should be put by the Council and the Mayor to improving park service with additional funds, particularly when there is a surplus.”

Park advocates are lobbying for the council to add $9 million to the parks budget to almost double the PEP force to 200 officers and to increase the frequency of tree pruning from the current ten-year cycle to the generally accepted standard of pruning each tree every seven years.

The additional funding would also include $3 million for expanding the Neighborhood Parks Initiative, a partnership of the parks department, the City Parks Foundation, and the Central Parks Conservancy inaugurated in 30 parks last year. The program assigns a full-time gardener and playground associate to outer-borough parks in need of better maintenance. The Central Park Conservancy helped train the new gardeners, the first to be hired by the parks department in years. One of the goals is to disseminate the practices that have improved Central Park so dramatically, including the zone management system that gives gardeners personal responsibility for a specific section of the park.

Drawing Revenue from the Parks

The parks department also raises about $60 million a year through concessions and various fees. The money goes into the general fund, not directly to parks, but it helps buffer the department from budget cuts.

For the next fiscal year, the city is proposing to bring in additional revenue by charging membership fees at the six recreation centers receiving federal Community Development Block Grant funding. These recreation centers had remained free in 2003 when the city began charging visitors to most centers. The fee is $50, or $75 for centers with pools. (Children up to age 18 can still use the centers for free, and there is a reduced senior fee.)

The new fees are projected to bring in $2 million. But that revenue goal may be unrealistic, according to the Independent Budget Office. Its recent analysis of center use and revenue after the fees were instituted found that attendance dropped at the centers charging the higher amount, while it increased at the free and less expensive centers.

The analysis suggests that once fees are imposed at the formerly free centers, fewer people -- especially from the lower income populations that are at higher risk of obesity and diabetes -- will use them. If charging for using park facilities ends up discouraging people from using them, it undermines the mission of the parks department as well as the larger public policy goal of improving the health of residents.

Commissioner Benepe takes issue with that conclusion, however. “What we have found is that when it’s free, lots of people join, but very few people actually come,” he said. “When people pay, they tend to use it more.” He noted that the fees were a fraction of a typical health club membership. He also said there was no difference in the socioeconomic status of people using the community development-funded centers and the others, so that it was more equitable to charge a fee at all centers.

The Independent Budget Office also looked at what happened when the parks department raised the price of a season’s tennis court pass from $50 to $100. Doubling the price led to a 40 percent drop in the number of passes sold, resulting in only a 16 percent increase in income, part of which came from higher sales of one-time use passes. The budget office found that tennis court usage “appeared to have dropped off significantly,” and concluded that a smaller price increase might have resulted in both greater total revenues and court use.

Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.

NYatKNIGHT

April 26th, 2006, 02:18 PM

Two small parks in my neighborhood have recently been ripped up and are presumably undergoing complete makeovers.

Father Demo Square - 6th Avenue @ Bleecker/Carmine:

http://www.pbase.com/image/59248183.jpg

Vesuvio or Thompson playground (?) - on Thompson and Sullivan Streets, between Prince and Spring Streets.

http://www.pbase.com/image/59248790.jpg

lofter1

April 26th, 2006, 04:46 PM

Father Demo Square was in long need of renovation. although the pigeons never seemed to mind.

Vesuvio Playground is the now-official name -- but no one seems to know what exctly is planned here. Again, this place was in dire need of work. But it looks like they didn't rip out that little 30s-era swimming pool or the restrooms.

NYatKNIGHT

April 26th, 2006, 05:34 PM

It looks like they're ripping out the pool, it is now exposed at the base. I hope they replace it or at least install something that sprays water for the hot days. This little park is the only refuge in Soho.

lofter1

May 8th, 2006, 11:31 AM

A mountain of upgrades coming at Vesuvio Playground

DOWNTOWN EXPRESS (http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_156/amountainofupgrades.html)
Volume 18 • Issue 51 | May 5 - 11, 2006

Ground was broken last Thursday for the long-awaited renovation of Vesuvio Park in Soho. Council Speaker Christine Quinn is funding the $2.8 million project, the first renovation of the playground in more than 25 years. Work is expected to be complete by September 2007, according to the Parks Department.

The playground was renamed in the late 1990s for Anthony Dapolito, who died in 2003 and owned the nearby Vesuvio Bakery. The longtime Parks Committee chairperson of Community Board 2, Dapolito, known as “Mr. Parks” and “Mr. Playgrounds,” led the way in acquiring property to create open spaces in the Village and Soho. The former Parks Department recreation center at Clarkson St. and Seventh Ave. S. is named in his honor.

“Vesuvio Playground has been for most of its life a classic, gritty urban play space, but recently it has started to show its age,” said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “Now this park, named for the venerable Italian bakery owned by the late neighborhood advocate Tony Dapolito, will be fully renovated to meet the recreational needs of the 21st century, while celebrating the vibrant but vanishing heritage of the Italian Greenwich Village.”

Parks will replace the 40-year old swimming pool with a brand-new in-ground swimming pool and install new play equipment and a spray shower.

The project also includes a chess and checkers table with benches, as well as landscaping with new plantings and greenery. The handball courts will also receive a facelift.

Dapolito’s former bakery on Prince St. is named for Mount Vesuvius, which in 79 A.D. erupted and destroyed the city of Pompeii. The renovation project was designed in the theme of Pompeii, with Parks designers incorporating research of the historic city into the patterns of the flooring and other elements of the playground.

The playground was acquired in three parcels over the course of 28 years. In 1929 and 1930 Parks purchased two parcels midblock on Thompson St. In 1957, Parks expanded the property south to Spring St. and west to Sullivan St.

Downtown Express is published by Community Media LLC.

lofter1

May 8th, 2006, 11:52 AM

Park on Canal Street Gets Going at Last

By Barry Owens
MAY 2, 2006
TRIBECA TRIB (http://www.tribecatrib.com/news/newsmay06/canalpark.htm)

For all the city's talk of plans to create a park on the triangular lot at Canal, Varick and Laight Streets, the site for years has been nothing more than dusty dead space, marked off by orange construction barrels and wind-whipped police tape. But last month there was finally a sign of life in this tiny corner of Tribeca—"Please keep off the newly sodded lawn," the sign read. It was posted on a new fence and signed by the city's Parks Department.

http://www.tribecatrib.com/photos/news/may06/park-today.gif
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http://www.tribecatrib.com/photos/news/may06/park_sod_cap.gif
Organizers of the Tribeca Film Festival footed the bill to lay sod on the triangle (Tribeca Cinemas is located across the Street from the site), and seemingly overnight it was transformed from an embarrassing neighborhood eyesore to an inviting green space, though off-limits for now.

The Parks Department says there is more to come. A fresh design plan is in place and it's riding the fast track through city channels.

"It is a very simple plan," said Gail Wittwer-Laird, a landscape architect who has designed a new look for the park that will include trees, benches, a lawn and an ever-rushing fountain in the form of a canal. "I think everyone is anxious to move this forward.

Wittwer-Laird presented the plan for the unnamed park to Community Board 1 last month and said that the design had already passed muster with the city's Arts Commission, which must approve changes to city-owned property that are visible from the street. Getting the commission's approval is no small hurdle. A previous plan for the park, created in 2002 by a landscaping contractors association from outside the city as a gift to the neighborhood following the Sept. 11 attacks, failed three times to win acceptance from the commission. The group finally walked away in frustration last year, leaving the city to plan anew.

"It is loosely derived from the plan of several years ago," Wittwer-Laird told the board, referencing the original city plans for the park that were drawn up in 2001, but set aside following the terrorist attack. "It has been a long time coming, but I think it is going to be great when it is finally built."

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The board voted to approve the plan with little hesitation. "I remember approving this before 9/11," said member Albert Capsouto.

The design presented last month calls for a fenced-in park with three gated entrances, lined with a perimeter of trees and cut through with a winding path of granite stones. In the center will be a small lawn under the shade of a large tree.

Along the north side, artist Elyn Zimmerman hopes to create a canal—120 feet long, 12 feet wide and eight inches deep—where recycled water would flow from high to low ground.

The installation is inspired by the former channel through Lower Manhattan that gave Canal Street its name. But Zimmerman, who designed the memorial for the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which was destroyed on Sept. 11), said the water feature would more closely resemble a mini-Panama Canal with its series of locks and dams.

"Call it poetic license, but this will make it more interesting," she said.

The park is one of six public spaces for which the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in February allocated $19.5 million, which the Parks Department will receive in June. Construction is expected to last 18 months.

Until work begins, the sod will remain. So too will the old concrete curbs that Wittwer-Laird and Zimmerman, in a moment of inspiration, rescued from the rubble when new sidewalks were installed around the park site. The curbs were placed in the center of the lawn to serve as benches.

"Totally temporary," said Zimmerman.

lofter1

May 9th, 2006, 01:48 AM

... parks in my neighborhood have recently been ripped up and are presumably undergoing complete makeovers.

Father Demo Square - 6th Avenue @ Bleecker/Carmine:

Doing Demo’s plaza proud

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_136/demo.gif

Images courtesy NYC Parks and Recreation

Designs showing the renovation plans for Father Demo Square,
which will include a new fountain and 3-foot-high perimeter fence.
The photo of the fence section, at left, is from a small “vest-pocket”
park on Sixth Ave. across the street from Father Demo Square.
The photos of the fountain, at right, are from Brooklyn Borough Hall.

THE_VILLAGER (http://www.thevillager.com/villager_136/doingdemosplaza.html)

The long-awaited renovation of Father Demo Square on Sixth Ave. at Bleecker St. recently got underway, as a construction fence was put up around the triangular plaza about two weeks ago. Depending on the severity of the winter weather, the renovation is expected to last up to nine months.

Budgeted at $1.3 million, the project will include installation of a new fountain, as well as a 3-foot-high fence similar to those ringing the nearby Sixth Ave. small “vest-pocket” parks. The uneven plaza will be leveled, the irrigation system redone, trees replanted and new lights embedded in the ground. Although until now the park has been used throughout the night, it’s expected there will be a curfew once it reopens.

David Gruber, president of the Carmine Street Block Association, said the community favors a 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. curfew and that the low fence will help police convince people that the park is closed. “The community wanted to have it secured overnight and safe and quiet,” Gruber said. “A lot of people live around there. We need to have some crowd control.” It’s not clear, however, if any pigeon-control plan is in the works for the plaza, which is usually festooned with pigeon droppings.

lofter1

May 9th, 2006, 01:52 AM

Doing Demo’s plaza proud

... Although until now the park has been used throughout the night, it’s expected there will be a curfew once it reopens.

David Gruber, president of the Carmine Street Block Association, said the community favors a 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. curfew ... “The community wanted to have it secured overnight and safe and quiet,” Gruber said. “A lot of people live around there. We need to have some crowd control.”

Not so much a problem of "crowd' control methinks, but rather a plan to reclaim the space from the few homeless folks who had claimed Demo's for overnight sleep-overs.

Kris

May 9th, 2006, 04:16 AM

May 9, 2006
City to Limit Car Traffic in Central Park and Prospect Park
By DIANE CARDWELL

Moving to further reduce traffic in city parks, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that stretches of Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn would close to cars under a six-month pilot program to begin June 5.

Under the plan, vehicles will no longer be able to use the East Drive of Central Park north of 72nd Street during weekday mornings or the West Drive in the afternoons. In Prospect Park, drivers will lose morning access to the West Drive, which runs roughly parallel to Prospect Park West.

"For many years people coming to Prospect Park or Central Park for recreation during weekdays have had to share road space on the park drives with automobiles," Mr. Bloomberg said in Prospect Park as he announced the changes.

"These new regulations will be especially welcome for the cyclists, joggers and in-line skaters who use the park drive and it should also make entering and leaving the parks safer for pedestrians."

The changes come as public pressure to ban park traffic entirely has been increasing and as the City Council is considering a bill, introduced by Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, that would mandate a trial of more comprehensive restrictions. But Mr. Bloomberg said that although he might personally like to see such a ban, it was unrealistic because of the congestion it would cause on surrounding streets.

"It would be better if you didn't have cars in parks," he said, adding that it would create chaos to ban traffic completely during the morning and evening rushes.

Officials estimated that 865 vehicles would be affected by the Central Park closings and 357 by those in Prospect Park. By contrast, Mr. Bloomberg said, on weekdays 70,000 people use Central Park and 15,000 use Prospect Park.

In Central Park, the West Drive will be open to cars only between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., while the East Drive north of 72nd Street will be open only from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. From 72nd Street to 57th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, the East Drive will continue to be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. In Prospect Park, only the East Drive will be open from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., while both the East and West Drives will be open between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

BrooklynRider

May 10th, 2006, 12:35 PM

It really is time for a full ban on cars in the parks. There needs to be certain areas that are pedestrian only and there is no reason why we should sharet hese parks with autos.

krulltime

May 11th, 2006, 06:36 PM

This is an interesting story about real estate prices around some NYC parks...

GET YOUR PARK PERKS FOR LESS
IF CENTRAL PARK DOESN'T FIT INTO YOUR BUDGET, LOOK HERE

BY JANET HUEGE
May 11, 2006

THINK you have to spend a fortune for a park view? Can't afford Central Park or Gramercy Park? Getting the park perks you're looking for could be as simple as picking another park.

But those views and that grass often don't come cheap. Properties with views of Central Park can start at $800,000 (a 400-square-foot studio on Central Park South) and go as high as $70 million (Pierre Hotel penthouse at 795 Fifth Ave.). Gramercy Park is pricey, too, with the low end at $625,000 (a 450-square-foot studio on Gramercy Park South) and the high end reaching $16 million (duplex penthouse at 50 Gramercy Park North).

But the city is full of other great parks: Stuyvesant Square Park, Seward Park, Tompkins Square, Fort Greene Park and Pelham Bay Park are five alternatives that offer lots of green for less.

"People love the sense of community that a park view gives them - no matter what park it is," says Corcoran Group senior vice president Glenn Schiller, who notes that park-side property values are always on the up and up. "And if you can pay less for that feeling, it feels even better."

PELHAM BAY PARK

Pelham Bay Park, located in the northeast corner of The Bronx, is the largest public park in New York City. At 2,764 acres, it's three times the size of Central Park. The area was part of the 50,000 acres purchased in the 17th century from the Siwanoy Indians by Thomas Pell.

Today, the park includes two golf courses, a miniature golf course, a driving range, a stable, tennis courts and baseball diamonds.

The park borders the neighborhoods of Country Club and Pelham Bay. Most of the homes with park views are brick-and-frame detached houses sitting on lots that are 3,500 square feet to 5,000 square feet.

There are also many smaller semidetached homes that sit on 2,500-square-foot lots.

Overall, most of these homes have been renovated and include amenities like formal dining rooms, driveways, porches and basements. Prices range from $500,000 to $725,000.

In addition, "There are a handful of mid-rise apartment buildings built in the 1930s to 1940s which have park views on the upper floors," says Prudential Kafcos Realty associate broker Phyllis Basilone. "There are also some multi-family homes with views that have rentals as well."

One-bedroom rentals average $950, two-bedrooms rentals are $1,200 to $1,300, and three-bedroom rentals average $1,500 a month

SEWARD PARK

Bordered by Essex Street, Canal Street and East Broadway, the three acres of land that are Seward Park (named after former Secretary of State William Seward, who negotiated the purchase of Alaska) were acquired in 1897. Seward Park is the site of the first municipally built playground in the United States, which was constructed in 1903.

"The area still has a lot of old-timers, including Chinese and Jewish immigrants," says Manhattan Apartments saleswoman Melissa Giordano.

The United Housing Federation built the Seward Park Co-ops in 1957. Today, 500-square-foot studios there cost $300,000 to $350,000. One-bedrooms, which average 850 square feet, cost between $450,000 and $520,000; 1,100-square-foot two bedrooms go for $575,000 to $725,000, and 1,250-square-foot to 1,300-square-foot three-bedrooms are $775,000 to $1 million. Amenities include 24-hour security guards, parking, a gym and a laundry room.

Not surprisingly, the cost of living near Seward Park is significantly less than Central Park or Gramercy Park. With the influx of luxury condos in the Lower East Side, however, that gap is decreasing.

The Forward Building at 175 East Broadway, built in 1910, was home to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. When the renovation of the building is complete this summer, the 10-story building will have 29 luxury apartments ranging from $575,000 to $4.5 million.

Another condo elevating Seward Park's prices and reputation is 7 Essex St., a new building with luxury lofts.

"Today, nothing in 7 Essex is below $1.5 million," Shemesh says, "and the triplex penthouse is $3.5 million."

TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK

Bordered by Avenue A, Avenue B, East Seveth Street and East 10th Street, the 10.5-acre park named after former Vice President and New York Governor Daniel Tompkins was designated a public park in 1878.

The properties with park views are largely rentals, although there is a particularly well-known condo.

Most of the rentals are archetypal East Village walk-ups, which means they are usually small and oddly shaped, with the occasional bathtub in the kitchen.

"The average price of a typical East Village one-bedroom rental is $2,300 a month," says Corcoran Group senior associate broker Paul Gavriani. "However, something with a park view will cost you more, running between $2,650 and $2,900."

The Christodora House at 143 Avenue B is one of Tompkins Square Park's most well-known addresses. The 17-story doorman building built in 1928 was converted to condos in 1986. One-bedrooms range from 650 square feet to 850 square feet and run from $650,000 to $850,000. Two-bedrooms, which rarely become available, average $1.6 million for 1,100 square feet.

Painter Dustin Horowitz, 32, has lived in three different studios in five years in the Christodora House.

"It's not like Central Park where tons of people have that view," he says. "Only a handful of people see what I see."

FORT GREENE PARK

Brooklyn's first park, Fort Greene Park is a 30-acre green oasis built in 1847 at the urging of poet Walt Whitman. Famed Central Park designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux redesigned the park in 1864.

The park, bordered by Myrtle Avenue to the north, Saint Edwards Street to the west, Dekalb Avenue to the south and Washington Park to the east, currently houses tennis and basketball courts, playgrounds and a weekly Saturday greenmarket.

The buildings that have park views are predominantly townhouses, though there is a high-rise condo two blocks from the park that offers views on the upper floors.

The townhouses, built in the mid- to late 1880s, are primarily Italian in style and are mostly four stories. They range from 17 feet to 22 feet wide. Prices start around $1.5 million and can go as high as $2.5 million.

The Greene House, a new high-end condo located at the corner of Carlton and Greene avenues, was completed in October 2005. Building amenities include a fitness area, a daytime concierge and parking. A 755-square-foot one-bedroom goes for $549,000; a 1,735-square-foot two-bedroom is $799,000, and a 999-square-foot two-bedroom with 1,208 square feet of private outdoor space is $899,000.

New housing stock is coming to the area in the nearby Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building. The tallest building in Brooklyn at 512 feet, is being converted into condos, which are expected to be ready next year.

STUYVESANT SQUARE PARK

Given to the city in 1836 by Peter Stuyvesant, former governor of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant Square Park is bisected by Second Avenue and hemmed by 15th and 17th streets. Many buildings in the park date back to the 1850s and 1860s.

"The condos with park views are mostly prewar walk-ups," says Prudential Douglas Elliman executive vice president Tamir Shemesh.

One-bedrooms that range from 700 square feet to 800 square feet run $650,000 to $775,000, and 1,400-square-foot two-bedrooms start at $1.5 million, according to Shemesh.

And there are three new condo conversions with park views. Landmark 17 at 233 E. 17th St. is a five-story Victorian Gothic building constructed in 1877. The two- to four-bedroom loft-like units range from $1.7 million to $4.8 million.

"For what you get, it's still cheaper than Central Park and Gramercy," Shemesh says.

