Manhattan's Parks, Playgrounds, Statues and Monuments
ANSWERS
#1 – D
Straus Park
Straus Park is named for Isidor Straus and his wife Ida, who died on April 15, 1912 when the S.S. Titanic sank on its maiden voyage from England to America. The ship hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank three hours later. More than 1500 passengers and crew members died in the disaster. The inscription on the rear exedra of the Straus Memorial pays tribute to Ida’s decision to remain aboard with her husband rather than save herself by boarding a lifeboat with the women and children.
Isidor Straus was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1845. The Straus family immigrated to America in 1854 and settled in Georgia. After the Civil War, they relocated to New York where Lazarus Straus began L. Straus & Sons with his sons, Isidor and Nathan. By 1888 the brothers had advanced from operating a crockery concession at R.H. Macy & Co. to owning the company. In 1902 they opened the world’s largest department store, Macy’s at Herald Square. They also became partners in Abraham & Straus in 1893 (in operation until 1995 when Federated Department Stores discontinued the name). In 1871 Isidor married Ida Blun (1849-1912), who was from Worms, Germany. In addition to raising their six children, Ida joined her husband as a philanthropist with a special concern for health, education, and other public services.
This triangle was named for the Strauses, who lived in a frame house at 2747 Broadway, near 105th Street, by the Board of Aldermen in 1912. The Straus Memorial fountain, in which the bronze figure of Memory reclines in contemplation, was dedicated on April 15, 1915. It was funded by citizens’ contributions and created by sculptor Augustus Lukeman and architect Evarts Tracy, who designed the fountain and exedra. A decorative bronze trough, installed by the ASPCA, stood at the north end of the site from 1907 until shortly before World War II.
This land was acquired by the City in 1895 and was previously known as Schuyler Square and as Bloomingdale Square, which took its name from Bloomingdale Road, the former name of Broadway. It remained unimproved, however, until the Straus Memorial was installed at the site. The park also played a part in Revolutionary War history as the western end of the fortification built by British forces following their capture of Manhattan on September 15, 1776.
From 1995 to 1997 Straus Park was renovated and expanded to the west, by the addition of 15 feet of the bed of West End Avenue. Improvements in the $800,000 capital project include the addition of benches, lighting, shrubs, fencing, and paving. Restoration of the monument, for which the Straus family has established an endowment fund, includes the transformation of its reflecting pool into a planting bed. The Friends of Straus Park, a project of the West 106th Street Block Association, was formed to promote security, cleanliness, and programming in the park to preserve its important position in the neighborhood.
.44 Acre
WRONG ANSWERS
Finn Square
In 1919, the widening and extension of Varick Street created a triangular space at Varick’s intersection with West Broadway and Franklin Street. The Board of Aldermen (predecessor of the City Council) named this space for Philip Schuyler Finn, who lost his life in 1918 fighting World War I with New York’s 69th Regiment, the famous Fighting Irish. Nevertheless, for most inhabitants of Lower Manhattan in the early 1900s, Finn Square conjured up memories of Philip Schuyler’s father, Daniel E. Finn (1845-1910).
Battery Dan,as the elder Finn was known, was a Tammany Hall politician and Democratic leader of Lower Manhattan. He won his nickname and the hearts of his constituents when he successfully opposed the construction of commercial piers along Battery Park, citing the necessity for open space in the crowded neighborhood. He became a city magistrate and police judge in 1904, dispensing advice rather than harsh sentences. Admonitions like Don’t try to compel a girl to love you if she prefers someone else. Get another to take her place, to two youths fighting over a girl, or Don’t wreck or sell your body and soul for diamonds and automobiles, to a prostitute endeared him to New Yorkers across the city. No incident caused more amusement than Finn’s encounter with three bulldogs on his way to a court session in the Bronx. Under attack, he climbed a lamppost and yelled for help. Local papers carried the story and New York loved it.
A New York Times editorial at the time of his death in 1910 praised him as an idealist, a friend of the people, and added, He was fairly adored by thousands as leader, friend, and protector. Crowds of mourners lined the streets as Finn’s funeral procession led to St. Peter’s Church.
Today the working class Irish neighborhood in what was Manhattan’s West Ward has become the fashionable Tribeca (TRIangle BElow CAnal Street), and Finn Square reflects the change. For almost 70 years, it was a weed-covered slab of concrete. Today it contains a triangle shaped garden bordered by cobblestones that is a profusion of flowers and shrubs. Thornless honey locust trees (Gleditsia triacanthos inermis) and flowering dogwoods (Cornus florida) provide a green canopy, and grassy plots separate the flowerbeds.
The transformation, which took place in April 1998, is the product of Greenstreets, a joint program started in 1986 and revived in 1994 by Parks and the Department of Transportation, to turn drab traffic islands into attractive green spaces with the help of community volunteers. Parks planted the trees, and Tribeca residents planted the flowers and maintain the garden.
.1 acre
McCarthy Square
The 1811 Commissioners’Plan’s the far-reaching gridiron pattern which laid out the streets and avenues of Manhattan’s had little immediate impact on the western part of Greenwich Village. The grid was intended to provide a system for the orderly development of land between 14th Street and Washington Heights. However the geography of the West Village had evolved in an unregulated fashion since colonial days, emerging from marshland to farmland and then from a rural suburb to a densely settled residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhood full of crooked streets.
Not until the 1910s and 1920s were Seventh and Eighth Avenues extended south of 14th Street. As a result, a number of small irregular parcels were created, including the traffic island at Charles Street, Waverly Place, and Seventh Avenue South. This parcel was acquired as a street and developed by the Borough President of Manhattan. In 1943 by Local Law #16 the City Council named the site in memory of Private First Class Bernard Joseph McCarthy, who was born and raised in Greenwich Village. A Marine, McCarthy was killed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in August 1942 at the age of twenty-two. His was the first reported death of a Greenwich Village resident in the war.
The original version of McCarthy Square’s central flagpole originally stood on the grounds of the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. It was moved to this site and embellished with an inscribed base of Deer Isle granite on behalf of neighborhood residents and the Dr. George A. Hayunga Maritime Post #1069 of the American Legion. Both the park and the memorial flagstaff were dedicated in June 1943, a tribute to a brave son of Greenwich Village, the first to fall for his country in World War II.
.039 acre
Schiff Mall
This parkland honors philanthropist and financier Jacob H. Schiff (1847-1920). Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, Schiff emigrated to the United States in 1865. Soon after his arrival in New York City, he found success as a Wall Street investment banker. In 1875, Schiff joined the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. As a partner in the firm, and later as its senior partner, Schiff helped Kuhn, Loeb and Company to become one of the most prominent investment companies in the world, second only to J. P. Morgan. Conscious of the plight of many other Jewish immigrants, Schiff became involved in numerous charitable causes. In 1884, he helped found the Jewish Montefiore Home. Originally located on 84th Street and Avenue A (now York Avenue) in Manhattan, the hospital treated the chronically ill among the city’s poor. With Schiff as its second president and primary benefactor, the Jewish Montefiore Home rapidly expanded and later moved to its present location in the Bronx. Throughout the 1890’s, Schiff also financed the work of Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster. Wald and Brewster, two nurses, provided medical care to thousands of immigrants on the Lower East Side. With Schiff’s backing, they created the Henry Street Settlement in 1895. The settlement house offered food, shelter, and medical treatments for the poor, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. In addition to his charitable work for the poor and sick in New York, Schiff contributed to many educational institutions including Columbia University, Harvard University, Cornell University and Barnard College. Schiff also helped found the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and provided the funds for the establishment of the department of Semitic Literature at the New York Public Library. Five years after Schiff’s death, Harvard recognized his unstinting support of education by creating the first Jewish Studies department in the United States in his honor. In 1921, shortly after Schiff’s death, the Board of Aldermen named this parkland for him. Schiff Mall runs through the center of Delancey Street from the Bowery to the Williamsburg Bridge. Delancey Street is named after James de Lancey, a powerful New York political figure who served as Chief Justice of New York State’s Supreme Court and as Lieutenant Governor in the 1700s. The de Lancey family estate originally extended from the Bowery to the East River. The street now marks the northern boundary of the family’s former holdings. Once known as Schiff Parkway, Schiff Mall was part of Delancey Street until the Department of Transportation reconstructed the approaches to the Williamsburg Bridge and separated the mall from the street in 1998. For years, Schiff Mall, has served as a familiar piece of greenery for all those heading to Brooklyn over the Williamsburg Bridge. Parks recently sponsored renovations of this parkland as part of its joint initiative with the Department of Transportation, known as Greenstreets. The Greenstreets program plants trees and shrubs in some of the smaller city parks and squares. Improvements to Schiff Mall include the addition of new shrubbery and the rehabilitation of several trees.
0.7 acre
ANSWERS
#2 – B
Murphy’s Brother’s Playground
Located near the waterfront of Manhattan’s old Gas House District, this playground has been known by at least three different names over the course of its ninety-five year history. The City of New York originally acquired this land in 1857 and 1861, and the Department of Docks and Ferries filled and improved the western parcel in 1893. After an Act of the Legislature transferred the parcel to the Department of Parks in 1903, it was planted, fenced, and improved as a playground. During its early years, the site was known as the 17th Street Park.
In 1921 the Board of Aldermen named the park for politician and businessman John J. Murphy (1865-1911). The son of Irish immigrants, Murphy was one of eight brothers and sisters who was raised on the east side of Manhattan. He served as an alderman and as the acting Democratic leader of the 12th Assembly District. Murphy made his fortune as president of the New York Contracting and Trucking Company, which had a contract to excavate the site for Penn Station. His good fortune in business and politics resulted in large part from his more remarkable brother, Charles Francis Murphy (1858-1924), the sachem of Tammany Hall.
A 1930s plan of Murphy Park indicates a fully developed playground with a variety of athletic facilities and play equipment for younger children. Surrounded by an iron picket fence, the grounds featured grassy plots, curving walks, and an open pavillion, which was probably used for outdoor concerts, classes, and other gatherings. The eastern parcel was backfilled during construction of the East River Drive in 1938 and officially transferred to Parks in 1947.
In 1985 new park signage saluted the achievements of the illustrious older brother, Charles. This Murphy attended local public schools until the age of fourteen and formed the Sylvan Social Club for boys. After working at wire factories, in a shipyard, and on the Blue Line streetcars, Murphy opened his first saloon in 1878. Serving a bowl of soup and a beer for a nickel, his various saloons were social centers in the Gas House District. Murphy established himself as a friend and adviser of neighborhood workers and politicians, and he quickly rose as a popular and powerful political player in his own right.
Having backed several candidates from Tammany Hall, Murphy was made election district captain for the Democratic organization. He earned a series of appointments, including leader of the 18th Assembly District (1892) and Dock Commissioner (1898). Named to the Tammany Hall Triumvirate of Executive Committee Members in May 1902, Murphy became Tammany’s sole leader four months later. Silent Charlie brokered agreements between warring parties in his organization and helped numerous Tammany candidates win city, state, and national offices. Six years after his death in 1924, the Charles F. Murphy Memorial Flagpole was dedicated in Union Square.
The park benefited from a substantial capital reconstruction in 1992-94. The improvements included the installation of new tee-ballfields, basketball court, playground equipment, hopscotch squares, benches, safety surfacing, pavements, and curbs. Four Norway maple trees were planted at the playground. On October 6, 1994, a group of about one hundred community leaders, elected officials, Parks representatives, children from the Epiphany School, and their teachers and friends gathered to rededicate the renovated playground and to celebrate the brothers Murphy: Charles Francis and John J.
1.275 Acres
WRONG ANSWERS
McCaffrey Playground
Monsignor Joseph A. McCaffrey (1890-1970), also known as the Bishop of Times Square,was the pastor of nearby Church of the Holy Cross for 36 years, and chaplain of the New York Police Department for 30 years. A well-known crusader against crime and pornography in the Times Square area, McCaffrey helped convince Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882-1947) to close down neighborhood burlesque houses.
Joseph McCaffrey attended Fordham University in the Bronx and St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1916, and achieved the rank of Monsignor in 1941. As a chaplain in the United States Army during World War I, McCaffrey was present during battles at Soissons, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, Champagne, and the Argonne in France. The army awarded McCaffrey the Silver Star and the Croix de Guerre for his bravery and service.
During the 1930s, at Father McCaffrey’s urging, the Church of the Holy Cross acquired half of this playground’s current land. McCaffrey helped convince city officials that the space was urgently needed for neighborhood children and students of the Holy Cross School. In 1938, following a Board of Estimate resolution, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) approved the purchase of the space that the church had developed, as well as an adjoining lot, for park purposes. The next year, the City Council named the plot McCaffrey Playground by a local law.
McCaffrey Playground is located on W. 43rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The surrounding neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen has a colorful history. The most told tale explaining the neighborhood’s name speaks of a conversation between one seasoned police officer and a rookie while watching a small riot erupt in the neighborhood. The rookie commented, this place is hell itself! The officer replied, Hell’s a mild climate, this is Hell’s Kitchen, no less!
Originally a district of slaughterhouses, lumberyards, and factories, the neighborhood was also home to the people who worked in these industries, many of whom were immigrants. The densely populated area expanded with the addition of the Ninth Avenue Elevated train in the late 19th century. By the 1950s, neighborhood residents, fearing that the name Hell’s Kitchen had become synonymous with crime, changed the name to Clinton, after the prominent New York family of the 1840s. Today the area is a bustling residential neighborhood with one of the city’s most diverse populations.
As with many of the 290 playgrounds Robert Moses built during the 1930s, McCaffrey Playground featured pavement, a brick comfort station, and pipe-frame swing sets. The play structures were added in the early 1980s. In 2001, Council Member Christine Quinn provided $1 million in funding for a reconstruction of the playground, including new play equipment and safety surfacing, paving, plantings, fences, and benches.
0.436 acre
Quisqueya Playground
This playground’s name honors the large Dominican American community of the surrounding Washington Heights neighborhood. Quisqueya, meaning cradle of life, is one of two aboriginal names for the island called La Isla Espatola (Hispaniola) by Christopher Columbus (1451-1506).
The Dominican Republic shares the island with Haiti, meaning land of mountains, the other traditional name for Hispaniola. Although, in the 1950s, there were relatively few Dominicans in New York, between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, more immigrants came to the City from the Dominican Republic than from any other country. Today, three-quarters of all of America’s Dominicans live in the New York region, and Washington Heights is the largest Dominican community in the City. The annual Dominican Day Parade, which takes place on the third Sunday of August, originated in 1981 in Washington Heights before moving to Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
Highbridge Park was assembled piecemeal between 1867 and the 1960s, with the bulk being acquired through condemnation from 1895 to 1901. The parcel that includes today’s Quisqueya Playground was acquired in 1890 and transferred to Parks jurisdiction in 1895. The old Highbridge Water Tower, constructed in 1872 and still one of Manhattan’s most picturesque landmarks, is visible from the southeast corner of the playground. Just to the north of Quisqueya, at 181st Street, is another city landmark, the Washington Bridge. Designed by Charles C. Schneider and Wilhelm Hildenbrand, it has linked Manhattan and the Bronx since 1889.
Quisqueya Playground opened in 1934. Within the site are several London planetrees (Platanus x acerifolia), popular in the park system due to their ability to withstand New York’s harsh soil and air conditions. The playground was refurbished in 1998 with $40,034 from Mayor Giuliani. The addition of new safety surfacing, play equipment, and a popular camel play sculpture added to the playground’s recreational facilities.
Vincent F. Albano Jr. Playground
This Kips Bay park is located on a small portion of the site for one of New York’s most ambitious unbuilt engineering projects, the Mid-Manhattan Expressway. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) acquired the parcel at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and East 29th Street as part of the right-of-way for an elevated highway, which would have run along 30th or 36th Street in order to link the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to the Lincoln Tunnel. Weaving among the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, this route was one of the many improvements envisioned in the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (1929). As head of the TBTA, the Department of Parks, and numerous other city, state, and independent agencies, Robert Moses realized many of the projects outlined in the Regional Plan and attempted many others.
Plans for the Mid-Manhattan Expressway were eventually abandoned. In 1966 the TBTA extended a permit for the Department of Parks to operate the .346-acre parcel as a playground and contributed $25,000 towards its development. The playground was designed by noted architect M. Paul Friedberg in the late 1960s.
In 1989 community members celebrated the reconstruction and official naming of the playground. The $722,000 capital restoration provided a handicapped accessible play area for both children and adults along with new game tables and benches. The new design introduced brick herringbone paving, raised granite curbs, a granite information kiosk, and an ornamental steel panel fence with bronzed ginkgo and oak leaf castings.
In its early years, the playground was informally known as Nathan Straus Playground for the distinguished department store magnate and philanthropist (1848-1931). Other city parks named for Straus include Straus Square and Nathan Straus Playground, both in the Lower East Side. In 1989 Council Member Carol Greitzer introduced the legislation which named the park for Vincent F. Albano Jr. (1914-1981). Albano was the local Republican district leader for thirty-two years from 1949 until his death in 1981 and the New York Republican County Chairman from 1963 to 1981. A power in Republican circles, he lived in the neighborhood and helped to preserve the playground during a time of demolition and construction in the area.
The playground was substantially upgraded in 1998, as a result of a grant from the City Parks Foundation and a requirements contract funded by Mayor Giuliani. Improvements include play equipment, safety surfacing, handball courts, and pavements. The following year the Mary Collins Playscape was dedicated to a beloved community activist. Active in community and church affairs, Collins (1937-1997) served on Community Board 6 and the 13th Precinct Community Council. Moreover, she directed her efforts into improving conditions at Albano Playground. Collins headed the Lexington East Twenties Society (LETS) which participated in and contributed to the “Take Back Albano Park” initiative in 1996. LETS and the 13th Precinct Community Council donated funds for a Playground Associate to facilitate recreational and arts & crafts programs at the park.
.346 acre
ANSWERS
#3 – D
William F. Passannante Ballfield
This ballfield is named in memory of William F. Passannante (1920-1996), a lifelong Villager who represented this community in the New York State Assembly for thirty-six years. Born on February 10, 1920, Bill was educated in New York City public schools. He received a B.S. degree from New York University in 1940, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and received the J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1948. Passannante worked as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1949 to 1953 and as Legislative Counsel to Abe Stark, the President of the New York City Council, in 1954.
In the fall of 1954, Bill Passannante was elected to the New York State Assembly from the old First Assembly District. He represented Greenwich Village and various parts of lower Manhattan from 1955 through 1990. During his long career as an Assemblyman, Passannante was known as an effective, liberal legislator as well as a political reformer. His dedication to the people of his community was legendary, and his work concerning issues involving children, education, civil and human rights, the environment, the arts, and cultural affairs earned Passannante praise.
Passannante was appointed Deputy Speaker in 1977 and named Speaker Pro Tem in 1979, and he served as President of the National Conference of State Legislatures in 1982 and 1983. A prominent Democrat-Liberal, Passannante was honored with an appointment by Republican President Ronald Reagan to the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in 1983. After his retirement from the Assembly in 1990, he was appointed a Commissioner of the New York State Commission of Investigation. Passannante served in that post until his death on December 15, 1996.
The site of this ballfield was acquired by the City of New York for the construction of the Independent Subway whose line curves from the Avenue of the Americas to West Houston Street. In May 1934 the Board of Transportation granted the Department of Parks a permit to develop for playground purposes four parcels on West Houston Street. The park at the northeast corner of West Houston Street and the Avenue of the Americas was one of thirty-eight new playgrounds added to the Park system in the first four months of Robert Moses’s twenty-six year tenure as Parks Commissioner. It opened on September 14, 1934.
At the request of Community Board 2, the park was named by Commissioner Stern in 1998 to honor the memory of Bill Passannante. That year Mayor Giuliani funded a $130,000 requirements contract for substantial renovations to the park. Improvements included installing new basketball backstops and a drinking fountain, repaving the ballfields, repainting the basketball courts and softball fields, and renovating the baseball backstop.
This Village ballfield provides a fitting memorial to Bill Passannante, who felt that the people of Greenwich Village were part of his family. So, it can be said, he was part of theirs.
.607 Acre
WRONG ANSWERS
Corporal John A. Seravalli Playground
At the request of Community Board 2, and by decision of the City Planning Commission, Parks, and Borough President Hulan E. Jack, this open space was carved out of Manhattan’s crowded West Village. During the early 1950s, Anthony Dapolito, lifetime park advocate and then chairman of Community Board 2, had successfully worked for the creation of Thompson Playground in SoHo. Residents of the West Village were inspired to approach Community Board 2 and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses for a playground in their neighborhood.
On April 9, 1958, the City Planning Commission held a site selection hearing. One of the proposed sites would have required the displacement and relocation of ninety-five tenants, as well as a fire station. The location chosen, however, on Hudson Street, between Horatio and Gansevoort, would displace only twelve families. Aside from three residential brownstones, the project required the demolition of a Department of Sanitation garage, and express depot, a waste paper loft building, a furniture warehouse, and a parking lot. Only the nine-story office building facing West 4th Street would be spared.
Opponents of the playground denounced the design as a “white elephant,” and claimed local civic groups and boards had not been adequately consulted. Its advocates, however, were confident that the residential Village would expand towards the west, and that the open space would be needed. On November 17, 1959, the Board of Estimate authorized the acquisition by condemnation of “all the structures, together with the appurtenances thereto, on property acquired for a park.”
The new playground featured full and half-size basketball courts, a baseball diamond, and a children’s play area with a sand box, swings, baby swings, a slide, and four see-saws. As the hands and feet of small Villagers first made their marks in the sand, members of the 60’s generation were sent to tread unknown ground in the Vietnam War. Corporal John A. Seravalli, “a youth of the neighborhood,” fell on February 28, 1967, in South Vietnam. His father, a member of the American Legion, asked that the City Council rename the playground in memory of the corporal. While Community Board 2 wanted to rename the playground in a way which would recognize all fallen soldiers from the Village, perhaps “Memorial Playground,” the City Council approved the family’s petition. On May 8, 1968, a small bronze plaque was affixed to the brick comfort station, telling of the corporal’s death at age 21, and remembering his service in the war.
In 1986 the fence surrounding the playground was elevated, to prevent stray baseballs from damaging pedestrians or windows. The playground was renovated in 1992. Two handball courts replaced the see-saws, the children’s area was re-centered around climbing apparatus, and picnic tables were installed under the cover of trees. Several generations of children have now enjoyed the playground, which accommodates an ever-increasing residential community.
1.143 acres
Father Fagan Park
This park commemorates four local heroes who perished in the face of fire, losing their lives that others might live. Born in Rio de Janiero, Father Richard Fagan (1911-1938) moved with his family to Boston, Massachusetts as a child and later lived in Brooklyn, New York. He studied with the Marist Brothers in Poughkeepsie and entered the Preparatory Seminary at Catskill in 1926. Three years later, he graduated from St. Anthony’s Seraphic Seminary and entered the Novitiate in Pittsburgh. In 1932 he came to St. Francis Seraphic Seminary and was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1935. Father Fagan was called to duty at St. Anthony’s Church in 1936 and lived at the rectory at 151 Thompson Street.
The rectory caught fire in the early morning of November 4, 1938. Father Fagan escaped and then twice reentered the burning building first to rescue Father Louis Vitale, and again to save Father Bonaventure Pons. Trapped in the rectory and badly burned, Father Fagan leaped through a window to the roof of the Settlement House a floor below. He was found and brought to Columbus Hospital, where he died on November 9, 1938 at the age of twenty-seven. To describe Father Fagan’s heroic life and heroic death, members of his church quote the Book of John: “There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15: 13).
In 1994 another deadly fire stunned the neighborhood. On the night of March 28, Ladder Company 5 and Engine Company 24 of the Fire Department of New York responded to a blaze at 62 Watts Street. While operating on the second floor landing, Captain John J. Drennan (1945-1994) and Firefighters James F. Young (1963-1994) and Christopher J. Siedenburg (1969-1994) were trapped in a sudden flashover from the burning apartment beneath them. Firefighter Young was killed almost instantly. Firefighter Siedenburg died the next day, and Captain Drennan died six weeks later.
Located at the Avenue of the Americas, Spring Street, and Prince Street, this sitting area was one of several wedge-shaped plazas developed when Sixth Avenue was extended south of Carmine Street in the mid-1920s. It was named in memory of Father Fagan by local law in 1941 and was one of several properties along Sixth Avenue and West Houston Street improved and rehabilitated by Parks in 1960.
In 1994 three Callery Pear trees were planted, and three bronze plaques were installed on the northwest corner of the parcel, in memory of the three firefighters who sacrificed their lives in the Watts Street blaze. Neighborhood residents and members of the St. Anthony’s Helping Hands group help to maintain and to beautify the park.
.048 acre
Ken De Groat Ballfield
This baseball diamond bears the name of dedicated Inwood Little League coach, Ken De Groat (1942-1991). De Groat became involved with the little league when his daughter joined the team in 1977. After a few years of helping out, De Groat began to coach the team, leading them to several championships.
De Groat was born in New York City and raised in Dumont, New York. When he was 14, his mother died and he moved back to the city to live with his grandmother on Fort Washington Avenue. He went to school and played football at George Washington High School in Washington Heights. De Groat left high school, however, to earn money to help his family. After securing a job as a clerk at the Wall Street firm Reynolds and Company, De Groat worked his way up the corporate ladder over the years. In 1987 he became Vice-President of Operations at Morgan Stanley.
During the years of working on Wall Street, De Groat became increasingly involved with the Inwood Little League. Inspired by his enthusiasm, his whole family participated. In late 1988, De Groat was stricken with kidney cancer. He continued to coach the team as long as possible, finally stopping in 1990, when he was no longer physically able to continue. Ken De Groat loved coaching, and relished the time he spent working with the team.
The Inwood Little League was founded by members of the Sherman Ram’s Men’s Club Baseball Team in 1950 for 10, 11, and 12-year-old players. Three hundred little league hopefuls tried out for 72 spots. Managers drew names out of hat to make the teams. The kids could play for free, although their families were advised to just send a dollar to the league treasurer.
The first league game on June 12, 1950 pitted Garry’s S&A Club against the Leaguers team. Baseball proved very popular in Inwood and the league quickly expanded with another team, Good Shepherd(now Copos Blancos Travel), more fields, and farm teams where promising players practiced in preparation for a possible career playing ball.
Lew Alcindor, better known as basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabbar, played ball in the league as a young man from the Dyckman Housing Projects. Although he never made it to the major league, Alcindor earned a place in the Little League Hall of Fame in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Since the 1950s, a dedicated network of families has raised funds for the league through raffles and events, spending their own time to sustain the children’s recreation.
Although Parks acquired Inwood Hill Park in 1916, this crescent-shaped tract was added to the property in 1925. Mere decades earlier, this land was part of the Bronx. The builders of the Harlem River Ship Canal widened the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from the Hudson to the East River by plowing through the northern section of Manhattan. As a result, this former part of the Bronx joined Manhattan Island. The large boulder painted with the Columbia University C, now across the river, also was once attached to Inwood. On a map drawn by historian Reginald Pelham Bolton at the turn of the 20th century, the landmass is marked as Site of the Barrick, which presumably refers to military lodgings that stood here during the Revolutionary War.
Answer 4
#4 – D
Ruppert Park
Colonel Jacob Ruppert (1867-1939), brewer, sportsman, public official, and member of the National Guard, was the first co-owner of Yankee Stadium and the second co-owner of the New York Yankees. As a child, Jacob attended Columbia Grammar School. He was admitted to Columbia College in 1884, but as a third generation brewer of German descent, he chose instead to help in his family’s brewing business.
In 1867 Ruppert’s father established the Jacob Ruppert Brewing Company which was located on Third Avenue from 90th to 94th Street. In its prime, it was the eighth largest brewery in the United States. Ruppert became president of the company in 1915, upon his father’s death. In 1886 Ruppert joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard as a private. Between 1889 and 1895, Ruppert advanced quite rapidly to colonel. He served as an aide-de-camp under Governor David B. Hill and a senior aide under Governor Roswell P. Flower. In 1898 Ruppert, a Democrat, was elected to the House of Representatives to represent New York’s 15th District, which included Yorkville. He served four consecutive terms, from 1899 to 1907.
Ruppert is remembered for his role in fostering the early success of the New York Yankees. The original owners, Frank Farrell and Bill Devery, sold the team to Ruppert and Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, also a Colonel in the National Guard, for $450,000. In 1919, Ruppert and Huston bought the Astor Estate at 161st Street in the Bronx for $650,000 as the site of the new Yankee Stadium. They paid an additional $2.5 million for the construction of the stadium. The triple deck complex was dedicated on April 18, 1923. At the time, it was the finest stadium in the American League.
Ruppert was instrumental in transforming the Yankees into the most successful team in the American League. In 1920, Ruppert and Huston bought the contract of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox for a record sum of $100,000. The team, whose lineup was nicknamed Murderers Row because it featured formidable batters like Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Wally Pipp, Roger Peckinpaugh, Bob Meusel, and Frank Baker, won six American League pennants and three World Series titles in the 1920’s under manager Miller Huggins. Ruppert became sole owner of the Yankees on May 21, 1922 by buying Huston’s share of the team. He died on January 13, 1939. The team was purchased from his estate in January 1945 by Dan Topping, Del Webb and Larry MacPhail.
The park, which is adjacent to Ruppert Towers, was built in 1979 by New York City’s Housing Preservation and Development Administration. It was transferred to Parks & Recreation on April 29, 1997. The renovation of the park was performed under a $192,000 requirements contract funded by Council member A. Gifford Miller. Improvements include new benches, sidewalk repairs, installation of three new planting areas and modular play equipment in summer 1997.
.99 acre
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Clement Clarke Moore Park
Scholar and poet Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) is the namesake of two New York City parks, each located on land previously owned by his family. The first is a playground in Newtown, Queens, known as the Clement Clarke Moore Homestead, because it was the site of the estate acquired by Clement’s great-great-grandfather, Captain Samuel Moore, in 1652. The second is this playground, located on a former farm purchased by Clement’s grandfather, Captain Thomas Clarke, in 1750. A retired officer of the British Army, Captain Clarke named his property “Chelsea” in reference to London’s Royal Chelsea Hospital for old soldiers. His daughter and son-in-law extended the acreage to what is now 19th Street, Eighth Avenue, 24th Street, and the Hudson River.
Born in New York City, Clement Clarke Moore spent most of his life on the Chelsea estate. He was tutored at home by his father and graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1798, an M.A. in 1801, and an honorary LL.D. in 1829. Moore donated the land for the nearby General Theological Seminary and served as a professor of Oriental and Greek literature there from 1823 until he retired in 1850. Fluent in six languages, he published numerous scholarly works, including a Hebrew lexicon, a biography, and several treatises and addresses.
Moore is best known as the author of the delightful children’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” He composed the poem for his wife Catherine Elizabeth Taylor Moore and their children in 1822. A family friend had the poem published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel the following year. With subsequent publication in newspapers, magazines, and illustrated editions, the poem became a classic popularly known as “The Night before Christmas.” Moore died in Newport, Rhode Island in 1863.
Ninety-nine years later (in 1962), the West 400 Block Association 23-22-21 initiated the process to improve the neglected property at the corner of Tenth Avenue and W. 22nd Street. The City of New York acquired the site in 1965 for use as a public park. With the cooperation of the Planning Commission, Parks, the Twenty-second Twenty-first Street Community Council, and local residents, plans were prepared by the architectural firm of Levine, Blumberg and Coffey. The playground opened on November 22, 1968, and it was named in memory of Clement Clarke Moore by local law in 1969.
Capital renovations to Clement Clarke Moore Park were completed in 1995. Improvements included a new perimeter fence, modular play equipment, safety surfacing, pavements, and transplanted trees. This lovely corner park is a favorite place for the people of Chelsea to celebrate one of the neighborhood’s most famous sons. Community members plant and maintain the flower beds, and the West 400 Block Association holds a variety of special events at the park. Every Christmastime, neighborhood residents gather to read the poem that begins with the familiar words:
Twas the night before Christmas,
when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse.
Eugene Mccabe Field
This field honors Eugene Louis McCabe (1937-1998), the founder and president of North General Hospital, located nearby on Madison Avenue. McCabe was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and following graduation from Hillhouse High School, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He returned to Connecticut after his term of service and attended Southern Connecticut University as a political science and history major.
After graduation, Eugene McCabe became the regional director for Deleuw Cather/Parsons and Associates. He was responsible for the company’s plans to launch a $2 billion rail transportation venture with Amtrak, the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. In the midst of the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, McCabe served as staff director for Governor Hugh Carey’s (b.1919) commission to concentrate lobbying efforts for public support of federal loan guarantees.
In 1979, Eugene McCabe founded North General Hospital. He was a valiant defender of the hospital, rallying local politicians and civic leaders to support the facility through its fledgling years. Using his managerial and political experience, McCabe worked with Governor Mario Cuomo and the State Legislature to secure the passage of a bill in 1988 that apportioned $150 million in state-sponsored bonds to improve North General. The hospital now provides greater Harlem with state-of-the-art medical centers, a nursing college, home attendant programs, and a thriving housing development corporation that has revitalized stretches of Madison Avenue with affordable co-op housing. North General Hospital is the only minority-operated, community teaching hospital in New York State.
In addition to these achievements, Eugene McCabe served on the Governor’s Healthcare Advisory Board, the Greater New York Hospital Association, the Apollo Foundation, and the Landmarks Conservancy. He also served as the Vice Chairman of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone in the 1990s and was a staunch supporter of Stillman College. Eugene McCabe passed away in 1998. The following year, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani signed a bill naming a stretch of Madison Avenue between East 118th and East 124th Streets Eugene McCabe Way.
Eugene McCabe Field is adjacent to P.S. 79, and bounded by Park Avenue, East 120th, and East 121st Streets. The City of New York acquired the property on December 17, 1959. The park has been jointly administered by the Board of Education and Parks, and the name of the facility, though unofficial, was P.S. 79 Playground. In 2001, Commissioner Henry J. Stern changed the name to honor McCabe, after Manhattan Community Board 11 voted in favor of a request for that action. In October 2001, a large scale renovation of the park was completed. The $1.887 million project, funded by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, featured a new athletic field with synthetic turf along with a new backstop, allowing for soccer games and softball. There are some interesting qualities to the new turf. Set off in relief are animal images of a ram, beetle, eagle and lynx, providing a distinct look to the field. Chain-link fencing and new benches have also been added to the field.
Eugene McCabe served his community with a deep sense of passion and commitment. This field is a tribute to his achievements.
0.789 acres
Peter Detmold Park
This park honors Peter Detmold (1923-1972), once a tenant of Turtle Bay Gardens, a conglomerate of 20 townhouses on East 48th and 49th Streets, between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. Detmold fought in World War II, serving under General Patton at the relief of Bastogne and during the climactic fighting of the Battle of the Bulge in France. According to friends, Peter always held himself like a military man, and retained the physical strength he acquired as a soldier.
After returning from the war in 1945, Detmold graduated from Cornell University with a major in history and a minor in music and continued on to earn a Master Degree in medieval history. Detmold was a man of diverse interests. He was fond of reading musical scores, collecting model trains, and working on the genealogy of his family name. Among his civic pursuits, Detmold served as president of the Turtle Bay Association and founded the Turtle Bay Gazette. Detmold lived in Turtle Bay Gardens on East 49th Street, and, with fellow activist Jim Amster, launched the Turtle Bay Association in response to plans to turn 49th Street into a major commercial thoroughfare. When landowners began to rent out office space in residentially-zoned areas, Detmold defended the rights of tenants and homeowners, protecting the quiet, neighborly spirit of the area, now a designated historic district.
On the night of January 6, 1972, after returning home from a meeting of the East Side Residential Association, Detmold was murdered. This park was named in honor of Detmold that same year.
Originally a crescent shaped inlet of the East River, Turtle Bay gets its name from the turtles that lived in it before 1868, when the City filled it in to make space for expansion. Parks acquired the property for Peter Detmold Park, located along the F.D.R. Drive from 49th to 51st Street, in three parts between 1942 and 1951. On October 21, 1986, community leaders and residents broke ground for the $794,000 restoration of the park that included a gazebo, a wooden entranceway, World’s Fair benches, new asphalt and new lighting. Parks also constructed a wall to shield the park from the F.D.R. Drive. In 1999, City Council member A. Gifford Miller funded a $100,000 renovation, which included a complete reconstruction of sidewalks and fencing.
A plaque and gazebo in Peter Detmold Park honor Peter’s friend James Amster (1908-1986), a strong force in the development of the park. In 1944 Amster bought an aging tenement house, and a few other pieces of property containing run down structures east of Third Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. He improved the lots, creating offices, stores, and apartments. The area is now known as Amster Yard. Together, Amster and Detmold are largely responsible for the buildings that stand in Turtle Bay today.
1 acre
# 5 – A
First Traffic Accident Memorial
Here at West 74th Street and Central Park West, Henry H. Bliss dismounted from a streetcar and was struck and knocked unconscious by an automobile on the evening of September 13, 1899. When Mr. Bliss, a 61-year old New York real estate man, died the next morning from his injuries, he became the first recorded motor vehicle fatality in North America. This sign was erected to remember Mr. Bliss on the centennial of his untimely death and to promote safety on our streets and highways.
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Giuseppe Garibaldi Monument
This monument is dedicated to General Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807& 1882), the 19th century Italian patriot who crusaded for a unified Italy during the European era of state building.
Known as the Sword of Italian Unification, in 1834, Giuseppe Garibaldi joined the Young Italy Society organized by Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 & 1872). They fought in the first republican uprising for independence in Genoa, Italy, but after the movement was crushed Garibaldi fled to South America where he remained in exile from 1836 to 1848. While there, he fought against Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in the Uruguayan Civil War from 1842 to 1846.
Garibaldi returned to Italy in 1849 to support Mazzini and his short-lived Roman Republic. After Mazzini’s regime capitulated to French forces, Garibaldi fled Italy for New York where he met inventor and fellow Italian exile Antonio Meucci (1808 & 1889), whose patent for telephone technology predated Alexander Graham Bell. Meucci invited Garibaldi to stay at his cottage in Clifton, Staten Island. There, Garibaldi worked as a candlemaker as he recovered from the war and planned his next military campaign. Today, the cottage on Tompkins Avenue is the home of the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum.
In 1854, Garibaldi returned to Italy to fight for a united Italian nation. In 1860, Garibaldi’s volunteer forces seized Sicily and Naples. The successful campaign led to the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II, and solidified Garibaldi’s international reputation as a military leader. President Abraham Lincoln offered Garibaldi a command in the Union Army at the beginning of the Civil War, which Garibaldi declined so that he could continue to fight for the fledgling nation.
The sculptor, Giovanni Turini (1841 & 1899), who also designed the bronze bust of Mazzini unveiled in Central Park in 1878, was a volunteer member of Garibaldi’s Fourth Regiment during the war between Italy and Austria in 1866. Donated by New York’s Italian-American community, the bronze statue on a granite pedestal was dedicated in 1888, the sixth anniversary of Garibaldi’s death.
By the 1960s, a good-luck ritual developed among New York University Finance students in which each new student in the School of Finance tossed a penny at the base of the Garibaldi Monument at the start of the school year. Acknowledging this tradition and reinforcing its commitment to the community, the university sponsored a wreath-laying ceremony in 1961 to honor the centennial anniversary of Italy’s unification.
In 1970, the Garibaldi monument was moved about 15 feet to the east to allow for construction of a promenade in Washington Square. A glass vessel containing documents from the 1880s was found under the original base of the statue. The documents included newspaper accounts of Garibaldi’s death, a history of the Committee for the Monument of Garibaldi, the organization that helped place the statue, and a poster for and news clippings about the monument’s 1888 dedication.
In 1998, the monument was conserved by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program. The treatment included cleaning, repatining, and applying a protective coating to the bronze sculpture, as well as cleaning and repairing the stone pedestal. In September 2000, Garibaldi’s scabbard, vandalized and long in storage, was reinstalled and unified with his sword. The project was funded in part by The American Express Company, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Samuel Sullivan Cox
Samuel Sullivan Sunset Cox (1824 & 1889) was born in Zanesville, Ohio, and served his home state as a Democratic Congressional representative from 1857 to 1865 before being unseated. After moving to New York in 1866, Cox served again in Congress for several terms from 1869 until 1889.
Although Cox once publicly declared that his most satisfying contribution to public service was championing the Life Saving Service’s founded in the 1840s to patrol the coasts and save imperiled boaters during bad weather, the group was absorbed into the Coast Guard in 1915’s this statue is sponsored by U.S. Postal Service workers because of Cox’s support for their quality-of-life issues. Known as the letter-carriers’ friend, Cox spearheaded legislation that led to paid benefits and a 40-hour workweek for postal employees. Mail carriers from the 188 cities named on the monument contributed $10,000 for the statue in a campaign that began soon after Cox’s death.
Sculptor Louise Lawson’s statue of Cox, unveiled in 1891, depicts him orating before Congress. Lawson (186? & 1899) came from a prominent Ohio family. She and her brother, U.S. Representative W. D. Lawson, both attended Cox’s 1889 funeral at which President Grover Cleveland and General William Sherman served as honorary pallbearers. One might interpret the statue’s somewhat stiff quality as representative of Cox’s steadfast stance on issues for which he advocated.
After the statue’s unveiling on Independence Day 1891, the New York Tribune noted, somewhat less charitably, that Cox’s usually genial countenance is strained and out of harmony with the Congressman’s natural demeanor. The likeness is not a good one, and the facial resemblance is hardly suggestive, the article added. A New York Times account of the ceremony questioned whether the statue will ever be greatly admired as a work of art. Nevertheless, a reported 2,500 letter carriers came from as far away as New Orleans and Memphis to participate in the moving ceremony to honor Cox at the statue’s unveiling.
The statue originally stood near Cox’s home on East 12th Street at the intersection of Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Astor Place. In November 1924, due to a street-widening project in the vicinity of Astor Place, it was moved to its current location at the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park.
In 1998, the monument was conserved by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program. The treatment included cleaning, repatining, and applying a protective coating to the bronze sculpture and plaques. The pedestal was also cleaned and the lettering was remolded on the front side of the base. The program was funded in part by the American Express Company, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Waldo Hutchins Bench
Though there are many benches in Central Park, few are as special as this elaborate exedra (curved outdoor bench) overlooking Conservatory Water, which honors public servant Waldo Hutchins (1822 & 1891).
Born in the same year as Central Park’s designer Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), Hutchins was an original member of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park, the state-authorized legislative body which oversaw the park’s design, construction, and management in its infancy. Hutchins served as a park commissioner from 1857 to 1869, and again from 1887 to 1891. He also was a United States Congressman from 1879 to 1885.
This monument to Hutchins was erected in 1932, a gift of August S. Hutchins. It measures nearly four feet high by twenty-seven feet long, and its architect was Eric Gugler. The carved white marble stonework is attributed to Corrado Novani and the Piccirilli Brothers studio, the same firm responsible for the Maine Monument at Columbus Circle and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The sundial component was designed by Albert Stewart, and famed sculptor Paul Manship is credited with the small bronze figure at its center.
Three semicircular lines inscribed in the paving match the bench’s shadow lines at 10:00 a.m., noon, and 2:00 p.m. at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Etched into the back of the bench are the Latin phrases, Alteri Vivas Oportet Sit Vis Tibi Vivere and Ne Diruat Fuga Temporium. Loosely translated, these mean, You should live for another if you would live for yourself, and Let it not be destroyed by the passage of time. The bench and its inscriptions honor a man who helped create Central Park, promote personal fulfillment through public service, and acknowledge the preservation of those things we treasure.
#6 – A
Abyssinian Tot Lot
The Abyssinian Baptist Church was the first African American Baptist congregation in the state of New York and the fourth in the nation. It was founded in 1808 by members of the First Baptist Church who took issue with the racially segregated seating arrangements maintained by the congregation. The dissenting parishioners, under the leadership of a small party of seamen from Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), began holding services of their own. In tribute to the seamen, the congregation called itself the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
The original church stood on what is now Worth Street in the heart of the Greenwich Village community then known as Little Africa. As the bulk of New York’s African American population moved northward, so did the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Construction on the present Harlem location began in 1922 under Pastor Adam Clayton Powell Sr. (1865-1953), who was instrumental in weaving the Abyssinian Baptist Church into community life. During his ministry, a community recreation center was built adjacent to the church to give people a place to gather outside of religious services.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908-1972), who became the Assistant Minister and Business Manager of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1930, extended the tradition of community involvement to activism. Powell started a relief program for victims of the Great Depression that predated the New Deal and led the movement to desegregate the physicians’ staff of Harlem Hospital. In 1937, Powell succeeded his father as pastor, and in 1945 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served 14 terms. Powell was among the first African Americans from New York to hold a seat in Congress. The boulevard to the west of the Tot Lot that bears Powell’s name is one of many local tributes to the distinguished Harlem leader.
The Abyssinian Tot Lot serves as a play area for the Annie G. Newsome Headstart Program. Newsome was an active parishioner of the Abyssinian Baptist Church who taught Sunday school and helped to found the church’s education program. The Headstart Facility encourages parents to become more involved in their children’s education and provides community-based support for the participating families.
The Tot Lot, bordered on the south end by the Headstart building, was previously a vacant lot into which people dumped their trash. In November 1997, Parks acquired the property and turned it into a play area. The renovation created a thoroughfare connecting 138th and 139th Streets and provided a green, open area for the neighborhood.
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Annunciation Park
Annunciation Park is named after the nearby Church of the Annunciation. The annunciation, according to Christian doctrine, was when the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she was pregnant with the Christ child. The church, founded in 1853, originally stood on 131st Street to the east of the Boulevard (the old name for the northern section of Broadway) in a church building constructed in 1854. At the time, the neighborhood was a rural hamlet called Manhattanville. Noted for its elevated views of the Hudson River and its distance from the unhealthy environment of New York City, the community was connected to New Jersey by ferry beginning in 1808, and to New York City by streetcar beginning in 1853. The church was adjacent to Manhattan College, one of two religious institutions of higher learning (the other being the Convent of the Sacred Heart). Manhattan College was founded in 1853 by the Christian Brothers. In 1921, Manhattan College moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where it remains to this day. The Convent of the Sacred Heart stood between 126th and 135th Street and Amsterdam and St. Nicholas Avenues. In 1952, it sold its property to City College of New York for use as a South Campus and moved to Westchester. Meanwhile, the Church of the Annunciation moved to 131st St and Convent Avenue in 1906, where it remains to this day in a large, neo-Gothic building.
Next to Annunciation Park is a small, castellated building of dark stone that resembles a romantic folly. In fact, its original purpose was highly functional. It was built in 1890 as the gatehouse for the joining of the New Croton and Old Croton aqueduct systems. The city built the Old Croton Aqueduct from 1837-1842 in response to the lack of a consistent supply of clean water. The lack manifested itself in the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed a quarter of the business district, as well as in several disastrous cholera epidemics. The Old Croton system was one of the 19th century’s great engineering feats. A gravity feed system, it conveyed water from the Croton River in upper Westchester County at a slope of 13 inches per mile, meaning that the conduit had to be bridged across valleys and tunneled through hillsides. Engineered by John Bloomfield Jervis, it was marked by landmarks such as the Roman-inspired High Bridge and the observation tower, both the work of Jervis, and terminated at the Croton Reservoir at the current site of the New York Public Library and Bryant Park. This satisfied the city’s water needs for a time being, but New York’s rapid growth soon outstripped the system’s capacity. As a result, the city’s engineers began plotting the New Croton aqueduct in the 1880s, largely as an underground stone tunnel. Water mains from the two systems met at 135th Street, and engineer Frederick Cook designed a miniature castle to house the fairly utilitarian functions hidden inside.
Annunciation Park sits between 134th and 135th Street and Amsterdam and Convent Avenues. It contains basketball courts, play equipment with safety surfacing, a red brick comfort station, and an open asphalt activity area with game lines. In 1996, Mayor Giuliani provided new chain link fences and guide rails for the park.
M’Finda Kalunga Garden
The M’Finda Kalunga Garden is named in memory of an African-American burial ground that was located on nearby Chrystie Street between Rivington and Stanton Streets.
Dutch colonists brought the first Africans to the New Amsterdam colony in the late 1500s. By 1748, African-Americans, slave and free, made up 20% of the city’s population. In addition to being banned from membership in churches, at best relegated to balconies and back pews, New York’s black residents endured curfews, meeting prohibitions, and burial restrictions.
In 1794, the African burial ground near City Hall was closed, and by October of that year, the Common Council of New York City received a petition from the Sunday Black men of this City praying the aid of this board in purchasing a piece of ground for the internment of their dead. By April, the land was granted in what was deemed a proper place, near the dilapidated ruin of James Delancey’s mansion. The land purchase was bounded to the east by First Street (now Chrystie) and to the north and south by Stanton and Rivington Streets. By the late 1700s, the growing population of the city forced northern expansion. The burial ground began to deteriorate, and in 1853, it closed forever. The human remains were disinterred, and the site was soon built over. The M’Finda Kalunga Garden, just a few hundred yards away, memorializes this moment in history. M’Finda Kalunga means Garden at the Edge of the Other Side of the World in the Kikongo language.
The garden was founded in 1983, as a project of the Roosevelt Park Community Coalition. This coalition, formed in 1982 in response to an overwhelming drug problem in the park, created several committees to assess and to solve the variety of problems facing the neighborhood. The original aims of the garden were more social than horticultural. The organizers viewed their work as a beachhead from which to launch initiatives that would make the community a better place to live. In the following years, more gardeners joined the project, and the garden began to take shape.
About 20 regular gardeners now maintain individual beds, and contribute to the upkeep of communal areas, such as the shrubbery and bulb plantings. The garden’s mailing list is nearly double this number. Keys and individual plots are earned on an apprenticeship basis, when would-be members work with current members on shared plots, and demonstrate their commitment to maintaining the garden. Community business is handled in a democratic fashion at monthly meetings. Scheduled events include Clean-Up Day, Kids Day, senior center hours, and fundraisers.
Samuel Seabury Playground
This playground honors the late Judge Samuel Seabury (1873-1958), a renowned public servant who was a direct descendent of the first American Episcopal bishop, Dr. Samuel Seabury III. Samuel Seabury was born in Manhattan, where he attended local private schools. Barely twenty years old, he graduated from New York Law School in 1893. Later that year, he was admitted to the New York Bar. Acknowledging the rampant corruption plaguing the New York court system, Seabury led several reform campaigns against Tammany Hall, the downtown political organization run by the notorious bosses of the New York City Democratic Party, William M. Tweed (1823-1878) and John Kelly (1822-1886).
In 1901, at twenty-eight, Seabury was elected to the New York City Court. Six years later, he was elected to the New York State Supreme Court, and in 1914, he was elected an associate judge of the Court of Appeals. In 1916, Seabury ran for Governor of New York, relinquishing his seat on the Court of Appeals. He lost the election, largely because he did not have the support of the Tammany Hall political machine. Soon after his defeat, Seabury found a lucrative private practice in arguing cases on appeal.
In 1930, at the request of the appellate division of the New York court system, Seabury returned to public service leading a series of investigations into state and city corruption. His most public inquiry was an investigation into the administration of New York City Mayor James Gentleman Jimmy Walker (1881-1946). Walker was alleged to have accepted bribes from businessmen seeking municipal contracts. Seabury’s inquiry confirmed these charges, and Walker resigned in disgrace as a result. Seabury remained in public service after the Walker investigation, serving as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s (1882-1947) political advisor. On May 7, 1958, at the age of eighty-five, Samuel Seabury died having faithfully served the City and State of New York for much of his life.
In 1957, the Board of Estimate decided that this land, bounded by Lexington Avenue and 95th Street, should be employed for school and recreational purposes. At the time, apartment buildings and Public School 86, a four-story, non-fireproof building constructed in 1889, occupied the site. Following their removal, the playground opened on March 3, 1962. The next year, Public School 198 opened on the site. For years, the playground was simply known as P.S. 198 Playground, however in 1989, at the request of Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, a local law officially named the parkland in honor of Samuel Seabury.
In 1987, Seabury Playground reopened, having undergone a $673,711 renovation sponsored by Council Member Carolyn Maloney. The old play equipment was replaced with new timber-form equipment. The area closest to the East 96th Street Subway entrance was re-graded and a brick facade was installed along the retaining wall at 96th Street. In addition, London Plane trees, Japanese maples, saucer magnolia hybrids, and regent sophora trees were planted. Today, Seabury Playground’s facilities include two basketball courts, a baseball field, a comfort station, climbing structures, swings, slides, sitting areas equipped with benches and game tables, and a yardarm that displays the United States, City of New York, and Parks flags.
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Cherry Tree Playground
In 1997, Parks renamed the George Washington Houses Playground of East Harlem Cherry Tree Playground. The park’s new name draws attention to both the property’s distinguishing trees and the folklore engendered by President Washington’s reputation for honesty. As popular 19th century legend has it George Washington (1732-1799) once cut down his father’s prized cherry tree on a youthful whim. According to Mason Weems, the biographer to whom the legend is attributed, Washington was tempted to deny his misdeed when confronted with the prospect of punishment, but, looking at his father with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’ Since then, the cherry tree has been regarded as a symbol of young Washington’s integrity.
Cherry Tree Playground’s original name referred to the adjacent housing project with which it was constructed. In 1952, during the creation of the George Washington Houses, this site was selected as permanent open space. The land for the project was conveyed to the city in February 1953 and by March 1957 the playground opened to the public. Cherry Tree Playground is a popular destination for families from the Washington and Lexington apartment buildings as well as the nearby public schools.
Neighborhood volunteers have taken an active role in preserving their playground by cleaning and patrolling the area, and organizing annual functions that include basketball and tennis tournaments, multicultural shows, and talent shows. In 1996, residents of the George Washington Carver Houses Project, which lies two blocks to the east of the George Washington Houses, formed the Washington Community Improvement Council (WCIC). The WCIC is a volunteer organization composed of concerned citizens who maintain the playground. Included is a complex with basketball and tennis courts. The playground itself also underwent a major reconstruction in 1996. New play equipment, basketball courts, and benches were added to the site. Of course, the main attraction of the playground remains the cherry trees which blossom each year around the second and third weeks of April.
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Abraham Lincoln Statue
One of three sculptural renditions of Abraham Lincoln (1809 & 1865) in New York City’s parks, this larger-than-life bronze by Henry Kirke Brown (1814 & 1886) stands vigil on a busy crossroads at the north end of Union Square Park.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Hardin County (now Larue County), Kentucky, and was mostly self-educated. He settled in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 and worked as a storekeeper, surveyor, and postmaster while studying law. In 1834, Lincoln was elected to the state legislature and served four terms, and was elected to Congress on the Whig ticket and served from 1847 to 1849. After this single term, he left politics and dedicated himself to a successful legal practice; it was not until the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 threatened to expand the practice of slavery in the West did Lincoln rejoin the national arena. He lost two bids for the Senate in 1856 and 1858, but made an impression on his state and the nation over the course of seven debates with Democratic opponent Stephen A. Douglas.
Lincoln successfully ran for president as a Republican in 1860. While campaigning, he made his first visit to New York City in February 1860, and delivered a famous speech in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. By Inauguration Day in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union, and four more would follow in April. As the nation plunged into Civil War, Lincoln proved a skillful and thoughtful leader and orator. In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves and delivered the Gettysburg Address that eloquently memorialized fallen soldiers.
Lincoln won re-election in 1864 against George McClellan. Five days after Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. He died the next morning. Lincoln’s funeral cortege traveled to all the principal cities in the United States, and arrived in New York City on April 24. His body lay in state at City Hall. Lincoln is buried at Oak Ridge, Illinois, near Springfield.
Not long after Lincoln’s death, the statue of Lincoln was sponsored by the Union League Club, a Republican organization, which retained the services of the noted sculptor Henry Kirke Brown. Though Brown, like many of his generation, made an obligatory visit to Italy to study, he was part of a group of sculptors attempting to establish a truly American sculptural idiom. In his statue of Lincoln, cast in 1868, and dedicated September 16, 1870, he combines a classically styled pose with a perceptive naturalism, uniting realistic detail with an idealistic stance. Brown also created a similar portrait of Lincoln in Prospect Park (1869), and his nephew and pupil Henry Kirke Bush-Brown (1857-1935) crafted the bronze bust for Gettysburg’s Lincoln Memorial.
The sculpture originally stood in the street bed at the southwest corner of Union Square, at the location today occupied by the statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). In 1875, Abraham Lincoln was protected by the installation of an elaborate stone and bronze rail fence, into which were inscribed from his second inaugural address, …with malice toward none; charity toward all. Union Square Park was completely redesigned in 1930 to accommodate new subway construction, and the statue, minus its fence, was relocated to its current position in axial alignment with the Independence Flagpole (1930) and Henry Kirke Brown’s striking equestrian George Washington (1856) located at the park’s southern plaza. Abraham Lincoln was conserved in 1992.
Eternal Light Flagstaff
This monumental flagstaff honors those victorious forces of the United States Army and Navy who were officially received at this site following the armistice and the conclusion of World War I. The monument was commissioned by Rodman Wanamaker at a cost of $25,000.
The massive stepped ornamental pedestal, made of Milford pink granite, is inscribed with dedicatory tributes to those who served their country in World War I, and lists also the names of significant battle sites. It was designed by Thomas Hastings (1860-1929), whose architectural firm Carrere and Hastings were responsible for many notable buildings, including the New York Public Library. The lavish decorative bronze cap at the base of the flagstaff includes garlands and rams heads, and was sculpted by Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865-1925). The monument supports a star-shaped luminaire at the top of the pole, which is intended to be lit at all times as an eternal tribute to those who paid the supreme sacrifice.
The monument was dedicated on Armistice Day, November 11, 1923, and each year is the site where the annual Veterans Day parade concludes, and official ceremonies are conducted.
Hare Krishna Tree
One of Tompkins Square Park’s most prominent features is its collection of venerable American elm (Ulmus americana) trees. One elm in particular, located next to the semi-circular arrangement of benches in the park’s center, is important to adherents of the Hare Krishna religion. After coming to the United States in September, 1965, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896 & 1977), the Indian spiritual leader, founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York. He worked from a storefront on nearby Second Avenue that he used as the Society’s American headquarters. Prabhupada and his disciples gathered in Tompkins Square Park in the fall of 1966 to introduce the East Village to the group’s distinctive 16-word mantra:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare
On October 9, 1966, Prabhupada and his followers sat beneath this tree and held the first outdoor chanting session outside of India. Participants chanted for two hours as they danced and played cymbals, tambourines, and other percussive instruments; the event is recognized as the founding of the Hare Krishna religion in the United States. Prabhupada’s diverse group that day included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 & 1997). Krishna adherents continue to return to the tree to acknowledge its significance.
American elm trees are known for their towering canopies, which provide abundant shade through spring, summer, and fall. It is rare today to find such a collection of American elms, since many of the mature elms planted across the country have been killed by Dutch Elm Disease. This incurable disease, a fungus carried by bark beetles (Coleoptera Scolytidae) which colonize on the branches of the elm tree, swept across the United States in the 1930s and remains a threat to the park’s collection of elms. Despite having lost at least 34 of the trees, Tompkins Square Park still hosts a large assemblage of elms, which continue to this day to enchant park patrons. The East Village Parks Conservancy, a volunteer group, raises significant private funds for the ongoing care and maintenance of the American elms and other historic trees in Tompkins Square Park.
#8 – B
James Weldon Johnson Playground
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an African American intellectual of broad interests and accomplishments who was associated with the Harlem Renaissance. After graduating from Atlanta University in 1894, Johnson accepted the post of principal of the Stanton school in Jacksonville, Florida. The following year he founded the first African American-oriented daily newspaper, The Daily American, and in 1898 became an attorney and the first African American to be accepted into the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. During these years he also studied music and collaborated with his brother Rosamond in the composition of several songs and operettas. In 1900, to commemorate Lincoln’s birthday he wrote the poem Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, which was later adopted by the NAACP as the Negro National Hymn.
After a 1901 fire ravaged Jacksonville and burned down the Stanton school, Johnson decided to take his assortment of talents elsewhere and moved to New York City with his brother. Here, he continued to write poetry and was able to devote more of his efforts to collaborating with Rosamond. The popularity of the Johnson brothers’ productions escalated and James became quite successful. James, however, never abandoned his political pursuits and in 1906, through Booker T. Washington’s influence, he received a consular post from the Roosevelt administration. While serving at the Venezuelan consulate in Puerto Cabello, Johnson continued to write extensively, and in his three years there he wrote his novel The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man.
After a subsequent position with the Nicaraguan consulate, Johnson moved back to New York in 1913 and was made editor of the magazine New York Age, the pre-eminent African American daily newspaper of its time. He assumed the post of field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1916, becoming the NAACP’s first African-American executive secretary. Ever prolific, Johnson compiled three anthologies of African-American poetry and spirituals and continued to publish his own work even while devoting his career to activism. In 1930, however, he resigned his position to allow himself more time to write and was appointed to a professorship in Creative Writing at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the time of his death, Johnson was regarded as a distinguished scholar and activist and was given a large public funeral that reflected his legacy in African American and New York City culture. He is buried in Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn.
The James Weldon Johnson Playground was acquired in 1929 by purchase and condemnation and named with the construction of the nearby James Weldon Johnson Housing Project in 1945. It has long served as a playground for the adjacent P.S. 57 elementary school and features a full basketball court, several half courts, and a handball court, all under the watchful eye of the concrete camel that graces the center of the park. In 1997, the play area was repaved and furnished with new playground equipment.
My City
When I come down to sleep death’s endless night,
The threshold of the unknown dark to cross,
What to me then will be the keenest loss,
When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?
Will it be that no more I shall see the trees
Or smell the flowers or hear the singing birds
Or watch the flashing streams or patient herds?
No, I am sure it will be none of these.
But, ah! Manhattan’s sights and sounds, her smells,
Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes
From being of her a part, her subtle spells,
Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums’s
O God! the stark, unutterable pity,
To be dead, and never again behold my city!
James Weldon Johnson
WRONG ANSWERS
Booker T. Washington Playground
This property is named for civil rights leader Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). Washington was born in Franklin County, Virginia, and lived there for the first nine years of his life. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the Washington family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where Booker worked in a salt furnace and coal mines. Because of his heavy work schedule, Washington received his early schooling between jobs. From 1872 to 1875, he attended the newly formed Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, now known as Hampton University. In 1879, he returned to Hampton as a professor while simultaneously organizing a night school and industrial training program for Native Americans. In 1881, impressed by the program’s success, Hampton’s founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong appointed Washington dean of the newly founded Tuskegee University in Alabama. Tuskegee’s success garnered national praise for both Booker T. Washington and the institute’s industrial/agricultural curriculum.
On September 18, 1895, the educator delivered a speech in Atlanta, Georgia, known as The Atlanta Compromise in which he argued that the problems of African Americans could be greatly reduced through vocational training and economic self-reliance. The speech drew accolades from many people of all ethnic groups. Some intellectuals, however, criticized Washington as too moderate. Washington drew fire from W. E. B. DuBois for his beliefs; DuBois believed economic reform without social reform to be an acceptance of subordination. Despite some criticism, Washington continued his work and founded several organizations including the National Negro Business League. He also authored many books including The Future of the American Negro (1899), Up from Slavery (1901), Life of Frederick Douglass (1907), The Story of the Negro (1909), and My Larger Education (1911).
Booker T. Washington Playground is situated on 108th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. The playground lies within Manhattan Valley, which is the area south of Morningside Heights and north of the Upper West Side. The name became common during the 1960s and refers to the sloping of Manhattan Avenue north of 100th Street. Prior to the construction of Central Park (1859), squatters, shacks, and shantytowns filled the area. The construction of the park evicted residents of the settlements. In the late 1870s, several asylums for the elderly and disadvantaged were built in Manhattan Valley. The neighborhood was also the original home of the New York Cancer Hospital, which has since moved and been renamed Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
The City of New York acquired this property on March 8, 1943, via a condemnation proceeding. The property was intended to be used for the construction of the West Side Vocational High School. After the Board of Education failed to complete the project due to budgetary constraints, Parks acquired the parcel on July 20, 1950. The park, which shares its name with adjacent J.H.S. Booker T. Washington School, was named by Commissioner Stern. The facility provides recreation for the school and local community with eight basketball standards, one full basketball court, four handball courts, and a large open play area.
Martin Luther King Playground
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement who became famous in the 1950s and 1960s for his advocacy of nonviolent, direct action in the struggle against racism. King was a child prodigy who entered Morehouse college at 15 and was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church at 19. As pastor of the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, King secured a reputation as an eloquent and committed opponent of intolerance. He was elected President of the Montgomery Improvement Association and was responsible for the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956.
King resigned from the Dexter Avenue Church in 1959 in order to found and direct the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization devoted to challenging racism with nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1963, he organized a march on Washington to support proposed civil rights legislation. There he delivered his famous I Had a Dream speech. The following year King, at age 35, became the youngest man, second American, and third black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, but his courage continues to inspire admirers all over the world. He is remembered as one of the great American heroes of twentieth century, a man who devoted his life to fostering tolerance and equity on the grounds that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
This property was acquired by the City of New York and authorized for use by the Board of Estimate on June 27, 1946 as part of the Stephen Foster Houses. The housing project was named for Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1824), the American composer who penned, among other well-known songs, O Susannah, Camptown Races, and Beautiful Dreamer. In November 1947 the city plan was officially changed and the property was designated a playground area. Five years later it was opened as the Stephen Foster Houses Playground, reflecting the name of the nearby housing complex. When the project that surrounds it was renamed the Martin Luther King Houses, the playground’s name was changed as well.
The Martin Luther King Playground’s most popular feature among neighborhood youth is its two full-courts for basketball. Other attractions include handball facilities, and both toddler and child play areas. There are also several swing sets, a comfort station, and a sprinkler for summer use. The playground has been a participating site in the City Parks Foundation’s Summer Fun in the Parks program. Summer Fun provides free day camp activities for children aged 6 to 14 and helps working parents to offer their children safe, outdoor diversions during the summer months. Parks recreation specialists supervise field trips, parties, basketball games, art projects and myriad other activities that make the Martin Luther King Playground a special place for neighborhood families.
William McCray Playground
World War I soldier William McCray (1898-1918) was born in New York City on February 7, 1898. He attended public school locally and enlisted on June 4, 1917 in the 15th Regiment, New York Guard, the troop popularly known as the Harlem Hellfighters. All of the enlisted men in the regiment (formed in 1913) were African-American, and most of the officers were white. The soldiers arrived in France in December 1917 and were redesignated as the 369th Regiment. They joined the 16th and 161st Divisions of the French Army under the command of General Levaue.
Using French weapons, helmets, and equipment, the 369th fought bravely and earned the Croix de Guerre as a unit citation. When the American headquarters asked the French to segregate the troops, the request was refused. McCray attained the rank of corporal. He was killed in a local infantry attack in the Champagne Sector on September 12, 1918. A year after the end of the war, the Harlem Hellfighters constructed their armory at Fifth Avenue and 142nd Street. In addition to their service in World War I, the unit was active in World War II and the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars.