Rutherford Place at 305 Second Ave., originally built as the Lying-In Hospital in 1899, now offers 122 multi-level units going for $500,000 to $3 million. The Abbey Condominiums at 205 E. 16th St., originally built in 1888 as a church parish, feature stained glass in studios to four-bedrooms that are around $1 million to $4 million.

Copyright 2006 NYP Holdings, Inc.

Kris

May 18th, 2006, 04:08 AM

May 18, 2006
Civic Pride and Volunteerism Bring Allure Back to Riverside Park
By TONI WHITT

Twenty years ago, Riverside Park was a forlorn and perilous slice of Upper Manhattan.

People who used it knew to leave by dusk, when drug dealers and prostitutes moved in. A playground at 91st Street was a homeless encampment. Graffiti covered seemingly everything, even Grant's Tomb. A hillside on the park's northern end was a graveyard for the skeletons of stolen cars, and the air was often pungent with the smell of decaying dog carcasses.

"The area where they used to shoot up was so bad," recalled Jenny Benitez, 73, who has lived on Riverside Drive for 44 years. "There was no fence there, and the users would just slide down the hill."

It was hardly the vision Frederick Law Olmsted had in mind when he designed the park in the 1870's to give people access to the water and a bit of serenity. Today, even a quick stroll shows how much has changed at Riverside over the years.

Where cardboard boxes and plywood lean-tos used by the homeless once stood around 138th Street, Mrs. Benitez and others tend garden boxes filled with lettuce, basil, tomatoes and flowers. Near 122nd Street, bird watchers look for the abundant species that stop on their migratory travels in an area of the park where a 23-year-old jogger was raped and beaten in 1985. The 91st Street playground is filled with children who cool off in water fountains near the flowers that cover the area once littered with hypodermic needles.

It is a striking transformation that began around a kitchen table where a group of residents decided to reclaim a space they considered their front yard. "It became obvious that if we wanted to make something happen, we had to do it ourselves," said Mary Frances Shaughnessy, 61, who attended that first meeting.

Those informal gatherings were the beginning of the Riverside Park Fund, which is marking its 20th anniversary this year with an art exhibition scattered across the 330 acres of what is now one of the city's jewels.

"It was a struggle," Milton Norman, 80, the chairman emeritus of the park fund, said of the group's start. "I used to stay up nights worrying about having enough money to pay the executive director."

Early on, the group realized it had to raise money and recruit volunteers to do the work long neglected by New York City as it dealt with a financial crisis. Information about the fund and requests for donations were mailed to nearby residents. For its first project, the fund decided to do something that would benefit everyone living along the park's four-mile stretch from 65th to 155th Streets, so emergency call boxes were installed and fencing was repaired, said Pamela Tice, one of the group's founders.

Reviving the park, Ms. Shaughnessy said, "involved a lot of different neighborhoods and involved bringing a lot of different people together who normally wouldn't have had contact."

Volunteers cleaned the park and hauled in soil to help fill in erosion. People with expertise in fields like horticulture and botany helped recruit and train other volunteers.

"In the first years volunteers were picking up trash and needles," said James T. Dowell, the president of the Riverside Park Fund. "We've moved far beyond that."

The fund encouraged local groups to adopt different parts of the park to care for, and in the first 10 years roughly 40 spots were taken. One group maintained the clay tennis courts, others looked after the playgrounds and a community garden group took responsibility for beautifying the park's northern section.

In the early years, volunteers brought their own tools and lugged buckets of water from their homes because there was no running water. Garden hoses were dragged into the park across Riverside Drive. Mrs. Benitez, who is a volunteer outreach coordinator for the fund, remembers attaching a hose to a faucet in her home, throwing it over her balcony and dragging it down the hill to the park. The fund has since installed an underground irrigation system covering much of the park, and the Riverside Drive rampart at 138th Street is used as a tool shed.

The buzz of civic involvement also put pressure on the city to do more in the park. The Parks Department continues to provide basic maintenance and trash pickup, but in recent years it has helped finance larger projects, like putting artificial turf on the ball fields. And for the past five years, the city has been working on connecting Riverside to its southern neighbor, Hudson River Park.

Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, grew up and lives on the Upper West Side, so he remembers Riverside's decline. "We despaired that anything would ever get better," he said. "Then bit by bit neighbors started to organize."

Today the park has so many concerned constituents that changes tend to spur heated discussions. In recent years two projects in particular stirred debate, the one to put artificial turf on heavily used ball fields at 103rd Street and 107th Street, and another to pave a dirt path extending north and south from the Firemen's Memorial at 100th Street.

"Now you see the park and it's full of people," said Ms. Shaughnessy, who still volunteers with the park fund even though she now lives in Midtown.

Mr. Norman said that despite its annual budget of nearly $2 million, the Riverside Park Fund is still at heart a grass-roots organization.

"We've redone every playground, and have a lot of irrigation, but our pride and joy is our volunteer force," he said. "We put 350 to 400 people in the park. It remains a neighborhood park."

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/18/nyregion/0518-met-clrRIVERSIDEmap.gif

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

ZippyTheChimp

May 18th, 2006, 06:44 AM

91st St Garden
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/6599/riverside91st012ta.th.jpg (http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=riverside91st012ta.jpg)

Stairway to waterfront at 91st St
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/5783/riverside91st023gb.th.jpg (http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=riverside91st023gb.jpg)

Cherry Walk at Riverside Church
http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/7206/riversidechery014hi.th.jpg (http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=riversidechery014hi.jpg)

Kris

May 30th, 2006, 04:04 AM

May 30, 2006
In the Works, Another Park for a Bit of the Waterfront
By JOSEPH P. FRIED

In its latest effort to reclaim waterfront land for recreation, New York City plans to turn a half-mile stretch of contaminated landfill and crumbled piers in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn into a park with panoramic views of the harbor and the Manhattan skyline.

The landfill was created in the 1970's, when the city planned to convert the site, which it owns, into a cargo terminal. The city halted the landfill work in 1978, though, when it learned that the private contractor had allowed questionable material to be used.

Investigators later found that elevated levels of arsenic, lead and other hazardous material were in the oil sludge, industrial waste water and other substances put in the landfill.

There has been no activity since the landfill work was stopped, and the entire half-mile stretch has been fenced off since at least the early 1980's.

The $36 million plan to correct the environmental hazards and remove the collapsing piers — and to create ball fields, picnic and fishing areas and possibly an environmental education center — was welcomed by Sunset Park residents interviewed last week.

"It's only going to help the neighborhood," Alex Plasencia, who has lived in Sunset Park for 59 of his 63 years, said near his home on Fourth Avenue and 44th Street, four blocks away. The site runs from 43rd to 51st Streets, between the waterfront and a large complex of buildings and warehouses known as Bush Terminal.

Mr. Plasencia, a retired truck driver, recalled his boyhood in the neighborhood in the 1950's. "I used to swim off the pier on 53rd Street," he said.

Candida Villanueva, 56, standing in front of her home of two decades on 43rd Street between Second and Third Avenues, said, "It will be better for it to be a park instead of all that mess."

Once completed, the park could cost her some of the quiet atmosphere she has now. The plan calls for 43rd Street to be one of two access streets to the park. "Nobody comes down here now," she said.

That is because the side streets between the water and Third Avenue have more industrial and commercial tenants than residents. There is much less pedestrian traffic on those side streets than on the streets east of Third Avenue, where most of Sunset Park's working-class population lives. The elevated Gowanus Expressway travels above Third Avenue.

Jeremy Laufer, district manager of Community Board 7, which includes Sunset Park, said the public's only access to the two miles of waterfront in Sunset Park now is a pier at 58th Street, which serves as a terminal for a ferry to Lower Manhattan.

The plan for more waterfront access here follows projects in recent years that have created a ribbon of new parkland along the Hudson River in Manhattan, and plans for parks in other largely inaccessible shoreline areas of Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Bridge and in Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

The largest share of the expected $36 million cost of the Sunset Park project will come from the state: $17.8 million, earmarked for the landfill work, said Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Blooomberg in describing the project last month. The city and federal governments are to supply the rest of the money.

Mr. Pataki called the $17.8 million the largest grant the state has awarded to fix a so-called brownfield. A spokesman for his office said the previous largest amount was $7.6 million.

According to a 2004 report by the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, "elevated levels" of arsenic and lead were found at various locations in the landfill. It says there are lesser levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, chemical compounds that the federal Environmental Protection Agency calls a probable carcinogen.

The state report says that among the steps to remove "potential risks to future park visitors and workers" will be a two-foot-deep cover of new soil over the current landfill surface, except that it will be six inches where trees have grown on the landfill and are to be retained.

The work on the landfill is expected to begin next year, and the park is expected to be completed in several years, said Janel Patterson, a spokeswoman for the city's Economic Development Corporation, which is coordinating the project.

Details remain to be worked out. Because the park will be a long walk from the homes of many Sunset Park residents and no parking areas are planned in the park, Mr. Laufer said his community board would seek to have bus routes extended to the park. And weekday truck traffic is heavy immediately around the park site.

"We're working with the community to assure safe and regular access," Ms. Patterson said.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Kris

July 6th, 2006, 06:32 AM

July 6, 2006
After Delays, Wireless Web Comes to Parks
By SEWELL CHAN

By the end of August, wireless networks will be established at 18 locations in 10 of New York City's most prominent parks — including Central, Prospect and Riverside Parks — in a major citywide expansion of free Internet access, according to city officials.

The development, to be announced today, would end months of delay for a city project that has faced considerable logistical and technical hurdles since it was announced in June 2003. Wi-Fi Salon, a small start-up company that won the contract for the work in October 2004, said yesterday that Nokia, a Finnish manufacturer of telecommunications devices, had signed on as a sponsor, giving it a well-financed partner that could finally turn the plan into reality.

Wi-Fi Salon intends to activate 18 wireless "hot spots" by the end of next month at Battery, Central and Riverside Parks and in Washington and Union Squares in Manhattan; at Prospect Park in Brooklyn; at the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens; and at Pelham Bay and Van Cortlandt Parks and Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

Eight of the hot spots will be in Central Park and two in Prospect Park. The first of the 18 locations — a stretch of Battery Park, from the Battery Gardens restaurant to the Castle Clinton National Monument — is to be activated today, with the other 17 to follow, in stages, through the end of next month.

At those locations, users with laptops configured for wireless networking will be able to check e-mail, browse the Internet and download files while sitting on a park bench or sipping a coffee at a concession stand, all at no cost.

"The expanded Wi-Fi network will give park visitors even more options to enjoy," Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, said in a statement. "Park patrons can throw a pitch, score a goal, catch a wave or surf the Internet at some of our city's greatest parks."

Park advocates said they were delighted to hear that the parks department and Wi-Fi Salon were getting the project moving. "We're glad that they seem to have gotten their ducks in a row," said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group that is not involved in the project. "It's long overdue and long awaited by park users."

Four years ago, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation created a Wi-Fi hot spot encompassing the six-acre park in Midtown. It has been a huge success, with use of the network rising each summer since the service began in June 2002. About 250 people now use the network each day during the peak summer months.

Following that example, the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business improvement district in Lower Manhattan, set up wireless hot spots at eight sites from 2003 to 2005, including City Hall Park, Bowling Green and the new Wall Street Park. Some cities, including Philadelphia and San Francisco, have begun to explore creating citywide wireless networks.

The parks department's own effort, covering some of the city's largest and most heavily used parks, began around the same time but has proceeded in fits and starts. Verizon Communications initially won the contract in April 2004, only to withdraw a month later after concluding that the venture would not be cost-effective.

Wi-Fi Salon, a small company started by an Upper East Side entrepreneur, Marshall W. Brown, won the three-year contract in October 2004, agreeing to make quarterly payments of $7,500 — totaling $90,000 over three years — or 10 percent of gross receipts from advertising and other sources, whichever is greater.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of Manhattan, chairwoman of the City Council's Committee on Technology in Government and a major proponent of the project, said that Internet access should be viewed as a public service and that the city's effort to derive revenue from the project was a strategic error.

"There's no revenue to be made, and I knew that and said that from the beginning," she said.

In an interview yesterday at Battery Park, Mr. Brown, 47, described Nokia's support as critical. "We looked for a long time to find the right partner — somebody who not only understood the future of Wi-Fi but was willing to commit the resources and vision to make that happen," he said.

At each hot spot, users will encounter an initial Web portal with information about the park and local history and advertisements for Nokia and other sponsors, which could include retail kiosks that do business in the parks.

Floris van de Klashorst, a director in the multimedia unit at Nokia's office in White Plains, said he believed that traditional park activities — reading newspapers and listening to music — were increasingly being done using mobile communications devices, in addition to watching television and sending e-mail.

"Wi-Fi in the parks provides an excellent podium for us to showcase these new kinds of applications," he said. Nokia is marketing several portable devices — essentially scaled-down computers for casual Internet browsing — that can tap into Wi-Fi hot spots. (The most popular "smart phones," including most models of the BlackBerry and the Palm Treo, rely on cellphone networks.)

Mr. Brown and Mr. van de Klashorst would not discuss the terms of the sponsorship arrangement, saying it was confidential.

Robert L. Garafola, the deputy commissioner for management and budget at the parks department, said that Wi-Fi Salon still needed final approval for the eight sites in Central Park from the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages the park under a long-term contract that was renewed in April for another eight years.

Mr. Garafola said he was optimistic about the project after the repeated delays. "I'm feeling pretty good, but we're going to watch it very closely and hold them to the schedule," he said.

Wi-Fi Salon and Nokia said they planned an extensive marketing campaign, but declined to discuss specifics. Warner Johnston, a parks department spokesman, said he believed that if the system worked, word of mouth would be powerful enough. "I have no question in my mind that once this is active in Central Park, word is going to spread like wildfire," he said.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/07/06/nyregion/0706-met-websubWIFImap.gif

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

ablarc

July 6th, 2006, 09:03 AM

^ There was a time this would have been regarded as an opportunity for muggers. All those laptops...

Eugenious

July 6th, 2006, 03:05 PM

^ There was a time this would have been regarded as an opportunity for muggers. All those laptops...

They really cleaned up Prospect Park and this is really another step in making it a really first class recreational area, the houses around prospect park have tripled in value in the last 10 years!

Transic

July 27th, 2006, 04:10 PM

Judge Halts Washington Sq. Park Redesign

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: July 27, 2006

A State Supreme Court judge has halted the city’s plan to redesign Washington Square Park, saying the Bloomberg administration violated the City Charter by failing to notify the public about all of the proposed changes.

The ruling, handed down on Tuesday by Justice Emily Jane Goodman, bars the Department of Parks and Recreation from beginning a $16 million renovation until the redesign plan goes through the entire approval process again, beginning with the local community board.

The proposal must also be re-approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Arts Commission.

The decision is the latest setback for the parks department in its effort to push through the park’s most significant alteration since the late 1950’s, when Eleanor Roosevelt and the urbanist Jane Jacobs took an active role and traffic was banned.

Now the city will again be forced to make its case for redesign, which has inspired impassioned debate in Greenwich Village and includes plans to move the centerpiece fountain about 22 feet so it aligns with the park’s arch and to install a perimeter fence.

Residents have accused the parks department of hiding critical elements of the plan and of acting without sufficient community input.

In her ruling, Justice Goodman found that the parks department failed to fully disclose information about the redesign, including the addition of a 45-foot spray jet to the park’s fountain and reduction of the size of the plaza surrounding the fountain by at least 23 percent. The plaza has traditionally been used as a performance space, and the parks department pledged to a council member not to shrink the area by more than 10 percent.

In a statement, Chris Reo, senior counsel of the City Law Department’s environmental law division, said the city was reviewing its legal options.

“We believe that the court’s ruling is erroneous, because it ignores the fact that the parks department’s renovation plan for Washington Square Park has been the result of more than two years of public outreach and input,” Mr. Reo said.

While most people agree that the 9.75-acre park needs a makeover, opponents believe that many of the changes will turn an open space with a tradition of nonconformity into a cookie cutter park.

The park’s fountain has long been one of the city’s popular spots for residents and tourists — the site of poetry and musical performances in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and of mimes, dancers and hip-hop artists today.

The ruling did not address other elements of the redesign, including the shifting of the fountain and the building of a perimeter fence, though the proposal could be altered as it makes its way again through a second review process.

The redesign was approved by Community Board 2 last year after a series of raucous public hearings. The Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Arts Commission also ratified the renovation.

Jonathan Greenberg, a Greenwich Village resident who filed the lawsuit, which sought to stop the renovation, said that the decision would allow the neighborhood to get another look at the proposal.

“I feel very pleased that there will be some transparency and accountability in this process,” he said.

While the city’s community boards have only advisory power, Justice Goodman said that a board’s role in the democratic process is protected by the City Charter.

From the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/nyregion/27park.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

mariusmellebye

July 29th, 2006, 10:56 AM

this looks like the most interesting park project I have ever seen: http://www.thehighline.org/

lofter1

July 29th, 2006, 04:06 PM

You bet ^^^

You'll love THIS (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2868&highlight=high+line) -- the "High Line" has its very own thread.

Kris

August 24th, 2006, 04:04 AM

August 24, 2006
Report Says Worst Parks Get Worse
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

The city’s most neglected neighborhood parks continue to get worse, according to an annual report released by a parks advocacy group yesterday. An analysis by the group, New Yorkers for Parks, found that the 10 small parks it had listed as the city’s 10 worst last year also received a failing grade this year. Several parks, among them University Woods in the Bronx and Coney Island Creek Park in Brooklyn, “have essentially hit the bottom, unable to perform much worse than they did this summer,” according to the report. The study cited trash, broken glass and dead animals among the problems at the failing parks. The Parks Department responded by saying that within the next two years it plans to invest about $20 million to help restore the 10 parks in the survey.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Ninjahedge

August 24th, 2006, 09:59 AM

OK, the question here would also be, how can teh community be encouraged to keep these parks clean?

Maybe if each person in that area had a $5 surcharge applied to their rent or taxes to pay for the park, you would feel more of that, then again, most would probably say "I'm paying, I shouldn't have to work!".

:(

Nothing like the park we all helped with... There needs to be community support or it wont be long before ANY park has broken glass and dead animals in it....

ZippyTheChimp

August 24th, 2006, 10:40 AM

^
The problem is that as signature parks in affluent neighborhoods get more private funding, the city cuts the overall Paks Dept budget. The same year the city decided it needed to find $15 million for BBP maintenance, it cut the budget by the same amount.

Maintenance is dollars per acre. The parks in my neighborhood are not nice because the resident population is more concerned with their upkeep. If you think so, take a walk around here after snow melts, and see the result of lazy people that don't want to trudge to the dog-walk. They are nice because the maintenance budget per acre is several times that of the city parks budget.

lofter1

August 24th, 2006, 11:54 AM

One solution could be that any of the privately-run parks conservancies (i.e. for Central Park, Bryant Park, Madison Park, etc.) should have to put a share of the funds raised for those particular parks into a general fund that goes towards the lesser served parks.

Share the Wealth

lofter1

December 18th, 2006, 06:45 PM

Doing Demo’s plaza proud

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_136/demo.gif

The long-awaited renovation of Father Demo Square on Sixth Ave. at Bleecker St. recently got underway...

The fountain and surrounding stonework is in -- they are laying the stone for raised planting areas along both 6th Avenue & Carmine Street, as well as the hexagonal pavers throughout the Square ...

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/Greenwich%20Village/FrDemo_04b.jpg

Our Lady of Pompeii (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/GV048OurLadyofPompeiiChurch.htm) across the street is also getting a make-over ...

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/Greenwich%20Village/FrDemo_04a.jpg

ablarc

December 18th, 2006, 09:08 PM

^ Always thought this was potentially New York's nicest small square. Delighted this is happening. Our Lady of Pompeii sure is a dynamite building. Will they work on the inside?

ZippyTheChimp

April 8th, 2007, 06:47 PM

Two small parks in my neighborhood have recently been ripped up and are presumably undergoing complete makeovers.