William McCray Playground is one of nine playgrounds that was built by the Parks Department through a war memorial fund, and was opened simultaneously on July 15, 1934. The War Memorial Fund of $250,000 was established in 1921 with monies collected by the Police Department, and by 1934 the fund never spent had grown in value to $350,000. Seeking additional open spaces for children, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses obtained a legal ruling which permitted use of the fund for playground development. Marked with a commemorative tablet, each property was to honor the memory of a soldier who gave his life in combat.
The Fund was transferred to Parks on March 19, 1934, and with additional funding from the Federal Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, the nine playgrounds were constructed within four months. Each site was equipped with a play area, wading pool, brick field house and comfort station, and flagpole. This construction was part of a larger citywide effort which expanded the number of playgrounds from 157 to 196 in that year. The war memorial playgrounds were dedicated in an official ceremony led by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia and Commissioner Moses at William E. Sheridan Playground in Brooklyn. From Brooklyn the ceremony was broadcast to all the other playgrounds by an elaborate public address system.
Parks acquired the site at W. 138th Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues in 1934. Later additions of land in 1989 and 1992 more than doubled its size of the property. On June 22, 1994 an extensive renovation was completed that provided colorful modular play equipment, safety surfacing, painted games, spray shower, benches, and game tables. New trees were planted, and the basketball court was completely resurfaced. The playground was rededicated on November 16, 1994.
#9 – A
24 Sycamores Playground
The 24 Sycamores Playground is located at York Avenue, between East 60th and 61st Streets. The site consists of land formerly underwater and property once owned by the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony). In 1943 Parks Commissioner Robert Moses suggested that the land be transferred to the Parks Department because the area was lacking .active recreation facilities. The majority of the property (.525 acre) was surrendered by the Commissioner of Marine and Aviation and transferred to Parks on March 11, 1943. The remaining piece of the property (.097 acre) was bought by Parks from Socony on August 13, 1943.The playground was built in the mid-1940s. It cost $45,000 and included an open area for roller skating, a pipe frame exercise unit, a slide, a sand pit, seesaws, swings, and a shower basin at the north end of the park. In addition, a handball court and a comfort station were built. Both of these features remain today. In the spring of 1975 a portion of the playground was closed to the public due to the construction of the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tramway Tower #2.Until 1985 the playground was unnamed. But when a real estate developer sought to raze the site as part of a highrise building project, the playground was given its present name by Commissioner Henry J. Stern. The name .24 Sycamores. is a protective measure, letting prospective developers know that the trees have been carefully counted, and their destruction will not go undetected.In 1995 a renovation program planted two new sycamore trees, but even though the park now has 26 sycamores, its name remains the same.
WRONG ANSWERS
Cherry Walk
Cherry Walk is part of Riverside Walk, a continuous four-mile-long path along the Hudson River from 72nd to 158th Street. Named for the cherry trees (Prunus) along the path between 100th and 125th Streets, this part of Riverside Park was added in the 1930s when the park was expanded by filling in the river as part of the construction of the West Side Highway.
Riverside Park, one of only eight officially designated scenic landmarks in the City of New York, has a long and storied history. The rugged bluffs and rocky outcroppings once descended directly to the Hudson River shore and were densely wooded during the Native American habitation. In 1846 the Hudson River Railroad was cut through the forested hillside. Acknowledging the city’s expansion northward, Central Park Commissioner William R. Martin proposed in 1865 that a scenic drive and park be built on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The land between the heights and the railroad was acquired by the city over the next two years.
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 & 1903), renowned co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, was retained in 1873 and submitted a plan in 1875 combining park and parkway into a synthesized landscape which adhered to the general topographical contours of hill and dale. Over the next twenty-five years park designs developed under a succession of landscape architects, including Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux (1824 & 1895) and Samuel Parsons (1844 & 1923). The result, stretching then from West 72nd to 125th Streets, was a grand tree-lined boulevard; an English-style rustic park with informally arranged trees and shrubs, contrasting natural enclosures, and open vistas.
Originally this part of the park was home to railroad tracks and unsightly dumps. In 1894, state legislature expanded Riverside Park to include the blighted land, and the Parks Department and neighborhood residents became involved in the renovation of the area.
In 1909, a naval parade from New York City to Newburgh, New York, in honor of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration began from this part of the river. The 18-day celebration commemorated the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s (1765 & 1815) demonstration of steam-power on the Hudson River and the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s (d. 1611?) discovery and exploration of the river. As part of the celebration, the Committee of Japanese Residents of New York presented 2,000 cherry trees as a gift to the city. The surviving trees of the original planting of 700, part of the same batch of trees planted in Washington, D.C.’s Tidal Basin, can be found elsewhere in Riverside Park, in nearby Sakura Park, and Central Park.
Plans to improve the site were first proposed in the early 20th century, and when the railroad expanded from two to six tracks, New York Central Railroad, under pressure from nearby residents, consented to covering the tracks. Plans to reconstruct the area took a twist, however, with the construction of the West Side Highway. Several West Side Improvement designs were proposed; an earlier plan by the noted architectural firm McKim, Mead and White placed the proposed parkway over the train tracks. Robert Moses (1888 & 1981), who first noticed the site’s potential as a fledgling civil servant, made transforming the waterfront one of his top priorities when he became Parks Commissioner in 1934. Moses opted instead to use the top of the enclosed train tracks for parkland, allowing the roadway to wend through the landfill-reinforced riverbank.
Under Moses’s direction, Gilmore D. Clarke and Clinton Lloyd, Parks landscape architects, designed a plan that afforded automobile drivers scenic views of the river while adding recreational facilities such as playgrounds and ball fields along the new expanse of land between the tracks and roadway. The West Side Improvement plan was completed in 1937 and added 132 acres to the park. The new landscape differed from Olmsted’s typically English garden design, utilizing the wall that covered the tracks as a backdrop for the new recreation features.
This link in the Hudson River Valley Greenway was completed in 2001, is part of one of several designated greenways in New York City on which only bicyclists and pedestrians are allowed. The project, which included an additional 35 new cherry trees, was funded by the Federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) and the State Environmental Quality Bond Act. Part of the greenway system first envisioned by Commissioner Moses trails on the Hudson River Valley Greenway which eventually will stretch from Battery Park in Manhattan to Battery Park in Waterford, New York.
Renaissance Playground
P.S. 194, also known as the Countee Cullen Literacy Academy, was built in 1939. The school playground opened on November 19, 1962 with courts for paddle tennis, handball, basketball, volleyball, and shuffleboard; kindergarten and school gardens; and an open area for playground ball and rollerskating. The school playground expanded to the west after 1965, the year that the City of New York acquired additional land between the school and the Alexander Hamilton Houses.
The Countee Cullen Literacy Academy is named for the brilliant poet and novelist who was born Countee Leroy Porter (1903-1946) in Louisville, Kentucky. Young Countee moved to New York with his grandmother and was later adopted by Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen, pastor of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. A graduate of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Countee Cullen won numerous poetry awards and published his works in national magazines while earning his bachelor’s degree from New York University. Before he graduated from Harvard University with a master’s degree in 1926, he had already published his first book of poetry, Color. Cullen returned to Harlem to work as an assistant editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, and later won a Guggenheim fellowship to travel in France. Upon his return to New York City in 1934, Cullen taught at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem. He died in New York in 1946.
Countee Cullen was one of the many artists and writers who participated in the Harlem Renaissance, a remarkable artistic and literary movement that bloomed in the 1920s and 1930s. The flourishing of African-American businesses, religious institutions, and political movements provided the backdrop for achievements in literature and the arts. As periodicals such as the Crisis and Opportunity served as the arena for established intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and young talents like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, African-Americans produced innovative works of poetry, fiction, and sociology. Pioneers like Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and Fletcher Henderson broke new ground in the performing arts. Contemporary visual artists included painter Aaron Douglas, sculptor Augusta Savage, and photographer James Van Der Zee.
The Harlem Renaissance lent its name to this school playground, which has recently undergone a renaissance of its own under the New York Junior League’s For Kids By Kids Playground Improvement Project. In the spring of 1999, the New York Junior League, several community groups, P.S. 194, the City Parks Foundation, and Parks joined forces to improve Renaissance Playground. Hundreds of volunteers helped to install new play equipment funded by the New York Junior League and the City Parks Foundation in a community build on May 1, 1999. Additional plantings and cleanings have brightened Renaissance Playground.
Volunteers also painted the play equipment in the children’s garden, painted game surfaces and decorative patterns on the asphalt pavement, and painted murals on the park house and school walls. The murals were inspired by The Lost Zoo (1940), a children’s book written by Countee Cullen. The paintings reflect the Countee Cullen Literacy Academy’s motto Open a Book, Open Your Mind, Open the World. The colors and design of the park house mural were derived from French artist Henri Matisse’s mural entitled Music.
Time Landscape
Landscape artist Alan Sonfist (1946-? ) created Time Landscape as a living monument to the forest that once blanketed Manhattan Island. He proposed the project in 1965. After extensive research on New York’s botany, geology, and history Sonfist and local community members used a palette of native trees, shrubs, wild grasses, flowers, plants, rocks, and earth to plant the 25′ x 40′ rectangular plot at the northeast corner of La Guardia Place and West Houston Street in 1978. The result of their efforts is a slowly developing forest that represents the Manhattan landscape inhabited by Native Americans and encountered by Dutch settlers in the early 17th century.
The surrounding neighborhood, now known as Greenwich Village, was once a marshland dotted with sandy hills that the Canarsie Indians called the Sapokanican and that the Dutch called the Zantberg. The trout-filled Minetta Brook ran to the west and made the area a favorite spot for fishing and duck hunting. Over the course of three-and-a-half centuries, agricultural, residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial development replaced the natural marshland with an urban landscape. While numerous man made features (such as buildings and streets) preserve the history of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century Greenwich Village, Time Landscape serves as a natural landmark of the 17th and prior centuries. This forested plot invites city-dwellers–including insects, birds, people, and other animals–to experience a bygone Manhattan.
When it was first planted, Time Landscape portrayed the three stages of forest growth from grasses to saplings to grown trees. The southern part of the plot represented the youngest stage and now has birch trees and beaked hazelnut shrubs, with a layer of wildflowers beneath. The center features a small grove of beech trees (grown from saplings transplanted from Sonfist’s favorite childhood park in the Bronx) and a woodland with red cedar, black cherry, and witch hazel above groundcover of mugwort, Virginia creeper, aster, pokeweed, and milkweed. The northern area is a mature woodland dominated by oaks, with scattered white ash and American elm trees. Among the numerous other species in this mini forest are oak, sassafras, sweetgum, and tulip trees, arrowwood and dogwood shrubs, bindweed and catbrier vines, and violets.
Time Landscape is on city-owned land, assigned to Transportation. It is maintained by Parks under Greenstreets, a program inaugurated in 1986 and reintroduced in 1994 to convert paved street properties, like triangles and malls, into green lawns. Funded through Parks & Recreation’s capital budget, Greenstreets plants trees and shrubs in the city’s barren street spaces. The assistance of volunteers keeps these areas clean and their plants healthy.
#10 – B
Abingdon Square Park
Abingdon Square Park shares its lineage with some of Greenwich Village’s earliest European landowners and social figures. Sir Peter Warren entered the British Navy as a volunteer in 1717 and rose to the rank of vice-admiral after an impressive tour of duty in such locales as the African coast, the Baltic Sea, the West Indies, and North America, where he fought in the French and Indian War. By 1744 he had purchased a three hundred acre farm in the area known as Greenwich extending along the Hudson River from what is now Christopher Street north to about West 21st Street and bounded on the east by Minetta Brook and Bowery Lane (now Broadway). Sir Peter and his wife Susannah De Lancey lived in a manor house with a large formal garden in the area now bounded by West 4th, Bleecker, Charles, and Perry Streets.
Their eldest daughter Charlotte married Willoughby Bertie, the Fourth Earl of Abingdon, and a share of the Warren estate was part of her dowry. Her portion included the land that came to be known as Abingdon Square. In 1794 the City Council changed the designation of streets and places with British names in order to reflect American independence. Nonetheless, the name of Abingdon Square was preserved, because the Earl and his wife had sympathized with the American patriots, and he had argued in Parliament against British policy in the colonies. The Goodrich Plan of Manhattan drawn in 1827 depicts Abingdon Square as a trapezoidal parcel between Eighth Avenue and Bank, Hudson, and Troy (later West 12th) Streets.
On March 4, 1831 the Common Council resolved that the ground called Abingdon Square should be “enclosed as a public park” and appropriated $3000 “for the expense thereof.” The City acquired the parcel on April 22 and enclosed it with a cast iron fence in 1836. About fifty years later, Mayor Abram S. Hewitt promoted a citywide effort to improve public access to green spaces. Parks superintendent Samuel Parsons Jr. and consulting architect Calvert Vaux collaborated on a new design for Abingdon Square. The iron gateposts at the West 12th Street entrance may have been introduced at this time. “Abingdon Square has been so long crowded with fine trees that a winding walk ending in a little plaza, and bordered by a few shrubs and little bedding was all that could be satisfactorily done,” wrote Parsons in 1892, “Shrubs and flowers would not thrive in such deep shade.”
Nonetheless, school children planted a garden plot at Abingdon Square Park in 1913 and “took entire charge of the garden, raising the flower from seed.” In 1921, twenty thousand spectators gathered in and around the small park to hear former and future Governor Alfred E. Smith present the Abingdon Square Memorial (also known as the Abingdon Doughboy) in memory of local men who fought in World War I. Created by sculptor Philip Martiny, this monument was restored by Parks monument crew in 1993. The flagstaff was dedicated by the Private Michael J. Lynch Post No. 831 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1933.
.222 acres
WRONG ANSWERS
107th Infantry Memorial
Sculptor Karl Illava (1896 & 1954) created this dynamic bronze figural group depicting seven larger-than-life-sized World War I foot soldiers in battle. The piece, set on a massive stepped granite platform designed by architects Rogers and Haneman, was donated by the Seventh Regiment New York 107th United Infantry Memorial Committee and was dedicated September 27, 1927. Taking advantage of its position at the end of East 67th Street at Fifth Avenue, Illava’s doughboys are in active poses, advancing from the wooded thicket bordering Central Park, as if mounting a charge. Illava drew from his own experience serving as a sergeant with the 107th, and even used his own hands as models for the soldiers’ hands.
Chelsea Doughboy Statue
This monument consists of a 14-foot-tall granite stele on which a bronze doughboy soldier is displayed. He holds a rifle, has a flag draped over his shoulders, and is depicted as if in the midst of battle.
The derivation of the term doughboy to describe an American soldier remains in question. It was first used by the British in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to describe soldiers and sailors who would certainly have been familiar with the fried dough dumplings known as doughboys.
In the United States, the nickname came into use during the Mexican-American War (1846 & 1848), and was widely popularized during World War I (1914 & 1918) to refer to infantrymen. Popular conjecture suggests that the name was derived from the soldiers’ uniforms. This was either because of the large globular brass shirt buttons, similar in shape to doughboy pastries, or because of the doughy clay that they had to use to clean their white uniform belts.
After the war, in which Americans saw combat in 1917-18, numerous communities commissioned doughboy statues to honor the local war heroes. The Chelsea Doughboy is one of nine such statues erected in New York City’s parks.
This memorial was placed in the heart of a working-class tenement district, and was dedicated on April 7, 1921. It was a gift to the City by the Chelsea Memorial Committee and cost $10,000. Designed by architect Charles Rollinson Lamb, the monument’s statue is by the noted sculptor Philip Martiny (1858 & 1927).
Martiny was born in Alsace, France, and later studied with and assisted the renowned American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848 & 1907). He received numerous public commissions in New York City. His other works include portrait statues and allegorical figures on the facade of the Surrogate’s Court House at 31 Chambers Street, as well as the Abingdon Square Doughboy, located at Abingdon Square, which bears strong similarities to this monument.
Clinton War Memorial
If ye break faith
With those who died
We shall not sleep
Though poppies grow
On Flanders Field
- an excerpt from Flanders Field by John McCrae
Located at the southeast corner of De Witt Clinton Park, this poignant monument is the work of sculptor Burt W. Johnson (1890-1927) and architect Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873-1954). It was commissioned by the Clinton District Association as a memorial to the young men from the neighborhood who died in World War I, and it was dedicated on Armistice (now Veterans) Day, 1929. The monument consists of a pensive infantryman, known as a doughboy, who holds poppies in his right hand and whose his rifle is slung over his left shoulder. The granite pedestal is inscribed with a the above verse, taken from the famous poem by John McCrae (1872-1918) Flanders Field.
The origins of the term doughboy remain in question. It was first used by the British in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to describe soldiers and sailors. In the United States the nickname was coined during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), and was widely popularized during World War I (1914-1918) to refer to infantrymen. After the war, in which Americans saw combat in 1917-18, numerous communities commissioned doughboy statues to honor the local war heroes. The Clinton War Memorial’s doughboy is one of nine such statues erected in New York City’s parks.
Burt Johnson studied with sculptors James Earle Fraser and Louis Saint-Gaudens, brother of the renowned artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Receiving many public commissions from coast to coast, Johnson also created the doughboy statue for the Woodside Doughboy (1923) in Doughboy Park in Queens. This statue was dedicated on November 11, 1929, before comrades and friends, two years after Johnson had died. In 1997, the sculpture was conserved through a project jointly sponsored by the Times Square Business Improvement District and the Mayor’s Office of Youth Employment Services.
#11 – D
Seligman Fountain
This striking bronze sculpture by Edgar Walter (1877-1938) is also known as Bear and Faun. It was dedicated in 1914 in memory of Alfred L. Seligman (1864-1910), vice-president of the National Highways Protective Association. Ironically, Mr. Seligman was killed in an automobile accident in 1910. For his years of public service in a relatively brief lifespan, friends of Seligman commissioned this sculpture at a cost of $2,000, and gave it to the City as a gift to its children. At the dedication ceremony on May 17, 1914 Parks Commissioner Cabot Ward and Frederic R. Coudert, president of the National Highways Protective Association, delivered addresses. In his speech, turning over the work of art to the City, Coudert commented, Alfred Lincoln Seligman sought not for fame, but in his comparatively short life he devoted much of his time to the young people of the City, in offering them opportunity for instruction in the art of music. It is because of his attitude toward the children and his work for their safety, health and happiness that this monument to his memory is peculiarly appropriate. About seven feet in height, the fountain depicts a bear overhanging a grotto in which a small faun (half man, half goat) plays on the pipes. The picturesque fountain, with a drinking apparatus for humans, and a basin for dogs to drink from, is situated at the foot of a staircase on the eastern edge of the park near the 114th Street entrance. Walter, the sculptor, was born in San Francisco, California in 1877. He studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in that city, and later in Paris, France, where he was a pupil of the famous Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). In 1997, the sculptures were conserved by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program, with funding from the Florence Gould Foundation.
WRONG ANSWERS
Bethesda Terrace and Fountain
In their 1858 Greensward Plan for Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) proposed an architectural open air hall of reception for this area. They imagined a sweeping promenade that would lead to a terrace overlooking the lake. As Vaux told Clarence Cook, art critic and reporter for the New York Daily Tribune, they wanted the structure to be subordinate to the landscape: Nature first, second, and third — architecture after awhile. Bethesda Terrace, mid-park at 72nd Street, seamlessly weaves architecture into the surrounding landscape, fully realizing Olmsted and Vaux’s vision.
The terrace, Calvert Vaux’s masterpiece, was one of the first structures built in the park. Construction began in 1859, just months after the Lake was excavated and filled in December 1858. General construction slowed during the Civil War, but the terrace, the architectural heart of the new park, remained a high priority. Reasserting the primacy of nature, Vaux chose a wildlife and seasonal motif, which included carvings depicting the passage of night and day. English-born architect Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886) brought Vaux’s concepts to fruition in his design of the decorative elements of the terrace.
Park visitors can stand on the upper terrace and look across the lake to the rugged shoreline of the Ramble, Central Park’s major woodland. The much-adored vista has changed little since the 19th century, with 22-foot ornamental poles framing the picture of the wilderness. These are topped by colorful medieval-style banners known as gonfalons, which lend their majesty and festivity to the landscape. The sandstone terrace with benches built into the walls is the site of the Angel of the Waters, one of the world’s most famous fountains. Bethesda Fountain, as it is commonly called, was the only sculpture commissioned during the original design of Central Park. Twenty-six feet high and ninety-six feet in diameter, it remains one of the largest fountains in New York.
Angel of the Waters was created by sculptor Emma Stebbins (1815-1882), the first woman to receive a commission for a major public work in New York City. She worked on the design of the statue in Rome, from 1861 until its completion in 1868. Cast in Munich, it was finally dedicated in Central Park five years later. At the dedication, the brochure quoted a verse from the Gospel of St. John 5:2-4: Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called…Bethesda…whoever then first after the troubling of the waters stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.
The fountain celebrates the 1842 opening of the Croton Aqueduct, which brought fresh water from Westchester County into New York City. Stebbins likened the healing powers of the biblical pool to that of the pure Croton water that cascades from the fountain. The lily in the angel’s hand represents purity, while the four figures below represent Peace, Health, Purity, and Temperance.
Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit agency that co-manages Central Park with Parks, has provided funding for major renovations since its founding in 1980. In the mid-1980s, the Conservancy funded the complete rebuilding of Bethesda Terrace. New stone quarried from the original sources was laid in alongside the existing stonework, and sculptors were commissioned to restore splendor to the aged ornamentation. The fountain was cleaned, repainted, and resealed with a protective coating in 1988; bronze specialists now wash and wax the fountain annually. Bethesda Terrace remains one of the most elegant and majestic sites in the sprawling variety of Central Park.
Hooper Fountain
This fountain is named for civic-minded businessman John Hooper (1812 & 1889). Having left the United States Military Academy (West Point) after two years, Hooper went to work as a civil engineer during the construction stages of the New York and Erie Railroad in the 1840s. He then joined Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where he began what was claimed to have been the first advertising agency in New York.
Hooper used the connections he made at the Tribune to go on to become a successful businessman; the one-time director of the Iron Steamboat Company, Hooper also served as president of the Colwell Lead Company and the North River Savings Bank. Hooper owned extensive real estate in New York and Brooklyn, was a trustee of the Tribune Association and supported many charitable institutions in the New York area. When Hooper died in 1889, he willed the cities of Brooklyn and New York $10,000 to construct two fountains whereat man and beast can drink.
Though the fund set aside in Hooper’s will was subject to an inheritance tax, and the bequest was correspondingly reduced, the work went forward. The Washington Heights Association paid for the laying of the fountain’s foundation, and in 1894, the erection of this simple yet elegant fountain in northern Manhattan helped realize half of Hooper’s philanthropic vision; another fountain was built in Brooklyn at Flatbush and Sixth Avenue near his Bedford-Stuyvesant home, but was dismantled long ago. The fountain, designed by George Martin Huss, consists of a large round horse trough, carved pedestal drinking fountain and a central Ionic column topped by an ornamental globe-shaped lantern.
When the pink granite fountain was erected, the streets of Manhattan were frequented by thousands of horses on a daily basis’s equine transport being the principal means of conveying goods throughout the city’s and numerous watering fountains and troughs could be found along thoroughfares and traffic intersections. Many were erected by humane societies such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and besides serving a necessary function in preserving the health of beasts of burden, these roadside fountains often exhibited a degree of artistry in their design and ornamentation. The decline of horse-drawn commercial vehicles resulted in the virtual elimination of these fountains by World War II.
Having long lost its original function, in 1935 (when many of the city’s monuments were cleaned as part of a WPA-funded project), parks officials considered relocating the fountain to an appropriate spot along a bridle path. Horse and sturdy ox have vanished in a cloud of gasoline exhalations, said a Parks official. [The fountain] stands there in the traffic with the serene inconsequence of a megatherium [sic] on Broadway. The plan went unrealized and in 1981 vandals toppled the shaft, damaged its capital, and destroyed the lantern on top; the remaining elements were salvaged and stored.
In 1992, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Macombs Dam Bridge, 155th Street Viaduct, and Maher Circle, which encompasses the Hooper Fountain, as an official landmark. The bridge, a metal-truss swing bridge, a marvel of modern engineering, was built between 1890 and 1894 under the auspices of the New York City Department of Public Works and the Department of Public Parks. It is the third oldest major bridge and oldest of its type in New York City.
The renovation of the Hooper Fountain has been achieved through a cooperative effort between the Department of Transportation and Parks & Recreation, as part of the reconstruction of the bridge and viaduct. The column and basins, including the plumbing, have been restored with newly designed bronze lion-head spouts, the lantern, weather vane and bronze plaque have been recreated and the fountain has been set within a larger landscaped wheelchair-accessible island, filled with roses suitable to the beauty of this historic monument.
James Fountain
Also known as the Union Square Drinking Fountain, this ornate piece by German sculptor Karl Adolph Donndorf (1835 & 1916) was donated by philanthropist Daniel Willis James (1832 & 1907) to promote the virtue of charity to 19th century New Yorkers. One of a few public drinking fountains of this type left, the figural group contains a mother holding a baby with an infant at her left side. The fountain’s figures were modeled on the artist’s family and the granite is from Sweden. The lion’s heads on the fountain’s four sides dispense water; the fountain originally featured tin cups chained to the piece to allow passersby to quench their thirst.
The piece, located in an alcove on the west side of the park, was dedicated October 25, 1881. A civic patron, James intended his gift to function not only as a decorative work of art but also to propagate a lesson about kindness and charity. After visiting the artist in his native Germany and procuring a model of the fountain, James commissioned Donndorf to execute the piece. The fountain was most recently renovated as part of the reconstruction of Union Square, scheduled for completion in 2002.
#12 – B
Claremont Playground
Rich in history, the plain of Claremont Playground has been the site of a Revolutionary War battle, a country estate, a fashionable inn, and a children’s recreation area. This was the scene of fierce combat during the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought on September 16, 1776. Michael Hogan, a former British Consul in Havana, purchased land here in 1806 and built the Federal-style Claremont Mansion (for which Claremont Avenue was named). Possible sources of the name are the elevated site’s scenic outlook; Hogan’s birthplace in County Clare, Ireland; and the title of his friend Prince William, Duke of Clarence, who would ascend the English throne as King William IV in 1830.
After a series of owners, the mansion came to be used as a popular roadside inn by 1860. The City acquired the property in 1873 for the development of Riverside Park and continued to operate the inn. At the turn of the century, the Claremont Inn and its formal gardens attracted visits from numerous politicians, military officials, socialites, and entertainers including President William McKinley, Admiral George Dewey, Lillian Russell, and members of the Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Whitney families. By 1907 it was a public restaurant, serving house specialties like curry of chicken Claremont to such notables as Cole Porter, George S. Kaufman, George M. Cohan, Fannie Hurst, and James J. Walker. Claremont Inn burned down in 1950, and a new playground was constructed on the site within two years.
There are an impressive array of monuments and structures near the playground. To the west, the Amiable Child Monument (1797) marks the grave of St. Claire Pollock, the five year-old boy who fell to his death on nearby rocks or drowned in the Hudson River. To the south stands majestic Grant’s Tomb, designed by architect John Duncan and sculptor John Massey Rhind. The neoclassical structure, modeled on the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, was dedicated in memory of U.S. President and General Ulysses S. Grant on April 27, 1897. Other nearby landmarks include the Riverside Drive Viaduct (1901), Sakura Park (acquired in 1896), and a tablet presented by representatives of the Chinese empire in memory of General Grant (1897).
The Claremont-Sakura Playground Association was founded in 1994, with assistance from Riverside Park Fund, to improve and maintain the area. Their efforts helped secure the $635,000 capital reconstruction of Claremont Playground, which was funded by the Manhattan Borough President in 1996. The reconstruction project was completed in 1998. It included installing new play equipment, safety surfacing, pavements and curbs, benches, and gates; reconstructing the drainage and water systems; and planting new trees.
The playground’s water and wildlife theme was inspired by the history and environment of the Hudson River Valley. Decorations include medallions of native fauna and a weather vane shaped like a peregrine falcon. The spray shower and three play animals are dolphins, which are not native to the Hudson River but have been sighted in the region on rare occasions since the settlement of New Amsterdam in 1624. A boat-shaped sandbox with a seahorse figurehead and a compass rosette depicting the historic Sloop Clearwater help visitors navigate a course through the playground.
WRONG ANSWERS
Alice Kornegay Triangle
Alice Wragg Kornegay (1932-1996) was a pioneering community advocate in East Harlem for more than thirty-five years. Born in Georgetown, South Carolina, she came to East Harlem to live with cousins at the age of ten, after her parents died. She studied social work at Baruch College, and received a Bachelor of Science degree from Antioch College in Baltimore, Maryland. She married Richard Kornegay, and together they raised a family.
Mrs. Kornegay devoted herself to improving social and economic conditions in the neighborhood where she grew up. In 1961 she joined with members of the Chambers Memorial Baptist Church to found the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle. As president of this organization, Mrs. Kornegay secured financing for the construction of low income housing and helped establish a variety of institutions that have become vital social centers for the community. These include the Community Day Care #2, Beatrice Lewis Senior Center, East Harlem Senior Center, and Salvation Army Center. She also was a member of Community Board 11, Community School Board 5, the 25th Precinct Community Council, and the Harlem Commonwealth Council. Alice Wragg Kornegay died in 1996.
The playground named in memory of Mrs. Kornegay is located on parkland along the Harlem River Drive, on the eastern border of the East Harlem Triangle. The Harlem River Driveway, also known as the Speedway, was authorized by chapter 102 of the Laws of 1893. Its purpose was to develop a secluded section of the west bank of the river for public use and eventually for trade and commercial purposes as well. The Speedway opened in July 1898, from W. 155th Street to Dyckman Street, and was a popular location for high speed horseback riding and horse-and-carriage races. In 1915 the route was adapted for use as a parkway for automobiles.
In 1937 Parks Commissioner Robert Moses announced a program to extend the Harlem River Drive south to E. 125th Street in order to connect with the north end of the projected East River Drive (now Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive). The new construction isolated a segment of the old Speedway that heads inland at W. 165th Street behind the Colonial Houses and Polo Ground Houses. New landscaping, parks, and playgrounds contributed to the beauty and utility of the Harlem River Drive. In 1957 Parks opened three new recreational areas between E. 126th and E. 130th Streets. The playground at E. 128th Street and Lexington Avenue featured a wading pool, sand pit, swings, slides, jungle gym, shuffleboard courts, benches, and comfort station’s all surrounded by a screen of park trees.
In 1997 Parks officials and community members gathered to celebrate the renovations to the playground. The City Council funded the $193,000 capital renovation of the comfort station, which took place in 1996. The building received a new roof, window units with security bars, metal doors and frames, handicap accessibility, lighting, and plumbing equipment. The following year requirements contracts totaling $147,210 were spent on new modular playground equipment, fencing, safety surfacing, tree pruning, asphalt paving, and a new concrete camel for children to climb.
Gustave Hartman Triangle
This plot of land, located at Second Street and Avenue C, is named for Gustave Hartman, a municipal court judge and philanthropist who spent most of his life in this neighborhood. Gustave Hartman (1880 & 1936) was born in Hungary and immigrated to the United States with his parents while still a young boy. He attended P.S. 22 on Sheriff Street (now Columbia Street), the College of the City of New York, and received his law degree from New York University in 1905. After teaching for several years at P.S. 22, Hartman was appointed municipal court judge in 1913. In 1914 he was elected to serve a full term. Hartman also served as judge in the City Court from 1920 to 1929.
Hartman’s greatest devotion, however, may have been to the Israel Orphan Asylum, which he founded in 1913 and ran until his death. The asylum, which Hartman financed out of his own pocket and through aggressive fund-raising, was located just across the street, on East Second Street between Avenues C and D. It served the needs of children ages one to six (and later girls up to age 14), many of them wartime orphans.
In 1928, Hartman married May Weisser, superintendent of the asylum. The couple had two children and remained in the neighborhood, living on East Third Street and East Fourth Street. When Hartman died in 1936, at age 56, the New York Times reported that community members were so distraught that the twelve hundred who attended the [funeral] service in the temple refused to leave to make room for invited mourners. . . . The throng was so great on Second Street that 85 policemen were needed to make room for the procession. Soon after Hartman’s funeral, the Board of Aldermen named this strip of land (then under the jurisdiction of the Board of Estimate) in his honor.
After Hartman’s death, his wife took over as president of the Israel Orphan Asylum. In 1944, the asylum moved to Far Rockaway, and in 1950 its name was changed to the Gustave Hartman Home to honor its founder. It merged with the Hebrew National Orphan Home in 1957, and in 1962 was consolidated with the Jewish Child Care Association.
In 1969, Gustave Hartman Triangle was transferred from the Board of Estimate to Parks for permanent use as parkland. The triangular mall is lined with London plane trees, a species known for its ability to survive in harsh urban environments, including dry soil and polluted air. A hybrid of the American sycamore and the Oriental plane tree, the London plane tree resembles the American sycamore, but its fruit clusters are borne in pairs rather than singly. The tree takes its name from London, England, where London plane trees have flourished despite the city’s coal-polluted air. New York City’s early park designers, who planted many of Manhattan’s most formal parks, considered London planes highly elegant trees. Due to the trees’ enduring popularity, Parks uses the silhouette of a London plane leaf as its official insignia.
Once populated by, Native Americans, Dutch settlers and free black farmers, this Lower East Side neighborhood was in Hartman’s time a largely Jewish enclave. It was home to a flourishing Yiddish theatrical and artistic community, radical intellectuals, and tens of thousands of immigrant families. After World War II, the Lower East Side’s ethnic makeup shifted as the neighborhood became one of the first racially integrated communities in the city. In recent years, the neighborhood’s legendary color and vitality have attracted residents of all nationalities and walks of life.
Samuel Marx Triangle
Located at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue, West 115th Street, and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, this triangle is named to honor Manhattan politician and community leader, Samuel Marx (1867-1922). Marx was born in Manhattan and educated in New York City public schools. In his twenties, Marx became an auctioneer and appraiser. He soon became one of the most highly recognized auctioneers in the city, co-founding the Association of Auctioneers of Greater New York. Beginning in 1898, Marx served two terms as a member of the Board of Aldermen, and was appointed Internal Revenue Collector for the Third New York District in 1919. Three years later, he was elected to Congress, but died of heart disease before the start of his term.
Samuel Marx was respected and loved by many. In 1923, the Board of Aldermen named the triangle after him, shortly after his death, noting that in his loss the city of his birth and pride is poorer by one outstanding member. Samuel Marx Triangle is located just three blocks away from Marx’s former residence at 1845 Seventh Avenue. Admiration for Marx was evident at his funeral, where 1600 mourners filled a synagogue’s auditorium to capacity while thousands congregated outside.
Samuel Marx Triangle provides a tranquil place for members of the community to rest their feet while city traffic flies by on some of its busiest thoroughfares. This parkland is composed of four benches surrounding a lush Littleleaf linden tree (Tilia cordata). A cool-climate staple from New Hampshire to the Midwest and just south of the Mason-Dixon line, the tree is recognizable by its heart shaped and serrated leaves. Pyramidal in shape, its dense branches and foliage make this tree an ideal landscaping and shade tree. The tree blooms yellow, deeply perfumed flowers in the spring. The Littleleaf linden is a popular street and city tree due to its legendary tolerance of harsh soil conditions. The tree has the ability to grow up to 70 feet high and 45 feet wide, providing shade and majestic beauty to its surroundings.
Its admirers and patrons dub Samuel Marx Triangle One Tree Park. Also notable is that the sole tree of the triangle is the first on the block to come to life with foliage in the springtime, bringing vitality to the surrounding area.
13 – B
Colonel Charles Young Triangle
Colonel Charles Young (1864-1922) was a distinguished army officer, cartographer, teacher, and diplomat who pioneered the entrance of African-Americans into fields that were previously closed to them. He was born in Mayslick, Kentucky on March 12, 1864, one year before the end of the Civil War. He moved to Ohio at the age of nine and graduated from Ripley Colored High School in 1880. When he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1884, Young was the ninth African-American to be admitted, and the third and last to graduate until nearly half a century later.
In 1894 he was assigned by the War Department to teach military science and tactics, in addition to French and mathematics, at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Young commanded the 9th Ohio Volunteer Infantry on the home front during the Spanish-American War in 1898 and served two tours in the Philippine Insurrection between 1901 and 1903. Three years later, Young was appointed as military attachi to Haiti. He was the first African-American military attachi in United States history. In addition to making maps, Young reported to the Army War College on Haitian society and government, and wrote a book entitled Military Morale of Nations and Races (1912).
From 1912 to 1915 Young served as military attachi to Liberia, where he helped to reorganize the National Military Constabulary. In 1916 he was awarded the Spingarn medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for his exceptional work in Liberia. After leading the 10th Cavalry Regiment on a punitive expedition against bandit Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1916, Young established a school for African-American soldiers at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. When he was found to be physically unfit for service in World War I, Young was retired and promoted to full Colonel. Young died in Lagos, Nigeria on January 8, 1922. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Located at Macombs Place and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard between 153rd and 154th Streets, this is one of two Harlem parks named for Colonel Young (the other is a playground located between Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X Boulevard and Harlem River Drive from 143rd Street to 145th Street). This site, originally called the Harlem Lane Park, was acquired by Parks in 1893. The Board of Aldermen named the triangle in Young’s memory on June 22, 1937. A second parcel was leased by the Housing Authority to the City for park purposes in 1957.
In 1996-97, Colonel Charles Young Triangle was renovated under a requirements contract funded by Mayor Giuliani. The reconstruction included repairing the bordering sidewalks, installing a new steel picket fence, repaving interior paths, and replanting the lawn. Shaded by sycamore, maple, and elm trees, this park provides benches and grass for visitors to enjoy a quiet respite near the Harlem River.
1.149 acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Alice Kornegay Triangle
Alice Wragg Kornegay (1932-1996) was a pioneering community advocate in East Harlem for more than thirty-five years. Born in Georgetown, South Carolina, she came to East Harlem to live with cousins at the age of ten, after her parents died. She studied social work at Baruch College, and received a Bachelor of Science degree from Antioch College in Baltimore, Maryland. She married Richard Kornegay, and together they raised a family.
Mrs. Kornegay devoted herself to improving social and economic conditions in the neighborhood where she grew up. In 1961 she joined with members of the Chambers Memorial Baptist Church to found the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle. As president of this organization, Mrs. Kornegay secured financing for the construction of low income housing and helped establish a variety of institutions that have become vital social centers for the community. These include the Community Day Care #2, Beatrice Lewis Senior Center, East Harlem Senior Center, and Salvation Army Center. She also was a member of Community Board 11, Community School Board 5, the 25th Precinct Community Council, and the Harlem Commonwealth Council. Alice Wragg Kornegay died in 1996.
The playground named in memory of Mrs. Kornegay is located on parkland along the Harlem River Drive, on the eastern border of the East Harlem Triangle. The Harlem River Driveway, also known as the Speedway, was authorized by chapter 102 of the Laws of 1893. Its purpose was to develop a secluded section of the west bank of the river for public use and eventually for trade and commercial purposes as well. The Speedway opened in July 1898, from W. 155th Street to Dyckman Street, and was a popular location for high speed horseback riding and horse-and-carriage races. In 1915 the route was adapted for use as a parkway for automobiles.
In 1937 Parks Commissioner Robert Moses announced a program to extend the Harlem River Drive south to E. 125th Street in order to connect with the north end of the projected East River Drive (now Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive). The new construction isolated a segment of the old Speedway that heads inland at W. 165th Street behind the Colonial Houses and Polo Ground Houses. New landscaping, parks, and playgrounds contributed to the beauty and utility of the Harlem River Drive. In 1957 Parks opened three new recreational areas between E. 126th and E. 130th Streets. The playground at E. 128th Street and Lexington Avenue featured a wading pool, sand pit, swings, slides, jungle gym, shuffleboard courts, benches, and comfort station’s all surrounded by a screen of park trees.
In 1997 Parks officials and community members gathered to celebrate the renovations to the playground. The City Council funded the $193,000 capital renovation of the comfort station, which took place in 1996. The building received a new roof, window units with security bars, metal doors and frames, handicap accessibility, lighting, and plumbing equipment. The following year requirements contracts totaling $147,210 were spent on new modular playground equipment, fencing, safety surfacing, tree pruning, asphalt paving, and a new concrete camel for children to climb.
Gustave Hartman Triangle
This plot of land, located at Second Street and Avenue C, is named for Gustave Hartman, a municipal court judge and philanthropist who spent most of his life in this neighborhood. Gustave Hartman (1880 & 1936) was born in Hungary and immigrated to the United States with his parents while still a young boy. He attended P.S. 22 on Sheriff Street (now Columbia Street), the College of the City of New York, and received his law degree from New York University in 1905. After teaching for several years at P.S. 22, Hartman was appointed municipal court judge in 1913. In 1914 he was elected to serve a full term. Hartman also served as judge in the City Court from 1920 to 1929.
Hartman’s greatest devotion, however, may have been to the Israel Orphan Asylum, which he founded in 1913 and ran until his death. The asylum, which Hartman financed out of his own pocket and through aggressive fund-raising, was located just across the street, on East Second Street between Avenues C and D. It served the needs of children ages one to six (and later girls up to age 14), many of them wartime orphans.
In 1928, Hartman married May Weisser, superintendent of the asylum. The couple had two children and remained in the neighborhood, living on East Third Street and East Fourth Street. When Hartman died in 1936, at age 56, the New York Times reported that community members were so distraught that the twelve hundred who attended the [funeral] service in the temple refused to leave to make room for invited mourners. . . . The throng was so great on Second Street that 85 policemen were needed to make room for the procession. Soon after Hartman’s funeral, the Board of Aldermen named this strip of land (then under the jurisdiction of the Board of Estimate) in his honor.
After Hartman’s death, his wife took over as president of the Israel Orphan Asylum. In 1944, the asylum moved to Far Rockaway, and in 1950 its name was changed to the Gustave Hartman Home to honor its founder. It merged with the Hebrew National Orphan Home in 1957, and in 1962 was consolidated with the Jewish Child Care Association.
In 1969, Gustave Hartman Triangle was transferred from the Board of Estimate to Parks for permanent use as parkland. The triangular mall is lined with London plane trees, a species known for its ability to survive in harsh urban environments, including dry soil and polluted air. A hybrid of the American sycamore and the Oriental plane tree, the London plane tree resembles the American sycamore, but its fruit clusters are borne in pairs rather than singly. The tree takes its name from London, England, where London plane trees have flourished despite the city’s coal-polluted air. New York City’s early park designers, who planted many of Manhattan’s most formal parks, considered London planes highly elegant trees. Due to the trees’ enduring popularity, Parks uses the silhouette of a London plane leaf as its official insignia.
Once populated by, Native Americans, Dutch settlers and free black farmers, this Lower East Side neighborhood was in Hartman’s time a largely Jewish enclave. It was home to a flourishing Yiddish theatrical and artistic community, radical intellectuals, and tens of thousands of immigrant families. After World War II, the Lower East Side’s ethnic makeup shifted as the neighborhood became one of the first racially integrated communities in the city. In recent years, the neighborhood’s legendary color and vitality have attracted residents of all nationalities and walks of life.
Samuel Marx Triangle
Located at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue, West 115th Street, and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, this triangle is named to honor Manhattan politician and community leader, Samuel Marx (1867-1922). Marx was born in Manhattan and educated in New York City public schools. In his twenties, Marx became an auctioneer and appraiser. He soon became one of the most highly recognized auctioneers in the city, co-founding the Association of Auctioneers of Greater New York. Beginning in 1898, Marx served two terms as a member of the Board of Aldermen, and was appointed Internal Revenue Collector for the Third New York District in 1919. Three years later, he was elected to Congress, but died of heart disease before the start of his term.
Samuel Marx was respected and loved by many. In 1923, the Board of Aldermen named the triangle after him, shortly after his death, noting that in his loss the city of his birth and pride is poorer by one outstanding member. Samuel Marx Triangle is located just three blocks away from Marx’s former residence at 1845 Seventh Avenue. Admiration for Marx was evident at his funeral, where 1600 mourners filled a synagogue’s auditorium to capacity while thousands congregated outside.
Samuel Marx Triangle provides a tranquil place for members of the community to rest their feet while city traffic flies by on some of its busiest thoroughfares. This parkland is composed of four benches surrounding a lush Littleleaf linden tree (Tilia cordata). A cool-climate staple from New Hampshire to the Midwest and just south of the Mason-Dixon line, the tree is recognizable by its heart shaped and serrated leaves. Pyramidal in shape, its dense branches and foliage make this tree an ideal landscaping and shade tree. The tree blooms yellow, deeply perfumed flowers in the spring. The Littleleaf linden is a popular street and city tree due to its legendary tolerance of harsh soil conditions. The tree has the ability to grow up to 70 feet high and 45 feet wide, providing shade and majestic beauty to its surroundings.
Its admirers and patrons dub Samuel Marx Triangle One Tree Park. Also notable is that the sole tree of the triangle is the first on the block to come to life with foliage in the springtime, bringing vitality to the surrounding area.
#14 – C
Erie Canal Playground
Erie Canal Playground is located in De Witt Clinton Park, one of the few New York City parks which gave its name to a neighborhood. This area, roughly bounded by 59th Street, 8th Avenue, 34th Street, and the Hudson River, is known as Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen. The park and playground are named for New York politician De Witt Clinton (1769-1828) and his most famous project & the Erie Canal, a 363 mile waterway that stretches from Albany to Buffalo.
De Witt Clinton was the son of Revolutionary War general James Clinton and the nephew of New York Governor George Clinton. He graduated from Columbia College in 1786 and served as a New York assemblyman (1798), state senator (1798-1802; 1806-11), U.S. senator (1802-03), New York City mayor (1803-07; 1810-11; 1813-15), and New York State governor (1817-21; 1825-28). He ran unsuccessfully for president against James Madison in 1812, with support from Federalists and Republicans. As a public servant and private citizen, Clinton improved the living conditions and as well as the defenses of New York and helped establish several charitable and cultural institutions, including the precursor of the New York Historical Society.
Clinton is best remembered for his role in planning the Erie Canal, constructed in 1817-25 at a cost of $8 million. Critics branded the project Governor’s Gutter, Governor’s Gully, Clinton’s Ditch, and Clinton’s Folly. By linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, the man-made waterway solidified New York’s position as the nation’s commercial center, and its success stimulated improvements to the interior and the Port of New York.
Parks acquired the 7.4 acre lot in Hell’s Kitchen in 1901, and officially opened De Witt Clinton Park on November 4, 1905. Designed by landscape architect Samuel Parsons, Jr., the picturesque park featured a recreation/bathing pavilion (by Barney & Chapman Architects), gymnasium, running track, playgrounds, and a series of curving paths that led spectators to a panoramic view of the Hudson and the Palisades. The park’s centerpiece was a children’s farm garden, which operated from 1902 to 1932. It featured flower beds, observation plots, a pergola, and 356 4′ x 8′ vegetable gardens each assigned to a little farmer. Director Frances Griscom Parsons (no relation to Samuel Parsons, Jr.), the city’s first female park administrator, taught local children about plant science, conservation, nutrition, and hygiene. The success of this program inspired the creation of similar farm gardens in other neighborhood parks in the 1910s-1930s and influenced the contemporary community gardens movement.
Sculptor Burt W. Johnson and architect Harvey W. Corbett designed the Flanders Field Memorial (1929) which depicts a World War I soldier or doughboy located in the southeast corner of the park. The monument was dedicated in 1930, and restored in 1997. De Witt Clinton Park was truncated on the west side by 1.5 acres in 1931 for the construction of the Miller Highway, which has since been torn down.
In 1996 the Erie Canal playground underwent a $635,000 renovation which included the installation of dog runs and play equipment, landscaping, and a colored concrete north arrow around the base of the reconstructed yardarm flagpole. A graphic on the pavement displays the words to The Erie Canal and the route of the famous waterway. In 2009 a $3.4 million
reconstruction of the parks ballfields, with funding allocated by Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Member Christine Quinn, included installation of synthetic turf. Part of this reconstruction features an element of green design whereby much of the water runoff will be captured within the site.
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Cherry Clinton Playground
The land now occupied by Cherry Clinton Playground was owned by the Board of Education through the first few decades of the 20th century, and was used as the Seventh Ward Athletic Field until jurisdiction was transferred to Parks on June 16, 1938. The park was opened to the public on April 3, 1940 and included four paddle tennis courts, four handball courts, and a basketball-volleyball court. For years, the small park situated at the intersection of Clinton, Cherry, and Water Streets was known simply as “Playground.” Not until 1985 was the park named Cherry Clinton Playground after the streets which border it to the north and west.
Cherry Street has had its name for over three centuries. During the 1660’s, this land was owned by Goovert Loockermans, a wealthy Dutch merchant working for the firm of Gillis Verbrugge & Co. Loockermans operated a seven-acre orchard which was said to produce the best cherries in all of New York. When the land was sold in 1672 for sixty dollars, the orchard was lost.
On April 23, 1789, George Washington (1732-1799) arrived in New York, then the nation’s capital, for his inauguration. It was his first trip to the city since the end of the Revolutionary War, and the city gave him a hero’s welcome as both General and newly-elected President. Thousands of people crowded the waterfront between the Battery and Wall Street to greet Washington’s ship as it sailed in. Governor George Clinton (1739-1812), the first Governor of New York and Clinton Street’s namesake, met President Washington as he landed at Murray’s Wharf. The two men made their way to 3 Cherry Street, George Washington’s official residence, and the nation’s first Executive Mansion.
One week after Washington’s triumphant reception in New York, he was inaugurated as the nation’s first President. George Clinton served as Governor from 1777 to 1795, and again from 1801 to 1804. He went on to serve as Vice President of the United States under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison from 1805 until his death in 1812. Clinton Street was originally called Warren Street, but was renamed in honor of Governor Clinton in 1792.
In 1993 the park underwent a $487,000 capital renovation funded by Council Member Kathryn E. Freed. The redesigned park provides opportunities for active recreation with a full complement of handball, basketball, and volleyball courts. Fourteen new cherry trees were planted to commemorate the history of the neighborhood and the namesake of the playground.
Members of the community have helped to care for the park since its renovation. The Two Bridges Tenants Association has been particularly involved in planning events which keep the park lively. Their vigilance and care call to mind the words uttered by President Washington to his guards upon his arrival in New York, “[T]he affection of my fellow citizens is all the guard I want.”
.438 acre
Renaissance Playground commemorates the Harlem Renaissance, a remarkable artistic and literary movement that bloomed in the 1920s and 1930s. The flourishing of African-American businesses, religious institutions, and political movements provided the backdrop for achievements in literature and the arts. While Renaissance Playground celebrates the memory of this important period in the city’s history, it also serves as a reminder of how others influenced the city’s natural history.
Septuagesimo Uno
Septuagesimo Uno (meaning seventy-one in Latin) is located on 71st Street between West End and Amsterdam Avenues. This parkland lies within the area settled following the Commissioners Plan of 1811. New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) created the commission, which was charged with planning the orderly development of Manhattan north of Houston Street. Prominent New Yorkers, such as the politician Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), the surveyor Simeon De Witt (1756-1834), and the lawyer John Rutherford (1760-1840), filled the commission’s ranks. The planners agreed on a system of rectangular blocks, extending from 14th Street through Washington Heights, designed to maximize the city’s efficiency and ease of use. Known as the grid system, the plan arranged 12 North-South avenues perpendicular to 155 East-West cross streets. The commission designed the avenues to be 100 feet wide and the streets to lie 200 feet apart. The plan provided for parks to be located on 53rd, 66th, 77th, and 120th Streets. Latter additions included Union, Tompkins, Stuyvesant, and Madison Squares as well as Lexington and Madison Avenues.
The Commissioners Plan of 1811 astutely predicted the exponential residential growth that would occur during the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the plan failed to include the park acreage necessary to provide adequate recreation for the growing population. By the 1960’s, land had become extremely scarce in New York City. Recognizing this scarcity, the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (b. 1924) began the Vest Pocket Park campaign in New York City. Vest pocket parks, like Septuagesimo Uno, are most often constructed on small vacant lots located between buildings. City, state, or federal governments fund the creation of these parks, which community residents use until they are developed. In many cases, community organizations and charitable groups petition for the construction of these parks. Vest pocket parks are located in densely populated neighborhoods and characterized by sitting areas, gardens, and playgrounds.
New York City acquired this property through condemnation on March 28, 1969. Mayor Lindsay’s Vest Pocket park initiative supervised the landscaping of the parcel. In May 1981, the Department of General Services transferred jurisdiction of the property to Parks. Based on the agreement, Parks developed a sitting area and maintains the site in cooperation with Community Board 7. Septuagesimo Uno boasts several benches that are surrounded by well-maintained gardens. In 2000, the park received a $14,325 renovation sponsored by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The improvements included the addition of steel fencing with bear claw extensions. At night, the fences are closed to deter vandalism. For the millennium, Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern spiced up the park’s bland original name, 71st Street Plot, by giving it its present Latin appellation.
#15 – C
Lajos Kossuth Monument
For many years on March 15th, Hungarian Independence Day has been celebrated on Riverside Drive at the monument to patriot Lajos Kossuth (1802-94). The bronze tableau portrays a vignette of the struggle for Hungarian independence in 1848. Atop a pedestal of Milford pink granite, a larger-than-life figure of Kossuth motions to two other male figures at the base: a revolutionary soldier and an aged peasant, representing Hungary’s new republic and old regime.
Kossuth was born to a family of noble heritage in Monok in northeastern Hungary. In the early 1830s, he emerged as a leader of the country’s radical reform movement. Trained as a lawyer, Kossuth edited several journals and newspapers that allowed him to broadcast his increasingly popular ideas. He issued fiery pleas for Hungary’s independence from Vienna’s Hapsburg Monarchy, for emancipation of the peasants, and for industrial development. Kossuth was elected to the Hungarian Diet (national assembly) in 1847, and a year later he led the revolution that created a new national government for Hungary.
The new government fell to invading Russian and Austrian armies in 1849, and Kossuth fled into exile. Rallying support for Hungarian independence, he dazzled European and American audiences with his eloquence. Sympathizers in the United States identified with the aims of overthrowing the foreign monarchy and establishing republican government for Hungary. Kossuth visited New York in December 1851 at the start of a seven-month tour of the United States. Upon arrival, he was given a tremendous welcome, described in the newly-founded New York Times as one of “the most magnificent and enthusiastic ever extended to any man in any part of the world.” A reception hosted by Mayor Ambrose C. Kingsland, banquets, and a parade up Fifth Avenue were held in his honor. Kossuth lived in exile in England and (after 1865) in Italy. After his death in Turin in March 1894, his body was brought to Budapest and buried in state.
On March 15, 1928, a crowd of 25,000 gathered at Riverside Drive and 113th Street to dedicate the monument to Lajos Kossuth, designed by Hungarian sculptor Janos Horvai (1873-1944) and funded by American citizens of Magyar origin. The ceremony was not without controversy. The delegation of 520 Hungarian public officials encountered a protest denouncing the conservative Horthy government for “hypocrisy” in honoring Kossuth and his liberal ideals. In 1930, the monument had to be dismantled due to poor fabrication; later a second cast was installed. The monument was originally intended to feature three bronze panels depicting scenes in the life of Kossuth; instead, in 1930, Horvai presented the panels to the First Hungarian Reformed Church, located at 344 East 69th Street.
Riverside Drive stretches along Riverside Park from W. 72nd Street north to Dyckman Street. In consideration of New York’s northward expansion, the City acquired land between the Hudson River Railroad and the rocky bluffs along the river in 1866-67 for a park and scenic drive. The original 1875 plan, by Central Park co-designer Frederick Law Olmsted, called for a park with a picturesque drive winding along the natural contours of the land. Twenty-five years later, the result was an English-style rustic park and a formal tree-lined boulevard. A fashionable address at the turn of the century, Riverside Drive attracted a collection of substantial neo-classical apartment houses and mansions along its east side. The Drive’s majestic elevation also made it an impressive location for colossal monuments and institutions, including Grant’s Tomb (1897) and Riverside Church (1930). The Kossuth tableau is one of more than a dozen monuments which adorn Riverside Drive, including sculptures of Samuel Tilden (1926), Joan of Arc (1915), and Franz Sigel (1907).
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Antonin Dvorak Statue
This statue by Croatian-American sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883 & 1962) honors the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (1841 & 1904) who made this neighborhood his home for a time, and helped to integrate several musical traditions.
Dvorak was born in the village of Nelahozeves, north of the capital city of Prague, on September 8, 1841. His father kept an inn, and there Dvorak as a child often experienced music-making. He took up the violin, and in 1857 was sent for two years to school in Prague for intensive musical training. At this time Dvorak began composing, and supported himself as a violist, organist, and teacher. He became a violist in the Czech National Theatre Orchestra when it was founded in 1862.
Early on, Dvorak was influenced by the musical compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 & 1827) and Franz Schubert (1797 & 1828), and later by Franz Liszt (1811 & 1886) and Richard Wagner (1813 & 1883); he drew equally from Czech and Slavonic folk traditions. In 1873 his cantata Hymnus was publicly performed, and in that year he married Anna Cermakova. An 1875 Austrian state grant brought Dvorak in contact with Johannes Brahms (1833 & 1897), who provided him with technical advice and found him the influential publisher Fritz Simrock. Over the next 15 years he was a prolific composer, exhibiting a flair for melody, often with a nationalist flavor. His works were performed across Europe, from England to Russia.
In 1892, Dvorak, already internationally renowned, was appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music in America, and settled for three years in New York City at 327 East 17th Street. During his stay in the United States, he was greatly influenced by African-American spirituals and Native American music. His most famous work in this period was the Symphony #9, in E Minor, better known as the New World Symphony (1893). Other notable compositions during his American tenure included the Cello Concerto (1894-95) and the Quartet in F for strings.
Dvorak’s impact as a teacher was broad. His students included Harry T. Burleigh, a prominent black baritone, and Amy Beach, the first well-known American woman composer. His pupils included those who would later teach such musical luminaries as Duke Ellington (1899 & 1974), Aaron Copland (1900 & 1990), and George Gershwin (1898 & 1937). In 1895, Dvorak returned to Bohemia, and in 1901 he became director of the Prague Conservatory. In his last years he composed two string quartets, five symphonic poems, and three operas; he died on May 1, 1904.
In the early 1990s Dvorak’s former house on East 17th Street was designated a city landmark, but rescinded shortly after. Efforts to save the house proved unsuccessful, and it was demolished in 1991. In response, the Dvorak American Heritage Association, in cooperation with the New York Philharmonic and the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association, procured this statue, and raised funds to conserve it, design a new pedestal, install it in the park opposite the site of Dvorak’s home, and endow its maintenance.
In 1963, this bronze portrait bust was given by the Czechoslovak National Council of America to the Philharmonic, but never put on public display. It is believed to be the last work of the noted sculptor Mestrovic, a student of Rodin and the first living artist to receive a one-person exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mestrovic’s plaster model for this work is on display in the lobby of the Manhattan School of Music. Consigned to a rooftop terrace of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the sculpture was mounted to an inadequate concrete base for three decades, and suffered extensive environmental corrosion.
As part of the relocation project, the statue was repatined, and a new pedestal of green granite was designed by Czech-American architect Jan Hird Pokorny. On September 13, 1997, the effigy of Dvorak was unveiled here near the site of many of his greatest accomplishments. Several hundred spectators and numerous dignitaries, including Jan Koukal, Mayor of Prague, attended the dedication ceremony. It was followed by a Dvorak concert performed by world-class musicians at nearby St. George’s Church.
Hope Sculpture
Located in the shadow of the United Nations at First Avenue and East 47th Street, this striking monument honors the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (1912-?), who is credited with helping to save the lives of some 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust in World War II (1939-1945). The monument was crafted by Swedish sculptor Gustav Kraitz (born in Hungary, 1926) in collaboration with his wife Ulla Kraitz, and was dedicated in 1998.
Wallenberg was born into a prominent Swedish banking family on August 4, 1912. Trained as an architect at the University of Michigan, he became a businessman and traveled widely in Europe before and during World War II. Meanwhile in Hungary, persecution of the country’s large Jewish population intensified toward the end of the war, with mass executions and deportations. In 1944, the American Refugee Board sought the aid of neutral Sweden in its efforts to save as many of the country’s Jews as possible.
Wallenberg was chosen to lead the rescue operation, largely because of his many business contacts in Hungary and elsewhere on the continent. With no prior background, he was posted to the Swedish Legation in Budapest as first secretary, and proved inventive and fearless. By the time he arrived in Budapest in July 1944, the Swedish diplomatic mission was besieged with requests by those threatened with persecution and eventual death. He contrived official-looking passports that declared the bearer to be under Swedish protection, and sheltered a large number of Jewish refugees in safe houses that he bought or rented throughout the city.
In January 1945, the Soviet army was stationed on the outskirts of Budapest. On January 17, 1945 Wallenberg left the city under military escort for a meeting with a Soviet commander, and never returned. After the 1989 collapse of the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), investigations into the mysterious disappearance of Wallenberg appeared to indicate that he died while in a Soviet prison on July 17, 1947. In honor of his heroic efforts a worldwide organization established in Wallenberg’s memory perpetuates his life and humanitarian beliefs and actions. In New York City, in addition to this plaza and monument three parks and playgrounds are named for Wallenberg, and on October 5, 1981 he was named an honorary citizen of the United States by a joint resolution of the Congress.
The monument consists of five pillars, varying in height, made of black Swedish bedrock, each polished on two sides and rough-hewn on the others. The pillars are intended to suggest the ruins of a devastated city, though the tallest pillar in the center is capped by a blue ceramic sphere symbolizing hope. Nearby a bronze attachi case is a vestige of Wallenberg and represents his mission. The entire monument is set on a platform comprised of granite paving stones from the old Jewish ghetto of Budapest.
The monument to Wallenberg was a gift to the city by the family of Hilel Storch. It was dedicated on November 9, 1998, a date chosen to coincide with the 60th Anniversary of Kristallnacht (the 1938 mass attack on Jews in Germany in which hundreds were killed and injured, and thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps; translates into night of broken glass).
In a solemn ceremony, remarks were delivered by Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, Swedish Consul General Dag Sebastian Ahlander, donor Marcus Storch, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, and Agnes Adachi, a surviving member of Wallenberg’s staff. Krister Stendahl, Dean Emeritus of the Harvard Divinity School and former Bishop of Stockholm gave the invocation and Maynard Gerber, cantor of the Great Synagogue of Stockholm performed; also in attendance were H.R.H. Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and Nane Annan, the wife of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and also Wallenberg’s niece. Though specific to the life of one individual, Hope honors all who would act in defense of human liberty and help overcome man’s inhumanity to man.
Trygve Lie Plaza
This park was acquired by the City of New York in 1948 in connection with the widening of First Avenue. It is one of three parks in Turtle Bay named for former officials of the United Nations. The slender park on First Avenue between East 41st and East 42nd Streets honors the memory of Norwegian statesman Trygve Halvdan Lie (1896-1968).
Lie was born in Oslo, Norway on July 16, 1896 and educated at the University of Oslo. Upon receiving his law degree in 1919, he went into law practice. Lie married Hjordis Joergensen in 1921, and they had three children’s Sissel, Guri, and Mette. A member of the Labor Party since he was a teenager, Lie quickly rose within the ranks. He was an assistant to the secretary of the party from 1919 to 1922, legal adviser to the Norwegian Trade Union Federation from 1922 to 1935, and national executive secretary of the party in 1926.
When a Labor Party Government was formed in 1935, Lie served as Minister of Justice from 1935 to 1939 and Minister of Trade and Industries in 1939. At the outbreak of World War II, he salvaged 85 percent of Norway’s merchant fleet for the Allies. Lie served as foreign minister of the Norwegian government in exile in London. He also was elected to the Norwegian Parliament twice, in 1936 and 1945. When the next Labor Party Government came to power in 1945, Lie remained Norway’s Foreign Minister.
Lie headed the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945 and served as chairman of Commission III, which drafted the charter of the Security Council. On February 1, 1946, Lie was elected the first Secretary-General of the United Nations. He was re-elected, over Soviet opposition, in 1950. Resistance from the Soviet bloc triggered his resignation in 1952. Lie was succeeded by Dag Hammarskjof Sweden, whose eponymous park is located six blocks to the north.
After leaving the United Nations, Trygve Lie served in a number of official and honorary positions, including Governor of Oslo and Akershus and Chairman of Norway’s Board of Energy. Lie died at Geilo, Norway on December 30, 1968.
#16 – A
Ahearn Park
This small Lower East Side park is one of New York City’s oldest. On August 2, 1824, the Common Council agreed to take a triangular piece of land between Grand, Harman (now East Broadway), and Scammel Streets as a public place. The City acquired the parcel by condemnation the following year for $3158.23.
In 1870 all of New York’s public parks, from small public squares in Lower Manhattan to the not-yet-complete Central Park, were placed under the control of the newly created Department of Public Parks. Sweeping improvements were initiated immediately. Between 1871 and 1872, Grand Street Place (as this park was then known) was surveyed and received new lampposts, plantings, curbs, water and drain pipes, and an iron railing. It was one of fourteen New York parks that featured a program of music and fireworks on Independence Day in 1873.
By the early 1910s, this site was known as Oriental Park. According to Department of Parks Annual Reports from 1911 and 1913, several trees were removed and replaced with four European lindens, three Norway maples, and eight Oriental plane trees. In 1923 the Board of Aldermen named the park for John Francis Ahearn (1853-1920), a Tammany Hall sachem who rose to power around the turn of the century. Ahearn’s leadership style was marked by his intense political game-playing and by his devotion to the personal needs of his constituents.
Born in New York City, Ahearn was educated at public schools and worked as a business clerk. He served one term in the State Assembly, from 1882 to 1883, and five terms in the State Senate, from 1890 to 1902. Senator Ahearn championed the interests of firemen, policemen, and school teachers. Elected Manhattan Borough President in 1903, he was the subject of a damaging report made by Commissioner of Accounts John Purroy Mitchel to Mayor George McClellan. Without accusing Ahearn of personal dishonesty, Governor Charles Evans Hughes denounced Ahearn’s administration as flagrantly inefficient and wasteful, and he removed Ahearn from office. The Board of Aldermen then selected Ahearn in 1907 to fill his own vacancy. After a legal struggle, Mayor McClellan removed Ahearn from office just before the end of both of their terms in December 1909. Ahearn died in his home at 296 East Broadway in 1920.
Ahearn Park assumed its present dimensions in the early 1960’s. A portion of the property was eliminated by the widening of Grand Street, and two parcels to the west were transferred to Parks and incorporated into the site. The park was renovated in 1998 under a $83,000 requirements contract funded by Mayor Giuliani. Improvements included installing new world’s fair benches, resetting the Belgian block, repaving the park and sidewalks, and creating a planted area enclosed by a steel picket fence. The renewed Ahearn Park is an enduring oasis in the Lower East Side.