Father Demo Square - 6th Avenue @ Bleecker/Carmine:

Vesuvio or Thompson playground (?) - on Thompson and Sullivan Streets, between Prince and Spring Streets.

Father Demo Square was in long need of renovation. although the pigeons never seemed to mind.

Vesuvio Playground is the now-official name -- but no one seems to know what exctly is planned here. Again, this place was in dire need of work. But it looks like they didn't rip out that little 30s-era swimming pool or the restrooms.

Vesuvio Playground doesn't look like it will be complete by the Summer 2007 target.

http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/1299/vesuvio01cfg7.th.jpg (http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vesuvio01cfg7.jpg) http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/2373/vesuvio02ciu8.th.jpg (http://img356.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vesuvio02ciu8.jpg)

The handball courts look good.

http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/1337/vesuvio03cwj8.th.jpg (http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vesuvio03cwj8.jpg)

Father Demo Square looks like is will be complete on time. Installing benches and painting the fountain railing.

http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/8852/fatherdemo01cbd1.th.jpg (http://img370.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fatherdemo01cbd1.jpg) http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/2065/fatherdemo02cft6.th.jpg (http://img253.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fatherdemo02cft6.jpg)

antinimby

April 8th, 2007, 08:02 PM

I hope those chain-link fences are temporary.

I hate the way they make the parks in this city look.

pianoman11686

April 26th, 2007, 09:11 PM

April 26, 2007

In Park Plan, a New Life for Spaces Long Closed

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Changes for the city’s 29,000-acre park system are even more ambitious than initially detailed by the mayor in his 25-year plan for a greener New York, and include reopening the High Bridge and the McCarren Park swimming pool, officials said yesterday.

The High Bridge, the city’s oldest standing bridge, will get a $65 million face-lift over about two years beginning in 2008, said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe.

The pedestrian bridge, which was completed in 1848 to connect Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, was shuttered during the 1960s; officials had deemed it a safety hazard because people had been dropping rocks and other objects from it onto passing boats.

The McCarren Park pool, built in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1936 and closed in 1984, is one of 11 giant swimming pools built in the city as part of the Works Progress Administration. The pool, which could accommodate 6,800 bathers, will be reduced in size by about one third and reopened as an Olympic size pool. The work is budgeted at $50 million, and officials expect it to begin this summer and take a couple of years.

Details of the city’s plan to reopen the bridge and the pool were not discussed when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined his PlaNYC initiative on Sunday, but were confirmed yesterday by the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Other elements of the $1.2 billion parks plan include planting one million new trees; working to ensure that every New Yorker will live within a 10-minute walk of a park by 2030; building lighting fixtures at 36 athletic fields to allow for nighttime play; and refurbishing portions of several large parks that have fallen into disrepair.

“It has been the perfect alignment of planets: a healthy economy and an administration that understands the importance of parks,” Mr. Benepe said.

While parks advocates generally praised the plan, they warned that the new money will mean little if more attention — and funding — is not given to maintaining the city’s parks and sports fields.

“We can meet the goal of having everyone live near a park because 75 percent of people already live within 10 minutes of parkland, but what do you get when you get to that park — and is it a park or a playground?” said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, who was consulted by the city during the planning process. “To make it a wise investment, it must be backed up by maintenance.”

Mr. Benepe said the initiative included funds for new gardeners and workers to prune trees, an allocation that has been almost unheard of in recent years. The result is that trees in the city will be pruned every seven years, instead of the current 10 years, he said.

“I think there was a recognition that you couldn’t build new parks without maintenance money,” Mr. Benepe said. “It’s a great precedent that is being established here, and I hope it continues in future administrations.”

At least one advocate, however, was somewhat skeptical of the plan, saying it was little more than a drop in the bucket toward transforming the city’s park system, where some parks are rarely used because they have become dominated by homeless encampments, drug users and weeds 10 feet high.

“These are good individual projects, but when taken as a whole, they will have very little measurable impact on the system,” said Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Parks Advocates.

To meet its goal of having each person live within a half-mile walk to a park, the mayor’s initiative calls for opening public school playgrounds after school hours, during summers and on weekends; creating at least one new public plaza in each of the city’s 59 community board districts; and expanding the Greenstreets program, which turns street medians into miniparks. The city said it would build 400 new Greenstreets spaces by 2017, bringing the total to about 3,000.

The plan also calls for planting 250,000 new street trees, in addition to the city’s current 600,000 trees, during the next decade, with a goal of a total of one million new saplings on public and private property by 2030.

The $118 million price tag for the program includes the cost of planting each tree — from $1,100 to $1,700 apiece — and hiring 15 new forestry workers.

The most ambitious part of the initiative may be in providing play space in areas with many children but few parks.

The parks standard set by the Trust for Public Land, a private, nonprofit conservation group, is 2.5 acres of parkland per 1,000 people — a ratio that 90 percent of city neighborhoods do not meet, according to the national organization.

City officials acknowledge that New York regularly fails to meet its even lower standard of providing at least 1.5 acres of park space for every 1,000 people and one playground for every 1,250 children.

According to the city, 97 of 188 neighborhoods — most in low-income areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn and southeast Queens — have more than 1,250 children per playground.

In East Flatbush, Brooklyn, there are 56,000 people for just 4.8 acres of parks and other open space — about 0.09 acres per 1,000 people. The neighborhood’s 12,000 children share three playgrounds, the city said.

Because of the cost of land in the city, which generally prohibits building large new parks or playgrounds, the initiative relies on working with what already exists but has become unusable through age and lack of maintenance, officials said.

So instead of building new playgrounds, the plan calls for opening playgrounds that are now closed during after-school hours.

The city has focused on 290 playgrounds in neighborhoods that lack other suitable play space for some 360,000 children.

Due to disrepair, however, the city said only about 69 of those playgrounds could be opened immediately. The others need to have unsafe play surfaces and equipment replaced.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

NewYorkDoc

April 26th, 2007, 09:15 PM

Heres a pic of Stuyvesant Cove Park. 23rd Street below the FDR.

http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/1349/pics049uf3.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

ZippyTheChimp

May 23rd, 2007, 07:58 AM

Grading Neighborhood Parks

05/10/07
New Yorkers for Parks has released its yearly report card on the neighborhood parks around the city, considering such park features as playgrounds, bathrooms and pathways. The report is designed to focus on these local, often small parks, which are entirely dependent on public funding and do not receive as much attention as some of the city’s larger park areas.

Report (http://www.ny4p.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=132)

timvireo

June 6th, 2007, 01:19 AM

Unfortunately, this nice park is being renovated with dozens of new benches made with wood ripped from the rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon. The wood is called ipê and according to the Brazilian government, 80% of ipê logging is done illegally. As well, loggers come into violent conflict with indigenous people and bulldoze roads into pristine forests, thus allowing access to agriculture and other destructive activities.

We've been after NYC Parks since 1995 to stop their use of this material but with only small success. The destruction continues.

Anyone know when this park will be "unveiled"? Is there an opening ceremony planned?

Please consider contacting Parks to ask them to end the use of this rainforest-destructive material.

Also, check out the Rainfores Relief webpage, http://www.rainforestrelief.org/Campaigns/New_York_City_s_Rainforest_Wood.html, for more on NYC's use of rainforest wood.

For the forests and the parks,
tim vireo keating

pianoman11686

June 25th, 2007, 02:49 PM

Father Demo Square on a gorgeous late Saturday afternoon:

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r260/pianoman11686/SA700029.jpg

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r260/pianoman11686/SA700030.jpg

NYatKNIGHT

June 25th, 2007, 05:31 PM

^Very grateful for the return of this public space, and it looks great.

BrooklynRider

June 26th, 2007, 07:04 PM

Wow! Now, if they could only renovate that little triangle over by Kenmare Street and Lafayette.

lofter1

July 6th, 2007, 03:02 AM

Seems that Our Lady of Pompeii (overlooking Father Demo Square) has just about finished her makeover, as well ...

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p242/Lofter1/Greenwich%20Village/FrDemo_12b.jpg

lofter1

July 8th, 2007, 01:00 PM

A GREAT IDEA ...

Playgrounds as Public Spaces

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/opinion/nyregionopinions/CIparks.html?ref=nyregionopinions)
July 8, 2007
The City / Opinions

EDITIORIAL

Over the years, New York City has built one of the largest urban park systems in the United States — 29,000 acres in all — and some of its public spaces, like Central Park, are the envy of the nation. In the last few years, the city has added more than 300 acres of new parkland, mainly by reclaiming waterfront that had been given up to industry years ago.

Even so, there is nowhere near enough open space to meet the needs of a growing population, particularly in lower-income communities. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted in PlaNYC, his blueprint for a more sustainable future, New York has fewer acres of green space per person than almost any other major American city.

With land at a premium, imaginative strategies will be required to create more open space, and last Monday, at a newly renovated schoolyard at the John J. Pershing Junior High School in Brooklyn, Mr. Bloomberg unveiled one of them — an ambitious plan to fix up 290 previously restricted and largely decrepit school playgrounds and convert them into attractive, usable public spaces open to the general population as well as schoolchildren.

Mayor Bloomberg's Press Release (http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.c0935b9a57bb4ef3daf2f1c701c789a0/index.jsp?pageID=mayor_press_release&catID=1194&doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom%2Fht ml%2F2007b%2Fpr223-07.html&cc=unused1978&rc=1194&ndi=1)

The project is a joint undertaking involving the city and the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group that has a considerable track record of helping cities across the country create small parks, gardens and other green spaces in crowded urban environments.

Trust for Public Land Website (http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cd.cfm?content_item_id=21609&folder_id=631)

The “Schoolyards to Playgrounds Initiative” will eventually cost more than $100 million in public and private money. The renovated playgrounds will be open to the public after school hours, during the weekend and when school is not in session. The Pershing playground was one of 69 spaces that opened last week, with the rest to follow by 2010. According to Rose Harvey, a senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, the project will be the “largest schoolyard transformation” in the country.

There is much about this undertaking that appeals to the mayor, not least the benefits it could have for the quality of life in many neighborhoods and the health and happiness of the city’s children. But being Michael Bloomberg, businessman, he also seemed mightily pleased by the cost-benefit ratio.

“On any given day,” he said, “schoolyards around the city are a beehive of activity for the students. But once school ends, the gates close and yards sit empty. They represent the greatest opportunity we have for transforming an existing underused resource cost-effectively into something we can all enjoy.”

By renovation, the city and the trust mean the following: new or freshly painted asphalt where the blacktop is broken, turf to replace asphalt where possible, landscaping, new fencing, new running tracks, new equipment. The trust will help oversee design and construction and, in some cases, will invite neighborhood residents, including children, to help with the design.

The playgrounds-to-parks proposal is hardly the most radical of Mr. Bloomberg’s visions, but it will help people of all ages, in all neighborhoods, and may well turn out to be the most popular.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Ninjahedge

July 9th, 2007, 09:55 AM

What a REVOLUTIONARY Idea.

You mean, they will take these schoolyards, many of which were originally green spaces, and convert them (back) to playgrounds that the community canuse??!?

Where on EARTH did they get an idea like this? New Jersey? <<sarcasm...

ZippyTheChimp

July 13th, 2007, 07:52 AM

Vesuvio opening pushed to the end of the month

The city has pushed back the long-awaited opening date of Vesuvio Playground once again due to some equipment issues.

“We have encountered some unanticipated problems with the playground equipment, enough to prevent the playground from being finished,” said Cristina DeLuca, a Parks Department spokesperson. “We expect the playground to be open by the end of the month at the latest.” DeLuca noted that the handball court, seating area and pool are already open at the park on Thompson St. between Spring and Prince Sts.

The park’s in-ground swimming pool opened to the public on Sunday, July 1. However, on July 10 the pool was closed for a health violation.

DeLuca said construction debris from the playground next door had been blocking a pipe in the bathroom and the bathroom needed to be closed to clear the pipe. The health code states that if the bathroom is closed, the pool must be closed as well. The pool reopened for swimmers on Wednesday morning.

— Jennifer Milne

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_218/vesuvioopening.html

NYatKNIGHT

July 13th, 2007, 12:25 PM

It's more than just equipment issues. I walk by this little park every day and check to see what's done. One day a set of pavers will be laid, the next day half are ripped up. One day the playground equipment is installed, the next day much is taken down. Benches get bolted in then unbolted days later. As the article says, they finally opened the pool and two days later it's closed. Also, they haven't completed construction of the area adjacent to the restrooms. There are piles of debris and half painted fences.

The neighbors have grown impatient, I've heard heated discussions between residents and builders about things I noted above.

It has some neat features though. There is an axis in stone that points in the direction of Mt. Vesuvius, showing the latitudes of it and NYC - a change of only three degrees latitude.

ETA - meant to say only three minutes of latitude.

ZippyTheChimp

August 10th, 2007, 10:01 AM

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_222/delayscommunity.html

Delays, community eruptions; Vesuvio opens at last

By Barrett Z. Gross

The sounds of happy children splashing and laughing can be heard every day now at the new in-ground pool installed in the freshly renovated Vesuvio Playground, on Thompson St. in Soho. The 3-foot deep, stainless-steel wading pool replaced an unsightly aboveground relic that was rusting behind its chain-link fence for decades. Young pool users, their guardians and Parks Department staff all expressed their delight with the new neighborhood amenity.

Christina Aurricchio, 9, of Sullivan St. said it’s a big improvement over the old pool.

“This one’s better,” she enthused. “It’s a little cold at first, but it’s bigger than the old one and lots of new people are coming with their kids. I’m making new friends.”

Her mother, Christine, agreed.

“I love it because it gives me a break,” she said. “Kids really have a good time here. They run a tight ship here, and everyone follows the rules.”

A temporary entry gate to the pool opens onto Thompson St. Once the park and sidewalk construction are completed, the temporary gate will close and access to the pool will be from within the park.

Besides the pool and handball/basketball court, the new Vesuvio Playground has a large piece of playground equipment for young children, more swings than the old park and a sprinkler with a flooring design intended to evoke Mt. Vesuvio in Italy.

Elizabeth Smith of Canal St. walked by with her two young children and declared the new playground equipment a success, even better than popular Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City.

“It’s not as high,” she said. “It’s going to be a lot more fun for my 3-year-old to play in this park.”

The pool opened in concert with all other city pools before the July 4 holiday, which seemed like a miracle to neighborhood residents who had watched the construction site sit idle for six months this past fall, winter and spring.

After the initial demolition was finished last summer, the contractor left the site an unsightly mound of dirt and debris with an idle backhoe parked on it. A broken windshield and flat tire on the backhoe added to the sense that the project and the neighborhood had been abandoned. Rats that lived under or behind the old pool swarmed into the streets, provoking an angry flood of complaints to the city’s 311 line.

Fran Santaga, a Spring St. resident who has been involved with the park’s renovation since early Community Board 2 meetings, recalled the first day the contractors arrived in spring 2006.

“People were sitting on the benches and the contractors put fences in front of them,” she said. “We were evicted from our own park.”

Many residents felt it was unreasonable to close the park for most of the spring and entire summer of 2006 when the pool would not reopen for at least 14 months. But hopes were raised when a sign posted on the handball court promised: “Over the next nine months, the Parks Department will rebuild Vesuvio Playground, creating a greener and more open space. Scheduled completion: January 2007.”

Unfortunately, the sign was too optimistic, and impatience in the neighborhood turned to anger as the handful of workers on the job in the fall botched what little work was being done. The pavers surrounding the handball court were laid down, pulled up and relaid twice again. New benches were installed but locked behind the temporary fencing; the handball court was repaved and painted several times, but remained closed for no apparent reason.

Early this spring, neighbors felt all but certain that the park would be lost for another summer. But in May, a small army of subcontractors suddenly appeared on the site and worked every day, including weekends and holidays, until the new park finally began to take shape. Cristina DeLuca, a Parks spokesperson, said as many as 40 workers a day were on the site at times.

Joseph Khaoury, the project manager for Omni Construction, said the delays were mostly on the city’s end.

“The main delay was for the pool,” according to Khaoury. “The Department of Health didn’t approve it until the fall of 2006.” The playground equipment was also redesigned when Parks determined that a large tree that was to have been transplanted would not survive. Khaoury claimed that five of the six months of delays were beyond his control: “No matter what we did, some people complained,” he said. “We closed the handball court and people complained, then we opened it and people complained about the noise of the ball bouncing on the wall.”

DeLuca said unforeseen underground conditions discovered in the initial excavation also caused problems, and she confirmed that Parks forced Omni to replace a fencing subcontractor that was unresponsive.

Despite the raves about the new pool and expanded children’s areas, not everyone is happy with the redesign. Santaga, who led a group of parents and teens who petitioned the city back in 2002 to retain the old basketball court, worries where her teenaged son and his friends will go to hang out now that the park is more receptive to younger children.

“I can’t tell you the effect when the kids were thrown out,” Santaga said. “They tried the Canal St. court, but it is too dirty.” She feels having the hoop in the handball court is dangerous, since there is no division between the basketball and handball areas. There is also a longstanding drainage problem in the southeast corner of the handball court that has yet to be fixed, though Khaoury promised that a sewer contractor would be hired to snake the drain.

The budget for the park renovation initially was set at $1.5 million in 2002. However, by the time the final contract was issued in 2006, the project’s cost had risen to $2.2 million.

NYatKNIGHT

August 10th, 2007, 03:56 PM

The new park is attractive and lively, definitely benefitting the neighborhood even though it's geared toward the toddlers and small children. It almost feels awkward being inside without kids, but at least there are new benches and tables on the periphery for all to enjoy.

brianac

March 27th, 2008, 05:30 AM

March 26, 2008, 6:22 pm

Man Is Arrested in Fire Off Henry Hudson Parkway

By Sewell Chan (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/schan/)

The police have arrested a homeless man for setting a heavy fire Wednesday afternoon that destroyed trees and bushes, backed up traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway and required the efforts of more than 60 firefighters to bring under control. No one was injured.

The fire was reported at 4:17 p.m. in the heavily wooded median that separates the northbound and southbound lanes of the Henry Hudson Parkway, around 192nd Street, wedged between Fort Washington Park to the west and Fort Tryon Park to the east. The fire lasted for more than an hour and required 12 fire units and 60 firefighters to extinguish, officials said.

Officials said they believed the man who set the fire was emotionally disturbed. Adrian Benepe, the commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation, offered this account in a telephone interview:
Two of our maintenance staff encountered what appeared to be a homeless man, who had a fire in an area along the Hudson River just south of the Dyckman Marina. Apparently, he had a big pot of water he was using to wash clothes. When they confronted him, he said he wasn’t going to be put out the fire or leave, so they called in park rangers and the police. At that point, the man became threatening and pulled out a knife, and then fled from the waterfront area, crossed railroad tracks, ran across the southbound Henry Hudson Parkway and then into a heavily wooded, steeply sloped area between the northbound and southbound lanes of the parkway. The man eluded the authorities, who only realized that he was in the median after the fire broke out, Mr. Benepe said. The fire covered an oval-shaped area at least seven dozen feet in length, he added.

Mr. Benepe noted that a suspicious fire with a similar pattern was set on Sunday evening in Fort Tryon Park, whose northern end is home to the Cloisters, the medieval-art branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vandalism and damage to park property in Upper Manhattan have been pressing concerns for the Parks Department. At least twice in recent months, vandals have chopped down trees in Inwood Hill Park, which is at the northern tip of Manhattan, just north of Fort Tryon Park.

Mr. Benepe said it was not clear yet whether the man arrested today — who was not immediately identified — was responsible for the Sunday fire or the earlier damage to the trees in Inwood Hill Park.