.094 Acres
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Sauer Park
World War I soldier Joseph C. Sauer (1896-1918) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His family moved to the Lower East Side of New York City when he was an infant. Sauer graduated from the Redemptorist Parochial School and excelled in athletics, especially track. He worked for the Western Electric Company, and following the death of his grandfather, Sauer and his mother took over the family’s basket manufacturing business. He worked there until he entered the United States Army on September 28, 1917.
At Camp Upton on Long Island, Sauer was appointed a bugler and assigned to Company F, 308th Infantry, 77th Division. On April 6, 1918, Sauer sailed for France where he fought on the Vesle, the St. Mihiel, and the Meuse Argonne. On October 7 a section of his company was cut off in the Forest of the Argonne. One of the volunteers who crawled through the forest to reach the rest of the company, Sauer was shot in both legs by German soldiers, and died of his wounds several days later. For his act of bravery, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
Sauer Park is one of nine playgrounds that were built by the Parks Department through the War Memorial Fund, and were opened simultaneously on July 15, 1934. The War Memorial Fund was established in 1921 with $250,000 collected by the Police Department, and by 1934 the fund never spent had grown in value to $350,000. Seeking additional open spaces for children, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses obtained a legal ruling which permitted use of the fund for playground development. The properties were intended to honor the memories of individual soldiers who gave their lives in combat.
The Fund was transferred to Parks on March 19, 1934. With additional funding from the Federal Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, nine playgrounds were constructed within four months. Each site was equipped with a play area, wading pool, brick field house and comfort station, flagpole, and commemorative tablet. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia and Parks Commissioner Moses simultaneously dedicated the memorial playgrounds in a ceremony held at William E. Sheridan Playground in Brooklyn. The program was broadcast to all the other playgrounds by means of an elaborate public address system.
Parks first acquired the land for Sauer Park in 1934 and expanded the site with subsequent additions in 1965, 1989, and 1992. The property underwent a dramatic renovation as a result of collaboration between the community and Parks. In the late 1980s fencing was installed around the park, and members of the East 12th Street Block Association prepared plans, raised funds, and initiated improvements, such as planting garden plots.
Once the design was completed in 1991, the reconstruction was funded by Manhattan Borough President Ruth W. Messinger. Construction took place in 1992-93, and the playground reopened on August 21, 1993. New features include a spray shower, pavilions, and modular play equipment with corkscrew slides. In 1994 community members planted a children’s garden on the east side of the park, and a local artist collaborated with children on a mural of local flora and fauna. The East 12th Street Block Association, Friends of Sauer Park, and El Sol Brillante Garden Sr. have agreed to maintain the park’s beautiful green spaces.
.433 acres
Mae Grant Park
This park is named for Mae Grant, a local activist and tenant of the Carver houses. Mae Grant served as president of the tenant association from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. She is best remembered for her giving spirit and fairness.
She served tenants and community members in many ways beyond in her official capacity as tenant association president. People turned to her for help in finding and securing apartments and jobs. Grant established a community food program to assist the less fortunate in the community. In addition to the volunteer work she did, she was also instrumental in bringing entertainment to the Heckscher Theater at El Museo Del Barrio.
The park is located at the center of the Carver Houses, a housing development named for George Washington Carver (c.1860-1943). The Carver Houses are one of the New York City Housing Authority’s complexes that also provides services to the community, such as mental health counseling and child care. Carver, the project’s namesake was an agricultural scientist, inventor, and educator. A freed slave who earned a Master’s Degree from the University of Iowa, Carver conducted research at the Tuskegee Institute. He refined crop rotation methods for conserving nutrients in soil and discovered hundreds of new uses for crops, such as the peanut. In so doing, Carver met his personal goal of helping African Americans and creating new markets for all farmers, especially in the South.
The Carver Houses, located in East Harlem, are surrounded by many outstanding cultural and recreational institutions, such as El Museo del Barrio, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Conservatory Garden and Harlem Meer in Central Park. El Museo del Barrio was founded in 1969 by local parents who wanted to capture Puerto Rican heritage for their children growing up in the modern East Harlem environment. Now it hosts traditional and contemporary artwork from all over Latin America, as well as film, theater, and music events.
This park, located between Madison and Park Avenues on the North side of 104th Street, was acquired by condemnation on February 1, 1951. The park was planned, mapped, and built from February to May of 1953. In late 1958, the park was closed in order to widen 104th Street, and was reopened in February of 1959 when the project was completed. In 1994, the park was renovated with $482,000 in funding from Council Member Adam Clayton Powell. This latest renovation added two colorful metal and plastic play structures, a new set of swings specifically for younger children and a refurbished sprinkler tower with new casing for the water facilities. All the play equipment, including the swings, was outfitted with safety surfacing. Picnic tables were also added, and they sit in the shade of London planetrees (<i>Platanus x acerifolia), which are scattered in and around the park. For older children and adults, the park is equipped with an enclosed basketball court and a double-sided handball court.
Like the giving spirit of Mae Grant, the park that bears her name continues to give to the community. It provides essential recreational facilities for the housing projects and all nearby residents.
Straus Square
Straus Square is named for Nathan Straus (1848-1931), who was born in Otterberg, Rhenish Bavaria (now Germany) on January 31, 1848. His father, Lazarus, emigrated to America in 1852, and the rest of the family followed in 1854. They settled in Talbotton, Georgia. Nathan’s formal education included Sunday School classes with a Baptist minister and preparatory schooling in Georgia; advanced studies, religious instruction, and Hebrew lessons in Alabama; and professional training at Packard Business College in New York City, where the family moved after the Civil War.
Nathan’s shrewd mind, tremendous energy, and kind heart all contributed to an outstanding business career. As the international representative for L. Straus & Sons, the family’s crockery and glass firm, Nathan traveled across America to open new markets and throughout Europe to acquire new products. He forged an alliance with R.H. Macy, and by 1896 the Strauses were sole owners of Macy’s famous department store in Manhattan and partners in the Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn. In 1902 the family opened the world’s largest department store, Macy’s at Herald Square. Nathan promoted the welfare of Macy’s employees by providing a dining hall with full meals for just five cents; offering personal gifts of money, clothing, and medical treatment; and, with his brother Isidor, establishing a Mutual Aid Society.
After the deaths of Isidor and his wife Ida aboard the S.S. Titanic in 1912, Nathan retired from business and devoted himself to family, charity, and public service. He and his wife Lina Gutherz Straus had six children, two of whom died at an early age. Nathan’s concern for all children inspired him to promote milk pasteurization in the United States. He established a pasteurization laboratory in 1892 and inaugurated milk distribution programs throughout the country. As a philanthropist, Nathan gave generously to support health, disaster relief, and charity, and he championed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In public life, he served as a member of the board of commissioners of the Department of Public Parks in New York City from 1890 to 1894, chairman of the New York State Forest Commission, and president of the city’s Board of Health in 1898. He was president of the American Jewish Congress from 1918 to 1920. Nathan Straus died in New York City on January 11, 1931.
Less than a month after his death, the New York City Board of Aldermen named this triangular plot in his memory. The report issued by the Commission on Public Thoroughfares proclaimed that “the designation of Straus Square pays tribute to the memory of a beloved son of New York who distinguished himself as a citizen, philanthropist and patriot.” Formerly known as Rutgers Square, the plot at the intersection of East Broadway, Rutgers Street, and Canal Street (here Straus Square) is located in the heart of the Lower East Side. Several of Nathan’s milk stations operated in this neighborhood, and he supplied a milk bar on the roof garden of the Educational Alliance, a settlement house and community center which stands to the east of Straus Square.
In 1953 the Manhattan Borough President and members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars gathered at the site to dedicate a monument to the men and women of the Lower East Side who served in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. In 1998 six new London Plane trees were planted along the perimeter of the square. The noble ideals of Nathan Straus and the valiant wartime service of local men and women are remembered at this small downtown park.
.015 acre
#17 – C
McKinley Playground
This playground is named for William McKinley (1843-1901), the twenty-fifth President of the United States. He was born on January 29, 1843 in Niles, Ohio and attended Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. At the outbreak of the Civil War, McKinley joined the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and he rose from private to brevet major. After the war he attended law school in Albany, New York and practiced law in Ohio. He married Ida Stanton in 1871.
In 1876 McKinley was elected to the House of Representatives, where he served until 1891. As a Republican Congressman, he supported silver currency and was largely responsible for the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which raised or added duties to many imported goods and agricultural products. With the support of Cleveland businessman and political boss Marcus Hanna, he was elected governor of Ohio in 1891 and 1893. Hanna also supported McKinley’s bids for the presidency. After McKinley lost the Republican nomination to incumbent President Benjamin Harrison in 1892, he came back to defeat Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and was inaugurated on March 4, 1897.
During President McKinley’s tenure, the U.S. adopted the highest tariff rate in its history and restored the gold standard. His administration was responsible for the Open-Door Policy, which promoted equal commercial and industrial rights for all foreign nations conducting business in China. On April 25, 1898 the president declared war against Spain to protect American interests in Cuba. With the conclusion of the war in December, the United States emerged as a world power, having annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, American Samoa, and the Philippines. Re-elected in 1900, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901. He died on September 14, and vice-president Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency.
Four years later, a new public school building in the East Village was named in President McKinley’s memory. P.S. 63 for girls opened on the north side of E. 3rd Street between First Avenue and Avenue A in 1905. Across the street are the First Houses, a group of former tenement buildings rebuilt by the New York City Housing Authority in 1935. The Housing Authority erected additional public housing in the area in the late 1950s and opened a playground for the use of residents and the public. In 1965 Parks undertook the reconstruction of the playground, which was ceded to the city for park purposes in 1966. The playground was later placed under the joint operation of Parks and the Board of Education.
In 1991 parents and staff members of P.S. 63 and the Neighborhood School joined forces to support the improvement and maintenance of McKinley Playground. Their efforts helped to secure the $365,000 capital reconstruction of McKinley Playground, funded by Council Member Kathryn Freed. The reconstruction project took place in 1997-98 and included the installation of new play equipment, game tables, painted games, drinking fountain, compass rosette, flagpole, safety surfacing, pavements, gates, and fences. The drainage and water supply systems were rebuilt, and a London Plane tree was planted on the grounds. The new spray shower is decorated with lily pads, and there are sculptures of a rabbit, a turtle, and two frogs.
.274 acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Jackson Square Park
One of New York City’s oldest parks, Jackson Square Park has a long and somewhat obscure history. The triangular shape of the park is a result of the diagonal route of Greenwich Avenue, the oldest known road in Greenwich Village. Greenwich Avenue originated as an Indian trail and was called the Strand Road by Dutch colonists. Forming the other two sides of the triangle, Eighth Avenue and Horatio Street date to 1811, when the New York legislature approved the Manhattan street grid, known as the Commissioner’s Plan. This unnamed triangular parcel at Greenwich Avenue, Eighth Avenue, and Horatio Street appears on the Commissioner’s Plan.
It is not clear how, when, or why the site came to be called Jackson Square. Most likely it was named after Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), the seventh President of the United States. Born at Waxhaw Settlement, on the border of North and South Carolina, Jackson was elected to Congress in 1796 and served in the War of 1812. Old Hickory emerged as a national hero who was very popular with the leaders of Tammany Hall, New York’s most influential Democratic organization. With Tammany’s support, Jackson won the presidential elections of 1828 and 1832. On October 30, 1832, a hickory tree was planted in front of Tammany Hall, and its roots were nourished with the contents of a barrel of beer.
In 1858 the Mozart Hall Democratic faction split off from Tammany, when Mozart candidate Fernando Wood was elected Mayor of New York. Between 1859 and 1863, members of the Mozart Hall organization held their gatherings at Jackson Hall, a building that formerly stood at 2 Horatio Street on the corner of Greenwich Avenue. The building was one of dozens that fronted on the triangular parcel of open space now, and perhaps then, known as Jackson Square. The land had been acquired by the City of New York in 1826.
The earliest reference found to Jackson Square appears in the Second Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks in 1872. According to the report, Jackson Square was one of twenty-nine properties mapped and improved as parkland by the City. At Jackson Square, the following improvements were made by May 1872: 5,900 square feet walks graded/103 cubic yards masonry in foundations/460 lineal feet railing/462 lineal feet coping/6 lamp-posts furnished and set.
In 1887 Mayor Abram S. Hewitt promoted a citywide effort to improve public access to the parks and squares that were entirely enclosed by iron fencing. Parks superintendent Samuel Parsons Jr. and consulting architect Calvert Vaux collaborated on a new design for Jackson Square. In an 1892 article for Scribner’s Magazine, Parsons described the central area as a great bouquet of brilliant flowers and leaves. He noted proudly, The neighborhood of this park is respectable but populous, and it is wonderful on a warm evening to see the dense masses of people that crowd the park benches and smooth asphalt walks.
In 1913, Parks gardeners planted a new school garden plot at Jackson Square and left its upkeep to the little farmers in the neighborhood. The park underwent renovations in the 1930s, when seventeen pin oaks were planted on the perimeter, the shower basin was replaced by a new wading pool, and new benches were installed. The park remained substantially unchanged for over fifty years, until a capital reconstruction project was completed in 1990. It included planting new greenery and restoring the historic iron fencing and benches. The centerpiece, a new cast-iron fountain with planters and a granite base, evokes the 19th-century origins of Jackson Square Park.
Roosevelt Triangle
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), the 32nd President of the United States, led the country through the Great Depression and World War II. Like his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), he received a Harvard education and became an active participant in New York State politics before becoming a national figure. Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 and was reelected three times, serving until his death& a tenure longer than that of any other US President.
FDR, as Roosevelt is popularly known, created a comprehensive network of social services under the designation The New Deal. The program helped revitalize the depressed national economy and many of its initiatives, such as the Social Security Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, remain in operation. As well as his expansive social policies, Roosevelt’s assured bearing brought confidence to the distressed public. Although he was unable to walk unassisted because of a debilitating attack of polio he had suffered in 1921, FDR was careful to present himself as a hale and jaunty optimist who was seldom seen without a grin. The President was one of the first national leaders to use the radio as a means of establishing a rapport with the American public. Among his many inspiring pronouncements, the most enduring is from Roosevelt’s first inaugural address: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
When Parks acquired and dedicated the triangle in 1941, its sole feature was a flagpole. The bronze sculpture that now ornaments Roosevelt triangle was donated by the Peter Putnam-Mildred Andrews Fund in 1976. This abstract piece, constructed from welded bronze plate and known as the Harlem Hybrid, is the work of Richard Hunt. Hunt is an African American artist with an international reputation. He has produced a number of public sculptures, most in his native Chicago, in a career that has spanned over thirty years. In New York, Hunt has exhibited his work at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum of Harlem. Although Hunt’s work is purely abstract and usually executed in metal or discarded machine-made parts, admirers find consistent evocations of plant life and geological formations in his work.
In September 2000, Parks completed an extensive $65,179 renovation of the triangle. The funding went to new sidewalks, benches, a steel fence, and a plethora of new plant life. A few trees and 354 shrubs were planted including, Crimson Pygmy (Berberis thunbergii), Rockspray Cotoneaster (Cotoneaster horisontalis), Shrubby Cinquefoil (Potentilla fruticosa). The Harlem Hybrid, which illustrates Hunt’s tendency to take inspiration from nature is perfectly suited to nestle among the trees in this small public plot consecrated to the memory of a New Yorker of great distinction.
0.035 acre
Thomas Jefferson Park
During the course of his forty years in public life, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) had a profound influence on the formation of the American legal and political system. He began his career as a lawyer and a farmer and became a champion of equal rights, religious freedom and public education. In 1776 Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. He went on to serve as governor of Virginia (1779-81), minister to France (1785-89), and Secretary of State under Washington (1790-93). He was elected Vice President in 1796 and then served two terms as President from 1801-1809. Aside from his political influence, Jefferson’s legacy includes creating the decimal monetary system and founding and designing the University of Virginia.
This park was planned and named by the Board of Aldermen in 1894, though the land for it was not purchased until 1897. It opened on October 7, 1905 to provide organized play to the children of “Little Italy,” as the crowded tenement district in East Harlem was then known. The park contained two playgrounds, two gymnasiums, baths, comfort stations, and a classical pavilion which provided shelter and recreation space. The structure stood at 112th Street and East River Drive until the 1970s when it was destroyed by vandals. A children’s farm garden, one of many which flourished in parks in the first half of the 20th century, opened on May 20, 1911 with 1008 plots for children to grow flowers and vegetables. Designed as a place of respite for child laborers, the farm garden later hosted nature study classes and, during the World Wars, provided a lesson in self-sufficiency for local children.
The park’s facilities were expanded in the 1930s according to the vision of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. June 27, 1936 marked the dedication of the second of ten pools to open that summer. Ten thousand people attended the ceremony celebrating “the last word in engineering, hygiene and construction.” Boccie courts were also added around this time. The playgound adjacent to Benjamin Franklin High School has been open since 1942. The school was renamed the Manhattan Center for Math and Science in 1982.
A renovation of the pool and recreation center was completed in 1992 by architect Richard Dattner under a $10.5 million capital project. The park was newly landscaped and reconstructed in 1994. The center’s programming includes boxing, fencing, martial arts, and aerobics, and the ballfields are popular with East Harlem teams. The park features two sculptures that were commissioned and installed in 1995 through a joint effort by Parks and the Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program: Tomorrow’s Wind by Melvin Edwards and El Arbor De Esperanza, or Tree of Hope, by L. Brower Hatcher.
15.24 Acres
#18 – D
Sol Bloom Playground
Sol Bloom (1870-1949) was a self-made man who rose from poverty to success in business and a distinguished career in public service. The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants had no formal schooling but learned Hebrew from his mother and educated himself. Bloom first went to work in San Francisco at the age of seven and made his way up from the factory to the theater to the import business. As a young man, he moved to Chicago to manage the Midway amusements at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. His lucrative music publishing company (which issued songs that he wrote) led him to settle in New York in 1903. Seven years later, Bloom devoted himself to the real estate business, and made another fortune by building substantial apartment houses and some of Manhattan’s best known theaters (including the Apollo, Harris, and Music Box).
At the age of fifty, Bloom retired from business and entered politics. In 1923 he was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives from Manhattan; Congressman Bloom began the first of his fourteen consecutive terms. As a veteran of the entertainment industry, he was involved with issues of copyright law and radio broadcasting, and he organized the national George Washington Bicentennial celebration of 1932. He worked on behalf of social causes such as the relaxation of immigration laws, intervention in the anthracite strike of 1926, modification of the Volstead Act, and he supported most New Deal legislation. Appointed chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1940, Bloom developed critical legislation during and after World War II, including measures involving armament, universal service, lend-lease, and relief to foreign countries. He helped write the United Nations charter in 1945, and he ardently supported the creation of a Jewish state. Sol Bloom died in 1949. He was succeeded in Congress by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., who won a special election on the Liberal Party line.
Bloom lived in and represented New York’s 19th (later 20th) Congressional District, which included much of the Upper West Side. Flemish and Dutch settlers of the late 17th century called this region Bloemendaal, meaning “flowering valley.” During the early 19th century, small villages developed among the country estates of the rich. The area changed dramatically as New York expanded north, Central and Riverside Parks opened, and Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) was rebuilt as a grand boulevard. From the 1870s to the 1920s, cultural institutions, residential hotels, apartment buildings, mansions, row-houses, and tenements rose on the Upper West Side. Urban renewal projects of the 1950s-1980s replaced old buildings with new construction such as large housing complexes and cultural institutions, as well as schools and playgrounds.
In 1962 the Sol Bloom School and Playground (P.S. 84) opened in an area undergoing redevelopment by the Urban Renewal Board of the City of New York. Parks architects had invited community leaders to make suggestions during the design of the new facility, which included a basketball and volleyball court; swings, seesaws, and slides for older and younger children; handball and shuffleboard courts; a sandpit; a flagpole; and a shower basin. The playground is jointly operated by Parks and Recreation and the Board of Education. In 1994, Congressman Bloom’s achievements having been consigned to history, the local school board renamed P.S. 84 for Lillian Weber (1917-94), a pioneer in Open Corridor education (without classroom walls) and a consultant who worked at the Sol Bloom School.
A $964,000 renovation was funded by Council member Ronnie M. Eldridge in 1997. Improvements include new play structures, a lanyard flagpole, baseball and basketball play areas, game tables, benches, and trees. The playground is decorated according to a playful theme, inspired by Sol Bloom’s name and its suggestion of the sun and flowers. Unique features include cast iron sunflower rosettes, a freestanding panel depicting animals from Frank Baum’s classic story The Wizard of Oz (1900), a sundial/compass of colored concrete, and a sunflower spray shower.
Sol Bloom lacked schooling and probably missed the opportunity as a child to enjoy carefree play, but he often played marbles and spun tops with neighborhood children, especially as a Congressman. His playful spirit and his outstanding accomplishments are celebrated at the playground which still honors his memory.
WRONG ANSWERS
Downing Playground
This West Village Playground, located on Downing Street and Avenue of the Americas, is named for the street that runs to its south. Downing Street was laid out in 1799 and named no later than 1803, when it first appeared on a New York City map. The origin of its name is unclear. Some credit it to Thomas Downing (1791-1866), an African American freeman who moved to New York from Virginia in 1819 and made a career selling oysters. Located at 5 Broad Street, Downing’s Oyster House was popular with leading politicians, businessmen, and celebrities. Intriguing as this association is, however, it appears to be no more than a coincidence, for Thomas Downing arrived in New York City about twenty years after the street was named.
The Downing referred to in the street name is more likely Sir George Downing (ca. 1623-1684), a distinguished diplomat who was also the namesake of London’s Downing Street. An English native, Sir George was one of the nine graduates at Harvard College’s first commencement in 1642. After Downing played a dramatic role during the English Civil War, King Charles II knighted him Sir George and appointed him to The Hague as an ambassador. Sir George may have been influential in the negotiations between Britain and the Netherlands that gave New Orange (now New York) to the British in exchange for Surinam in 1674.
Legend has it that this land was once the property of Aaron Burr (1756-1836), third Vice President of the United States, and the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel. The city acquired the original 0.173-acre parcel of land between Downing and Carmine Streets by condemnation in 1896 for use as a school playground. The site was assigned to Parks in 1924 and developed as a children’s playground with slides, seesaws, flagpole and portable shower in the mid-1930s.
A series of renovations from 1982 to 1987 provided new timberform play equipment, a sprinkler shower, swings, a sandbox and tire swings, as well as the new gate surrounding the playground. London planetrees (Platanus x acerifolia), a species known for its ability to thrive in harsh urban environments, line the playground and provide welcome shade.
0.223 acres
Moore Playground
Fred R. Moore (1857-1943) was a self-made man. He was born near Richmond, Virginia to parents who were enslaved. The family moved to Washington, D.C. when he was an infant. Moore served as a confidential messenger for twenty-two years to five Secretaries of the Treasury during the Grant, Hayes, Arthur, and Cleveland administrations. He married Ida Lawrence in 1879, and they had eighteen children. In the late 1880s, their family moved to New York, where Moore took a job at the Western National Bank. After resigning in 1905, he became a Deputy Collector of Internal Revenue.
Moore also entered the publishing field in 1905, when he became the editor of Colored American magazine. In 1907 he became the full-time editor and publisher of The New York Age, a weekly newspaper founded in 1887 and Devoted to the general interests of the American Citizens of African descent. Although his Republican opinions were considered conservative by some, Moore was revered in Harlem, in New York City, and throughout the African-American community.
In addition to his position in publishing, Moore was active in political, community, and financial matters. He was Brooklyn’s first African American to be a candidate for the New York Assembly, narrowly losing the 1901 race. Moore was appointed U.S. Minister to Liberia in 1912, but he resigned within a few months without having gone to his post. He was elected to the Board of Aldermen in 1927 and in 1929. As Alderman, he brought traffic lights to Harlem and secured funds for Harlem Hospital, a new police station house, and the 369th Infantry Armory.
A leader in Harlem, Moore served as Secretary of the Board of Managers of the Katy Ferguson-Sojourner Truth Homes, president of the Parent-Teacher Association of P.S. 119, trustee of the Monarch Lodge Building Corporation, officer of the National Negro Business League, President of the local Business League, and director of Dunbar National Bank. He died on March 1, 1943 at his home at 228 West 135th Street, next door to the headquarters of The New York Age at 230 West 135th Street.
In October 1949, community members, government officials, teachers, and students gathered to dedicate the new Fred R. Moore School/P.S. 133 at Fifth Avenue and 130th Street in Harlem. Mrs. Marian Moore Day, youngest daughter of the late editor, spoke at the ceremony. The site of the neighboring playground had been acquired by the City of New York in 1946. It was developed with basketball and handball courts, as well as a softball diamond and a large open area for rollerskating. The playground opened on December 22, 1951.
Former Council Member (now Manhattan Borough President) C. Virginia Fields funded the $885,000 reconstruction of Moore Playground in 1998. As they enter the playground from the northeast, pupils at P.S. 133 and community members encounter a granite and cast-stone replica of the front page of the New York Age, announcing the achievements of Fred R. Moore. The playground features new play equipment, safety surfacing, benches, spray shower, climbing turtles, drinking fountain, drainage and water supply, and resurfaced tennis and basketball courts. The entire site is enclosed with new fencing adorned with steel silhouettes of turtles, birds, and marsh plants.
Nathan Straus Playground
This playground and school are named for Nathan Straus (1848-1931), who was born in Otterberg, Rhenish Bavaria (now Germany) on January 3, 1848. His father, Lazarus, emigrated to America in 1852, and the rest of the family followed in 1854. They settled in Talbotton, Georgia. Nathan’s formal education included Sunday School classes with a Baptist minister and preparatory schooling in Georgia; advanced studies, religious instruction, and Hebrew lessons in Alabama; and professional training at Packard Business College in New York City, where the family moved after the civil war.
Nathan’s shrewd mind, tremendous energy, and kind heart all contributed to an outstanding business career. As the international representative for L. Straus & Sons, the family’s crockery and glass firm, Nathan traveled across America to open new markets and throughout Europe to acquire new products. He forged an alliance with R.H. Macy, and by 1896 the Strauses were sole owners of Macy’s famous department store in Manhattan and partners in the Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn. In 1902 the family opened the world’s largest department store, Macy’s at Herald Square. Nathan promoted the welfare of Macy’s employees by providing a dining hall with full meals for just five cents; offering personal gifts of money, clothing, and medical treatment; and, with his brother Isidor, establishing a Mutual Aid Society.
After the deaths of Isidor and his wife Ida aboard the S.S. Titanic in 1912, Nathan retired from business and devoted himself to family, charity, and public service. He and his wife Lina Gutherz Straus had six children, two of whom died at an early age. Nathan’s concern for all children inspired him to promote milk pasteurization in the United States. He established a pasteurization laboratory in 1892 and inaugurated milk distribution programs throughout the country.
As a philanthropist, Nathan gave generously to support health, disaster relief, and charity, and he championed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In public life, he served as a member of the board of commissioners of the Department of Public Parks in New York City from 1890 to 1894, chairman of the New York State Forest Commission, and president of the city’s Board of Health in 1898. He was president of the American Jewish Congress from 1918 to 1920. Nathan Straus died in New York City on January 11, 1931.
Twenty-five years after the death of Nathan Straus, the City of New York acquired land on the two blocks in the Lower East Side for a new elementary school and playground. Before P.S. 140 opened in 1959, part of Attorney Street was closed and several buildings were torn down to make room for the playground. Landscape architect George C. Green designed the relatively conventional area with a variety of play equipment as well as basketball, volleyball, and handball courts.
In 1998-99 Mayor Giuliani funded two requirements contracts which provided a thorough renovation of the playground. Improvements included new play equipment, spray shower, safety surfacing, concrete bear, basketball court, restored handball courts and compass rosette. New pavements, gates, fences, and benches have improved the overall appearance of the playground.
#19 – B
Duane Park
Duane Park, located at Hudson and Duane Streets in Manhattan, was the first public space acquired by the City specifically for use as a public park. This park and the adjacent street take the name of James Duane (1733-1797), New York’s first mayor after the Revolutionary War.
Born in New York City and admitted to the bar in 1754, Duane went on to serve as New York attorney general in 1767 and in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1784. Despite having initial reservations about his country’s independence, he later supported the Declaration of Independence and helped to draft the Articles of Confederation and the first New York State Constitution. He was a member of the New York State Senate, the first mayor of New York City (1784-1789), and he served as a U.S. District judge in New York.
The park is the last remnant of the greensward of the Annetje Jans farm, granted in 1636 by Governor Wouter Van Twiller to Roelfoff and Annetje Jans. After the death of Roeloff Jans, his widow married the Revered Everardus Bogardus, second minister of the Dutch Church of New Amsterdam, and the farm became known as the Dominie’s Bouwery, (minister’s farm).
The farm was sold in 1670 to the English Governor, Sir Francis Lovelace, but was later confiscated by the Duke of York and deeded in 1705 to Trinity Church. In 1797 the triangle was purchased from Trinity Church for five dollars in order to create a public park.
Originally an open commons, the park was later enclosed by an iron fence. By 1870 it had been enlarged and enclosed with trees, lawn, and shrubs following a design by Parks Chief Engineer M.A. Kellogg and Chief Gardener I.A. Pilat, who were also responsible for designs for City Hall and Washington Square Parks. The 1870 design featured bluestone curbing, iron fencing on a granite base, grading and planting of the enclosed green space, and twelve new street trees. The sidewalk along the south side of the park was widened from two to ten feet, and the sidewalk along Hudson was narrowed from sixteen to ten feet.
Around this time many of the nearby buildings were erected, and as part of a citywide effort to improve public access to enclosed parklands, Parks Superintendent Samuel Parsons, Jr., and landscape architect Calvert Vaux introduced a new plan for the space in 1887 that added paths while retaining the plantings.
Parsons in particular wrote extensively about designing public squares like the one at Duane Street. I do not know why it is that city squares are generally treated as mere open spaces of greensward with shade trees dotted over them, Parsons opined in his 1892 article The Evolution of a City Square. Poverty of designing ability, probably, and lack of knowledge of what might be done to beautify such places will entirely suffice to account for this baldness of treatment.
Noting that ideally parks should be of the most liberal character – ten, twenty, fifty acres, Parsons acknowledged that there were often vacant places, triangles, and irregular spaces, not suited for building lots, that seem to be left unoccupied, perforce, as we might say. The Duane Street site, in what Parsons called one of Manhattan’s crowded and dusty neighborhoods, was one such example.
Integrating definite artistic principles and taking into account the foreboding native soil in this part of Manhattan, the Vaux-Parsons plan for Duane Park featured paths curving in from each surrounding street. At Duane Street a diagonal walk has been introduced swelling out to a considerable width at one point between the three entrances, Parsons explained. Beyond this there are only three small bits of green grass on either side, a few shrubs along the fence and a small flower-bed, but even this is a boon to the crowded neighborhood.
In 1940 a design by Chief Consultant Landscape Architect Gilmore D. Clarke and Parks Landscape Architect Janet Patt gave the park a formal Beaux-Arts style look, reducing the planted area and adding a central flagpole. The design was typical of Works Progress Administration projects, and featured a geometric style.
In 1999, a plan by landscape architect Signe Nielsen sponsored by the Friends of Duane Park, replaced much of the paved area with planting to evoke the 1887 design. Tablets detailing the park’s history and design were installed and the flagpole’s base was reinscribed.
WRONG ANSWERS
Dante Park
Sources conflict as to how this triangular parcel at Broadway, Columbus Avenue, and West 63rd Street became parkland. It may have been acquired from John A. Bunting in 1852, or it may have been acquired as a public place by condemnation in 1868. For many years the site and the parcel to its north were both considered part of Empire Park. The two parcels were eventually separated into two parks. The north portion of Empire Park became Richard Tucker Triangle, and in 1921 the south portion of Empire Park was officially renamed by the Board of Aldermen for Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).
Italy’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri was born to a noble Florentine family. After the death of his beloved Beatrice in 1290, he immersed himself in the study of philosophy and Provenal poetry. In 1302 Dante was banished from Florence for his political views and became a citizen of Italy. While in exile, he composed The Divine Comedy, the first vernacular poetic masterpiece. It tells the tale of the poet’s journey from Hell to Heaven, presenting a changeless universe ordered by God. Through The Divine Comedy and his many other works, Dante established Tuscan as the literary language of Italy and gave rise to a great body of literature.
The New York branch of the Dante Alighieri Society had intended to erect a Dante monument on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Italian unification in 1912. Carlo Barsotti, editor of Il Progresso (the first Italian daily newspaper in the United States), urged subscribers to contribute towards the creation the statue. He had already raised funds for four other New York City monuments honoring Italians: Giuseppe Garibaldi (c. 1888) in Washington Square, Christopher Columbus (1892) in Columbus Circle, Giuseppe Verdi (1906) in Verdi Square, and Giovanni da Verrazano (1909) in Battery Park. Sculptor Ettore Ximenes, however, did not complete the statue until 1921. The monument was dedicated that year, which was the 600th anniversary of Dante’s death. In the early 1990s the Radisson Empire Hotel funded the conservation and repair of the sculpture and sponsored horticultural improvements and public programs in the park.
In 1999 “TimeSculpture” by architect Philip Johnson was installed in the northern point of Dante Park. The work reinvigorates the surrounding geometries of the Lincoln Center area and updates the tradition of sidewalk pedestrian and town square clocks that dot New York City. The bronze sculpture rests on a granite base three-and-one-half feet off the ground-level with the base of the Dante monument and the Lincoln Center Plaza. Prismatic in form, “TimeSculpture” features four clock faces oriented to the west, north, and southeast. The piece was donated by Sonia and Gedalio Grinberg and placed in Dante Park with the cooperation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and City of New York/Parks & Recreation.
.142 acres
Governor Alfred E. Smith Park
The greatest privilege that can come to any man
is to give himself to the nation which reared him.
-Alfred E. Smith, Governor
Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873-1944) was a great figure in New York State, New York City, and the Lower East Side. A son of Irish immigrants, Smith dropped out of St. James Parochial School to help support his family. However, his lack of formal education did not hinder Smith from becoming a renowned New York legislator and executive.
In 1904 Smith was elected to his first government office as a Democratic member of the State Assembly. While serving on the Assembly, Smith co-chaired the Factory Investigating Commission with State Senator Robert F. Wagner. Together they investigated labor conditions and passed laws to raise safety standards and limit work hours. In 1917 Smith was elected President of the Board of Aldermen. In 1918 he was elected the first Irish Catholic Governor of New York, a position he held for four two-year terms. A loyal supporter of improvements to the Lower East Side which he called “the old neighborhood”-Smith sponsored legislation for rent control, tenant protection, and low-cost housing. As Governor, he appointed Robert Moses as Chairman of the New York State Council on Parks in 1924, and as Secretary of State in 1927.
Smith made history in 1928 as the first Irish Catholic to be nominated for President. He ran as the Democratic nominee but lost the election to Herbert Hoover. Soon after his defeat, Smith and his family returned to New York City and moved into an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Smith became a central figure in municipal development. He supported the development of new housing and parkland that was eventually built near his birthplace, 174 South Street. The housing was to provide homes for the overpopulated Lower East Side, and to provide residents with open space and greenery on their doorstep. The Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses were erected in the early 1950s, and were named in memory of Smith, who had died in 1944.
Alfred E. Smith Park, located at the junction of Catherine Slip, Madison, and South Streets, was dedicated on June 1, 1950. The park features two memorials to Governor Smith, who was also known as “The Happy Warrior,” “The King of Oliver Street,” and “The First Citizen.” Charles Keck designed the nine-foot bronze figure of the Governor and the bas-relief of children at play. The relief represents “The Sidewalks of New York,” a song always played at Al Smith’s campaign rallies. Paul Manship created the flagpole base decorated with animals native to New York before colonial settlement. The park includes a large children’s playground and a plaza equipped with benches.
By 1963 the Lower East Side was suffering from a shortage of schools and recreational spaces. An agreement was reached between Parks and the Board of Education to relinquish a portion of the park for the new Public School 126. In exchange, the Board of Education would build a recreation center and cede the vocational school to Parks. The Alfred E. Smith Recreation Center was opened in 1967 with a new gymnasium and community rooms. The Human Resources Administration maintains the vocational school as a family shelter.
Today, the park is an oasis in a vibrant neighborhood. A capital reconstruction project, completed in 1997, brought new life to the playground. New modular play equipment, animal art, a spray shower, and a fire engine slide were installed in the playground, now the site of the City Parks Foundation’s “Summer Fun in the Playground” program. The park and recreation center have become what Smith hoped would be a “happier home for his neighbors.”
2.766 acres
John Jay Park
Situated on the East River, John Jay Park is named for a New York jurist and statesman. John Jay (1745-1829) was elected President of the First Continental Congress in 1778. He drafted New York’s first constitution in 1777, was appointed Minister to Spain in 1779, and negotiated the peace treaty with England in 1783. With Hamilton and Madison he wrote The Federalist Papers (1787), which advocated the new Constitution. Jay then served as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1789-1795). In his last political position, he was elected for two consecutive terms as the Governor of New York (1795-1801).
The first parcel of land for John Jay Park was acquired by the City in 1902 by condemnation. In 1906 a public bathhouse was constructed for $104,843.92 and was under the jurisdiction of the Manhattan Borough President’s Office until the site was transferred to the Parks Department in 1941.
The swimming complex was opened in stages between 1940 and 1942 as part of a massive Work Projects Administration (WPA) capital construction program. The outdoor swimming pool was opened in 1940 and measured 50 by 145 feet. Legend has it that Parks Commissioner Robert Moses required the pool to be five feet short of the length necessary for 150-foot sprints. In 1941 the bathhouse was remodeled and reopened with an auditorium, large recreation room, gym, and changing facility which could accommodate 1,002 male and 590 female bathers. Systems were installed to filter, purify, and re-circulate the water, and a large promenade around the pool was constructed.
Also in 1941, an aquatic program, which provided for group swimming lessons, diving tournaments, inter-pool contests, water shows, and life saving and first aid classes, was initiated. The WPA swimming pools were among the most remarkable public recreational facilities in the country, representing the forefront of design and technology. The influence of the pools extended throughout entire communities, attracting aspiring athletes and neighborhood children, and changing the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time.
Douglas Abdell’s (1947-) sculptures were installed on the west side of the park in 1979. Made of welded steel, painted black, they are meant to frame space and define irregular areas. The artist likens his works, part of “The Aebyad Series” to writing and calligraphy. He views each sculpture as a building block of something potentially more complex, as the alphabet is the basis of the written language.
In 1985-86, Mayor Edward I. Koch allocated $807,570 for renovation and restoration of the park. The children’s playground was remodeled with slides, bridges, swings, sandboxes, and sprinkler area. Trees and groundcover were planted. New lighting and pavement were installed, and the existing pavement, curbs, and stone walls were rehabilitated. A wrought iron fence was relocated to enclose the pool area, and all other wrought iron and chain link fences were refurbished. New benches were installed and the water supply was improved as drainage was reconstructed. In the final phase, the central mall and esplanade were refurbished, additional pavement was installed, and drinking fountains, game tables, and fences were added. In 1995 all the climbing equipment, decks, gates, and handrails were restored and replaced. A park well cared for by its neighbors, John Jay Park remains an active and vital center of the Upper East Side Community.
3.312 acres
#20 – C
Little Flower Playground
This playground, formerly La Guardia Houses Park, refers to the popular nickname of New York City mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia (1882-1947), Little Flower. The nickname is a literal translation of the Italian mayor’s first name and an allusion to his small physical stature of 5 feet 2 inches. La Guardia, the son of a United States Army bandleader, was born in Little Italy at 177 Sullivan Street. He received his law degree from New York University, was admitted to the bar in 1910 and became the nation’s first Italian American Congressman in 1916. La Guardia held various Congressional posts until 1932, and served as president of New York City’s Board of Aldermen from 1920 to 1921.
Mayor La Guardia was inaugurated on New Year’s Day 1934. Over the next 12 years La Guardia left a distinctive mark on city politics. He unified the public transit system, consolidated and centralized much of the city government, cracked down on illegal gambling, and constructed numerous bridges, parks, and airports. With Robert Moses, his Parks Commissioner, he embarked on an unprecedented expansion of the New York City Parks system throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. La Guardia also served as Director of the Office of Civilian Defense from 1941 to 1942. Shortly after leaving office in 1945, La Guardia became Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
A bust of La Guardia stands at the southeastern corner of the park. The life-size bronze bust was created in 1934 by sculptor Jo Davidson (1883-1952), who also immortalized in bronze Mohandas Gandhi, James Joyce, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Gertrude Stein. The bust remained in Davidson’s collection until he died in 1952, when the La Guardia Memorial Association purchased it. The monument was dedicated and installed in its present location in 1957, when the La Guardia Houses and the adjoining playground were completed.
The La Guardia Houses complex was part of a late-1950s push for public housing to accommodate people displaced by urban renewal and road construction programs. Its facilities include a senior citizens program, at 2 Cherry Street, and a community center, at 286 South Street.
From 1999 to 2000, Little Flower Playground underwent extensive renovation, including improvements to the park’s fencing, play equipment, basketball courts, handball courts, spray shower, utility lines, drinking fountains, drainage, grading, and curbs. In addition, the monument of the mayor was conserved and relocated within a flowerbed. The $1.2-million renovation was sponsored by Council Member Kathryn E. Freed. The park’s facilities, popular with children and their families, now include swing sets, climbing structures, picnic areas, basketball courts, a large flower mosaic, and a handball court.
WRONG ANSWERS
Happy Warrior Playground
Located at West 98th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, this playground and the adjoining school honor four-term New York Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873-1944). The son of Irish immigrants, Smith dropped out of school to help support his family. His lack of formal education, however, did not hinder Smith from becoming a distinguished New York political leader. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) nicknamed him The Happy Warrior, referring to William Wordsworth’s poem Character of the Happy Warrior (1807), which celebrates diligence and perseverance.
In 1903, Smith began his political career as a Democratic member of the State Assembly. With then-New York State Senator (later, United States Senator) Robert F. Wagner (1877-1953), Smith investigated labor conditions and fought for laws to raise safety standards and limit work hours. All told, he served 12 years in the Assembly from 1903 to 1915, becoming that body’s Democratic leader in 1911 and Speaker in 1913. In 1917, he became the President of the New York City Board of Aldermen, a precursor to the City Council. One year later, Smith became the first Irish Catholic Governor of New York, a position he held for four terms of two years (1919-1921, 1923-1929). As governor, Smith sponsored legislation for rent control, tenant protection, low-cost housing, and equal pay for female workers. He also appointed legendary Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981), Chairman of the New York State Council on Parks in 1924, and Secretary of State in 1927.
In 1928, Smith became the first Irish Catholic to be nominated for president. He ran as a Democrat, but lost the election to Republican Herbert Hoover (1874-1964). Soon after his defeat, Smith returned to New York City and became an active figure in municipal development. He served as the president of the Empire State Building Corporation, undertook many charitable projects, gave lectures, and was active in the Catholic Church in New York City. Smith died at his home on Fifth Avenue in 1944.
In 1952, the City of New York acquired this site for school and recreation purposes from Manhattantown, Inc., a housing development company. Four years later, the Board of Estimate assigned the land to the Board of Education. In 1965, the playground opened as P.S. 163, the Alfred E. Smith School, Playground. Commissioner Stern designated it as Happy Warrior Playground in 1994 in homage to Smith’s nickname.
Happy Warrior Playground, however, honors more than one person; it is a park that pays tribute to several individuals. The basketball area of the park honors the memory of Earl The Goat Manigault (1944-1998), a gifted basketball player and well-known community leader. The Goat played basketball throughout the city during the 1960s and 1970s, with such future NBA greats as Wilt Chamberlain, Connie Hawkins, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Manigault’s signature move was the double dunk where he dunked the ball, caught it in mid-air, and dunked it again. Although drug use kept The Goat from college and professional stardom, he eventually overcame his addiction. He became involved in neighborhood recreation, counseling, coaching, and organizing a basketball tournament that has taken place every year since 1971. Soon after his death, friends and family worked with Commissioner Stern to dedicate the basketball courts in the playground to Manigault, naming them The Goat Courts.
Some people call the playground as Rock Steady Park, for the well-known 1980s break-dancing group, Rock Steady Crew, who once frequented the park. At one time, the dance group numbered over 500 members throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Rock Steady Crew practiced their footwork and routines in Happy Warrior Playground, among other parks. Malcolm McLaren’s 1983 video, Buffalo Gals, featured Rock Steady Crew, as well as several local dancers, break-dancing in this playground.
In 2001, Happy Warrior Playground underwent an extensive $1.2 million renovation, funded by City Council Member Phillip Reed. Designed by Rachel Kramer, the rehabilitation project involved the installation of new modular play equipment, animal art, a spray shower, and new basketball courts. Today, Happy Warrior Playground is more than a welcome place of rest and relaxation for people of all ages; it is a tribute to those who gave something back to the city they called home.
Jacob K. Javits Playground
Jacob Koppel Javits (1904-1986) was a towering figure in New York politics. He began his 34-year career in 1947 as a United States Congressman for the Washington Heights/Inwood district, and sponsored legislation concerning civil rights, health care, and social welfare. He left Congress in 1955 to serve as New York State Attorney General until 1957, when he was elected United States Senator. Javits held his post for 24 years. At the time of his defeat in 1980, he was the longest-serving Senator in history.
Jacob Javits was born on the Lower East Side to Russian Jewish parents. He lived variously in Brooklyn and Manhattan, including this neighborhood, on West 192nd Street, when he was 15. A graduate of Columbia University and New York University School of Law, he served as an assistant to the Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service in the United States Army. In 1943 and 1944, Javits served in both the European and Pacific Theater of Operations, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He received his discharge in 1945, after being awarded both the Legion of Merit and the Army Commendation Ribbon. He married Marion Ann Borris two years later and they had three children: Joy, Joshua, and Carla.
As Senator, Javits is remembered for having a progressive voice, which represented a highly liberal wing of the Republican Party. His most significant acts of legislation were the War Powers Resolution (1973), which limited Presidential authority during wartime, and the Pension Reform Act (1974), which safeguarded the retirement pensions of over 50 million Americans. In 1984, a massive mirrored-glass convention center was built on 38th Street and 11th Avenue in Manhattan and named for Javits.
Senator Javits was present at the dedication of this playground, though he was stricken with Lou Gehrig’s disease at the time. Mayor Edward I. Koch commented on the significance of this rare situation saying: We have a Senator who is so beloved and who has overcome such enormous difficulties that he’s become an inspiration in his lifetime. The Senator replied This is a very touching ceremony for me and I hope and pray that my life has been valid enough to be a role model to the children who will play here and learn to live with their neighbors.
Margaret Corbin Circle, Fort Washington, and 193rd Street bound Jacob K. Javits Playground. Between 1935 and 1937, Empire Mortgage leased this property to the City of New York. Per the agreement, the playground was and continues to be operated as a parcel within Fort Tryon Park. In February 1944, Empire Mortgage deeded the property to the city as a gift. In December 1981, the Department of General Services placed Jacob K. Javits Playground under Parks jurisdiction. In 1982, the City Council assigned the playground’s present name via local law. Parks officially dedicated the facility on June 2, 1985, and continues to maintain it.
In 1995, Jacob K. Javits Playground received a $50,000 renovation sponsored by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The improvements featured the installation of safety surfacing. The playground includes benches, a full basketball court, a basketball standard, two tire swings, and play equipment. A cast iron fence and large stone gates bound the facility. The property’s flora includes numerous American and Siberian elm trees. Looking west, through a lush canopy of trees, park goers enjoy splendid views of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades.
Thompson Playground
Thompson Playground takes its name from the adjacent street, one of a handful of Greenwich Village streets named after Revolutionary War officers in the late 18th century. These north-south streets include MacDougal Street (named for Major General Alexander McDougall), Sullivan Street (named for Major General John Sullivan), Thompson Street (named for Brigadier General William Thompson), Wooster Street (named for Brigadier General David Wooster), Mercer Street (named for Brigadier General Hugh Mercer), and Lafayette Street (named for the Marquis de Lafayette). Three of these streets presently run north to Washington Square Park, named for the greatest Revolutionary War general and father of our country, George Washington.
William Thompson (c. 1725-1781) was born in Ireland and emigrated to Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War Thompson served as the captain of a troop of mounted militia. In 1775 he was made a colonel and was sent to Massachusetts to aid in the defense of Boston following the Battle of Bunker Hill. After Thompson’s company of Pennsylvania sharpshooters drove back a British landing-party, he was made a brigadier-general. Thompson was captured during an attack on the enemy at Trois Rivieres in Quebec. Soon after his parole, he died at his home near Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1781.
Land for this playground was acquired in three parcels over the course of twenty-eight years. In 1929 and 1930 Parks purchased two parcels mid-block on Thompson Street. The playground was developed with a comfort station, swings and benches arranged around a large central wading pool. In 1957 Parks expanded the property south to Spring Street and west to Sullivan Street. This additional land was the site of a warehouse, two commercial garages, and two buildings for business and residence, structures typical of the Lower Village-SoHo area.
The buildings were razed, and the entire playground was redeveloped. The improvements expanded the program of the playground from a tot lot for small children to a recreational facility for all ages. A spray shower was created in the place of the wading pool, more play equipment and gingko trees were added, and a new sandbox, handball courts, basketball courts, and boccie courts were built. The mini-pool was installed in the late 1960s.
In the mid-1980s Parks redesigned Thompson Playground to redefine the athletic and play areas for different age groups. The west side of park was made into a children’s play area with new climbing equipment, swings, benches and tables, and new play unit was constructed near the spray shower area. The handball and basketball courts were reconstructed, and the low brick walls were extended to delineate courts from tot areas. The granite block walkway along Thompson Street was also reconstructed and extended. In addition, decorative squares of granite block pavement were placed throughout the park.
#21 – A
Abe Lebewohl Park
Over a period of forty years, Abe Lebewohl (1931-1996) transformed his Second Avenue Deli into a New York institution, drawing loyal customers from celebrities, tourists and locals alike with his Jewish culinary delicacies and generous and magnetic spirit.
Lebewohl was born in Kulykiv, Ukraine, in 1931. When the Soviets occupied western Ukraine, Abe’s father was arrested and exiled to Siberia, and Abe and his mother were banished to Kazakhstan. The family was reunited and traveled to western Ukraine and then to Poland. They illegally escaped Poland, and made their way through Austria to a refugee camp in Italy, where they spent five years before immigrating to America in 1950.
For a few years, Lebewohl worked as a waiter at a twelve-seat coffee shop on Second Avenue and E. 10th Street. In 1954 the family purchased the property, and gradually expanded it into a 250-seat restaurant, the Second Avenue Deli. The deli became famous for its extensive menu of Ukrainian and Jewish delicacies and its stupendous sandwiches. Customers included such luminaries as Joe DiMaggio, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Mason, Bob Hope, Joan Rivers, Raoul Felder, and Milton Berle.
Abe (also known as Abie) endeared himself to the East Village community with his deep humanity and unflagging generosity, and he often provided free food to homeless people, striking workers, and neighborhood events. In tribute to the Yiddish theaters clustered on and around Second Avenue, Lebewohl created a Walkway of Yiddish Actors at the restaurant’s entrance. Proud of his Ukrainian-Jewish roots, he traveled back to the Ukraine in the 1970s. He patronized Ukrainian businesses in the neighborhood and was among the few businessmen who attended a private meeting with Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of independent Ukraine, during a visit to New York.
On March 4, 1996, Abe Lebewohl was fatally shot while depositing his daily receipts at a nearby bank. More than 1,500 mourners attended his funeral at the Community Synagogue on East 6th Street. In tribute to his memory this park was named Abe Lebewohl Park, at the initiative of Council Member Antonio Pagan and the 10th and Stuyvesant Streets Block Association.
This triangular space in front of the St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Church dates to 1799. It was originally acquired, along with the triangle at East 10th and Stuyvesant Streets, for street purposes and was developed as a sitting area in 1938. The park is host to a greenmarket and a summer concert series. It contains a memorial flagpole that was dedicated in 1944 by the Ukrainian American Society.
WRONG ANSWERS
Gorman Park
This park, situated on a very steep hill rising from Broadway to Wadsworth Terrace, between West 189th and West 190th Streets, honors Gertie Amelia Gorman (1859-1920), a real estate investor. It was named at the request of her daughter, Gertie Emily Webb, whose husband, Charles Webb, carried out his wife’s wishes after her death. Webb, the chairman of a prestigious real estate company, donated $25,000 on June 28, 1929 towards the construction of the park and $50,000 to establish a trust fund for its maintenance. The City of New York acquired this property in 1929 as a gift from Charles Webb and the Denton Realty Corporation. Parks acquired jurisdiction over the property the following year.
Gorman Park is in Washington Heights, a neighborhood bounded by Dyckman Street, the Harlem River, 155th Street, and the Hudson River. Because of its strategic position along the Hudson, the area housed several Colonial forts during the Revolutionary period, including the neighborhood’s namesake, Fort Washington. The British Army captured Fort Washington, along with Fort Tryon, Cockhill Fort, and Fort George in 1776, and held it until the Continental Army prevailed, winning the war in 1783.
Washington Heights was farmland until the mid-19th century, when wealthy New Yorkers started settling here, drawn by the breathtaking views of the Hudson River. In 1889, the Washington Bridge over the Harlem River was completed, linking Manhattan and the Bronx. The area was still largely rural in 1904, when the Broadway subway line was extended through its southern portion, and subsequently through its northern portion, in 1906. With improved transportation, the neighborhood grew exponentially. Several institutions were built during this time, including the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, Audubon Terrace, Yeshiva University, and the Polo Grounds stadium.
In 1931, the George Washington Bridge became the first and only bridge over the Hudson River to connect New York City and New Jersey. The following year, the City opened the Eighth Avenue subway, on the west side of the neighborhood, to serve the growing population.
During the 1980s, Washington Heights attracted the largest number of immigrants of any neighborhood in New York City. By 1990, the neighborhood’s Dominican community was the largest in the United States. In 1991, City Council Member Guillermo Linares became the first American of Dominican ancestry to be elected to political office in the United States.
The terrace-like park features numerous sitting areas, a wide, descending stone staircase that leads to Broadway, and walking paths. Gorman Park also contains a stone wall with an inscription dedicating the park to the memory of Gertie A. Gorman. In 2000, Council Member Guillermo Linares allocated $980,000 towards a reconstruction and landscaping of Gorman Park that began in the summer of 2001.
1.89 acres
Peretz Square
A sliver of Manhattan bounded by Houston Street, First Street and First Avenue, Peretz Square marks the spot where the tangled jumble of lower Manhattan meets the regularity of the Commissioners’ Plan street grid.
With the implementation of the Manhattan grid plan proposed in 1811, a new order of north-south avenues and east-west streets was imposed upon New York City. First Avenue opened to traffic in 1813, and by the end of the year, stretched from North Street to 25th Street. (North Street, then the northern boundary of settled Manhattan, was later renamed for William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress; at the time of the renaming, the more famous Sam Houston was an unknown teenager). The new grid system did not align exactly with North Street, and with the opening of First Street from North Street to First Avenue in 1824, this small triangle was formed. This area, which had been the uppermost settled area of Manhattan, became known as the Lower East Side, as the burgeoning city expanded northward.
Many of the Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1920 settled in the Lower East Side. By 1920 an estimated 400,000 Jews lived in this area. Most were native speakers of Yiddish, and many were devoted readers of the works of I.L. Peretz, the Polish playwright and poet. Peretz played a major role in the early development of both Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and was particularly beloved for his simultaneous appreciation of both traditional Judaism and socialist doctrine.
Isaac Loeb Peretz (1852-1915) was born in Zamosc, Poland to a religious family. As a young lawyer, he wrote primarily in Polish, and belonged to the Haskalah, or enlightenment movement, which called for a greater assimilation of Jews into the larger community. He published a number of works in Hebrew, including his first major poem, Li Omerim (They Tell Me’), but little in Yiddish, the vernacular language of Russian and Eastern European Jews. After a series of vicious pogroms in 1881, however, Peretz developed strong nationalistic leanings and an appreciation of the role that Yiddish could play in awakening a Jewish national identity. Accusations of radicalism in the late 1880s cost him his legal license, and from then on he made his primary livelihood through his writing.
Peretz’s first major work in Yiddish was his ironic poem Monish in 1888, published in Shalom Aleichem’s Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek. Moving to Warsaw in 1890, he became increasingly involved in the socialist movement, and was imprisoned for several months in 1899. During this period, Peretz edited several Yiddish journals, and also published a number of volumes in Hebrew, including a collection of love poems titled Ha-Ugav (The Harp’). He continued his socialist activity but, despite his hopes for a Jewish national awakening, did not join the Zionist movement (which was formally established in the late 19th century), believing that the future of the Jewish people lay rather in an enlightened Diaspora.
Later in his career, he grew cautious about the future of socialism, addressing a socialist meeting with the prescient remark I hope for your victory, but I fear and dread it. Together with Shalom Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Seforim, Peretz pioneered a number of literary genres in Yiddish, including the short story and the symbolic drama. Upon his death in 1915, over 100,000 Polish Jews attended his funeral in Warsaw.
This site was acquired by the Parks Department on May 9, 1934, when the Board of Transportation issued a permit to Parks for temporary use and occupation. On November 23, 1952, Manhattan Borough President (later Mayor) Robert F. Wagner, Jr. dedicated Peretz Square, saying [Peretz's] writings gave hope and purpose to his people. This park has been cared for since September 11, 2001 by the Friends of Peretz Square.
Steven Perry Grove
Mayor Giuliani dedicated this grove in August of 1999 to Stephen Perry (1958-1994), a marvelous human being and a great sports fan, who dedicated his life to New York City, sports, and children. Born November 26, 1958, Perry attended the Browning School at 62nd and Park Avenue for 12 years, followed by Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Perry played hockey, soccer, tennis, and golf and was an avid Yankees fan. Mr. Perry died tragically at 35, only months after his 1994 appointment as the head of the New York Sports Commission. Perry was about to draft plans for one of his life-long dreams, implementing more children’s sports programming. Perry is remembered for adding tens of thousands of New Yorkers to the voting rolls. He organized parties and functions to raise awareness for Giuliani’s campaigns, driven by his love for the city and his concern about its welfare.
Perry is survived by his mother, Sophia Bookis, his wife, Mary, and daughters Liana and Victoria. This picnic grove is a fitting tribute for rest, contemplation, or light sports, where park-goers may enjoy the Island’s greenery and spectacular views.
Perry’s sports affinities will be satisfied elsewhere on Randall’s Island as its Sports Foundation fulfills extensive plans for a marina, new ballfields, bicycle paths, a water park, a field house, and new festival and concert grounds. All funding will come equally from public and private sources. Board Members will support the project along with the Mayor’s office, the City Council, and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President. The Foundation dedicates its efforts to providing the children and families of New York City with high-quality sports and recreation facilities amidst the endless green and skyline views of the island.
#22 – D
St. James Square
This park, located at the intersection of St. James Place, Oliver, Madison and James Streets bordering the Civic Center, Chinatown, and Lower East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan, takes its name from nearby St. James Roman Catholic Church. The Church is named after St. James the Greater, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, and one of the Christian faith’s most enduring figures.
Since the early 17th century, Lower Manhattan has been home to generations of immigrants. In 1643, a French Jesuit priest, visiting New York, identified 18 distinct different languages being spoken throughout the city. Less than fifty years later, the island’s religious communities boasted a Jewish Temple, several Quaker, Presbyterian, and Independent churches as well as an Anglican church. With the close of the American Revolution, Manhattan served both as the new nation’s gateway for immigration and as a vital port of mercantile commerce. By the mid-1800s, new residents, largely the poor and immigrant populace, began filtering into the Lower East Side’s dilapidated and cramped tenement houses to suffer for a day’s wage in the neighborhood sweatshops and on the nearby docks.
In 1836, St. James Roman Catholic Church began to serve the neighborhood’s largely Irish immigrant Lower East Side community. Built atop the foundation of one of the neighborhood’s oldest breweries, the parish quickly became an influential part of the neighborhood. Dedicated to serving the poor and indigent of their community, the priests of St. James also often cared for cholera patients stranded aboard nearby quarantined vessels; several priests contracted the disease and died shortly after their patients. During the Civil War, the priests of St. James blessed the regimental colors of the Fighting 69th and, around the same time, championed the cause of Catholic temperance in a bid to end local alcohol abuse, ignoring the critical attitudes and admonishments of contemporary Protestant reformers.
In March 1961 Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), a Polish immigrant, successful New York financier, and donator of several large grants to New York City’s ongoing development and restoration projects, gave $30,000 to Parks for the creation of this sitting area. Adjoining the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Cemetery, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries (1682) in the United States, the site’s previous structures, a parking garage and tenement, were rapidly demolished and replaced with benches and greenery. A bronze plaque was placed on a nearby wall in 1965 to commemorate Bernard Baruch’s efforts on behalf of one of New York’s oldest neighborhoods. Renovations occurred in 2000, including sidewalk repaving and other site improvements, with $47,617 allocated by Mayor Giuliani.
Acres: 0.04
WRONG ANSWERS
St. Gregory’s Park
This park takes its name from St. Gregory’s Parish, founded in 1907. St. Gregory I (540-604), the church’s patron saint, was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from the year 590 until his death, and is best remembered for introducing Gregorian chant. The school (est. 1912) offers instruction from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade and occupies two floors above the chapel in the church parish. The fourth floor houses the rectory. The baseball legend Babe Ruth (1895-1948) was married in the rectory on April 17, 1929.
St. Gregory’s Park lies on West 90th Street, nestled between the West Side Community Garden and St Gregory’s Church. The property faces the Stephen Wise Houses. Stephen S. Wise (1874-1949), a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, first became well known in 1929 for his efforts to reform Mayor James J. Walker’s (1881-1946, mayor 1926-32) shady administration. Beginning in 1938, he helped lead the Zionist movement in the United States, and is considered one of the county’s greatest Jewish leaders of the period between the wars.
Until 1993, St. Gregory’s Park was the site of a demolished tenement and a neighborhood dumping ground. On May 27, 1993, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) acquired the land and allowed the Open Space Greening Program to begin construction of a park. Open Space is a subdivision of the Council on the Environment of New York City, a citizens’ organization in the Mayor’s Office that was founded in 1970 to promote environmental awareness and find solutions to environmental problems. St. Gregory’s School, which had shown an interest in the property, agreed to maintain the park in return for Open Space’s services in constructing the playground.
The HPD transferred the property to Parks on November 24, 1997. Although the property is maintained by Parks, it still serves as a playground for St. Gregory’s School, and the school’s janitorial staff helps tend the space. The site contains a basketball court and play equipment with safety surfacing. Benches provide a place to sit, and trees provide shade.
St. Nicholas Park
This spacious park is named for St. Nicholas of Myra. It is located at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue, 127th Street, St. Nicholas Terrace and 141st Street, bordering the Manhattan neighborhoods of Hamilton Heights, Manhattanville, and Harlem.
Originally settled by Dutch farmers in the late 1600s, after the American Revolution (1775-1783) the neighborhood’s agricultural yield began to wane. Many residents moved to southern Manhattan’s newly industrialized areas. In the 1880s, the area developed quickly as the elevated trains and tenement houses were constructed in Harlem, Hamilton Heights and Manhattanville.
The City acquired some of the land for St. Nicholas Park by condemnation for the construction of the Old Croton Aqueduct in 1885-86. New York State laws of 1894 and 1895 authorized the creation of a public park instead, and it was called St. Nicholas Park. The name for the park was taken from the adjacent Harlem streets, St. Nicholas Terrace (to the west) and St. Nicholas Avenue (to the east). These streets honor New Amsterdam’s patron saint, whose image adorned the masthead of the New Netherland that brought the first Dutch colonists to these shores. St. Nicholas of Myra is also known as the patron saint of children, sailors, bankers, pawnbrokers, travelers, and captives–as well as the inspiration for Father Christmas or Santa Claus. Legend claims that he gave his considerable inheritance to charity and often made secret and anonymous gifts to the desperately needy. He served as bishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the 4th century where he was venerated even before his death as a man of exceptional holiness. St. Nicholas’ relics are enshrined in the Italian town of Bari.
Additional property for the nascent park was assembled in 1900-1906, and construction began in 1906. Like Harlem’s other ribbon parks, St. Nicholas was built on a rugged mass of rock, following the steep and irregular topography of northern Manhattan. Landscape architect and Parks Commissioner Samuel Parsons Jr. (1844-1920) was responsible for the design of the rustic park, of which he said a dominant note must be followed with a harmonious treatment, a high hill made higher, a rugged slope more rugged, a deep valley made deeper, thus invariably following nature’s lead. The development of the park and the completion of the elevated rapid transit line made this area of Harlem a fashionable residential district at the turn of the century.
In 1909 Parks acquired an adjacent parcel that extended the southern boundary of the park from W. 130th Street to W. 128th Street. This property contained the area known as The Point of Rocks, where General George Washington had positioned himself during the Battle of Harlem Heights in 1776. Parks opened a playground near the West 129th Street entrance in 1931; and the new facility included swings, a basketball court, and a garden where farm products were grown for educational purposes. Thirty years later, Parks and the Board of Education made arrangements for a new jointly operated playground on this site. The 129th Street Playground opened in 1965, and P.S. 129 opened in 1970 on nearby property held by the City College of New York. P.S. 129 is also known as the John H. Finley Campus School in memory of City College’s third president, who served from 1903-13.
Since 1995, Harlem community members and City College (under the leadership of Director of Community Development Jim Bawek) joined together to Take Back St. Nicholas Park. Neighborhood groups participating in the initiative to make the park a cleaner and safer place included the Hamilton Heights Homeowners Association, A. Philip Randolph High School, Thurgood Marshall School, the Community Helpers, and the Harlem YMCA. The 129th Street Playground benefited from their efforts and from a $602,000 capital renovation funded by City Council Member Stanley E. Michels in 1996. The playground benefited from the installation of new play equipment, color seal-coated basketball courts, improved safety surfacing, a frog spray shower, a drinking fountain, World’s Fair benches, and a community bulletin board. The handball courts were also renovated. New pavement and curbs, a steel picket fence with lockable gates, and improved water supply and drainage systems improved the overall appearance of the park.
22.74 acres
St. Vartan Park
St. Vartan Park, between East 35th and 36th Streets on Second Avenue, is named for the St. Vartan Cathedral of the Armenian Orthodox Church in America. Vartan was an Armenian who lived during the fourth century, remembered for his martyrdom at the Battle of Avarayr in 451AD between Armenian and Iranian forces in present-day Albania.
In June 1897, Mayor William L. Strong (1827 & 1900) appointed an advisory committee that became known as the Small Parks Commission. That commission selected this site for a park in 1901, and they acquired the land through condemnation two years later. This park opened as St. Gabriel’s Park in 1904, named for nearby St. Gabriel Church formerly at 310 East 37th Street. The park was reconstructed in 1936, and a playground, wading pool, roller skating track, and courts for handball, shuffleboard, and horseshoe pitching were added, as well as a field house and comfort station.