Christine Hauser contributed reporting.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company.

brianac

April 6th, 2008, 06:15 AM

Park Slope

A Namesake Park, and a Luminary Little Remembered

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/06/nyregion/park600.jpg Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: April 6, 2008

THE official name of the two-square-block collection of grass, asphalt, swings and jungle gyms at Fifth Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope is J. J. Byrne Park. But to the old men playing dominoes there and the nannies keeping an eye on strollers, that name means little.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/06/nyregion/bryne190.jpg
"I'm surprised it too the city fathers so long to say; 'Wait a minute, who is this guy?" Bob Byrne said of his grandfather, top left, a borough president.

“It’s always ‘Who was J. J. Byrne?’ ” said Kimberly Maier, executive director of the Old Stone House, a historical center in a 17th-century farmhouse in the little park.

Like many other local residents, Ms. Maier has supported a move to strip the park of the name of Mr. Byrne, a Brooklyn borough president elected in 1926 who died in office four years later. Instead, the park would be named
Washington Park, as it was in the 1880s, when it was home to the baseball team that would become the Dodgers. That name is a nod to the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, in which British and American forces fought for control of the farmhouse.

As a consolation prize, a playground within the park would be named after Mr. Byrne. “That way, we would preserve both names but give Washington top billing,” said Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6, which voted on March 12 to recommend the change. The City Council is expected to pass the legislation. The proposed name change was reported in The Brooklyn Paper.

Among those unopposed to the change is Bob Byrne, one of Mr. Byrne’s three surviving grandchildren. “I’m surprised it took the city fathers so long to say: ‘Wait a minute; who is this guy?’ ” said Mr. Byrne, a lawyer who lives in Westchester County.

In J. J. Byrne’s day, borough presidents were quite powerful, each holding a vote on the city’s old Board of Estimate. Previously, as Brooklyn’s commissioner of public works, he oversaw construction of Brooklyn’s Municipal Building and Criminal Court. His pale, thin-lipped face concealed a reputation for jollity, and as a young man with a memorable baritone, he performed in light operas and at private parties. “I remember as a child, listening to an old 38 record of his voice, and the entire room shook because it was so deep,” his grandson said. “When asked to speak, he would say, ‘Would you rather I spoke or sang?’ And invariably people said, ‘Sing.’ ”

When he died, his funeral drew 30,000 mourners, according to The New York Times.

Besides J. J. Byrne’s descendants, at least one person in New York might be expected to take a proprietary interest in the memory of a former borough president, and that person is also pleased about the change of names.

“I am happy that Washington’s name will once again grace this beautiful Park Slope treasure,” said the current borough president, Marty Markowitz (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/marty_markowitz/index.html?inline=nyt-per). But he added: “What else is new? Borough presidents just don’t get any respect.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times.

brianac

April 9th, 2008, 09:16 AM

Off the Waterfront!

Regs would keep city park projects away from water—shadows harm the fish

byEliot Brown (http://www.observer.com/2007/author/eliot-brown) | April 8, 2008

This article was published in the April 14, 2008, edition of The New York Observer.

http://observer.cast.advomatic.com/files/imagecache/article/files/brown_041408.jpg Getty Images
Adrian Benepe and Pete Grannis.

A clash between state environmental regulators and multiple government agencies threatens several planned waterfront projects in the city, including portions of Hudson River Park on Manhattan’s West Side, the East River Waterfront and the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park set to rise on Brooklyn’s once industrial shore.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation is pushing back against sections of all three projects, particularly because of the shadows that structures like floating walkways and a heliport would cast on the water. Led by Commissioner Pete Grannis, the D.E.C. has determined that shade from the new construction could damage marine life below, and, in many cases, violates the law.

Advocates of the imperiled projects and government officials have been in discussions with the D.E.C. for months about the issue, though thus far there has been little noticeable progress.

The dispute is a hurdle for the Bloomberg administration and its vision to reinvent the New York waterfront by opening it to public recreation.

Taken with multiple other planned waterfront initiatives that could be later shaken by the D.E.C.’s reading of the law, the affected projects are at the heart of an effort in the city to undo the actions of past generations who built the city’s shoreline to accommodate the needs of industry, shipping and transportation rather than public leisure. With relatively plush governmental coffers and a will on behalf of the city and the state, parks advocates view the final two years of the Bloomberg administration as a prime time to get projects under way.

But to get any new development in or over the water, the D.E.C. needs to issue a permit, and therein lies the controversy. Among other considerations, the agency issues such permits for uses that require structures built over the water, or that are water-dependent. The D.E.C. under Mr. Grannis has staked out a rather firm stance—critics call it rigid—that many types of recreation, such as floating walkways, do not qualify as necessary, according to people familiar with the issue, a departure from the Pataki administration’s D.E.C. (A barge dock, for instance, is an example of a clear water-dependent use.)

“I think there’s probably a good-natured disagreement among people who love nature and love the waterfront as to what is a good water-dependent use,” said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. “Some water-dependent use is clearly defined. Some of us rather believe that you can expand that definition. … A waterfront walkway and greenway and bikeway, to me, would seem water-dependent.”

The nonprofit operators of a barge-based swimming pool ran into problems with the shadow issue last summer, as the group had to pay a $20,000 fine even though it was granted an exception to temporarily locate the pool south of the Brooklyn Bridge, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

Responding to a set of questions via e-mail, a spokesman for the D.E.C., Arturo Garcia-Costas, defended the agency’s policies as observing state law that says waterfront construction must be for necessary and reasonable uses. “Much of New York’s shoreline already had been impaired before these laws were passed, and part of the D.E.C.’s responsibility is to protect what is left,” he said.

As for the issue of floating walkways, planned for use in both Brooklyn Bridge Park and the East River Waterfront, Mr. Garcia-Costas said in the e-mail that the agency looks at issues on a case-by-case basis, but emphasizes limiting “over-water structure to that which is deemed necessary.”

“In many cases, additional floating structures are not necessary at all,” he said.

While some in the environmental community welcome the D.E.C.’s firm stance, other park and environmental advocates have expressed a desire for more flexibility in the position, given the restrictions it could place on the planned developments.

Brooklyn Bridge Park would likely be the most directly affected if the D.E.C. did not allow for any floating walkways—the planned parkland, already well over budget given rising costs, consists of numerous such structures that connect a set of piers while slowing waves to calm the water. “I think it’s what makes this a unique and special park in the world today, and I think it’s really worth having very serious conversations to resolve this issue,”

Marianna Koval, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, said of the walkways.

The state agency overseeing the development is working with the D.E.C. on its application for the permits that would allow the walkways and other construction.

Across the river, officials say they are focused on resolving the issue for the East River Waterfront, as the city had planned to start construction this summer on the esplanade, which seeks to revitalize the waterfront for public use. Like Brooklyn Bridge Park, the discord stems over a floating walkway that is planned for the southern tip of Manhattan.

“One of the issues about building waterfront parks is that you can only build in the water between May and October, because of how the fish breed, or spawn,” said Madelyn Wils, a vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation. “We’re hoping to remain on schedule, and as I said, we are very actively working with D.E.C.”

At Hudson River Park, the stretch of open space and renovated piers emerging on Manhattan’s West Side, a proposal for a new heliport site has gone nowhere due to the shadow issue.

Advocates, led by the Friends of Hudson River Park, have pushed strenuously to move an existing heliport off the park’s land and onto an adjacent pier, which would require some new construction over the water. The governing body of the park, the Hudson River Park Trust, was warm to the idea, according to people familiar with the matter, though it was unable to put out a request for proposals for the site due to concerns from the D.E.C. over the shadows. Mr. Grannis is a member of the trust’s board, which has split representation from the state and city.

“We have not felt like we could issue [a request for proposals] if there seemed to be a major flaw with the concept from the perspective of one of our board members and a key regulatory agency,” said Noreen Doyle, the trust’s vice president.

With a clock ticking on the East River Waterfront plan and with the potential to affect numerous other planned parks—conceptual renderings for a park on Governors Island show floating walkways, for instance—many parties impacted by the matter, particularly the city, said they are eager to revisit the science behind the D.E.C.’s position. Unlike piers or other large structures, shade from walkways may not have any noticeable effect on marine life, city officials said.

Kenneth Able, a professor at Rutgers who has studied the effects of shadows on marine life, said past studies have shown fish life to drop substantially under the shade of large piers, though he is in the midst of studies that could offer new insight.

“The preliminary findings were, very simplistically, there were not as many fish under piers as in adjacent open waters,” he said of his past studies.

“We’re in the middle of a new set of studies now, and we don’t have any results from those now. … We will know more next fall.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Observer.

brianac

April 12th, 2008, 08:48 AM

Tracking Crime in the Parks

by Anne Schwartz
April 2008

http://www.gothamgazette.com/graphics/2008/04/prospectPark.jpg Photo (cc) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/) Josh Jackson (http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshsjackson/)

For many years, New Yorkers were afraid to go into the parks. Instead of seeing them as an escape from urban stress -- a place to exercise, read a book, enjoy a picnic -- people viewed the run-down parks as even more dangerous than the streets. Over the past decade and a half, though, the parks have become much safer. Crime rates have dropped citywide, and one park after another has been restored. The city has increased maintenance staff and, since 2005, doubled the number of Park Enforcement Patrol officers, who enforce park rules and deter vandalism and crime.

But crime is still a problem, and until recently, the city had no hard data about how many crimes occurred in the parks. In the absence of that kind of solid information, when a terrible crime in a park is splashed across the headlines, like the 2004 murder (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E4D9103EF93BA15756C0A9629C8B 63) of drama student Sarah Fox in Inwood Hill Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/inwoodhillpark), it casts a shadow of fear over all the parks.

The New York City Police Department's Compstat (http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20030707/200/432) computerized crime-tracking program, which analyzes patterns of crime by precinct and uses that information to address problem areas, has been credited with dramatically reducing crime in the city. But Compstat doesn't track crimes in parks separately (except in Central Park, which has its own precinct).

With the passage of Local Law 114 (http://www.nyccouncil.info/html/legislation/legislation_details.cfm?ID=Int 0470-2004&TYPE=all&YEAR=2006&SPONSORS=YES&REPORTS=YES&HISTORY=YES) in 2005, the city began gathering data on crime in the parks for the first time. The law, which was introduced by Councilmembers Peter Vallone Jr. and Joseph Addabbo Jr., requires the police to report felonies that take place in parks and make the information available to the City Council. The program was supposed to be phased in over three years, beginning with a pilot project in 20 parks. The first data from the project have just been released in "Tracking Crime in New York City Parks," (http://www.ny4p.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=323) a report from the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks (http://www.ny4p.org/).

An Incomplete Picture

For each of the 20 parks, "Tracking Crime" provides the number of felony complaints, in seven different categories, from April 2006 to September 2007. The data examined by the report comes from the four largest (though not necessarily most heavily used) parks in each borough. For comparison's sake, it also includes crime numbers for Central Park, which has been monitoring crime for years.

There was a small increase in crimes in these parks over this time period, but as the report notes, the pilot project covered too few parks, over too short a time period, to allow accurate generalizations about trends citywide. It is also difficult to compare crime rates across parks because the parks department does not collect information on how many people use most of its parks.

Of the 20 parks in the report, Flushing Meadows Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/about_the_park.html), with 99 felonies, had the highest number of reported crimes. To put that in perspective, however, the report notes that a third of the crimes in 2006 and nearly half in 2007 occurred not on parkland but at the two sports venues within the park, Shea Stadium and the National Tennis Center.

Central Park (http://www.centralparknyc.org/site/PageServer), with 25 million visitors, had 103 major crimes in 2006, but its crime rate was lower than that of Prospect Park (http://www.prospectpark.org/), which had about half as many felonies reported (57) but a third as many visitors. Two parks, both in Staten Island, had no reported crimes, but one, Fresh Kills Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/fresh_kills_park/html/fresh_kills_park.html), is not developed yet.

The tracking data also turned up a significant drop in crime in the colder months, when park usage is lower.

One finding that merits further scrutiny is that some parks had much higher percentages of violent crime than others. Parks where more than 70 percent of the crimes were violent (mostly robbery and felony assault, with a very few rapes and murders) included Prospect Park, Fort Washington Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/fortwashingtonpark), Inwood Hill Park, Forest Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_forest_park/vt_forest_park.html) and Riverside Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_riverside_park/vt_riverside_park.html). On the other hand, only 35 percent of the crimes reported in Central Park were violent.

Making Parks Safer

Under the law, the city was supposed to expand the crime-tracking program to a total of 100 parks after one year, 200 parks after two years, and to all parks over one acre in size after three years. It has fallen behind this timetable, and the police department has not said when it would be able to meet it. New Yorkers for Parks called on the city to expand the program to 100 parks immediately and to all parks by 2010.

At a January hearing (http://webdocs.nyccouncil.info/attachments/81744.htm?CFID=1305024&CFTOKEN=57259353) before the City Council Public Safety committee, the police department said that it still did not have the technology needed to give information on more than the 20 parks in the pilot project. At present, park crimes are still entered into the system manually. Vallone, who chairs the committee, called the lack of progress "disappointing at the very least."

"We are trying to get the police to be a little more realistic and track parks that are most heavily used," he said.

The police department Web site (http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/crime_prevention/crime_statistics.shtml) posts crime data by precinct, but so far, information about crimes committed in parks is not available online. In its report, New Yorkers for Parks recommended that the parks department post park crime data on its Web site.

Vallone said that there is still a lack of communication between the police and the public. Referring to the discovery of a body in a pond in Flushing Meadows Park, which was part of a vicious crime wave (http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17699770&BRD=2731&PAG=461&dept_id=574902&rfi=6) for which two homeless teenagers were eventually arrested, he said, "It took a long time for police to alert the public" to a pattern in the crimes.

Beyond the need for more data, "Tracking Park Crime" focused on ways to keep the park safe. In particular, it called for the city to budget money for enough uniformed Parks Enforcement Patrol officers. They enforce park rules, such as prohibitions against adults using playgrounds, and issue summonses for health, traffic, sanitation and environmental violations. By keeping an eye on the parks, they also deter serious criminal activity. The report also suggested providing safety tips online and on signs in parks.

In his response (in PDF format) (http://www.ny4p.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=321), Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said the department would add information on safety practices to its Web site (http://www.nycgovparks.org/). Noting the importance of the Parks Enforcement Patrol, or PEP, in preventing crime, he said, "At the height of the season, we have over 800 uniformed staff in the parks, including full-time and seasonal PEP and Rangers, and fixed post enforcement officers. " He said that the parks department works closely with the police and has been reaching out to community organizations in an effort to design safer parks and deter crime.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/graphics/schwartz.jpg Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.

Copyright 2008 The Gotham Gazette.

brianac

May 25th, 2008, 06:49 AM

Time and Cost Rise for Parks at Yankee Stadium

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/25/nyregion/25park.span.jpg James Estrin/The New York Times
Anthony Santiago, left, and his twin brother, Christopher, playing in a temporary park at Jerome Avenue and East 161st Street.

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: May 25, 2008

The cost of replacing two popular parks where the new Yankee Stadium is being built has nearly doubled. At the same time, several of the eight new parks, which were supposed to be completed before the new stadium opens next spring, have been delayed by as much as two years, according to city documents.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/25/nyregion/0525-met-webPARKSmap.jpg The New York Times
Cost estimates for eight small parks around the new Yankee Stadium have almost doubled.

The price of the new small parks — which are to replace tennis and basketball courts, a running track and baseball and soccer fields eliminated to make way for the new stadium — is now projected to be $174 million, almost one-seventh the cost of the $1.3 billion stadium itself. The original estimate had been $95.5 million. The increase comes amid skyrocketing costs for construction projects, both public and private, around the city.
The stadium is being financed by the Yankees with city subsidies, while the eight new parks for the South Bronx, which range in size from 0.24 acre to 8.9 acres, are being paid for by the city.

None of the replacement parks have been completed, and construction on several has not yet started; however, the parks department has built a temporary replacement park on a parking lot in the area, opened a ball field this spring at a school almost a mile to the east, and is building a sports field at a recreation center about a mile to the north.

The city was required to build the new parks after it selected the 28.4-acre Macombs Dam Park and a portion of the 18.5-acre John Mullaly Park as the site of the new stadium in 2005. State and federal law dictated that a similar amount of parkland nearby of equal or greater fair market value be built to replace the parks that would be lost.

Some residents have been critical of the trade-off. While Macombs Dam and Mullaly Parks were almost contiguous stretches of grass and trees amid the concrete topography of the South Bronx, the replacement parks are small parcels scattered around the area. The sites include sports fields atop a planned stadium parking garage and a park along the Harlem River, which is on the opposite side of the Major Deegan Expressway.

The parks department has predicted a net increase of 2.14 acres of parkland in the swap, to 24.56 acres from 22.42 acres. But that has failed to quell some local disappointment.

“We’ve lost our biggest park, and what we’ve been reduced to is this parking lot,” said Anita Antonetty, 51, a South Bronx resident, referring to the temporary park at Jerome Avenue and East 161st Street. “We lost hundreds of trees that were 80 years old, and now there’s this monstrosity of cement across the street from where people live.”

The parks department gave the $95.5 million cost estimate for the replacement parks as part of the city’s final environmental impact study for the stadium project in August 2006.

In March, Adrian Benepe (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/adrian_benepe/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the parks commissioner, told the City Council parks committee that the figure had climbed to $190 million. Last week, Jama Adams, a department spokeswoman, put the cost estimate for the replacement parks at $174 million — about $16 million less than Mr. Benepe’s figure — but said that it might continue to grow. She said Mr. Benepe had spoken “off the top of his head.”

The estimated cost of the replacement parks now almost matches the amount the parks department has spent building and refurbishing parks and recreation centers throughout the Bronx over the past six years.

Since 2002, the agency has spent $178 million on parks and recreation centers in the borough, according to department figures.

Parks officials said the cost of the replacement parks had risen because of a series of unforeseen circumstances, including the discovery of buried oil barrels beneath one of the future parks and construction costs that have been rising 1.5 percent each month.

“This increase to city funds covers conditions we have recently encountered that simply could not be anticipated beforehand,” the department said in a May 12 report provided to The New York Times.

As part of a further explanation, Ms. Adams wrote in an e-mail message that “construction costs have continued to increase at a rate beyond what we anticipated, we have added new aspects to our projects, and we have learned new things about the sites that have affected our design and infrastructure work.”

Ms. Adams added that the cost of building the stadium had also increased, by about 60 percent, although Yankees officials have said the stadium will be completed on time next spring, even if the replacement parks are delayed.

Mr. Benepe declined to be interviewed for this article. Ms. Adams said it was typical for costs to increase as projects proceed from the design stage.

The parks department attributed the delays of as long as two years for the replacement parks to “unforeseen site conditions and new design aspects.”

The delays mean the neighborhood will go at least five years without some of its sports fields: Stadium construction in Macombs Dam Park started in 2006, and the permanent replacement park will not be completed until 2011.

The Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/adolfo_jr_carrion/index.html?inline=nyt-per), a supporter of the stadium project and the parks plan, said through a spokeswoman that he was briefed monthly by the parks department.

“As of today, the project remains on schedule,” the spokeswoman, Anne Fenton, said in an e-mail message last week. “We have made sure that the parks department is meeting on a regular basis with the community and addressing any concerns.”

But opponents of the stadium project said they are not surprised by the problems surrounding it.

“The real emphasis was on building a stadium for the Yankees, and the community and the parks were an inconvenient afterthought,” said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group. “The Yankees couldn’t miss a season, but it was O.K. for the community to miss five years of parkland and be shut out of a community benefits agreement.”

Under a community benefits program agreement between the Yankees and Bronx elected officials, intended to help mitigate the effects of the stadium construction, Bronx charities were to receive $800,000 annually once construction started. But only $11,500 of that money has been distributed so far, according to the group that administers the fund.