In 1938, shortly after the park was renovated, part of the land was surrendered to the Board of Estimate. This was part of an agreement with the New York City Tunnel Authority to make way for an approach to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel completed in 1940. The park’s trees, benches, and playground areas were relocated as the approach road cut the park in two, and decreased the parkland by nearly a quarter acre. In exchange, the Tunnel Authority agreed to improve nearby parks and playgrounds in the vicinity of 42nd Street.
By 1951, residents of the congested neighborhood had succeeded in restoring the playground areas lost when the tunnel approach was built. The renovation added a sand pit, jungle gym, and seesaws as well as a 16-foot-high fence separating the ball field and the children’s playground. In 1978 the property was renamed St. Vartan Park.
A 1984 renovation remodeled the park’s 1936 field house and playground. The building serves as a program center for preschoolers, teens, and seniors. The renovation added safety surfacing, benches, water fountains, game tables, a sprinkler, a small concrete amphitheater, and timberform play equipment. More than 9,200 shrubs were planted, including Japanese barberry, firethorn, baltic ivy, rhododendron, and forsythia. Saucer magnolia and honey locust trees were also planted at the site.
The 1984 renovation was privately funded, a harbinger of a new era of creative financing to aid the City’s park system, which suffered in the wake of the City’s 1970s fiscal crisis. The Glick Organization contributed $900,000 to enhance the site. This is my favorite kind of dedication, Mayor Edward I. Koch noted at the park’s reopening, one where a city park has been rebuilt without a penny of city money.
In 2000 Council Member Andrew S. Eristoff allocated $250,000 for a new playground, and his successor, Council Member Eva S. Moskowitz provided an additional $332,000 for the renovation. Designed by Parks’ Bernadette Grullon and completed in 2002, the project included the installation of new pavements, curbs, fences, benches, play equipment with safety surfacing, and a new water supply, drinking fountain, and drainage system. Ms. Grullon added a spray shower in the center of the amphitheater, and an animal art sculpture near the park’s northern entrance.
#23 – A
Alice in Wonderland Monument
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.
This impressive sculptural group, on the north side of Central Park’s Conservatory Water, is the work of the Spanish-born, French-trained sculptor Jose de Creeft (1900-1982). Publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte (1893-1991) commissioned the sculpture as a tribute to his late wife Margarita, and as a gift to the children of New York City. Dedicated by Robert Moses on May 7, 1959, the bronze statuary depicts characters from Lewis Carroll’s whimsical Alice in Wonderland, published in 1862.
Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), an English mathematician and writer. Dodgson was a lecturer of mathematics at Oxford University (1855-1881) and published various mathematical treatises, among them Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879). He is best known, however, for the classics of children’s literature, Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872).
The two books, which have as their central character a young girl named Alice, were lovingly illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. They are based on stories which Dodgson originally invented to entertain Alice Liddell, the second daughter of Henry George Liddell, Dean of the Christ Church in Oxford. Dodgson’s imaginary world is populated by strange and wonderful creatures often engaged in fantastic escapades, which at times provide thinly disguised commentary on English society. Dodgson, writing as Carroll, also authored Phantasmagoria (1869), Hunting of the Snark (1876), Rhyme? and Reason? (1883) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889).
Cast by Modern Art Foundry of Long Island City, Queens, the statues represent many of Dodgson’s best known creations, including the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the Cheshire Cat. The central figure of Alice was based on the artist’s daughter Donna, while many of the features and costumes are inspired by the earlier Tenniel illustrations. De Creeft worked in many media, and created numerous stone carvings. The Alice in Wonderland project’s architect and designer were Hideo Sasaki and Fernando Texidor, who inserted plaques with inscriptions from the book in the terrace around the sculpture.
The area around the model boat pond-the scene of the fictional Stuart Little’s exploits aboard a fragile craft-encompasses a cluster of monuments with themes from children’s literature. Also in the park are the Sophie Irene Loeb Fountain (1936), near East 76th Street, with figures from Alice in Wonderland by Frederick G. R. Roth; on the west side of Conservatory Water the statue of Hans Christian Anderson and the Ugly Duckling (1956) by Georg John Lober; and on the east side of Rumsey Playfield the Mother Goose (1938), also by Roth. Yet it is perhaps De Creeft’s Alice in Wonderland sculpture, that makes tangible the stories which sprang from the mind of Lewis Carroll, which has most captivated generations of young New Yorkers.
WRONG ANSWERS
The Amiable Child Monument
This unique New York City monument marks the site of one of the few private graves on public land within the five boroughs. It belongs to St. Claire Pollock (the namesake of nearby St. Clair Place), a child who died on July 15, 1797 in the fifth year of his life, probably from a fall from the cliffs of the parkland onto the rocks near the Hudson River.
In the two centuries that have passed since the tragedy of the “Amiable Child”–as he was described on his headstone–different accounts of St. Claire’s origins and family have persisted. George Pollock, the owner of the property on which the boy was buried, was either his father or his uncle. He was a linen merchant of Scots-Irish, or possibly English descent, who lived in a mansion on Strawberry Hill (later called Claremont) in the 1790s. He had sold his property to Mrs. Cornelia Verplanck, his former neighbor, by January 18, 1800 when he wrote as follows:
“There is a small enclosure near your boundary fence within which lie the remains of a favorite child, covered by a marble monument. You will confer a peculiar and interesting favor upon me by allowing me to convey the enclosure to you so that you will consider it a part of your own estate, keeping it, however, always enclosed and sacred.”
Claremont Hill was the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought during the Revolutionary War, on September 16, 1776. By 1806 it had been acquired by Michael Hogan, a former British Consul in Havana, who built Claremont Mansion (for which Claremont Avenue was named). Possible sources for the name are Hogan’s birthplace of County Clare, Ireland and his friend Prince William, Duke of Clarence, who would ascend the English throne as King William IV in 1830. Known as the site of a popular roadside inn by 1860, Claremont was acquired by the City from the heirs of Joel Post in 1873, for the development of Riverside Park.
In the 1890s Claremont Inn was host to numerous politicians, socialites and entertainers including the Morgans, Vanderbilts and Whitneys, Lillian Russell, and Admiral George Dewey. By 1907 the Inn had been transformed into a restaurant, serving the likes of Cole Porter and James J. Walker. It was destroyed by fire in 1950. The playground which now stands on the site was built shortly afterwards.
A century after the Tomb of the Amiable Child was laid, New York’s most famous monumental grave–Grant’s Tomb–was completed. The domed structure across Riverside Drive, designed by architect John Duncan and sculptor John Massey Rhind, was dedicated on April 27, 1897. The latter structure is as grand a testimony to the accomplishments of national leader as the monument to the amiable child is a modest and touching tribute to a young boy who never had the opportunity to grow into adulthood.
Lehman Gates
The Lehman Children’s Zoo opened in 1961 to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Governor Herbert H. Lehman (1878-1963, governor 1932-1942) who contributed to its construction. Paul Manship (1885-1966), sculptor of the more elaborate gates found at the Bronx Zoo designed the fanciful bronze crosspiece over the gates at the Children’s Zoo. The current complex replaced the Children’s Zoo, and only the old gates remain. Manship’s work is also represented in Central Park by Group of Bears at the Pat Hoffman Friedman Playground at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street. His most famous work is the gilded Prometheus at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center.
A boy, flanked by two goats, dances to the music played on Panpipes by two other boys positioned over the end posts. The figures stand on organic ornamentation in which birds frolic. Manship’s musical and dancing animals, in place when George Delacorte commissioned the Delacorte Clock, may have been the inspiration for Spadini’s enchanted animals. The composition is a fanciful display of children and animals, fitting for the entrance to the Children’s Zoo.
Sculptures at the Zoo
Animal sculptures abound in Central Park, but the largest concentration can be found in or near the Wildlife Center. In 1934, the first year of Commissioner Robert Moses’s administration, modern brick buildings replaced the dilapidated wooden Menagerie. Officially renamed the Central Park Zoo, decoration for the new buildings included elegant limestone bas reliefs and niches displaying whimsical bronze animals by Brooklyn-born sculptor Frederick George Richard Roth (1872 & 1944). Roth, noted for his animal sculptures, was subsequently named chief sculptor of Parks & Recreation. His sculpture of the Alaskan dog-sled hero Balto, at 67th Street near Fifth Avenue, commissioned in 1925, is his most famous Central Park work. Two years later he created Dancing Goat and Honey Bear, placed respectively at the southern and northern external niches of the zoo. Both function as fountains and feature miniature frogs and birds spouting water at the base of the animals. The bear and the goat dance and whimsically extend their tongues to catch insects that may be passing by.
The bas relief friezes featured on the buildings of the Wildlife Center depict the simple forms of animals drawn in stone. The delightful representation of antelopes, lions and wolves are animals that were once featured in the former Central Park Zoo. The monkey frieze over the entrance to the Zoo School, formerly the Monkey House, depicts a fanciful scene of a mother protecting her young while another monkey chases a butterfly. Over the entrance to the Zoo Gallery, formerly the Bird House, Roth sculpted an imposing eagle with outspread wings. The relationship between the artist’s bird and the eagle already in place over the entrance to the Arsenal was evident to Roth. Whereas Roth’s eagle represents the animal in his natural habitat, the one on the Arsenal’s a former military structure and now headquarters of New York City Parks & Recreation’s emphasizes the eagle as the iconic symbol of America.
Tigress and Cubs, by Auguste Cain, was presented to the Park in 1866. This piece has a character different from the other sculptures in the area. Where Roth strove to portray animals in a fanciful and light-hearted manner, other mid-nineteenth century sculptors like Caine preferred to depict the fierce qualities often associated with them. Auguste Cain was a student of Antoine-Louis Bayre, the most influential animalier in France, as this realistic school of sculptors was called. Here we see the tigress with tense muscles and bared fangs proudly presenting a dead peacock in her mouth to her young cubs eagerly awaiting their next meal. The sculpture, originally placed in a rural park setting, was moved to the newly renovated zoo in 1934.
#24 – A
Asser Levy Recreation Center, Pool and Playground
The Asser Levy Recreation Center has its origins in the Public Health movement of the turn of the last century. Between 1820 and 1870, New York City’s population increased tenfold, while cholera and typhoid epidemics raged through crowded neighborhoods. Most tenement buildings lacked such basic facilities as toilets and showers. In 1896 a survey conducted in the Lower East Side revealed an average of one bathtub for every 79 families.
To fight dirt, and the ills associated with it, reformers promoted the idea of municipally-run public bathing facilities. The first plea for public bathhouses was made in an 1889 New York Times editorial by Dr. Simon Baruch, an authority on the “curative power of water,” who had investigated the public baths in Europe. In 1895 a state law requiring local health boards to build public baths was passed. However it was not until 1901 that the city’s first public bathhouse opened at Rivington Street; this facility was named in honor of Dr. Baruch in 1917. He is perhaps better known as the father of Bernard Baruch, industrial and economic advisor to the federal government during both World Wars.
In 1903 the Department of Docks and Ferries surrendered property on Avenue A for a new bathhouse to the Manhattan Borough President. When it opened in 1908, the facility was called the East 23rd Street Bathhouse. It was designed by architects Arnold W. Brunner and William Martin Aiken. Echoing the style of ancient Roman baths, the architecture was inspired by the “City Beautiful” movement, a turn-of-the-century effort to create civic architecture in the United States that would rival the monuments of the great European capitals. In 1974 the bathhouse was honored as a New York City landmark. It is a superb example of the Roman Revival style, which features vaulted ceilings, balconies, mullion windows, skylights, and stone urns.
The bathhouse was later named for Asser Levy, a Jewish trailblazer in colonial times. The street to the west of the bathhouse was named for Levy by local law in 1954. Levy and a group of 23 Jews fled Brazil in 1654 to seek refuge in New Amsterdam. Shortly after their arrival, Governor Peter Stuyvesant attempted to evict the Jews from the settlement. Levy became the first Jewish citizen of the colony and was the leading advocate of civil rights for Jews, challenging Stuyvesant on such issues as citizenship, the right to bear arms, and property ownership. He was the first Jew to serve in a militia and own property, the first kosher butcher in the New World, and a founding member of Shearith Israel, the country’s first Jewish congregation. Shearith Israel’s synagogue (1897) on Central Park West was co-designed by Arnold W. Brunner, who was also the co-designer of the bathhouse at East 23rd Street.
In 1936 new outdoor swimming and diving pools and a new playground expanded the site’s recreational facilities. Parks gained jurisdiction over the bathhouse and recreation center in 1938. From 1988 to 1990, the facility was closed to the public due to an extensive restoration. Both indoor and outdoor pools were rebuilt, and a senior citizens room, auditorium, fitness center, and wading pool were added.
In 1993 the Asser Levy Playground opened, one of the first playgrounds in Manhattan built for disabled children. Funds were provided by the City, the Heckscher Foundation for Children, and the City Parks Foundation. The playground contains specially designed free-form game tables, wood and concrete benches, drinking fountains that are accessible to the physically challenged, and tactile paving for the visually impaired. The equipment, suitable for use by all children, features pull-up bars, balance boards, steps and ramps, chain ladders, and parallel bars.
1.8 Acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Hansborough Recreation Center
The 134th Street Bathhouse opened to the public on June 1, 1925 under the auspices of Manhattan Borough President Julius Miller. It was one of many bathhouses built early in the century to promote public health, hygiene, and recreation. According to a 1927 newspaper article, the Harlem facility was built at a cost of almost $500,000 and was the last word in shower bath construction. The stunning natatorium (meaning indoor swimming pool, from the Latin natare, to swim) was decorated with tiles, mosaics, and ceramic panels depicting sea creatures. In addition to the pool, there were 164 showers and 6 bathtubs on the first floor, which was operated by the Borough President’s staff. The gymnasium, running track, locker room, and showers on the second floor were operated by the Department of Parks. In 1926 the gymnasium was used by 43,000 visitors, including public school children and members of boys and girls clubs, such as the Chapel Boys, the New York Flashes, and the Sunshine Girls Club. In 1934 the structure was turned over to the Department of Parks to serve as a recreation center. For generations of Harlem residents, the 134th Street Recreation Center was a magnet for amateur athletes. In 1984 the facility was named in memory of John Rozier Hansborough Jr. (1907-1981), a former Parks recreational employee and Harlem community leader. Born in the Bronx, Rozier moved with his family to Harlem when he was a teenager. He was a superb all-around athlete and played varsity football at Stuyvesant High School, where he was also a member of the Law Society. After graduating from Stuyvesant in 1925, Hansborough attended college at New York University and Howard University. In 1929 he became a recreation instructor at Harlem Playground and rose to become Assistant Director of the Harlem Children’s Center (formerly the Harlem Playground, now the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Center). Hansborough joined Parks as a Playground Director in 1938 and assembled many star-studded teams in track and field, football, basketball, softball, and baseball. He was promoted to Assistant Supervisor of Recreation in Manhattan in 1969 and implemented a cultural arts program at the Mount Morris (now Pelham Fritz) Recreation Center. Hansborough broke the color barrier as the first of two African-Americans in the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials. As a founder of the Sports United Basketball Association, he trained several outstanding basketball officials who worked in the National Basketball Association. Hansborough served as a surrogate father to many children in Harlem and a mentor to some who became professional athletes. He married Audrey Solomon, a former Parks employee and Department of Social Services District Director, in 1971. Though Hansborough retired from Parks in 1975, he returned to work as a Community Service Aide in Manhattan from 1976 to 1979. He died in 1981 at the age of seventy-three.
In 1988 Audrey S. Hansborough founded the John Rozier Hansborough Jr. Recreation Center Conservancy in memory of her husband. Under her leadership, the Conservancy established a partnership with City of New York/Parks & Recreation to promote and monitor the restoration, maintenance and management of Harlem’s parks, playgrounds, and recreation centers. In 1994 the Manhattan Borough President funded a $1,259,000 capital project to improve access to the recreation center by installing an elevator, ramps, and outside lighting and by renovating the bathrooms for the handicapped. New fencing, lighting, and flooring were installed on the building’s roof to provide a dramatic setting for special events.
Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center
The Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center were built in 1936. The pool was the fifth of eleven city pools built with labor supplied by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). It opened during the hot summer of 1936, leading Fortune magazine to dub 1936 the swimming pool year.
An avid swimmer since his college days as a freestyler at Yale, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888 & 1981, Parks Commissioner 1934-60) created many facilities that increased public access to New York’s water resources. Moses began a flurry of pool construction when he became New York City Parks Commissioner in 1934. Highbridge Pool opened July 14, 1936 with great fanfare; Moses and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882 & 1947) both attended the opening, and after the Mayor turned on a switch lighting the pool, a swimming and diving exhibition ensued. When it opened, the pool’s hours were 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and admission to the pool was 20 cents for adults and 10 cents for children.
Moses implemented many innovations to make the pools cleaner and more accessible to the public, including improved filtering systems and underwater lighting. He was able to build so many in part because, during the Depression, the Federal government was funding public works projects as a means of providing people with jobs. Moses and Mayor LaGuardia were able to secure a great deal of WPA funding for New York City, in part because its projects were so well organized. After the WPA disbanded in 1943, Moses continued to build pools, providing overheated New Yorkers with a place to swim, wade, or just beat the summer heat.
The High Bridge, for which the park, pool, and the center are named, was built in 1848 to carry the Old Croton Aqueduct over the Harlem River. Begun in 1837, High Bridge was once part of the first reliable and uninterrupted water supply system in New York City, the Old Croton Aqueduct. It was one of the first of its kind constructed in the United States. The innovative system ran 41 miles into New York City through an enclosed masonry structure crossing ridges, valleys, and rivers. The High Bridge soars 138 feet above the 620 foot-wide Harlem River, with a total length of 1450 feet.
Highbridge Park, located at 175th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was assembled piecemeal between 1867 and the 1960s, with the bulk being acquired through condemnation from 1895 to 1901. The cliffside area from West 181st Street to Dyckman Street was acquired in 1902, and the parcel including Fort George Hill was acquired in 1928. In 1934 the Department of Parks obtained the majestic Highbridge Tower (1872) and the site of old High Bridge Reservoir. The recreation center and pool were built on the site of the old reservoir
Parks’s Monuments shop has been located for decades underneath the pool complex, which was renovated in 1985 following a three year, $9.1 million project. The 165-foot by 228-foot pool was made handicap accessible, the main pool building, concessions building, and filter building were repaired, and new heating, ventilation, electrical and filtration systems. Mayor Giuliani funded a $305,000 renovation of the pool’s filtration system in 1996 and Council Member Guillermo Linares funded a $445,000 upgrade of the pool’s heating and ventilation systems. In 2001 Council Members Linares and Stanley E. Michels and Borough President C. Virginia Fields funded a nearly $1 million renovation of the recreation center that added volleyball and basketball courts, ensuring that the facility will continue to serve New Yorkers for many years to come.
Sheltering Arms Pool
Named after the institution from which it was acquired in 1945, Sheltering Arms Pool was once the site of a free asylum for homeless children. The Sheltering Arms was organized in 1864 by Rev. Thomas M. Peters, then Rector of St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, who had provided for its operation from his own home near West 100th Street. That location became inadequate a few years later, when Broadway was being cut through the grounds, urging the Sheltering Arms to relocate its services to West 129th Street and Tenth Avenue.
The Sheltering Arms established a haven for the children in the midst, for whom many of the charitable institutions in 19th century New York still failed to provide. Some were rejected due to incurable illnesses, some were abandoned, and others were so-called half-orphans, whose parents required temporary assistance while striving to overcome abject poverty or other adversities. On March 6, 1869, the cornerstone was laid at this site, and close to a year later, the children of the Sheltering Arms moved into their first custom-built home on February 5, 1870.
The building’s plan was inspired by the innovative rough house cottages in Wichern, near Hamburg, Germany, which dispersed children into equally numbered families. Manhattan’s prohibitive land values compelled an alternative design by prominent architect Charles C. Haight who created a single, two-story, brick Gothic Revival building composed of five sections, whose slated mansard roof housed a third story. Unlike many institutions, the Sheltering Arms did not require parents to surrender their children for good. It received up to 120 children at a time from infancy to the age of 14, subject to the call of their parents or relatives, regardless of creed or nationality.
This area was then known as Manhattanville, established in 1806 by merchant Jacob Schieffelin (1757-1835), local Quakers, and others. The village straddled both sides of present-day 125th Street along the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway). Its picturesque valley opening onto the Hudson River was the village counterpart to Harlem on the Harlem River. The partnership helped both towns to flourish as popular suburban retreats from the crowded city. By 1850, Manhattanville was a distinct residential, manufacturing, and transportation hub and the first principal northbound station of the new Hudson River Railroad.
The Sheltering Arms grounds also have a significant history. In 1851, the first Manhattanville post office had opened on the western point of this triangular block. In the center was the historic St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church which offered the institution free chaplain’s services, and where Rev. Peters was formerly rector. Until St. Mary’s was organized at Manhattanville in 1823, the Dutch Reformed Church had been the only place of worship of any denomination in all of Harlem. Jacob Schieffelin and his wife Hannah Lawrence donated the church lot facing Lawrence Street, now called West 126th Street, where they are buried. In 1831, St. Mary’s became New York’s first free pew Episcopal church. Its congregation was racially mixed, and included the widow and children of Alexander Hamilton, the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury; African-American abolitionists; and Daniel F. Tiemann, Mayor of New York City in 1858 and 1859. In 1998, St. Mary’s-Manhattanville was designated a City Historic Landmark. The church is Harlem’s oldest religious institution operating from the same location at which it was founded.
The opening of the Broadway Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway line in 1904 sparked an apartment development boom that caused the exodus of many neighborhood institutions. In 1944, the Sheltering Arms merged with the New York Children’s Foster Home Service to create the Sheltering Arms Children’s Service, whose headquarters today are located on East 29th Street. Parks acquired the land from the Sheltering Arms under Robert Moses (Commissioner from 1934-1960) during the administration of Mayor Fiorella H. LaGuardia.
The current facilities at this site, designed by engineer James J. O’Brien in 1968, include a brick men’s and women’s changing pavilion opening to a 1′3-deep wading pool, and a larger, 3′6-deep pool for casual swimming. During the Spring of 2001, a $178,000 renovation of the site was completed. The two handball courts were reconstructed and new play equipment and safety surfacing was installed. New trees and bushes were planted in the garden area. Sheltering Arms Pool not only provides a welcome urban oasis to beat the summer heat, but its name also perpetuates the memory of an institution that opened its arms to protect the city’s most needful residents.
#25 – A
Bennett Park
Bennett Park occupies the highest point of land in Manhattan, 265.05 feet above sea level. A large outcropping of Manhattan schist dominates the center of the park. The area was part of a densely wooded hill known as Penadnik to the Delaware Munsee Indians. Early Dutch settlers called this part of northern Manhattan “Long Hill” and found the land useful for lumbering.
During the Revolutionary War, General George Washington located his base of operations at this strategic high point. Fort Washington was built in 1776 and was the last stronghold for the Americans as the battle for New York swept northward on Manhattan Island. On November 16, British and Hessian troops swiftly attacked and seized Fort Washington in a pivotal defeat for the Americans. After the war, vestiges of the Fort disappeared, and the surrounding area became known as Washington Heights. Granite paving outlines the former contours of Fort Washington in the southern portion of Bennett Park.
In 1871 the land that is now the park was purchased by James Gordon Bennett (1795-1872), the prominent newspaper publisher and editor who is widely recognized as a pioneer of American popular journalism. Born in Keith, Scotland, Bennett emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1819 and settled in New York City four years later. He worked as the Washington correspondent for the New York Enquirer in 1827-28 and became associate editor for the Courier and Enquirer in 1829.
Bennett launched the New York Herald in 1835, assuming the responsibilities of editor, reporter, proof-reader, folder, and cashier. Because of his independent and opinionated style, Bennett was lambasted in other publications and was physically assaulted by two of the targets of his critical pen. Nevertheless, the newspaper’s coverage of finance and politics, crime and scandal, and national and international news, along with Bennett’s bold and often controversial editorials, made the Herald one of the most successful daily newspapers in the United States. Bennett retired in 1867 but continued to write for the Herald until he died on June 1, 1872.
In 1901 his son, James G. Bennett Jr., permitted the Sons of the American Revolution to erect a monument on his land to commemorate the Battle of Fort Washington. Sculpted by Charles R. Lamb, this bronze and marble stele is located on the eastern perimeter wall of the park. Although he was said to have intended to donate the property for a park, the younger Bennett died in 1918 without putting it in his will. Consequently, the property was divided for sale, while honoring the request of the American Scenic and Historical Preservation Society to preserve that portion of the land where Fort Washington once stood. In 1928 the City of New York acquired the site of the fort and additional land and assigned the property to Parks.
Bennett Park opened in 1929, and three years later the Washington Heights Honor Grove Association planted an American Elm tree in the park to commemorate the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth. A playground was constructed in the 1940s, and the brick comfort station and storage building was erected in the north part of the park in 1964. For the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Washington in 1976, the Washington Heights-Inwood Historicalal Society re-enacted the conflict on the site of the former fort in Bennett Park. A neighborhood treasure, this historically significant park offers visitors a place for quiet recreation.
In 1996 a bronze plaque set in marble was dedicated in memory of Private First Class Emilio Barbosa (1926-1945), a United States Marine enlisted in World War II. On March 27, 1945 Private Barbosa was manning a gun turret aboard the battleship USS Nevada at Okinawa Shima. As a Japanese Kamikaze plane attacked his ship, Barbosa fired and disabled the enemy aircraft. The plane plunged onto the deck of the battleship, and the bomb carried by the plane blew up on impact. The explosion mortally wounded 11 marines, including Barbosa, and injured 95 others. A gift to the City by the soldier’s brother, the Barbosa monument honors the young hero who grew up on nearby Pinehurst Avenue.
1.8 acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Hancock Park
Winfield Scott Hancock (1824-1886) was born in Montgomery Square, Pennsylvania. Following his education at home, in the Norristown academy, and a public high school, young Winfield graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1844 at the age of twenty. He immediately entered military service, serving on the frontier, in the Mexican War, in the Seminole War, in Kansas during the border troubles, and in California. In 1861 Hancock requested to be returned east for active duty, and he was commissioned a Brigadier-general of volunteers by General-in-Chief of the Army George B. McClellan on September 23 of that year.
Hancock proved an outstanding leader in the Civil War. His performance at the battle of Williamsburg (1862) earned him the sobriquet “Hancock the Superb” and resulted in his promotion to Major-general of volunteers. He commanded the first division of the second army corps at Fredericksburg (1862) and at Chancellorsville (1863). Hancock was severely wounded repulsing Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg (1863). While pursuing General Robert E. Lee’s army through western Maryland, he assumed command of the second army corps. By March 1864 Hancock had recovered sufficiently to resume command and take part in assaults at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. Due to the effects of his Gettysburg wound, he relinquished his command of the second army corps in June 1864. He was assigned several other command posts, including the Department of West Virginia, the Middle Military Division, and the Army of the Shenandoah.
General Hancock’s masterful performance in the war translated into distinction in peacetime. He was called to Washington D.C. in order to establish calm following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. After his service as commander of the Department of the Missouri, he was transferred to the command of the Fifth Military District of Louisiana and Texas in 1867. From this post Hancock issued his “General Order No. 40,” which stated that the rights of the southern states were not being upheld in the reconstruction policy set forth by Congress. As a result of this order, when Hancock ran for President as the Democratic nominee in 1880, he carried the “solid south”; however, he lost the election by a narrow margin to James A. Garfield. General Hancock served as commander of the Military Department of the Atlantic from headquarters on Governors Island in New York from 1874 until he died there on February 9, 1886. His body was returned to Norristown, Pennsylvania for burial.
In 1886 the Board of Aldermen named the recently acquired property at Manhattan and St. Nicholas Avenues at 124th Street “Hancock Place.” James Wilson Alexander MacDonald, an accomplished sculptor of Civil War heroes, was commissioned to create a bronze portrait bust of General Hancock. MacDonald may have based the statue on a plaster mask he took of Hancock the year he ran for president. The statue’s torso is bare except for a wide sash across the left shoulder to signify military honor. It was fabricated in 1891 and dedicated on December 30, 1893.
The park was improved with new pavements, lawns, landscaping, and curbs in 1898-99. According to the 1929 Annual Report of the Department of Parks, subway construction in the late 1920s “totally destroyed” Hancock Park. The park was restored by 1936, at which time it included the statue, lawn, seven locust trees, and an iron picket fence.
Since 1981 volunteers from the Coalition of 100 Black Women have planted and maintained the small park. Improvements made in 1998 and 1999 focused on the Hancock monument and the plantings. The City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation program conserved the portrait bust of General Hancock by cleaning and waxing it. New plantings include four specimen Taxus evergreens, 800 golden yellow tulip bulbs, lawn, groundcover, and a perennial garden.
.067 acre
Isham Park
In 1864 William B. Isham, a wealthy leather merchant, purchased twenty-four acres along the Kingsbridge Road, now known as Broadway, from 211th Street to 214th Street, and northwest to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The park named in his honor is bordered on the north by the Harlem River Ship Canal, on the west by Inwood Hill Park, on the south by Isham Street, and on the east by Broadway. Isham Park functions as a sort of town common as well as a gateway to its larger neighbor, Inwood Hill Park. The park’s hills and abundant trees, shrubs, and lawn give it a pastoral quality.
The park originally included the old Isham mansion, stables, and green house, with the mansion located at the summit of the hill. These structures were demolished in the 1940s because of prohibitive maintenance costs. Only a stone terrace on the east edge of the park, lined with beautifully crafted stone benches overlooking the Harlem River, indicates that a stately mansion once stood on the site. Early photographs depict a worn brownstone milemarker on the original carriage road. The park’s design included several ballfields and playgrounds.
Julia Isham Taylor donated a six-acre parcel of her estate to the city in remembrance of her father in 1912. She wanted the estate’s views of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, the Harlem River Ship Canal, and Spuyten Duyvil to be preserved for future generations to enjoy. Julia’s daughter, Flora, donated her portion of the estate to the city in 1916. With Parks Department purchases in 1925 and 1927, the land for Isham Park was assembled. These acquisitions explain the unusual shape of the park which juts into Inwood Hill Park so that the two share a boundary in the middle of a field.
Like other parks in northern Manhattan, the site of Isham Park played a crucial role in the battle of Fort Washington during the American Revolution. The site served as a landing point for Hessian troops coming up the Harlem River to drive the American forces to Westchester and New Jersey. Within the park lies a lovely, worn outcropping of Inwood marble, and a large ginkgo (<i>Ginkgo biloba) tree. Today the Urban Park Rangers work with school children on a variety of restoration projects to stabilize the slope and improve the health and appearance of the park by planting native shrubs and trees.
Morningside Park
Morningside Park takes its name from the eastern side where the sun rises in the morning 45of the rugged cliff of Manhattan schist which separates Morningside Heights on the west from the Harlem Plain to the east. The area was formerly known as Muscoota to the Indians of the Harlem Plain, Vredendal (Peaceful Dale) to 17th century Dutch settlers, and Vandewater Heights after the Dutch landowner who acquired property here in 1738. On September 16, 1776, during the Revolutionary War Battle of Harlem Heights, colonial forces retreated on a road through the area. Three blockhouse fortifications were built here and put to use during the War of 1812.
In 1867 Andrew Haswell Green, Commissioner and Comptroller of Central Park, recommended that a park be located in Morningside Heights. He argued that it would be “very expensive” and “very inconvenient” to extend the Manhattan street grid over the area’s severe topography. The City of New York was granted jurisdiction over this property in 1870. Construction of Morningside Park was delayed, however, because the Board of Commissioners for Public Parks rejected the design proposals submitted by Parks Engineer-in-Chief M.A. Kellogg in 1871, and by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (co-designers of Central and Prospect Parks) in 1873.
Architect Jacob Wrey Mould was hired to rework Olmsted and Vaux’s plans in 1880. He designed the promenade and buttressed masonry wall that encloses the park along Morningside Drive. The 30 foot-wide walkway was constructed as a series of esplanades, linked by steps, with semi-octagonal bays providing visitors with places to rest and to enjoy the view. Although a construction contract was awarded in 1883, Mould died in 1886 before the work was completed.
Fourteen years after their original proposal was rejected, landscape architects Olmsted and Vaux were hired in 1887 to continue improvements to Morningside Park. They enhanced the park’s natural elements by planting vegetation tolerant of the dry, rocky environment. Two paths one broad, one meandering traversed the lower portion of the park. Retained as a consultant, Vaux saw the work to completion in 1895, the year he drowned in Gravesend Bay. Parks Superintendent Samuel Parsons Jr. wrote of Vaux’s work, “. . .perhaps Morningside Park was the most consummate piece of art that he had ever created.”
The park’s design continued to evolve in the 20th century. Monuments installed in and around the park included Lafayette and Washington (1900) by Fradaric-Auguste Bartholdi, the Carl Schurz Memorial (1913) by Karl Bitter and Henry Bacon, and the Seligman (Bear and Faun) Fountain (1914) by Edgar Walter. Between the 1930s and the 1950s playgrounds, basketball courts, and softball diamonds were constructed in the east and south parts of Morningside Park.
In 1968 student and community protests halted construction of a large gymnasium in the park intended for the use of Columbia University and the public. The excavated foundation crater was converted into an ornamental pond and waterfall in 1989-90 as part of a $5 million capital reconstruction of the park from 110th to 114th Streets. The project also included installing new play equipment, creating a picnic area, planting new trees, and rebuilding the ballfields.