The temporary park at Jerome Avenue and 161st Street was meant to provide a measure of tranquillity and recreational space as the stadium construction opened last spring, but it was almost a year behind schedule, according to city documents. Now heavily used, it will be paved over for a stadium parking garage once the replacement parks are finished.

With the exception of Heritage Field, a park planned for the grounds of the existing Yankee Stadium, the city said in its 2006 environmental impact report that the replacement parks would be ready by next year.

“By 2009, all of the replacement parkland and recreational facilities would be constructed,” the report stated. Residents said parks officials told them at the time that the parks would be finished by April 2009, in time for opening day at the new stadium.

But the department now says that much of the work will not be finished until almost a year later, including a park that will house a permanent 400-meter running track, four basketball courts, a combination soccer and football field and eight handball courts.

Heritage Field, which will have three sports fields, has also been delayed nearly a year — from December 2010 to the fall of 2011. The park is expected to cost $50 million, a figure that includes the demolition of the existing Yankee Stadium, the parks department said.

Work on two other replacement parks — each smaller than a half-acre — which had been scheduled for completion by October 2007 will not begin until next month, the parks department said.

Another replacement park, a 5.8-acre parcel on the Harlem River waterfront that is expected to cost $56 million to build, was also scheduled to be finished by last October, but will not open until sometime in the winter of 2009, the department said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/nyregion/25parks.html?pagewanted=1&ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

lofter1

May 25th, 2008, 09:43 AM

The ony ones NOT surprised by the City's failure to make good on this deal seem to be the local residents.

It could be a hot summer in that section of the Bronx ...

brianac

May 25th, 2008, 02:00 PM

Yes Lofter, it's been a bad period for the City, having to break so many promises.

I only see it from a distance, I'm sure there are many more broken promises than the ones I read about.

lofter1

May 25th, 2008, 07:03 PM

Unfortunately the park replacement scheme around Yankees Stadium was a false promise from day one.

brianac

August 14th, 2008, 07:57 PM

August 14, 2008, 5:59 pm

Amid Troubles, 4 Bronx Parks Reopen

By Sewell Chan (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/schan/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/14/nyregion/story-533.jpg
Story Playground, named for a Supreme Court justice who died in 1845, was one of four sites in the Bronx that were reopened on Thursday after extensive renovations that included a new ball field. (Photos: New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)

The Croton Water Filtration Park, which is being built deep below Van Cortlandt Park, in the northern Bronx, is not only one of the costliest projects in the city’s history, but one of the most troubled (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/nyregion/11plant.html). Since the city agreed to the project in 1992, it has been plagued by delays (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9402E5DF1739F937A25751C1A9639582 60), cost overruns, community opposition (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05EFD61630F937A35750C0A9619582 60), accusations of bungled management and court decrees.

On Wednesday, Bronx residents were reminded that at least some good has come out of the project. The city formally reopened four newly renovated parks (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/X013/pressrelease/20532) in the Bronx. The money to rehabilitate the parks came from a $200 million fund set up through the city’s Municipal Water Finance Authority and its Department of Environmental Protection, which is building the filtration plant, to make up for the inconvenience and loss of parkland.

The projects fall into five categories: improving neighborhood parks, renovating regional recreation facilities, developing the Bronx Greenway, improving and expanding access to the Bronx waterfront, and “greening” the borough.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/14/nyregion/soundview-190.jpg
Soundview Park also reopened on Thursday.

At a series of successive ceremonies, officials unveiled $14 million worth of renovations to Story Playground (http://nycgovparks.org/parks/X204/highlights/11705), Soundview Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id=6355), Aqueduct Lands Playground and Devoe Park. The improvements include new play equipment, spray showers, basketball courts, seating, fencing and landscaping.

In a phone interview, Adrian Benepe, the commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation, praised the $200 million agreement. “It set an important new precedent, saying that if you must build an importance piece of infrastructure in city parks, it must be mitigated with new or improved parkland,” he said.

So far, the Parks Department has completed 21 of the 75 Croton-financed projects at a cost of more than $34 million. Construction has begun on 20 more projects, totaling more than than $62 million are in construction. There are also 34 additional projects in the design phase, totaling more than $99 million.

Along with Mr. Benepe, the officials taking part in today’s ceremonies included First Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris, State Senator Efrain Gonzalez Jr., Assemblymen Ruben Diaz Jr. and Jose Rivera, and Councilwoman Annabel Palma.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/amid-troubles-4-bronx-parks-reopen/

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

brianac

August 29th, 2008, 03:02 PM

Time Out New York / Issue 673 : Aug 20–26, 2008

Park Life

Bronx River Forest

1 hour from midtown

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/resizeImage/htdocs/export_images/673/673.x600.at.canoe.jpg?width=480
The Bronx River Forest used to be a hotbed for prostitutes, junkies and glory-hole seekers; nowadays you’re more likely to see a praying mantis than any illicit activities (at least in the daytime).

“People were afraid to go there,” says Anne-Marie Runfola, deputy director of the Bronx River Alliance. “When they hear Bronx River, they don’t associate it with an area that’s green and quiet. ”But thanks to a $3 million restoration project, completed in 2005, the park’s a whole new woman. An old cricket pitch was connected to the river, and visitors can navigate the floodplain via paths and boardwalks. The space is also home to more than 250 species of native flora and fauna, including the elusive red-tailed hawk.

Indiana Jones types can sign up for regular canoe trips (suggested donation $10–$25; bronxriver.org (http://bronxriver.org/)) or bike ride along the developing Bronx River Greenway. And if you forget to pack a picnic lunch, Runfola recommends Trinidad and Tobagonian takeout from nearby Feroza’s Restaurant Roti (716 Burke Ave between Cruger Ave and White Plains Rd, Bronx; 718-405-9081). So good is the grub, she stops there after every canoe trip.

Go there now! Take the D to Norwood–205th St; or the 2, 5 to Burke Ave. Call 718-430-4665 for more info.

— Roisin McGinn

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/own-this-city/51401/bronx-river-forest

Copyright © 2000–2008 Time Out New York

brianac

October 9th, 2008, 05:11 AM

The City’s Flowery Parks Turn a Danish Group Green

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/09/nyregion/09parks.600.jpg Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
A group of Danish parks department officials found the flowers and greenery at Prospect Park in Brooklyn very impressive.

By SUSAN DOMINUS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/susan_dominus/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: October 8, 2008

To its natives, New York may seem like a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But to a team of Danes from the Copenhagen parks department on a grand tour of New York’s best parks this week, everything appeared to be coming up roses. Or at least flowers.

“In your parks, you have so many more flowers than we do,” said Jon Pape, the director of the Copenhagen parks system, gesturing at a spray of buds in Hunts Point Riverside Park in the Bronx. “This is very expensive.”

In Copenhagen, flowering plants are particularly hard to maintain because pesticides are not used in the public parks. That pesticide-free policy may be the only way that Copenhagen parks could be considered more advanced than New York’s, in the opinion of Mr. Pape, whose parents were from the Bronx and Brooklyn. In the typical American mind’s eye, a Copenhagen park is a model of symmetry, grooming and order.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Pape, who brought 14 Danish parks employees and consultants to tour New York’s green jewels on Monday and Tuesday. “No, no, no — they aren’t pristine at all.”

That Copenhagen could have dirtier parks than New York seems to subvert the natural order of things — next we’ll start hearing that the Danes are also pushier in line and are even more insistent that they get better tables when they eat out.

But the public-private model of financing for parks that has helped New York’s green spaces thrive is a harder sell in Denmark, where high taxes quell spontaneous civic donations. The same goes for the challenge there in involving the community in maintenance, a cornerstone of such beautiful New York oases as Fort Tryon Park.

“People feel like, ‘I paid such high taxes, you do the work,’ ” Mr. Pape explained.

The Copenhagen visitors said that one of the biggest problems with parks in Denmark was the prevalence of graffiti. Mr. Pape, who saw the graffiti that marred New York’s parks in the early 1990s, was flabbergasted to see almost none on this visit.

“In Copenhagen, we see it more in the middle-class parks than the ones in very poor neighborhoods,” he noted.

Apparently hip-hop culture there, as here, has been adopted as street chic far outside the urban areas where it originated.

“Maybe they don’t have money for spray paint,” Mr. Pape said of the young men in less-affluent neighborhoods of Copenhagen. “Or they have other things on their mind. He said of graffiti: “In Denmark, there are a lot of officials who believe that it is an art form. They don’t want to come down too hard on it. There is no consensus that it is something we should eliminate.”

After their tour — Central Park and Morningside Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Barretto Point Park in the Bronx were among the stops — Mr. Pape and his team decided that they would try to create at least one graffiti-free park in Copenhagen, and measure how much use increased as a result of the cleaner environment (or the art-free environment, as some officials would have it).

Right now might not seem like the best time for Danish officials to be reaching out for big investments in public-private partnerships, but Mr. Pape said that his country’s economy appeared to be weathering the storm pretty well (with a caveat that he had been away from home for two weeks — two fairly eventful weeks for the world’s economy).

Steen Bisgaard, a landscape architect in the Danish group, said that of all the parks they visited, he liked Prospect Park best. All the new parks he saw were impressive and creative, he said, but he found there was something about all of that Brooklyn park’s “old trees” that gave it a remarkable atmosphere.

“You really feel that you’re going out of the city and into a small paradise,” Mr. Bisgaard said. “To build a beautiful park — that’s something that takes time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/nyregion/09parks.html?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

Merry

September 18th, 2009, 07:09 AM

:D

“How about a no-fly zone for pigeons?”

Some fashion faux pas should also have no placeSeptember 18, 2009

So the City Likes to Ban Things. How About These?

By C. J. HUGHES

Bob Visintainer sat in Washington Square Park on Wednesday cradling an acoustic guitar. Two days earlier, the city announced a plan to ban smoking at parks and beaches. Mr. Visintainer, strumming a D chord, said people smoking in parks was not something that bothered him.

But trash overflowing from garbage cans? That’s worth cracking down on.
“It has a foul odor, especially when it’s crowded, and the city doesn’t come and clean up,” Mr. Visintainer said, his nose reflexively wrinkled.

Some New Yorkers think that the city’s latest antismoking initiative will tread on civil liberties. Others think it could improve public health. But the people in Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, and Union Square Park seemed more intrigued by the idea of using a similar ban to prohibit other behavior in city parks that they found vexing or annoying.

Some suggestions, like Mr. Visintainer’s, seemed facetious, although if there is some truth in all jest, parkgoers have a lot of other things on their minds than the effects of secondhand fumes.

“How about a no-fly zone for pigeons?” said Miguel Pimentel, 34, a Verizon technician from the Pocono region of Pennsylvania, as he sat a table in Washington Square watching some gray-toned birds waddle close. “They’re disgusting.”

“True,” added Mike Perez, 37, of Rego Park, Queens. “If you’re sitting under a tree, having your lunch, and they happen to be above, accidents can happen.”

Some fashion faux pas should also have no place, said Victoria McNally, a sophomore at next-door New York University, as she did her Spanish homework on a nearby bench in Washington Square Park.

In particular, N.Y.U. first-year students should not be allowed to wear telltale lanyards affixed with keys and IDs around their necks, Ms. McNally said.

“It’s just kind of funny, because these 18-year-old kids are trying to look fashionable, like they’ve been here awhile,” said Ms. McNally, 19. “But they haven’t, and that’s how you know.”

While air quality might ostensibly be the reason for the city’s puff-free plan, noise pollution — from drums — is a greater concern, said Louis Seigal, 32, a photographer who sat hunched under an elm at a laptop. Snares, congas, djembes, it doesn’t matter — all it takes is one percussionist to “drown out any other musicians in the area,” Mr. Seigal said.

Similarly, cellphone blabber needs a timeout where people sit cheek by jowl, said Laurice Jamieson, a Minneapolis resident. She was in Union Square catching up with Dr. Ernest Lieber of the Upper East Side, whom she had met in 1945 when they were teenagers.

“They talk loudly, as if you care, and it’s offensive,” said Ms. Jamieson, who had no electronic devices in her lap, just a sandwich. “It’s another intrusion, like elevator music.”

Dr. Lieber nodded. “If you’re going to talk, talk for like two minutes, like ‘I’m sick’ or ‘Where’s the wine?’ ” he said. “That’s it.”

But for Bret Wellman, 21, a carpenter, the length of the conversation matters little; it’s how many four-letter words are in it.

“They should ban cursing, because there are ladies walking with their kids around here,” Mr. Wellman said as he sat in Union Square wearing paint-spattered work boots watching shoppers stroll past tables piled with amethyst.

In rural Michigan, where Mr. Wellman comes from, swearing in public is frowned upon, he said, “and if I use ‘construction language’ in the house and my aunt’s around, she’ll backhand me.”

While secondhand smoke may be harmful, a body blow from a bicycle is more immediately devastating, which is why Alex Davis, 25, a professional skateboarder from Ohio who was at Union Square (he was in New York to visit friends in Greenpoint, Brooklyn), would not mind keeping bicycles at bay.

“Yes, skateboards can shoot out and hit you in the ankle,” he said. But bikes “seem more dangerous, because you can’t get off them quickly.” As he spoke, a bike rider performed a gravity-defying balancing act a few steps away.

But then Mr. Davis seemed to amend his position, in a way that evoked the whole anti-park-smoking dilemma. “I guess there’s just not enough space to go around,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/nyregion/18parks.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Merry

September 19th, 2009, 03:43 AM

Bronx Parks Twofer: Concrete Plant Park & Ferry Point Park

September 16, 2009, by Lockhart

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From the department of flying way too low under the radar, here's our first look at the remade Concrete Plant Park in the Crotona Park section of The Bronx. A neighborhood activists' dream for the better part of the decade, the park occupies the site of an abandoned—yes—concrete plant, on the banks of the Bronx River between the Bruckner Expressway and Westchester Avenue (below). What makes this 2.7 acre park unique in the new-generation of NYC greenspace, however, is the degree to which the numerous industrial objects that defined the site have been kept and reworked into its fabric. The park apparently opened to the public earlier this month; while we plan to get our asses up there, anyone had a look around and want to shed more light?

http://curbed.com/uploads/2009_09_cpp.jpg

And now, from Concrete Plant Park, let's head to another Bronx waterfront site in the making...

http://curbed.com/uploads/2009_09_fpw1.jpg
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[Renderings courtesy Thomas Balsley Associates via A/N]

Meanwhile, further east by the Whitestone Bridge, is an even larger undeveloped waterfront space, Ferry Point Park. It's been in the news for most of this decade, too, as an ambitious plan to redevelop a large portion of the site into a golf course went nowhere. But now, reports the Architect's Newspaper, there's finally a plan for action. Behold the renderings for phase one of the park's waterfront makeover, designed by Thomas Balsley Associates (with 'comfort stations' by Karen Bausman + Associates), due for completion in 2013. The design emphasizes the park's connection to the land, going so far as descending parkgoers down literally to the edge of the East River. More info and renderings over at A/N.

Behold, the two new Bronx parks, in context:

http://curbed.com/uploads/2009_09_bronxparks.jpg

Concrete Plant Park Finally Open (http://www.bronxnewsnetwork.org/2009/09/concrete-park-finally-open.html) [Bronx News Network]
Friends of Ferry Point Park (http://www.ferrypointpark.org/) [ferrypointpark.org]

http://curbed.com/archives/2009/09/16/bronx_parks_twofer_concrete_plant_park_ferry_point _park.php

Merry

October 28th, 2009, 07:38 AM

Bronx gets lots more green with new park

BY Tanyanika Samuels

The Concourse Village neighborhood can now boast a new park - and what a park!

Parks Department officials last week debuted Mill Pond Park, 10 acres of waterfront recreation space and tennis courts along the Harlem River.

Sitting just north of E. 149th St., between the Gateway Center Mall and the river, the new park is the first significant city parkland opened on the Bronx side of the river, parks officials said.

"We are thrilled to bring increased green space and new, state-of-the-art recreational amenities to this community," Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said at last week's dedication.

As part of the Yankee Stadium Redevelopment Project, the city invested $64 million to transform the once-decayed industrial waterfront.

Along with waterfront views, the park includes picnic and grass areas, 16 tennis courts and an esplanade.

Other amenities include an outdoor classroom, children's spray showers and a sand play area. Landscaped plantings line the wheelchair-accessible pathways.

Parks will operate 16 tennis courts during the outdoor season, running until late November.

"I am happy to see that the promise of new parks surrounding Yankee Stadium is being realized," said Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. "This new park is a great addition to the Bronx, a place where our children, youth and seniors will be able to spend quality time engaged in athletics, having picnics or simply enjoying the beautiful view of the waterfront."

The Parks Department is reviewing responses to a Request for Proposals for a vendor to install a bubble over some of the tennis courts for winter season play.

Plans also are in the works to offer a year-round indoor/outdoor cafe.
In December, Parks plans to unveil the restored historic 25,800-square-foot Power House building in Mill Pond Park.

Ultimately, this LEED-certified building will include a green roof with plantings visible from the nearby Major Deegan Expressway, space on the first floor for Parks Department operations and a cafe.

The building is among the possible locations for a long-awaited Bronx Children's Museum.

No firm plans yet exist for the space, department officials said. The city is to seek a vendor to develop the 12,900 square feet of space on the building's second floor for public programming.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/bronx/2009/10/27/2009-10-27_bronx_gets_lots_more_green_with_new_park.html

lofter1

October 28th, 2009, 12:02 PM

From NYC Department of Parks ...

Parks Cuts Ribbon On Mill Pond Park Along Harlem River (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_newsroom/press_releases/press_releases.php?id=20879)

Mill Pond Park (https://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/nyy_stadium/html/nyy_redevelopment.html)

Construction Photos (https://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/nyy_stadium/html/nyy_redevelopment.html#updates)

The decayed industrial waterfront is being transformed into this new 10-acre park, the first significant park on the Bronx bank of the Harlem River in decades, with pedestrian esplanade, open green space, and sixteen tennis courts with waterfront views. Rehabilitated piers and slips and a new esplanade for strolling connect the park’s active recreation areas and a landscaped picnic area, with a children’s spray shower located next to a sand play zone. Landscaped plantings will line the accessible pathways throughout the park and Parks signage will interpret the history of the site.

Twelve of the sixteen tennis courts will be open year-round, as they are designed to allow for a bubbled enclosure. Parks released a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a concessionaire to install a bubble, operate the enclosed tennis courts during the winter season, and manage a year-round café, on April 8, 2009. The concessionaire will also have the option of constructing and operating a seasonal ice skating rink during the winter.

The restoration of the park’s historic 25,800-square-foot Power House includes a green roof visible from the Major Deegan and space on the first floor for Parks Department operations, a café operated by a future concessionaire, a locker room and a public restroom. The Parks Department will seek an operator to develop 12,900 square feet of programmable space on the building’s second floor.

Mill Pond Park, including the Power House, is expected to open Winter 2009/2010. The café in the Power House and the bubble-enclosed winter tennis courts will be open once a concessionaire has been selected through the RFP process.

BrooklynRider

October 28th, 2009, 04:31 PM

That Concrete Park is lovely and an great improvement over the ruins of the past. I wonder why there aren't more trees planted.

lofter1

October 28th, 2009, 11:28 PM

Merry

October 29th, 2009, 07:54 AM

Train's a rollin' for formerly closed Williamsburg park: New playground to include locomotives

BY Erin Durkin

October 29th 2009

http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/10/29/alg_river_state_park.jpg
The East River State Park in Williamsburg will soon have a revamped playground.

A Williamsburg (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Williamsburg+%28Brooklyn%29) park that was shuttered last winter to save money is faring better this season - it's getting a new playground.

Construction started this week on the playground at East River State Park (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/East+River+State+Park), which will open in the spring.

"It's not going to be the same cookie-cutter playground that's usually found in state parks," said Friends of East River State Park President Cathleen Breen. "It's going to be a green, innovative playground."

In addition to slides and swings, the space will feature all-wood structures, small hills for kids to roll down, a stream bed crisscrossed by bridges, and a "jumping flower" - a wooden structure with springs to bounce on - in the middle of a grove of trees.

And in a nod to the Kent Ave. park's past as a railyard, there will be a two-car wooden locomotive for kids to climb in.

It's a boon for the troubled waterfront oasis, which the state Parks Department shut down last winter to save money after getting hit with a $16.9 million budget cut, sparking outrage among residents and advocates.

State parks regional director Rachel Gordon (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Rachel+Gordon) said building the playground is the latest step in the development of the park, which has proceeded in fits and starts and kept residents waiting for years before it opened in summer 2007.

"We only had enough money to clean it up" at first, she said. "It had been sort of a local junkyard. We cleaned it up, we did some planting .... Little by little, as we're able to, we're adding amenities that the community wants."

The state Parks Department - still strapped for cash - is getting $60 million to build the playground from Juicy Juice (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Juicy+Juice), part of a $350 million project by the juice maker to build playgrounds at seven parks across the state.
"The government's cutting back in so many areas. We feel like it's an opportunity to give back," said marketing director Kim Peddle Rguem.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/10/29/2009-10-29_east_river_state_park_swinging_into_action_afte r_williamsburg_.html

brianac

March 3rd, 2010, 05:48 AM

March 2, 2010, 6:24 pm

A Park for Mr. Green

By NATASHA LENNARD (http://wirednewyork.com/author/natasha-lennard/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/03/02/nyregion/02park-cityroom/02park-cityroom-blogSpan.jpgNatasha Lennard for The New York Times
The future site of Andrew Haswell Green Park on the East River.

While the name Robert Moses (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_moses/index.html?inline=nyt-per) rings synonymous, for better or worse, with the shaping of modern-day New York City, Moses was hardly the metropolis’s first master planner.

Many historians, politicians and others believe Andrew Haswell Green, the 19th century civic leader and urban planner, to be the father of New York City as we know it. But while Mr. Moses lives on in posterity — with a Manhattan playground (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M158/), a bridge-authority administration building and even an upstate hydroelectric dam bearing his name – in the city, only the annals of history and a commemorative Central Park bench recognize Green’s contributions.

This will change, however when Andrew Haswell Green Park opens in a few years’ time along the Manhattan banks of the East River, from 60th to 63rd Streets.

“He was the architect of the consolidation of New York,” said Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. “He deserves more than a park bench.”

Community Board 8 approved the final phase (http://www.dnainfo.com/20100222/upper-east-side/upper-east-side-riverfront-park-gets-final-green-light) of the park project last Monday.

Although Green played instrumental roles in the building of Central Park and the establishment of the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his greatest achievement was the consolidation of the City of Greater New York, which took effect in 1898.

Green formed the so-called Imperial City from the earlier cities of Brooklyn, New York and Long Island City, and rural parts of Westchester, Richmond and Queens Counties.

“It took Robert Moses, Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt, drawing upon the combined resources of the federal, state and city governments to exceed Green’s accomplishment,” wrote Thomas Kessner, distinguished professor of history at City University New York Graduate School.

Green’s park, which will be build on vacant, industrial land over the F.D.R. Drive, is in its infancy. The City Council approved the project in 2006, but according to Mr. Stringer, it will take a couple of years before the park opens. Presently, a concrete dog run and a number of benches occupy the area, overshadowed by the Queensboro Bridge, and green space is sparse.

According to the co-chairwoman of the community board, Judy Schneider, the community support for the park has been overwhelming. The park is expected to be completed by 2012 (http://ourtownny.com/2010/02/17/coming-in-2012-andrew-haswell-green-park/).

The Manhattan borough historian, Michael Miscione, campaigned for more than a decade to raise awareness about Green, whom he calls the unsung 19th century master planner. Mr. Miscione fought fiercely for the new park to bear Green’s name. He described news of the park as “very gratifying” in an e-mail message to colleagues.

In the meantime, however, New Yorkers remain largely oblivious of the master planner’s contributions.

On Tuesday afternoon, mentions of Green’s name drew blank faces from pedestrians walking along the bank of the East River where the park will one day stand.

“I’ve never heard of him,” said Ben McGlinn, a musician who has lived in New York for more than 20 years. “It seems I should have if he did so much.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/a-park-for-mr-green/

Copyright 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

Merry

March 4th, 2010, 07:34 AM

See the future of Fresh Kills

By Glenn Nyback

March 03, 2010

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- From garbage dump to picturesque, recreational hub.

City planners have bold plans for Fresh Kills, labeled one of the great regional parks of the 21st century.

Have trouble seeing that grand vision? Then set aside 90 minutes to see for yourself.

The Parks Department is again opening up the 2,200-acre West Shore site for guided tours between April and November, led by Urban Park Rangers and Freshkills Park staff.

The largest park developed in New York City in more than 100 years, Freshkills Park will provide a wide range of recreational opportunities, ecological restoration and cultural and educational programming that promote environmental sustainability and a renewed public concern for the human impact on the Earth.

Tour guides will discuss the site's history, engineering and landscape design, including the abundant flora and fauna that are returning to the area. The tour will take visitors to the tops of two of the site's four large landfill mounds, offering expansive views of the site and views of downtown Manhattan and all four Staten Island bridges.

In addition, tour participants will learn about the four near-term projects: North Park, with its panoramic landscape overlooking the Travis neighborhood and the tidal creeks of the adjacent William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge; South Park, offering a network of walking and biking trails leading to the top of Little South Mound; Schmul Park, an existing playground that will be renovated into a colorful recreation site, and the Owl Hollow Fields, the Parks Department announced.

Tours are free of charge and are open the public but seating is limited. To register or to learn about private group tour options, visit the Web site (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/fresh_kills_park/html/fresh_kills_park.html) or call 311.

http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/see_the_future_of_fresh_kills.html

Merry

April 18th, 2010, 02:45 AM

Sunday in the Park, Feeling Nature’s Call

By ARIEL KAMINER

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Bethesda Fountain

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Bryant Park

slide show (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/04/18/nyregion/18ctiric-ss_index.html)

The birds and the bees are in full view across New York’s parks these days, but when it comes to another fact of life, the signs can be a little less obvious. In Central Park, where a generous conservancy has attended to every landscaped inch, many maps posted along the way say nothing about any of the 19 free restrooms scattered across its 843 acres.

“If you’ve got to go to the bathroom, you might have to walk a mile,” warned Colm O’Connell, a park plumber whom I ran into as I was wandering around looking.

“Some people don’t want to do that. They want to go behind a tree. They ask me, ‘Can I go?’ ” He laughed. “I’m not a cop, I’m a plumber.”

Without plumbing, cities could not exist, and without public facilities, people couldn’t navigate those cities — they would be, as the scholar Clara Greed has written, “tethered close to home by the bladder’s leash.” So if an army travels on its stomach, you might say a city travels on its bladder. Why, then, is it so difficult to find a good restaurant on the front lines, or an open restroom in New York City?

A number of community-minded citizens have compiled maps (first on paper, now online at sites like sitorsquat.com and nyrestroom.com) of where New Yorkers on the go can go. My mother’s advice: hotel lobbies. And there’s always Starbucks.

Public parks present a special challenge. With no Starbucks around, you must attend to intimate needs while in the company of strangers, try to stay clean in a place designed to attract cooties, take shelter in an island of privacy to which the entire city has access.

These paradoxes are nowhere more evident than in the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, where Caterpillar tractors fill the air with churning grunts and cautionary beeps, and where visitors relieve themselves as all of Lower Manhattan watches. That’s the way it feels, anyhow. Still under construction, the park, for now, offers three portable toilets positioned on a flat expanse of green just yards from the waterfront. They have a stunning view of the financial district. And vice versa.

On the other hand, privacy is not an issue in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx — at least not in the restrooms in the park’s southwest corner. Follow the hulking concrete bleachers until you find an inlet. Walk through the unobtrusively marked door, down a flight of stairs, around a corner, past a service window for an office no longer in use, through an empty industrial-beige corridor, to a small sign indicating, by way of an arrow, the direction to Locker Room No. 2, the Female Comfort Station.

Preceded by a tall, empty chamber roomy enough for cocktails for 50, the equally empty toilet area is the very definition of discreet. If a user found herself in need of assistance, female comfort could be a long time coming.

The city’s parks include hundreds of spots to heed nature’s call, each with its own character: the splendid isolation of the north end of Meadow Lake in Queens, where the sparkling new restrooms are surrounded by cherry trees, but not people; the user-friendliness of the Picnic House in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the basement hallway leading to the toilets includes soda machines and a newspaper stand, in case you decide to stick around for a while; the mechanical weirdness of the high-tech pay toilet in Madison Square Park, intended as the first of many and now stranded like a lost visitor from another planet. But none can compare to the grace, the elegance, the downright untoiletness of the public restroom in Bryant Park.

Your first hint is the enormous arrangement of fresh flowers. Accompanying me there recently, Harvey Molotch, the New York University professor who edited the forthcoming volume “Toilet: The Public Restroom and the Politics of Sharing,” called those flowers “an act of deliberate vulnerability, which signals that something is right about this place.” Think of it as the opposite of the “broken windows” theory in criminology: when people see that such care has been taken with something so perishable and lovely, they start to treat the place with care themselves. The wood and marble finishes help too, as do the attendants who are right there at all times, wiping counters and replacing toilet paper rolls. And just in case, the seats are covered in a thin plastic sheath that automatically refreshes itself after each use.

Professor Molotch sees in all this an effort to allay anxieties — about the presence of semi-naked strangers, about the possibility of sex or crime, about the position of an individual in a crowd. “The cleanliness and the high standard of the maintenance signal that not only is something right about the restroom,” he said, “but something is right about the park, and by extension the city.”

Mr. O’Connell, the Central Park plumber, is partial to the facilities at Bethesda Fountain, and it’s not hard to see why. On a recent afternoon, a group of break dancers was playing early Michael Jackson a few steps up from the toilets, while a few steps down, a crowd gathered for a stirring Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 2. It was a spontaneous mash-up with wonderful acoustics — a great show all around. I can’t say I had much of a view, but I had a great seat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/nyregion/18critic.html

dpny

April 19th, 2010, 08:26 PM

You might want to ask Mayor Mike and the Yankees about the slow pace of parks that were promised (http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/bronx/2009/10/13/2009-10-13_waiting_to_play_ball.html) to be ready and done by now ...

I will only grudgingly give Bloomberg credit for two things: parks and bike lanes. And even those he's managed to mess up.

ZippyTheChimp

May 27th, 2010, 12:29 PM

Parks and Wrecked?

By Eliot Brown
May 24, 2010 | 6:56 p.m

On May 17, Governor Paterson and several other officials and community leaders assembled on Manhattan's West Side for a ribbon cutting at Hudson River Park, the 5-mile-long strip of green space, converted piers and bike lanes along the Hudson River. They were on hand to christen the new (and growing) park's latest section, a 9-acre run that has a new skate park and gardens near West 24th Street.

It is, indeed, the season of parks: Earlier this spring, the long-planned Brooklyn Bridge Park opened its first section, a large pier; and the year-old High Line elevated park that runs through Chelsea is laying materials for its second phase, to open next year.

There's just one little nagging detail with these expanding parks: There's not enough money to fund their upkeep, and, for the most part, no one quite knows where it will come from.

All three parks were held up as gems of an economic development agenda in New York, as, theoretically, they were to be self-sustaining or close to it, with the private sector to pay for the ongoing operations. Yet the situation is one of classic overreach, as the administrations of Mayor Bloomberg and three governors put their faith in the panacea concept of the public-private partnership, pledging a win-win for all involved. The logic ran like this: New parks would be built; creative planning would open the floodgates to money from the private sector to fund maintenance year after year; and public balance sheets would be spared. The reality is far less heartwarming. The city and state are now grasping to find ways to make the parks work in the long term and are finding no answers that pass muster with the local communities and elected officials whose sign-off is needed. With this question mark hanging overhead, the fact that the groundbreakings continue-money continues to go into expansion-looks to be something of a reckless move, as officials are betting that some unspecified solution will indeed materialize at some future date.

THE PREDICAMENT IS best embodied by Hudson River Park, the sliver of a waterfront sward that runs from downtown to Hell's Kitchen. When the park was first authorized in 1998, it was expected that the state and city would pay the upfront construction costs, and the park would pay for its own operations and maintenance, totaling $15 million annually, with rent from a few private developments within its borders, including Chelsea Piers.

But the largest development site in the park, the 15-acre Pier 40 by West Houston Street-which was to bring in the bulk of the revenue-has proved a headache for all involved. Two proposed private developments that would pay the needed money have fallen flat. The latest failed proposal, an entertainment-focused project, courtesy of the Related Companies, fell flat when the local community loathed the thought of what is now a parking garage and sports field being turned into a tourist trap. No other viable options have presented themselves, and now revenue is decreasing as the crumbling roof is increasingly cutting down on the amount of parking at the pier.

The pier is also on its way to falling into the Hudson, as the piles are in great need of repair. Connie Fishman, president of the Hudson River Park Trust, estimates a cost of $55 million to repair the pier's supports and its roof.

This year, the park's operating budget is showing a deficit of more than $1 million, a gap that will likely continue or grow in future years, as a small reserve fund dwindles.

"We are exploring any option that anybody with a reasonable amount of intelligence can help us with," Ms. Fishman said of Pier 40. "We're at that stage where we have to do anything we can to figure out where we go to get some money to deal with, at the very least, the parking, which is a big revenue generator."

A BLOCK AND a half to the east and 30 feet above ground, a similar funding gap looms.

The widely embraced and tremendously popular onetime rail trestle that is the High Line needs some $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually to operate and maintain, just over a million of which comes from the city, per an agreement between the Bloomberg administration and nonprofit operator Friends of the High Line.

Private fund-raising is not easy to come by; retail and concessions on the line would fill only a portion of that gap; and a proposal last summer by the Friends group to tax local businesses was met with strong distaste by many, and so the proposal was dropped.

And on the East River next to Dumbo, the Bloomberg administration is plodding away at construction on the $350 million Brooklyn Bridge Park, the new waterfront parkland rising on former warehousing piers. Like Hudson River Park, the city and state agreed to pay for the construction but not long-term operations, which were to be funded by new development along the piers.

But none of that development has started yet, and the bulk of the revenue-some $7.6 million a year from planned housing-is up in the air, as the local state senator, Dan Squadron, has long opposed its development and would have to sign off on its construction. (The Bloomberg administration has said it would not proceed with building out the rest of the park until this issue is resolved, leaving the Brooklyn park on more stable fiscal footing than the other two.)

The Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation's president, Regina Myer, estimates there are three to four years of reserves available before the park must begin receiving money from new developments. As for the timing on the development of the nonhousing uses (retail and hotel), Ms. Myer did not set a specific time, suggesting the market was still too weak to allow a new development now.

"Over the next several years, we will pursue those development sites," she said.

"The financial model is viable, but it's work," Ms. Myer said of the park, "and working over various economic cycles is the challenge."

ebrown@observer.com

Merry

July 3rd, 2010, 03:18 AM

Digging into the Past of New York Parks

Katherine Lindstedt
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4119/4748946307_7fbabfd973.jpg
Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx (Photo: Malcolm Pinckney)

Most New Yorkers have an intimate relationship with the city’s many parks, especially during summer months when public events transform our favorite green spaces into temporary yoga studios and music venues. It can be easy to forget the industrial past of these urban oases, or the planning work and earth-sculpting toil responsible for the conversion of reservoirs and jails into Bronx parks and West Village gardens. Before They Were Parks, an exhibition presented by the New York City Parks Department, narrates the often untold history of the city’s open spaces.

Curated by Jonathan Kuhn, Parks’ director of art and antiquities, the exhibit features over 100 vintage and contemporary photographs from the department’s photo archive, along with other artifacts and memorabilia, including an 18th-century grave marker from the cemetery on the site of present-day Washington Square Park.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/4749589244_42e53f7ee6.jpg
Henry I. Stetler Warehouse and Comfort Station (now Bleecker Street Playground), 1959
(Courtesy New York City Parks Photo Archive)

The show explores the visual transformations of former industrial and commercial sites into green spaces, and also examines these changes from a civic perspective. “The exhibit highlights the intrepid efforts of individuals and government officials to transform industrial, forbidden, or private areas of the urban landscape into public parkland,” Parks & Recreation commissioner Adrian Benepe said in a release.

Before They Were Parks is free to the public and on display (http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_things_to_do/attractions/public_art/arsenal_gallery/pa_arsenal_gallery.html) through September 9 at the Arsenal Gallery, at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue in Central Park—where swamps, bluffs, and rocky outcroppings stood over a century and a half ago, of course.

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/8126

Merry

July 9th, 2010, 12:44 AM

Gruesome.

Derelict Greenwich Village Playground Slated for $1.5 Million Facelift

http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2010_07_R477_HOLD_FOR_PARKS_DEPT_FAC T_MINETTA_PLAYGROUND_15M.jpg

http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2010_07_R5670_HOLD_FOR_PARKS_DEPT_FA CT_MINETTA_PLAYGROUND_15M.jpg

slide show (http://dnainfo.com/20100708/manhattan/derelict-greenwich-village-playground-slated-for-15-million-facelift)

GREENWICH VILLAGE — A dilapidated 75-year-old children’s playground in Greenwich Village, better known these days as a hangout for the homeless and rats, is about to undergo a highly-anticipated makeover. Minetta Playground, which first opened in 1935 on West 3rd Street and Avenue of the Americas, will undergo a $1.5-million makeover when construction breaks ground later this month.

“It’s great news that it’s getting cleaned up, so hopefully not just children, but also the elderly and other community members, can use it more,” said mom Amy McDermott, 36, who has lived in the Village for nearly two decades. “It’s been kind of abandoned and decrepit as long as I can remember.”

Crews have cordoned off the area and have been taking out old playground equipment. Crews are also tackling the rodent problem — as indicated by signs that warn of rat poison use.

Renovation plans for the park include new swings, additional lighting, spray showers, a play house, deck pathway, new benches, game tables and extensive landscaping, according to the Parks Department.

“Thank goodness it’s finally getting renovated,” said Sally Hines, 42, who works down the block as a home healthcare aide, but wouldn’t dream of taking her clients for a break to Minetta Playground. “That playground was horrible, dirty and filthy. I never went in and I never would.”

A spokeswoman for the Parks Department said the makeover will increase safety in the playground with new equipment and a more "visually-open" play space.

“Over the years we’re gotten a lot of the local parks renovated, and this one was left for last,” said Tobi Bergman, chair of the Parks Committee for Community Board 2, which oversees the Village. “It’s good that this is finally happening. It was an ugly, huge rat maze.”

A groundbreaking ceremony originally scheduled for last month has now been slated for July 19.

The playground is slated to be finished next summer.

http://dnainfo.com/20100708/manhattan/derelict-greenwich-village-playground-slated-for-15-million-facelift#ixzz0t9VlGEvo

NYatKNIGHT

July 9th, 2010, 11:14 AM

That playground is next to a McDonalds and it sported a giant and very creepy Ronald McDonald painted on its facade forming the back of the park. They recently painted over it, thankfully, it was so ugly.

Merry

October 15th, 2010, 10:02 PM

New York’s Tiny Squares Offer Breathing Room

By JAKE MOONEY

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/realestate/10172010-squares/10172010-squares-01a.jpg
Jackson Square

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Staus Park

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Verdi Square

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/realestate/10172010-squares/10172010-squares-10a.jpg

slide show (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/10/15/realestate/20101017_COVER.html?ref=realestate#1)

ABINGDON SQUARE PARK, a 0.222-acre triangle of greenery in the West Village, is not a place that requires much time for exploration. A lap of its curving byways, around a manicured garden island, takes just a minute or two. Indeed, most everyone there on a recent sunny Saturday was partaking in the square’s main day-to-day activity: sitting on benches.

Yet that is a pleasure, devotees say, that should not be understated. For neighbors of the park it is a place to read, to sit quietly in the shade, to meet friends and in general to retreat from the busy streets just a few steps away. The advantages of life near a big park, with acres of forest and lawn, are well known and well chronicled. But living on a square like Abingdon, or any of a handful of other patches of greenery tucked in around New York, is a more intimate and private experience.

“It’s a wonderful place to just go and collect your thoughts and think about current projects,” said Michael Neville, an artist and composer who has lived for 33 years on Bank Street, about a block from Abingdon Square (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M001/). “The plantings, the landscape and the whole environment is just so beautiful and calming.”

All that, real estate brokers say, means apartments and houses on green spaces, even very small ones, sell or rent for a premium. Peter Comitini, a vice president of the Corcoran Group, said the appeal of places like Duane Park (https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M025/) in TriBeCa, where he recently sold a three-bedroom co-op unit, was largely visual.

“It creates a little more room to breathe between you and the next closest building,” Mr. Comitini said, “and I think that has value right there.”

Besides interesting locations — squares tend to be in places where the urban grid breaks down, like Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side near Broadway and Lower Manhattan — Mr. Comitini said units near squares had built-in advantages.

“They offer greater light and views, and those are things that are at a premium in the city,” he said. “The stuff that doesn’t sell is the stuff that faces a dark shaftway in the back, and this is the polar opposite of that.”

People in search of a unit on a square have a range of options. Some vest-pocket parks, like Verdi Square (https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M097/), at West 73rd Street and Broadway, are bustling and vibrant. Others, like Jackson Square (https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M044/), just northeast of Abingdon at Eighth and Greenwich Avenues, are shady and placid. Most are in Manhattan, where open space is rarest, but there are exceptions, like Cobble Hill Park (https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/B326/), on Verandah Place in Brooklyn, a 0.585-acre site where a neighborhood petition drive in the 1960s defeated plans for an apartment building.

Two-family town houses there have sold in recent years for $2.2 million or more.

Straus Park (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M085/), at Broadway and 106th Street in Manhattan, is named for the department store mogul Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, both of whom perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Among the visitors to the park on a recent afternoon were a man eating lunch, a mother and child blowing bubbles, and a pigtailed girl jumping rope.

Across Broadway, at 272 West 107th Street, two condominium units that look out over the park are for sale. One is 15C, with three bedrooms and two and a half baths, on the market for $2.75 million, and listed by Lisa Lippman and Scott Moore at Brown Harris Stevens. It has a large eat-in kitchen, and its balcony and floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room look out to the Hudson River. The square is far below; the treetops look like a welcome mat of greenery.

Also on the Upper West Side, but on a much busier corner, is 200 West 72nd Street, a new rental building that faces Verdi Square. The focal point of that square is a subway station, served by the No. 1 local and the Nos. 2 and 3 express trains. Gray’s Papaya is on one side of Broadway, Urban Outfitters on the other, and the building has a Trader Joe’s on the ground floor.

The building’s unit closest to the action is 3H, a two-bedroom two-bath apartment that Cody Moore, an agent in the leasing office, said was available for $9,800 a month. Its tall windows, at treetop level, afford a dizzying perch for people-watching: the sidewalks are a constant stream of pedestrians. Apartment 15E, with three bedrooms and two and a half baths, is at a greater remove, but it has an 830-square-foot terrace from which it is possible to hear a saxophone player in the square. Monthly rent, Ms. Moore said, is $18,000.

Greenacre Park (http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/north-america/united-states/new-york/new-york-city/42645/greenacre-park/attraction-detail.html), on 51st Street between Second and Third Avenues, is not a square like the others, formed by the intersection of multiple streets. Instead, it is in a small notch of land at midblock, owned and maintained by the private Greenacre Foundation. Started by the Rockefeller family (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/rockefeller_family/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the foundation maintains a small concession stand, a handful of tables and chairs, and the park’s centerpiece, a tiered waterfall 25 feet high.

The waterfall is audible through open windows in some units of the redeveloped condominium building just west of the park, at 211 East 51st Street (http://www.211east51.com/). The view of the park from 6F and 7F, one-bedroom units on the eastern side of the building, is mostly of the tops of honey locust trees. But along with the units’ white-oak floors and marble counters, the waterfall is a sort of amenity: a very large white-noise generator. Both units are listed by Josephine LaPietra at H. Justin Realty, 6F for $1.075 million and 7F for $1.095 million.

Greenacre Park has looked very much the same since it was founded in 1971, but many of the city’s squares are only recently coming into their own after decades of disuse and deferred maintenance. Abingdon Square is one: it was the beneficiary of a renovation between 2000 and 2004 and is now maintained by the nonprofit Abington Square Alliance, to which some of the surrounding buildings contribute a monthly per-unit fee.

Jackson Square, with an even more recent renovation, is another. It has free wireless Internet, courtesy of an adjacent new condominium building at 122 Greenwich Avenue. Michelle MacLachlan, a resident of 122 Greenwich, says she goes to the square to read, sip coffee or do a bit of work. Ms. MacLachlan, who is 25 and works as a broker in the financial industry, describes the open space as precious.

“You don’t think of that when you live in New York,” she said. “You don’t feel like that ever exists.” It is, she added, quite different from the woodsier setting around her native Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s crazy how people will get so excited about 10 trees in a square,” she said.

Ms. MacLachlan, who lives on the Eighth Avenue side of her building, said some neighbors had paid extra to face the square.

The curving glass building, also known as One Jackson Square (http://www.onejacksonsquare.com/), has several available units on the park. One of them, 6D, a two-bedroom three-bath, is listed with Heather Cook of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group at $6.35 million; it has a 319-square-foot terrace overlooking the square across Greenwich Avenue. A bedroom, which has floor-to-ceiling windows and one of two wood-burning fireplaces, offers an even more dramatic view.

The building’s penthouse is also available. It has four bedrooms and a private roof deck with a pool and an outdoor kitchen. It is listed at $21.75 million, also through Ms. Cook.
A short walk to the south, Unit 3C at 302 West 12th Street, a one-bedroom condo, is more humble. It has a wood-burning fireplace and access to a leafy common roof deck, but its fixtures are relatively drab. Still, it faces Abingdon Square, and is on the market for $1.395 million, listed through Robert Browne at the Corcoran Group.

Lee Zimmerman, another Corcoran broker, is a founder of the Abingdon Square Alliance and lives in the building. One of the best things about the area, Mr. Zimmerman said, is getting to know the neighborhood characters who frequent the square.

One is Philip Thompson, 81, who has lived nearby on Jane Street since 1965. Mr. Thompson’s name appears on a bench in the square: He dedicated a plaque to his longtime partner, Alex Szogyi, who died in 2007. They used to sit there together, and in recent years, Mr. Thompson said, the green space has provided solace.

“When you’re sharing your apartment with somebody for so many years, the loneliness is very difficult,” he said. “So just to be surrounded by the trees and flowers — all of a sudden you’re chatting with somebody.”

Mr. Zimmerman said he knew that feeling of reflection from the many hours he had spent in the square.

“It’s not Central Park; it’s not Prospect Park; it’s not Battery Park,” he said. “You kind of lose yourself in those kinds of parks. In the smaller parks, you find yourself.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/realestate/17cov.html

lofter1

October 16th, 2010, 01:09 AM

An Oasis Beckons in a Spot Once Used by Trash Trucks

http://www.gothamist.com/attachments/Jen%20Chung/2005_10_canalpakdrawing.jpg
(Gothamist)

http://www.gothamist.com/attachments/Jen%20Chung/2005_10_canalpark.jpg
(Gothamist)

The park, at the corner of Canal and West Streets in TriBeCa, has actually been a public space of some sort since King James II of England ceded the parcel to the city in 1686, one year after his coronation. After many incarnations - public square, public market, a viewing garden - the space was designated a park in 1870 and redesigned in 1888 by Calvert Vaux, a designer of Central Park, and Samuel Parsons Jr.

Canal Park, 1893:

11159

Merry

November 17th, 2010, 06:58 AM

Titanic Park Reopens in Financial District Following Renovations

By Julie Shapiro

The park features a lighthouse dedicated to the 1,517 Titanic victims.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2010_11_R6205_TITANIC_PARK_REOPENS11 162010.jpg

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FINANCIAL DISTRICT — Titanic Park reopened to the public last week after an 11-month renovation.

The small triangular park at Pearl and Fulton streets has new oval seating area, bluestone sidewalks and tidal grasses that recall the area’s history as Manhattan’s shoreline. In the spring, a water feature will run over the park’s colored concrete and river stones.

"It looks like a little oasis," said Julie Brunner Cross, 40, a Brooklyn resident, as she passed through the park at the entrance to the South Street Seaport Monday afternoon.
Her friend, Kerstin Krall, 38, agreed.

"It’s a beautiful place to sit and read a book," Krall said.

The $917,000 renovation, funded by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the city Economic Development Corp., also included necessary infrastructure upgrades.

The most prominent feature of the park, a lighthouse commemorating the 1,517 people killed when the Titanic sank, remains in place.

Just .15 acre in size, Titanic Park is located on what was once an oyster-rich tidal zone occupied by Native Americans. As Manhattan’s shoreline expanded eastward, buildings went up on the site of the park, but they were later torn down to widen the adjacent streets, the Parks Department said.

The more recent incarnation of Titanic Park opened in the 1970s, when the large lighthouse monument arrived. Previously, the lighthouse memorial, dedicated the year after the Titanic sank, sat atop the Seamen’s Church Institute building nearby. The metal sphere at the top of the lighthouse dropped every day at noon so that sailors in New York Harbor could tell the time.

http://www.dnainfo.com/20101116/downtown/titanic-park-reopens-financial-district-following-renovations#ixzz15XIJ8OH8

Ninjahedge

November 19th, 2010, 09:10 AM

It's nice... but that took 11 months?

lofter1

November 19th, 2010, 04:25 PM

It's all the underground stuff that takes so long -- mainly replacing & reconfiguring plumbing / drainage, which can be circa 1800s in many parts of downtown.

Unless it's Petrosino Square (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20664&p=328947&viewfull=1#post328947) where we're still waiting for some cut granite from CHINA! Didn't know we have no granite of our own.

ablarc

November 26th, 2010, 08:49 AM

Our granite costs more because it isn't quarried by convicts and children.

infoshare

November 26th, 2010, 10:31 AM

The laws of nature (in this case the law of inertia) will ultimately have the final word.

Their was a 100 year ‘cover-up’ (http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-51664520100922)about the sinking of the Titanic; so I wonder how many folks know the ‘true’ story.

A little know fact is that the Titanic went down due to a simple ‘blunder’: once the iceberg was spotted (in ample time to avoid it) the steersment turned the ship ‘toward’ the iceberg – rather then away.

Once the error was detected - within minuites - it was too late. The 'massive' ship had already gained too much momentum to correct the error in the ships direction; resulting in the collision.

Interesting story, and one that I hope will be included in the ‘exibit’.

http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-51664520100922

Another link: Captains Blog. (LOL)
http://www.colinhilton.com/2010/09/titanic-error.html

ZippyTheChimp

November 26th, 2010, 11:41 AM

We'll have dueling books in 2012.

The great-granddaughter of the titanic helmsman Robert Hichins, Sally Neillson is preparing to release Hard-a-Starboard on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking. This refers to the famous order depicted in several Titanic films; starboard is right, but the ship turns left - to port.

This seems confusing today, but in 1912, steering was given in tiller orders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiller#Tiller_orders), derived from sailing ships. Although, as Louise Patten notes, the "world was moving from sailing ships to steam ships," the mechanical transition to "rudder steering" had begun in the 1890s, and tiller orders remained in effect in the UK and US until after 1930. 1912 was not a transitional period.

Accounts have placed Patten's grandfather, 2d officer Charles Lightoller, asleep in his cabin at the time the iceberg was sighted, so he wasn't a witness to events on the bridge.

Doubtful that this "wrong turn" will be proven or dis-proven, but it'll sell books.

Merry

November 30th, 2010, 07:36 AM

A Thousand Drops of Light in Madison Square Park

Branden Klayko

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/scattered_light_01-500x323.jpg (http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/10481/scattered_light_01)
Scattered Light installation by Jim Campbell
(Photo by James Ewing courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy)

Upon first stumbling across this massive array of 2,000 LED lights encased in standard light bulbs in Madison Square Park a few weeks ago, I thought holiday decoration had come a little early to the Flatiron’s front yard, but as shadowed figures began moving across the field of light, it became apparent that this installation by artist Jim Campbell (http://www.jimcampbell.tv/) was something special.

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/scattered_light_02-500x334.jpg (http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/10481/scattered_light_02)

Situated on Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn, Scattered Light consists of a three-dimensional grid of light spanning roughly 80 feet by 16 feet and standing 20 feet tall. When viewing the installation from the front, programmed LED lights flicker in sequence to create the illusion of shadows walking through the park. Moving around the artwork causes the image to blue and abstract as the grid moves in and out of focus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xnI8p5xGPg

See article for various other videos (http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/10481)

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/10481

GordonGecko

November 30th, 2010, 04:24 PM

http://i51.tinypic.com/v7t85f.jpg

To me, one of the most interesting "parks" in the city is the Collect Pond Park in lower Manhattan. It's been in the news this year for a major rat infestation problem because of what lies beneath. It sits on top of what was left of the historic Collect Pond. Initially in the 1800's this was a waterfront playground for the wealthy, then became so polluted by industry that the rich moved out.

In an attempt to fix the pollution, the Pond was drained in a canal which, you guessed it, became Canal Street. Little did they know that underground streams existed and just refilled the Pond as it drained. So they backfilled it and the poor moved into what becaame the Five Points slum. The underground streams still exist below collect pond park, and I can only imagine what else lies there...

MidtownGuy

December 1st, 2010, 03:37 AM

I saw the Madison Sq. Park light installation in the daytime but had no idea what it "did" once the lights were on. I'll definitely have to pass by at night.

brianac

February 3rd, 2011, 09:27 AM

Morningside Park Renovation Plan Will Add Green Space Updated 90 mins ago

February 3, 2011 6:49am

The northern end of the Olmstead-designed park will get a new playground and more greenery.

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110203/manhattan/morningside-park-renovation-plan-make-green-space-more-park-like#ixzz1CtzK4VG0

http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2011_02_R2507_mornigsidepark020211.j pg
Morningside Park at 118th Street. (Courtesy Friends of Morningside Park)

By Jeff Mays
DNAInfo Reporter/Producer

HARLEM — Morningside Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the same duo who designed Central Park.
But the park, known for its vistas overlooking Harlem (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/morningsidepark), hasn't always gotten the same respect as its famous cousin, falling into disrepair and developing a reputation for being unsafe. But now that the Parks Department is set to start a two-phase renovation plan for the northern end of the park, residents are hoping that will change.

"We recognize that unlike Central Park we don't have a lot of private funds coming in," said Brad Taylor, a board member and former president of Friends of Morningside Park (http://morningsidepark.org/), a group devoted to park upkeep that tried 11 years ago to start a renovation project. "We can't raise tens of millions of dollars like they do.

When it comes to public dollars, we understand these things take time."

http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_lrgimage_2011_02_R1509_mornigsidepark020211. jpg
Children at a gathering in Morningside Park. (Courtesy Friends of Morningside Park)

The Parks Department was expected to unveil its plans Wednesday night for renovating the northern end of the park from West 121st to West 123rd streets. The changes include renovating the playground, handball courts, basketball courts and water spray area. Entrances and pathways will also be improved along with new plantings.

Taylor said the northern end of the park has a lot of asphalt.

"The overall goal at the north end is to make it more park-like. Now, it has high metal fences and looks like the 1940s recreation center that it is," he said. "Our goal is to make it more park-like and more green and get it closer to the Olmsted design."

Given the park's designation as a historic landmark in 2008, the Parks Department will also have to seek approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Parks spokesman Philip Abramson said several improvements have taken place at the park over the years. The playground at West 116th Street was renovated in 2006.

New gardens greet visitors to the park at five of its entrances and a rare, 25 foot tall sequoia tree was donated in 2009 by a nursery in Portland, Ore. It sits at West 121st Street with 32 other pine trees. A dog run and a seasonal farmers market now helps draw people to the park.

New development is also sprouting on Morningside Avenue, and Taylor said the park is benefitting from the gentrification of the Frederick Douglass Boulevard corridor (http://www.dnainfo.com/20100923/harlem/restaurant-bar-boom-continues-on-harlems-frederick-douglass-boulevard).

"The word is getting out there more and more and the landmark process in 2008 helped," said Taylor. "These upcoming changes are going to have a real effect on the people who live near the park. The goal is to have more green space available to the people."

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110203/manhattan/morningside-park-renovation-plan-make-green-space-more-park-like#ixzz1Cu01M7dj

Stroika

February 3rd, 2011, 05:28 PM

The changes include renovating the playground, handball courts, basketball courts and water spray area.

Handball courts? That's random. I'm not sure I would even know what a handball court is ... bizarre that they would be building courts specifically for ... handball ... instead of, for instance, generic courts for hopscotch, four-square, etc.

lofter1

February 3rd, 2011, 07:16 PM

There are dedicated handball courts all around downtown. And they get a lot of use. Well, when they're not covered with ice and snow, anyway.

GordonGecko

February 4th, 2011, 01:04 PM

Not just downtown, they're in basically every other park in New York City.

Ninjahedge

February 4th, 2011, 01:47 PM

lofter1

February 4th, 2011, 01:56 PM

Not just downtown, they're in basically every other park in New York City.

You're right, they're found everywhere (http://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/handball).

Handball has been around in NYC for nearly 150 years (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50D15FF385D16738DDDAA0A94DB405B 838CF1D3&scp=34&sq=handball&st=cse).

One of the earlier articles on Handball and how it's played is found in the NY Times, dated 1876 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9801E7DD1631E23BBC4B51DFB766838D 669FDE&scp=6&sq=handball&st=p).

More recently ...

Sweat | Cold Weather, Hot Handball

NY TIMES (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/sweat-cold-weather-hot-handball/#more-251871)
By Corey Kilgannon
December 4, 2010

Handball is New York City’s quintessential street game, and for nearly a century, the city has produced many of the best players in the world.

In the summer, the talent is spread out over the roughly 2,000 courts in the city. “But in the winter,” said Raymond Soriano, 32, a devoted handballer, “the best players all run into each other here, so they have to play each other.”

... “The reason New York has the world’s best players is because you can grow up playing at these spots — it feeds on itself,” said Eddie Neville, 25, of Ozone Park, an A-player though he began playing only four years ago. “You can play every day of your life, but if you don’t play with A-players, you’ll never become one. That’s why all these guys are here, for this competition on this one court.”

KenNYC

February 4th, 2011, 02:24 PM

They are a wall with a line painted on it and an area of flat pavement in front of it.

One of the most basic, cheap layouts available (and able to be integrated with other existing structures).

I just remember playing "wall ball" when I was a kid. Find a wall and chuck a ball against it to locally varying rule sets (the base being, drop the ball and you have to run and tag the wall before someone else throws the ball at the wall).

HB courts are also handy for solo tennis practice.

The only thing I do not like about them are that they are very sterile, bleak kind of things. Usually asphalt and concrete. Kind of like the childrens school playgrounds they pave over to save on grass maintainence costs. You really need to plan them well (trees, etc) to become part of a "park" and not a sweaty lot of asphalt in the summer.

Agree with what you said; what I also note (I have a HB court just outside of my window), it offers activity for a very low amount of people, compared to it's square footage. Yeah, it's a fairly small and simple thing to set up, I am sure, but it seems to be limited to 1 on 1 play, occasionally there's 3 or 4 when kids are playing, but compared to a basketball court that takes more or less the same space, it's rather poor usage of area.

ZippyTheChimp

February 4th, 2011, 02:45 PM

:)

And when you weren't in the park, there was Chinese Handball (everything different was Chinese_____ ).

All you needed was a long wall with a smooth concrete sidewalk. The number of players was only limited to the number of sidewalk boxes along the wall. The first box was the Ace, who served. Ball had to bounce once before hitting the wall, and the player whose box it landed in had to return before the ball bounced twice. If the Ace lost serve, he went to the end of the line, and everyone moved up.

The game often ended with Asses Up.

I remember this like it was yesterday. Douglass St off Smith St was a good Chinese Handball court. Have to check this out with a camera.

ZippyTheChimp

February 4th, 2011, 02:52 PM

it's rather poor usage of area.Sort of like a tennis court. Or half.

Ninjahedge

February 4th, 2011, 04:42 PM

Basketball and Soccer seem to be about the best uses of space (soccer being the variants played on the street and in open fields, not necessarily regulation).

Others are also pretty good if you strip them down to what they are and where they originated.

Football with abunch of guys and no real equipment?

Hockey with old skates, sticks and foil "gloves" out on a frozen lake?

Golf with....with...... ok maybe not all of them.....

Merry

March 25th, 2011, 07:51 AM

Nice :).

Special pavers make a mark in Tompkins Square Park

By Bonnie Rosenstock

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_413/markert.jpg

From graffiti tags to elaborately painted murals, the East Village abounds with ephemeral expression. But the East Village Parks Conservancy has devised a unique way to leave a more lasting impression in the neighborhood’s Tompkins Square Park: Set it in stone with Make Your Mark in the Park.

“It’s a way to use the graffiti tradition of the East Village,” said Roland Legiardi-Laura, an E.V.P.C. board member. The Barre, Vt., hexagon-shaped granite pavers surrounding the park’s Temperance Fountain can be engraved to represent feelings and ideas, honor the living or deceased and even oneself.

There are sentiments on the stones, like “We love you Nana” and, in memory of Spalding Gray, “The Best Dad in the World.” There are marriage proposals, declarations of love and welcome-to-the-world birth announcements. Beloved pets, like Tom Tom, the Fat Cat, and Ginger — “the best little dog in the world” — also get recognition.

“She had 12 happy years at the dog run,” said owner Suzanne Kreps of Ginger’s park life.
The stone pavers, which cost $250 apiece, have to be succinct, said Legiardi-Laura, since there are only up to 70 characters (including spaces) to “Tweet with.” But the good news is you can order as many pavers as you want — performance artist/actor John Leguizamo purchased several to appreciate his children, and another East Villager paid tribute to 14 family members, including the cat.

“You can go from stone to stone and write an essay,” quipped Legiardi-Laura.

To date, 155 longer-lasting granite pavers around the fountain have replaced about half of the original asphalt stones, which tend to erode. But in and around the park, there are sites for tens of thousands of messages, Legiardi-Laura said, as he reeled off available areas: the main walking center on the park’s south side where the band shell used to be, the area to the east of the Parks Department building, the park’s entire perimeter. In fact, he hopes someday the entire park will be one beautifully written essay etched in stone, “a part of the evolution of this community,” although you don’t have to be an East Villager to “get stoned.”

Every spring, E.V.P.C. holds a stone-setting ceremony. Last April, those honored included neighborhood activist Philip Wachtel, who died in 1994. Katharine Wolpe, former Village Independent Democrats club president, said that she and Jack Linn, assistant Parks commissioner, purchased the stone “to remember Phil’s many and varied services to the community he lived in and served for so many years.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver came out to commemorate Wachtel, whom he knew for 18 years.

“You always got a sense of what was happening in the neighborhood because Phil had his ears to the ground, attuned to everything that was going on,” said Silver, who spoke as a private citizen, since the park area is not part of his district. “This is not about politics or work, it’s about a personal relationship. We ran against each other in 1976 for a vacant seat and got to know each other and remained friends.”

Former Tompkins Square Park head gardener Michael Lytle, who retired in 2009, was also acknowledged with “His Care & Passion made a difference,” by K.J. Grow and the Tompkins Square Park volunteers. Grow, who is from Brooklyn, coordinates the monthly team that helps maintain the park through New York Cares.

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_413/specialpavers.html

Merry

April 9th, 2011, 02:03 AM

Big Deal | Paying Extra to Smell the Flowers

By SARAH KERSHAW

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/10/realestate/SUB-deal-cov/SUB-deal-cov-blog480.jpg

Supporters of New York City’s parks and gardens have long asked residents of nearby buildings to help pay for the upkeep of these green spaces.

Consider the tulips, cherry trees and begonias along the median of Park Avenue. Mary Woodard Lasker, a philanthropist and a champion of medical research, was considered a pioneer in the 1950s when she urged her fellow citizens to make donations for the plantings on the avenue. That led to the creation of the Fund for Park Avenue, which, like the Central Park Conservancy and other groups that raise money for city parks, depends on annual donations from neighboring buildings and their residents.

But should those who live on Park Avenue, Central Park or Prospect Park, or along the High Line, be required to pay for them as if they were an amenity?

Some groups, including the Prospect Park Alliance, have tried to persuade nearby buildings to formalize donations, perhaps through required payments included in common charges or association fees, usually to no avail. Others, like Friends of the High Line and Friends of Hudson River Park, have explored or are testing the waters with special tax districts around the parks, making the argument that these residents enjoy higher property values. But these can be prickly proposals, with New York City’s real estate taxes already a sore point.

Now, though, some new developments are requiring park contributions as part of the package for apartments on sale.

A new condominium on the High Line, 245 Tenth Avenue, which stood empty for almost 18 months before being refinanced several months ago and was to hold its first open house this weekend, will require contributions to the park as part of the monthly common charge.

The offering plan for the building, which has 18 condos and 2 commercial spaces, and is steps from the nearly finished second phase of the park, says the residents and commercial tenants will make an annual $10,000 donation, or about $500 per unit, on average, depending on size. The money will go to Friends of the High Line, which raises 70 percent of the park’s budget.

It is the only such arrangement Friends of the High Line has with a building, the group said, although neighboring buildings and residents have made contributions on their own.
The High Line has drawn millions of visitors and become a major selling point for new developments in the area, prompting something of a West Chelsea boomlet. The first section runs from Gansevoort to West 20th Street and the next will stretch from 20th to 30th Street.

Given the $153 million cost of the two sections, $10,000 from the 11-story building at 245 10th isn’t much in the scheme of things. (Prices of units for sale now range from $1.725 million, for a one-bedroom, to $5 million for a two-bedroom penthouse.) Even so, Joshua David, a co-founder of Friends of the High Line, said in an e-mail, “their support demonstrates their leadership and deep understanding of the challenges we face in keeping the High Line thriving at the high standards we have all come to love.”

Leonard Steinberg, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman who is marketing the condominium, said, “I’m hoping this building will guilt the other buildings in the neighborhood into saying they will make a contribution.”

Todd Lippiatt, a managing principal of Aristone Realty Capital, which is working with the original developer, Grasso Holdings, and helped buy out the condo project’s crippling debt, said the common charges were on par with those of neighboring buildings. That is because the condominium does not have some of the lavish amenities found in the other buildings, like 200 Eleventh Avenue, which has a sky garage with car elevators. So the idea is that the High Line is the main amenity, he said.

Across the East River, residents of One Brooklyn Bridge Park, at 360 Furman Street, are contributing to their park through common charges and payments in lieu of real estate taxes, according to the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation. Under the plan for Brooklyn Bridge Park, payments from businesses and apartment buildings on the park’s footprint would finance most costs associated with construction and maintenance. The plan requires a similar arrangement with other new residential buildings on the unfinished park, although city officials are considering other options amid opposition to using luxury condos to pay for the green space.

The Central Park Conservancy works with about 200 buildings on the park’s perimeter to raise money, but there are no official donations to the conservancy set up through common charges, said Scott Johnson, a spokesman for the conservancy.

A few years ago the Prospect Park Alliance approached the handful of large buildings along the park to ask about requiring regular contributions, said Eugene Patron, a spokesman for the alliance. But Mr. Patron said that co-op boards were not eager to do so because many residents were already making donations.

Now that some new developments are requiring contributions, he said, perhaps the group will try again.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/big-deal-paying-extra-to-smell-the-flowers/

londonlawyer

April 10th, 2011, 08:23 AM

THat Lukoil station must go!

mariab

May 6th, 2011, 02:34 PM

Echo Sculpture Draws Crowds in Madison Square Park Updated 6 hrs ago

May 5, 2011 6:33pm Updated May 6, 2011 7:28am

By Jill Colvin

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MIDTOWN — There's a new face at Madison Square Park.
ECHO, a new art installation (http://www.madisonsquarepark.org/art/echo-is-here) by sculptor Jaume Plensa, officially opened Thursday on the main lawn of the park at the foot of the Flatiron building.

The massive, 44-foot-tall sculpture depicts the head and face of a 9-year-old girl who lives near Plensa's home in Barcelona, Spain. Named after the Greek nymph Echo, the girl is portrayed in a dream-like state, according to Plensa, and is meant to be "a monument to everyday people."
http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_lrgimage_2011_05_R5342_Echo_sculpture.JPGEch o will be on display through Aug. 14. (DNAinfo/Jill Colvin)

"If in the myth of the nymph Echo, she was forced by the goddess to repeat the words uttered by others, in my project, the head becomes a mirror in where people can see themselves," Plensa said in a statement.

"With Echo, I aim to create a new intimate place in the heart of New York City, in where we can finally repeat the real words of our souls," he added.

The piece, which is made of white marble gel-coated fiberglass resin, was designed specifically for the site, and is the largest piece of art to don the square in the Mad. Sq. Art program’s 7-year history.
"I love it. It feels like a hologram in real life," said Stephen Stanczyk, 49, who lives on the Upper West Side and was one of several dozen tourists and locals who stopped by to photograph the sculpture at all angles Wednesday night.
"It’s just wild. It’s kind of ghost-like," he said. "It has a very two-dimensional quality."
Aron Baxter, 41, who lives in the East Village and works nearby said he’d seen a photograph of the sculpture and just had to come and check it out.
"It’s pretty unique," he said.
But while it's impressive by day, he advised viewers to come by at night.

"There’s so much to distract you during the day," he said. "It seems more impressive at night because it’s illuminated."

ECHO will be on display through August 14.

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110505/manhattan/echo-sculpture-draws-crowds-madison-square-park#ixzz1LavdBM7M

Merry

July 1st, 2011, 11:54 PM

Growing List of Park Rules Irks Some New Yorkers

by Marisa Miller

A move to enforce "quiet zones" has silenced some musicians in Central Park.

For New Yorkers, parks are not simply aesthetically pleasing. In a city where people live in cramped spaces, parks offer a place -- an oasis -- to retreat from the chaos of the bustling sidewalks and colossal buildings. People go to these public spaces to read the paper on their lunch break, walk their dogs in the wee hours of the morning or sun bathe on a Sunday afternoon. Despite being public, parks provide New Yorkers with a kind of backyard -- a free space to enjoy a wide range of activities.

Lately, though, some New Yorkers have come to feel less free in their parks. In the past month, the New York City Parks and Recreation Department has started to enforce some highly contentious regulations. The city-wide smoking ban and the recent enforcement of quiet zones in designated areas of Central Park have garnered criticism from many New Yorkers. And the never-ending battle continues between artist vendors and the city government regarding sale of "expressive matter" in public parks.

While the administration maintains such controls make parks more enjoyable for all New Yorkers, some in the city wonder whether the government has over-regulated the parks, eroding their cherish role as a "free space."

Smokers Not Allowed

On May 23, New York City instituted a ban on smoking in its 1,700 parks, 14 miles of city beach and on pedestrian malls such as Times and Herald Square. If caught with a cigarette, violators can face a fine of $50. Although this new law will be enforced by park officials -- not police -- the parks department "expects that New Yorkers will ask people to follow the law and stop smoking." This ban expands Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2002 anti-smoking regulation, which outlawed smoking in restaurants and bars.

Many New Yorkers have lauded this new regulation and believe it will contribute to a healthier environment.

"There is a demonstrated health and maintenance management issues around smoking. Cigarette butts present a real problem to the parks department. We are supportive of that policy," said Alyson Beha, director of research, planning, and programs at New Yorkers for Parks.

Although many New Yorkers agree with Beha, others argue that banning cigarette smoking violates the civil liberties of smokers.

In a phone interview, Audrey Silk, the founder of the smokers advocacy group CLASH (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment said, "This isn't about public health; it's about control. It's a slippery slope." Silk believes that this issue is "not just about defending smoking" but a "matter of civil liberties that we are defending."

Silk and fellow CLASH supporters organized a "Smoke In The Park" protest on Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, on May 28 to express their contempt for the new smoking ban.

"There is no more trying to reason with the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg," said Silk, but her group plans to continue to press the issue. "We will never stop trying to get this done," she said.
Since the smoking ban went into effect on May 23, only one ticket has been issued by park officials. It went to a Daily News photographer who, for the benefit of a story, was hanging out on the High Line trying to get a ticket. She finally did, but not before, in the News' words, she and her colleague got " a first-hand look at the lax enforcement."

The Artists’ Plight

The fight over vendors goes back far longer. For years, New York's parks have served as a bastion for artists and vendors whose livelihood rests on sales to tourists and other park-goers. Artists from all over the city go to Manhattan's most celebrated parks to display their works --whether glorified paintings of New York or quirky souvenirs.

In the past year the city government has started to crack down on artists and other vendors who sell what is referred to as expressive matter in parks. In June 2010, the parks department proposed new limits, which designated where artist vendors could sell their artwork. They also limited the number of artists who could be present in one area (only one artist per spot). According to the department website, "expressive matter vendors may only vend expressive matter at the specifically designated spots identified by the commissioner."

The administration has sought to restrict the selling of so-called expressive matter by vendors such as these in some of Manhattan's most popular parks.

The city wanted to enforce these new regulations in Central Park, the High Line, Battery Park and Union Square -- the four parks with the highest concentration of artist vendors. The city hoped that these new limits would decrease congestion on park sidewalks and pathways and allow for park-goers to enjoy the verdant scenery without the hustle and bustle of vendors.

This restriction spurred an uproar from parts of the artist community and others who felt it represented yet another curtailment of New Yorkers' civil liberties. Several artists sued the parks department, charging the rules infringed on their first amendment rights. The lawsuits have been going on for over a year within the state and federal courts. However, in May an appeals court ordered that a temporary restraining order be removed, allowing the city to proceed with enforcement of the limits.

Robert Lederman, the president of A.R.T.I.S.T. has been fighting the city government on this matter for years. "The whole idea of the first amendment is that the government cannot make laws that limit people's freedom of speech," he said. "If you can have giant advertisement banners in a park then why can't an artist show a picture?"

How Loud is Too Loud?

In the past few weeks, musicians also have come to feel they are a target of parks department rules as the city has started enforcement of "quiet zones" in Central Park. Eight of the park's most frequented spots, including Strawberry Fields and Bethesda Fountain, are now dotted with green signs officially designating them as "quiet zones" and prohibiting any musical instrument or amplified sounds. The signs have only been put up in Central Park so far.

"Quiet zones have been in place for decades. It's a new season. The parks are crowded. A lot park visitors want quiet zones. We are responding to all park users,” said Vickie Karp, a spokeswoman for parks department.

But for the many musicians who make their living playing in Central Park, these new quiet zones may end up costing them money. Tickets have been issued to musicians who have violated the rule, and there was even one arrest.

Vasyl Fomytskyi is a Urkainian cellist who has been playing in the hall of Bethesda Terrace for three and a half years. When asked about the new enforcement of quiet zones, he said, "I think it is very stupid. This spot has wonderful acoustics, and it makes our music sound even better. It is our right to play here."

Civil liberties and street artist advocates agree with Fomytskyi and the coterie of musicians who have practically become permanent fixtures in certain areas of Central Park.

Susie Tanenbum, cofounder of the Street Performer's Advocacy Project believes, "Current policies framing artistic performances in New York’s streets and parks make it increasingly difficult for street musicians and dancers to exercise their First Amendment right to express themselves in public space,"

"And yet, for centuries, street performing has helped to make New York the vibrant cultural center that it is," she added.

Will the Battle Ever End?

Many New Yorkers feel that all these park restrictions constitute a clear breach of our first amendment rights.

James Keller immigrated to New York when he was in his early 20s and has lived here for 41 years. Keller believes that these regulations are yet another sign of governments trampling on our civil liberties.

"We are gradually starting to lose our freedom," he said.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/parks/20110701/14/3555

lofter1

July 2nd, 2011, 01:05 AM

Corporate Behavior For All

The World as Mike Wants It

Merry

July 26th, 2011, 11:42 AM

Wow. Is the Washington Square Arch still lit up like that at night?

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/34124/slide_34124_311099_large.jpg?1311691070199

Bigger Wow.

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/34124/slide_34124_311070_large.jpg?1311691249079

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lacy-schutz/nyc-historic-parks_b_906114.html#s311073&title=Prospect_Park

Merry

August 14th, 2011, 02:48 AM

Hadn't heard of Courtney Callender Park. Very nice.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_UKr9URsCkeE/S9DngB2F_4I/AAAAAAAAISY/ANOJ67cptfk/s1600/photo.jpg

Interesting history about what was there originally at Harlem+Bespoke (http://harlembespoke.blogspot.com/2010/04/remember-mott-mansion-on-130th.html)

New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M155/highlights/11072)

This playground honors Courtney Callender (1937-1983), New York City’s first African American Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Callender became the first African American official in Parks under Commissioner Thomas Hoving and Executive Director Henry J. Stern. He established the Community Relations division, which initiated the policy of including the neighborhoods in park decisions. Callender served as community relations officer from 1966 until 1969 when Commissioner August Heckscher appointed him deputy commissioner of Cultural Affairs. He held that position until 1972, organizing many community events, including the Harlem Cultural Festival.

http://www.cityparksfoundation.org/park.html?id=9

Matthews-Palmer Playground (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M154/dailyplant/20193)

http://cdn.timeoutnewyork.com/sites/timeoutnewyork.com/files/imagecache/timeout_492x330/images/slideshows/album-639/730.otc.x476.playground1_CreditStephen_kosloff.jpg

http://cdn.timeoutnewyork.com/sites/timeoutnewyork.com/files/imagecache/timeout_492x330/images/slideshows/album-639/730.otc.x476.playground2_CreditStephen_kosloff.jpg

http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new-york/50145/hells-kitchen

Nanny Sarah Swymer Talks About Reviewing Manhattan's Parks

By Willis Plummer

Sarah Swymer isn't just a nanny; she's a blogging nanny on a mission to review every park in Manhattan before the end of the summer. As she explores the borough's parks with her two charges, Lexi and Annie Lee, she posts some information and a rating between one and five "slides" on her site, New York City Park Hopper (http://nycparkhopper.blogspot.com/). Swymer spoke with us on the phone yesterday about her blog and her new venture, Sarah Poppins Tours. Check the interview after the jump.

So far, what has been your worst park experience?

So far, the worst was the Matthew Palmer park in Hell's Kitchen. It was such a pretty park. It had a really cool painted train and teeter totters, but there was a homeless guy taking a shower in the sprinkler, so we got out of there pretty fast.

What has been your favorite park so far?

We loved the Courtney Calendar Park on 130th and 5th. It has these gigantic sprinklers and this big painting of the world. The girls and I spent an hour playing a game where we went from continent to continent, and most of the time switching continents meant we would have to run through the sprinklers. They also had these great kid's sized picnic tables.

full article in Village Voice (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/08/nanny_sarah_swy.php)