29.88 acres
#26 – A
Bleecker Playground
Since its opening in 1966, Bleecker Playground has been a social and recreational meeting place for neighborhood families and children. Its name derives from its location on Bleecker Street which once ran through the Bleecker family farm. In 1809, Anthony Lispenard Bleecker and his wife Mary ceded land to the city for the streets running through their property including Bleecker, Houston, Mercer, Wooster, Greene, Laurens (now West Broadway), Thomas and Sullivan streets.
The Bleeckers son Anthony (10/1770-3/13/1827) was an early Village literary figure. He was born in New York City and graduated from Columbia College in 1791. Though he studied law, Bleecker preferred writing and contributed prose and poetry to New York and Philadelphia periodicals for over thirty years. His social circle included Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant (both of whom have New York City parks named for them). Bryant once reported that a certain woman had “gone to the country to take refuge from Anthony Bleecker’s puns.” Bleecker also played a role in New York cultural life as a founder of the New York Historical Society and trustee of the New York Society Library.
This land was acquired by Parks in 1963 as an extension of Abingdon Square Park, which was laid out in 1830. Its development followed the implementation of a new traffic pattern that involved the widening of Bleecker Street and elimination of part of the bed of Bank Street. A number of warehouses, as well as a circular comfort station under the jurisdiction of the Department of Public Works, were demolished to make room for the new playground, which was the first of its kind in the West Village. It was created as the result of cooperation between Parks and neighborhood civic groups who recognized the need for safe play spaces for local children.
Park facilities and security were greatly improved in 1997 with the completion of a $400,000 dollar capital project funded by Councilmember Tom Duane. The renovation by Parks landscape designer George Vellonakis provided new lighting, benches, shrubbery, handicap accessibility, new play equipment and the reinstallation of play equipment that was contributed by the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation in 1994. Animal art and decorative details were added that reflect the architecture of the Greenwich Village Historical District in which Bleecker Playground is located. The adjacent sitting area features linden trees and Chaim Gross’s statue, The Family, dedicated by the artist to former Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1992.
.45 Acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Hamilton Playground
This playground, bounded by Hamilton Place, West 140th Street, and West 141st Street, takes its name from Hamilton Place, which is named for the most distinguished resident of Harlem Heights, Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). Born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies in 1755, Hamilton moved to New York City in 1772 and attended King’s College (now Columbia University). With the outbreak of war in 1776, Hamilton volunteered for service in a New York artillery company. A year later, he came to the attention of General George Washington (1732-1799), who later made Hamilton his aide and secretary.
In 1780, Hamilton cemented his rising position by marrying Elizabeth Schuyler (1757-1854), a member of one of New York’s most prominent families. Two years later, he was admitted to the New York State Bar, and was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1787, he attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and helped develop our current federal constitution. Although he remained critical of the final document, he nevertheless argued vigorously for the Constitution’s ratification in a series of articles co-authored with James Madison (1751-1836) and John Jay (1745-1829), known today as The Federalist Papers (1787-1788). In 1789, President George Washington appointed Hamilton the first Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1795, after developing many of nation’s financial institutions and fiscal practices, Hamilton retired from national government. He settled in New York City, where he continued to remain active in public life. He resumed his law practice, and became an important political advisor to state and national politicians. In 1801, he helped to found the New York Evening Post, known today as the New York Post, as a platform for expressing his views. He soon, however, came into conflict with Aaron Burr (1756-1836), another New York lawyer and politician. After Hamilton supported Jefferson for the presidency over Burr in 1800, and then supposedly slandered Burr, Burr challenged Hamilton to duel. Although Hamilton had lost his eldest son Philip (1782-1801) in a duel in 1801, he nevertheless accepted the challenge. At Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804, Hamilton was fatally shot by Burr. He is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in Manhattan.
In 1895, the College of the City of New York first acquired this parkland for use as part of their campus. Under the jurisdiction of the City of New York, the property was assigned to Parks in 1923 for use as a playground. The southern section of Harlem Heights where this property is located is popularly referred to as Hamilton Heights for its proximity to Hamilton’s country estate, known as the Grange. Designed by the same man who designed City Hall, John McComb, Jr. (1762-1853), the Grange today is located at 287 Convent Avenue between West 141st Street and West 142nd Streets. Named in recognition of the neighborhood’s history, the playground officially opened for public use as Hamilton Place Playground in 1924. It features included basketball and handball courts, a comfort station, and children’s play equipment. In 2000, Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern shortened the name of the park to Hamilton Playground.
In August 1995, the playground was redesigned through a $600,000 capital project funded by Council Member Stanley E. Michaels and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a part of the Neighborhood Parks Improvement Program. The renovation included updating the play equipment, installing safety surfacing, and planting new flowerbeds. Also as part of the project, elephant animal art was chosen for the playground. Together with Parks, the West Harlem Art Fund (WHAF), the Hamilton Place Block Association and local volunteers, including Isabelle Montell, the Founder and Chair of the Park Committee of Hamilton Place, have helped to maintain this playground as a place for rest, relaxation, and recreation.
Mercer Playground
Mercer Playground is one of New York’s youngest parks, located in one of its oldest areas, Greenwich Village. Mercer Street, directly to the east of the park, was laid out prior to 1797 and called First Street and Clermont Street. By 1799 it was renamed for physician and soldier Hugh Mercer (c. 1720-1777). Born in Scotland, Mercer emigrated to America in 1747 and settled in Pennsylvania. His military service included fighting in the French and Indian War of 1755 and organizing and drilling the Virginia militia and the Minutemen in 1775-76. Appointed brigadier-general in June 1776, Mercer advised General George Washington to march on Princeton and commanded the advance. Mercer died of wounds he suffered during the Battle of Princeton, and his funeral in Philadelphia was attended by a crowd of 30,000.
This part of Greenwich Village has a long modern history dating back to the 17th century and the original Dutch colonists. Wouter Van Twiller, Director-General of New Netherland once owned the land in this part of Manhattan, and towards the end of the 18th century several families of freed slaves, established farms and homes in what eventually became known as Little Africa . In the early 1820s the intersection of Mercer and Bleecker Streets, just across the street from Mercer Playground, served as one of the sites of what could be the earliest African-American theatre company, the African Theater, also known as the African Grove. Headed by the West Indian William Henry Brown, the African Grove launched the career of Ira Aldridge, who went on to play the role of Othello at the Royal Theatre in London, and gave James Hewlett the opportunity to play Shakespeare’s Richard III for a mixed audience of blacks and whites.
The area continued to grow as Manhattan grew, and Washington Square became home to the city’s affluent by the end of the 19th century. By the 20th century, the area was home to a thriving Italian and Irish immigrant population. This area of Greenwich Village was once occupied by mixed-use buildings like those south of Houston Street, but the area was transformed in the 1950s when Parks Commissioner Robert Moses helped secure federal funds for slum clearance, leading to the development of the adjacent Washington Square Village. Mercer Playground itself was originally owned by the Department of Transportation in anticipation of a project to widen Mercer Street. That plan was prevented by neighborhood objections and the site remained vacant for four decades, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation. In 1991 the Lower Manhattan Neighbors’ Organization Inc., known by the acronym LMNO(P), initiated plans to create a playground on the site in keeping with their mission to make downtown New York more hospitable for the growing residential community.
In 1995 the Department of Transportation gave Parks a permit to use the site. Two years later the site was formally transferred to Parks, and plans were made for capital improvements. The playground construction was funded jointly by Council Member Kathryn Freed and LMNO(P) at a total cost of $340,000. LMNO(P) raised an additional $100,000 for the construction of the fence. Supporters included New York University, the Robinson & Benham Charitable Trust, and the Archives Fund.
Architect Peter Wormser, an LMNO(P) member, developed the design concept, which provides play spaces for pre-teens. Features include a long snaked path for in-line and roller skating, a large paved path for running games and bicycling, climbing structures, and a spray shower. A decorative wrought-iron fence, adorned with spirals and silhouettes of familiar objects, unites the three sections of Mercer Playground. The community can be justifiably proud in knowing that, together, they made their own backyard.
Rivington Street Playground
This playground, along with the adjacent street honors London born James Rivington (1724-1802), gambler, bookseller, rumored spy and publisher of the Royalist Gazette, a loyalist newspaper, during the American Revolution.
Fleeing England after amassing considerable debt due to extravagant tastes and a penchant for playing the horses at the Newmarket Race Track, James Rivington and his wife, Elizabeth Mynshull, arrived in Philadelphia in 1760. He opened bookshops in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City, and by 1765, Rivington moved from Philadelphia to concentrate his business in New York City. His first wife most likely died giving birth to his son James in 1769, and, within the year, Rivington married Elizabeth Van Horne, a wealthy New York widow and future mother of his sons Henry (1770) and John (1773).
In March 1773, Rivington began publication of Rivington’s New York Gazetteer. Published out of his shop on Queen and Wall Streets, the Gazetteer, in the words of its publisher sought &hellip;every particular that may contribute to the improvement, information and entertainment of the public, and he also held that &hellip;no personal satire, and acrimonious censures on any society or class of men shall ever stain this paper. His ideals were quickly subsumed by the swirling chaos of the coming American Revolution.
The newspaper became a prime venue for the political rantings of patriots and loyalists alike. The Tea Tax, the troubles in Boston, all were hotly debated in his pages. Rivington was politically conservative, and he had no sympathy for those he called the Sons of Freedom, but as late as 1774 he still maintained a printer of a newspaper ought to be neutral where his own press is employed. However, by 1775, Rivington began to shift the tone of his paper toward an openly pro-British slant, making him the target of American patriot criticism.
Issac Sears, a prominent Patriot called Rivington a servile tool, ready to do the dirty work of any knave who purchases. Organized boycotts were launched against Rivington in an attempt to destroy him financially. Patriots in Freehold, New Jersey declared him a base and malignant enemy to the liberties of this country. With the American occupation of the City in 1775, Rivington fled to the safety of British ships in New York Harbor. He briefly went back to London, and returned to New York in 1777 after the British regained control.
While the British occupied the City during the Revolutionary War, this street was named by the occupation authorities as a reward for Rivington’s loyalist sympathies. Rivington was appointed King’s Printer for New York, and in October 1777, he began printing his paper again as the Royal Gazette with the help of English funds. The paper quickly changed its name once more to the New York Loyal Gazette; its purpose: to print explicit Brittish propaganda in order to undermine the American cause.
There is a bit of mystery about Rivington’s life in this period, for some scholars maintain that Rivington was also secretly helping the Americans. Aides to George Washington, when interviewed long after the war, held that Rivington (seeking money due to his lack of payment by the British) passed on descriptions of British fleet signals to American agents. The street retained its name following the end of the war in 1783 after Rivington publicly renounced his old beliefs and accepted the rule of the new American order. In 1797, Rivington was confined to a debtors prison because of the obligations he assumed on behalf of his sons’ ventures in East India trade. He was released in January 1801, and died in New York on July 4, 1802.
This parkland was acquired by the City in 1929 for the purpose of widening Chrystie and Forsythe Streets and building low-cost housing but was later set aside for playgrounds and resting places for mothers and children. The construction of Sara D. Roosevelt Park, including his playground in 1934 was the largest park project on the Lower East Side since the acquisition of Tompkins Square Park a century earlier.
#27 – A
Bowling Green
Bowling Green is New York City’s oldest park. According to tradition, this spot served as the council ground for Native American tribes and was the site of the legendary sale of Manhattan to Peter Minuit in 1626. The Dutch called the area “the Plain” and used it for several purposes. It was the beginning of Heere Staat (High Street, now Broadway)a trade route which extended north through Manhattan and the Bronx. It was also the site of a parade ground, meeting place, and cattle market. In 1686 the site became public property, when the City Charter put all “waste, vacant, unpatented and unappropriated lands” under municipal domain.
Bowling Green was first designated as a park in 1733, when it was offered for rent at the cost of one peppercorn per year. Lessees John Chambers, Peter Bayard, and Peter Jay were responsible for improving the site with grass, trees, and a wood fence “for the Beauty & Ornament of the Said Street as well as for the Recreation & delight of the Inhabitants of this City.” A gilded lead statue of King George III was erected here in 1770, and the iron fence (now a New York City landmark) was installed in 1771. On July 9, 1776, after the first public reading in New York State of the Declaration of Independence, this monument was toppled by angry citizens, dragged up Broadway, sent to Connecticut, melted down, and recast as ammunition. Portions of the statue are held by the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society (which also possesses musket balls made from the statue’s lead).
By the late 18th century, Bowling Green marked the center of New York’s most fashionable residential area, surrounded by rows of Federal-style townhouses. In 1819 the Common Council voted that neighbors could plant and tend the area in return for the exclusive use of the park by their families. By mid-century, shipping offices inhabited the old townhouses, and the park was returned to more public use. Monuments installed in the park in the 19th century include two fountains (now gone) and a statue of New York’s first mayor, Abraham De Peyster (1896, by George Bissell). De Peyster was moved to nearby Hanover Square in 1976.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Bowling Green was disrupted by the construction of the IRT subway. The park was rebuilt as part of citywide improvements made in preparation for visitors to the 1939 World’s Fair. Renovations to Bowling Green included removing the fountain basin, relocating the interior walkways, installing new benches, and providing new plantings. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, members of the Board of Estimate, and local businessmen participated in the re-dedication ceremony, held April 6, 1939. Despite unseasonably late snow, the ceremony included a demonstration of colonial-era lawn bowling.
A 1976-77 capital renovation restored Bowling Green to its 18th-century appearance. Improvements included the redistribution of subway entrances, the installation of new lampposts and benches, and landscaping. Publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte donated the park’s central fountain.
Since December 1989 the statue of Charging Bull (1987-89) has been on display at the north end of the park. Its sculptor, Arturo DiModica, says the three-and-a-half-ton bronze figure represents “the strength, power and hope of the American people for the future.” It has also been linked to the prosperity enjoyed by Wall Street in the past decade.
.517 Acre
WRONG ANSWERS
Columbus Park
Columbus Park was named in 1911 after Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), the Italian explorer credited with discovering America, or at least with awakening Europe to the opportunities there. Bounded by Baxter (formerly Orange), Worth (formerly Anthony), Bayard, and Mulberry Streets, the site has alternatively been named Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park, and Paradise Park. Columbus Park is situated in the heart of one of the oldest residential areas in Manhattan, adjacent to the infamous “Five Points” and “The Bend.
Until 1808 the site for the park was a swampy area near the Collect Pond (now Foley Square) and hosted a set of tanneries. In 1808 the pond was filled and became Pearl Street. When the filling began to sink, a foul odor emerged which depressed the living conditions of that neighborhood. As a consequence, the area became host to one of the world’s most notorious tenements, known for its wretched living conditions and rampant crime, earning such names as “murderer’s alley” and “den of thieves.”
In 1842, on a visit to the United States, English author Charles Dickens made sure to visit the notorious Five Points, and he wrote about it in his American Notes in the most scathing terms. He described it as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” concluding that “all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.” But it was in the 1890’s, when plans for the construction of a park were already underway, that the area’s notoriety achieved new heights. Danish newspaperman Jacob Riis devoted an entire chapter of his epic How the Other Half Lives to “The Bend,” detailing the “foul core of New York’s slums.” He likened the filth and dearth of sunlight to a “vast human pig-sty,” claiming that “There is but one ‘Bend’ in the world, and that is enough.”
Despite its dangerous and difficult conditions, Five Points mixed the residential, commercial, and industrial elements in an unprecedented fashion, bringing together a wide array of immigrants. In the 1840’s, Baxter Street became host to German Jews and New York’s first garment district. Meanwhile, the neighborhood quickly grew to become the largest Irish community outside of Dublin itself. In the 1880s, the Italians began to arrive, populating an adjacent neighborhood that remains to this day.
Immigrants used Five Points as a stepping stone to a better life in a new land and, nowadays, one can view the area not as a wretched slum but as a microcosm of the young city’s burgeoning and complex demographic. As Walt Whitman wrote in 1842, (the same year that Charles Dickens wrote his American Notes), the inner-city residents are “not paupers and criminals, but the Republic’s most needed asset, the wealth of stout poor men who will work.”
In the 20th century, the area around Five Points was subsumed by a sprawling Chinatown, with the latest generation of immigrants beginning to create a new life afresh in Manhattan’s historic downtown. The residents of the area around Five Points have always served as a paragon of hard work and the drive to succeed.
Mulberry Bend Park was planned in the 1880’s by Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Vaux saw this park as an opportunity to bring new life and order into the depressed neighborhood. Riis remarked of Vaux’s newly designed park that it is “little less than a revolution” to see the slum housing replaced by trees and grass and flowers, and its dark hovels infused with light and sunshine and air. The park opened in the summer of 1897, with bench-lined curved walkways and an expansive, open grassy area.
Columbus Park is one of the city’s first major urban parks, and was home to such events as “Interpark Playground Basket Ball,” then played by youth segregated by weight class, as described by the Park Commission in 1913. Throughout its life, the dynamic park has undergone many changes and much reconstruction. In 1934 a limestone recreation center was erected, which is now a comfort station. In the 1980s the construction of new playground equipment and the addition of basketball courts were completed. In 1999 two new pieces of play equipment were installed, as well as new paving and safety surfacing. A medley of planting has been done regularly throughout the life of the park. The area continues to be a gathering place for people of different cultures and ages, and hosts a wide variety of events and assemblies.
2.76 acres
Hanover Square
The land in and around this park has been used continuously since at least 1637 when it was part of a public street and fronted directly on the East River. By 1730 this area was known as Hanover Square in tribute to the House of Hanover which had acceded to the English throne in the person of George I in 1714. For much of the 18th century, Hanover Square was the center of New York’s printing trade and retail business. Local shops sold imported books, clothing, glassware, hardware, and furniture, as well as wine, tobacco, and tea. The Bank of New York moved its headquarters to the square in 1787.
In 1794 the Common Council changed the names of several city streets to reflect the young republic’s independence. Hanover Square and Hanover Street were to be incorporated into Pearl Street, but the changes were never enforced, and the names remained intact. An article in an 1815 issue of the Columbian reported that heavy demolition and construction in Hanover Square Apromise much amendment in the convenience and beauty of this city, not unworthy of a growing metropolis, rapidly resuming the first rank in commercial activity and importance in the United States. That year the site of this park was acquired by the City of New York for street purposes.
The Great Fire of 1835 destroyed almost all of the buildings in the area. In time, the area was rebuilt as a commercial and financial center, which it remains to this day. The landmarked India House building (originally the Hanover Bank) is the only surviving example of the many Italianate banks erected in the financial district in the 1850s. Other historic buildings around Hanover Square include 1 Williams Street and 1 Wall Street Court, both built in the first decade of the 20th century. Numbers 3, 5, 7, 10, and 11 Hanover Square are examples of more recent downtown development.
The small triangular parcel known as Hanover Square Park did not receive park jurisdiction until 1952, when it was developed as a sitting area. In the late 1970s the park was thoroughly reconstructed and replanted as part of an overall redevelopment of nearby private commercial properties. The improvements provided new benches, paving, curbs, and hedges and small trees in planters.
In addition to recognizing the completed renovations, the 1979 rededication of the park also celebrated the installation of the over life-size portrait statue of Abraham De Peyster. Born in New Amsterdam, De Peyster (1657-1728) was one of the city’s wealthiest merchants. He held almost all of the important offices in the city and colony, including alderman, mayor, member of the king’s council, and acting governor. His descendant John Watts De Peyster commissioned sculptor George Edwin Bissell to design the monument, which was dedicated in Bowling Green in 1896. The bronze statue was removed from its original location in 1972 and moved to a new pedestal in Hanover Square Park four years later. In 1999 the sculpture was restored by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program. From his lofty perch, the lustrous and illustrious Dutchman surveys the hustle of the Financial District.
The Abraham De Peyster sculpture has been removed from the park to accommodate the redesign of Hanover Square as the British Memorial Garden. It has been temporarily placed in storage until a new location has been determined for its re-installation.
Updated Apr. 09, 2007
.056 acre
Jackson Square Park
One of New York City’s oldest parks, Jackson Square Park has a long and somewhat obscure history. The triangular shape of the park is a result of the diagonal route of Greenwich Avenue, the oldest known road in Greenwich Village. Greenwich Avenue originated as an Indian trail and was called the Strand Road by Dutch colonists. Forming the other two sides of the triangle, Eighth Avenue and Horatio Street date to 1811, when the New York legislature approved the Manhattan street grid, known as the Commissioner’s Plan. This unnamed triangular parcel at Greenwich Avenue, Eighth Avenue, and Horatio Street appears on the Commissioner’s Plan.
It is not clear how, when, or why the site came to be called Jackson Square. Most likely it was named after Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), the seventh President of the United States. Born at Waxhaw Settlement, on the border of North and South Carolina, Jackson was elected to Congress in 1796 and served in the War of 1812. Old Hickory emerged as a national hero who was very popular with the leaders of Tammany Hall, New York’s most influential Democratic organization. With Tammany’s support, Jackson won the presidential elections of 1828 and 1832. On October 30, 1832, a hickory tree was planted in front of Tammany Hall, and its roots were nourished with the contents of a barrel of beer.
In 1858 the Mozart Hall Democratic faction split off from Tammany, when Mozart candidate Fernando Wood was elected Mayor of New York. Between 1859 and 1863, members of the Mozart Hall organization held their gatherings at Jackson Hall, a building that formerly stood at 2 Horatio Street on the corner of Greenwich Avenue. The building was one of dozens that fronted on the triangular parcel of open space now, and perhaps then, known as Jackson Square. The land had been acquired by the City of New York in 1826.
The earliest reference found to Jackson Square appears in the Second Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks in 1872. According to the report, Jackson Square was one of twenty-nine properties mapped and improved as parkland by the City. At Jackson Square, the following improvements were made by May 1872: 5,900 square feet walks graded/103 cubic yards masonry in foundations/460 lineal feet railing/462 lineal feet coping/6 lamp-posts furnished and set.
In 1887 Mayor Abram S. Hewitt promoted a citywide effort to improve public access to the parks and squares that were entirely enclosed by iron fencing. Parks superintendent Samuel Parsons Jr. and consulting architect Calvert Vaux collaborated on a new design for Jackson Square. In an 1892 article for Scribner’s Magazine, Parsons described the central area as a great bouquet of brilliant flowers and leaves. He noted proudly, The neighborhood of this park is respectable but populous, and it is wonderful on a warm evening to see the dense masses of people that crowd the park benches and smooth asphalt walks.
In 1913, Parks gardeners planted a new school garden plot at Jackson Square and left its upkeep to the little farmers in the neighborhood. The park underwent renovations in the 1930s, when seventeen pin oaks were planted on the perimeter, the shower basin was replaced by a new wading pool, and new benches were installed. The park remained substantially unchanged for over fifty years, until a capital reconstruction project was completed in 1990. It included planting new greenery and restoring the historic iron fencing and benches. The centerpiece, a new cast-iron fountain with planters and a granite base, evokes the 19th-century origins of Jackson Square Park.
#28 – C
Tony Dapolito Recreation Center
This building is named in honor of Anthony V. Dapolito (1920-2003), a long-time chair of Community Board 2, whose roots in the community and tireless work on its behalf earned him the honorary title, Mayor of Greenwich Village.
In 1920, shortly after he was born, Dapolito’s family opened the Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street. Over the years, he progressed from making bread deliveries to owning the family business and ultimately becoming a highly respected community leader. For many years, Dapolito served as president of the First Precinct Police Community Council. He was elected 12 times as chairperson of Community Board 2 and also served as chairperson of its Parks Committee. His efforts resulted in the rebuilding of several neighborhood parks, and he helped lead the successful battles to defeat Robert Moses’s ill-conceived plans for the extension of Fifth Avenue, which would have cut through Washington Square Park, and for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have leveled a wide swath of SoHo. He took a special interest in facilities and amenities for children, and was a consistent advocate for the youth of Greenwich Village. He died on July 2, 2003, one day before his 83rd birthday. In consideration of Mr. Dapolito’s great impact on this neighborhood, and especially its children and parks, the Department of Parks and Recreation named this recreation center for him in 2004.
The building originally took its name from nearby Carmine Street, which in turn is named for Nicholas Carman, a colonial-era vestryman from Trinity Church. Located at Clarkson Street and Seventh Avenue South, the facility was opened to the public on May 6, 1908 as one of several bathhouses in Manhattan commissioned by Mayor William L. Strong. In 1895, after decades of lobbying by social reformers, the State Legislature passed a law requiring free bathhouses in cities with populations over 50,000. By 1911 there were 12 such facilities serving the great unwashed in the city, as an antidote to the overcrowded and often unsanitary conditions of tenement life.
The architectural firm Renwick, Aspinwall and Tucker designed the facility, which cost approximately $132,954 to build. Originally, three City agencies operated in the building. The office of the Manhattan Borough President ran the showers and tubs on the first and second floors. The third floor gymnasium was supervised by the Recreation Commission (later the Department of Parks and Recreation), and the Board of Education was responsible for the roof area, which served as an open-air classroom for anemic and sickly children.
The center has undergone many changes since it was built. In 1911 Manhattan Borough President George McAneny announced that it would be furnished with a number of benches, weights, several goals for basketball and all the other appurtenances to be found in up-to-date gymnasia. The extension of Seventh Avenue South in 1912 delayed plans for an outdoor pool, and in 1920 a new indoor pool was completed, altering the building’s eastern facade. The Department of Parks assumed full jurisdiction over New York City’s bathhouses in 1938. The outdoor pool, designed by Aymar Embury II and built with Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) labor, was opened in 1939. Artist Keith Haring created the fanciful mural alongside the pool three years before his death in 1990.
The Tony Dapolito Recreation Center serves as a year-round hub for many in and around the neighborhood. In addition to providing fitness facilities, it hosts youth and adult athletic leagues, after-school programs, a summer day camp, fitness classes and many other activities. This center will continue to serve the people of Greenwich Village and New York City for many years to come, as did the extraordinary man it honors, and it will symbolize to future generations how one man’s work can have a lasting and positive effect on his community.
WRONG ANSWERS
Dr. Thomas Kiel Arboretum
This arboretum (a Latin word meaning “a place grown with trees”) was named in memory of one of Morningside Park’s most dedicated volunteers, Dr. Thomas Kiel (1960-1996). Born in Meriden, Connecticut, Kiel attended Columbia College in Morningside Heights. As a college senior, he founded the Friends of Morningside Park in the fall of 1981. Even after Kiel graduated with a B.A. in 1982 and moved out of the neighborhood, he faithfully returned to Morningside Park to volunteer alongside other community members. While he was chairman, the Friends group launched a fundraising program, organized special events, replanted lawn areas, made horticultural and structural improvements, and cleaned and cleared the park to increase visibility.
Kiel received his M.D. degree from the New York University School of Medicine in 1986 and joined the staff of the Staten Island and University Hospital in 1988. He shared a private practice with Dr. George Ferzli, and together they published several articles about medical surgery and the digestive system. Dr. Kiel was an associate fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a diplomate of the American Board of General Surgery, and a first-place winner in the annual paper competition of the Society of Medicine of Richmond. Tom Kiel died tragically, at the age of 36, in a trailbike accident during a ten-day tour from Brisbane to Ayers Rock, Australia.
The Kiel Arboretum was inspired by a description of the arboretum proposed for the northeast corner of Central Park in 1858. The latter arboretum was one of the original features of the “Greensward” plan created by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. In 1858 Olmsted wrote, “This arboretum is not intended to be formally arranged, but to be so planned that it may present all the most beautiful features of lawn and wood-land landscape, and at the same time preserve the natural order of families, so far as may be practicable.” Winding paths were to direct visitors amongst 112 different species of trees, from Magnolia virginiana (sweet bay magnolia) to Juniperus virginiana (red cedar), and 169 species of shrubs, from Atragene Americana (glory bower) to Taxus Canadensis (ground hemlock).
Ultimately, the Central Park arboretum was not planted. The 1868 revised plan of the park labeled this area “Unfinished Ground”; it was later landscaped and designated as the East Meadow. Olmsted and Vaux were commended for their work in Central Park and won commissions to design public parks and private estates throughout the United States. Although their initial plan for Morningside Park was rejected in 1873, Olmsted and Vaux’s revised plan was accepted in 1887. Construction of Morningside Park was completed in 1895.
In 1998 Olmsted and Vaux’s arboretum took root in Morningside Park. Land was set aside from the foot of the entrance stairway at 116th Street north to 121st Street for a new planting program modeled on the original arboretum plan. The Kiel Arboretum was initiated with a first planting of trees from the Magnoliaceae (magnolia) family and shrubs from the Ranunculaceae (buttercup) and Berberidaceae (barberry) families. Plantings of additional tree and shrub families have created an informative arboretum and provided a fitting memorial to Dr. Thomas Kiel, a young man dedicated to the beauty of Morningside Park.
Loeb Boat House
Boating has a long and rich history in Central Park. The first recorded boating concession was established in the early 1860s for a yearly sum of $1,000, and boating on the lake rapidly became a popular summer activity. By 1869 the number of patrons had risen to over 125,000 each year. A series of landings and, eventually, houses culminating in the Loeb Boat House, were built to accommodate the growing demand for the popular new pastime.
Initially, boats were moored and boarded at various landings; there were six such docks in 1865. The boats were stored in a small wood plank dock just west of Bethesda Terrace, but increased demand made the construction of a regular boat house necessary, and the idea was first aired in 1870. When the park’s landscape architects, Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) agreed that construction was needed, Vaux embarked on the $2,360 project himself.
Vaux’s boat house was a Gothic-detailed timber complex on the south shore of Bethesda Terrace, with the front facade facing the lake and terraces on the second floor. Opened in 1873, it served the public for over eighty years and offered a splendid view of the Ramble, a sprawling, hilly space dotted with trees, an aviary, and a gazebo.
By the early 1950s, with boating as popular as ever and Vaux’s original structure in a state of disrepair, a generous donation of $305,000 by investment banker and philanthropist Carl M. Loeb enabled the building of a new boat house, with the contribution of a further $110,000 from Parks. Vaux’s building was demolished and a new one constructed on the east-end of the lake. The Loeb Boat House was designed by Chief Park Designer Stuart Constable and officially opened in March 1954 at a ceremony presided by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981).
The boat house, named in honor of the Loeb family, is a tri-partite neo-classical brick structure with a copper-hipped and gabled roof. The landside of the building includes a parking area and approaches from the east side. Loeb Boat House contains a food concession, dining terraces, restrooms, and all the necessary facilities for boat landing, boarding, and storage. It has become a popular cafi and event venue, and it also serves as the unofficial headquarters of birdwatchers, who record their sightings of birds in Central Park in a notebook kept on a table inside.
William Earl Dodge
This bronze sculpture depicts William Earl Dodge (1805 & 1883), one of the founders of Phelps, Dodge, a leading mining company. Dodge helped organize the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in the United States and served as the president of the National Temperance Society from 1865 to 1883. John Quincy Adams Ward (1830 & 1910) sculpted the piece, which was donated by a committee of Dodge’s friends and acquaintances and dedicated October 22, 1885.
Dodge is represented leaning on a podium while delivering a speech. The piece originally stood in Herald Square on a pedestal designed by Richard Morris Hunt (who designed the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty) until it was moved in 1941 to the northeast corner of Bryant Park, after the Bennett Memorial was installed at the square. The original Hunt-designed pedestal, discarded and replaced by the current granite base after the monument was moved from Herald Square, included a drinking fountain that commemorated Dodge’s commitment to temperance. The statue was renovated as part of an overall restoration of the park by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, completed in 1992.
Sculptor Ward has been referred to as the Dean of American Sculptors. He contributed nine sculptures to the parks of New York, among them Roscoe Conkling (1893) in Madison Square Park, Alexander Holley (1888) in Washington Square Park, Henry Ward Beecher (1891) in Columbus Park, Brooklyn, Horace Greeley (1890) in City Hall Park, and The Pilgrim (1885), The Indian Hunter (1869), William Shakespeare (1872), and the Seventh Regiment Memorial (1874) in Central Park.
#29 – C
Clement Clarke Moore Park
Scholar and poet Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) is the namesake of two New York City parks, each located on land previously owned by his family. The first is a playground in Newtown, Queens, known as the Clement Clarke Moore Homestead, because it was the site of the estate acquired by Clement’s great-great-grandfather, Captain Samuel Moore, in 1652. The second is this playground, located on a former farm purchased by Clement’s grandfather, Captain Thomas Clarke, in 1750. A retired officer of the British Army, Captain Clarke named his property “Chelsea” in reference to London’s Royal Chelsea Hospital for old soldiers. His daughter and son-in-law extended the acreage to what is now 19th Street, Eighth Avenue, 24th Street, and the Hudson River.
Born in New York City, Clement Clarke Moore spent most of his life on the Chelsea estate. He was tutored at home by his father and graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1798, an M.A. in 1801, and an honorary LL.D. in 1829. Moore donated the land for the nearby General Theological Seminary and served as a professor of Oriental and Greek literature there from 1823 until he retired in 1850. Fluent in six languages, he published numerous scholarly works, including a Hebrew lexicon, a biography, and several treatises and addresses.
Moore is best known as the author of the delightful children’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” He composed the poem for his wife Catherine Elizabeth Taylor Moore and their children in 1822. A family friend had the poem published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel the following year. With subsequent publication in newspapers, magazines, and illustrated editions, the poem became a classic popularly known as “The Night before Christmas.” Moore died in Newport, Rhode Island in 1863.
Ninety-nine years later (in 1962), the West 400 Block Association 23-22-21 initiated the process to improve the neglected property at the corner of Tenth Avenue and W. 22nd Street. The City of New York acquired the site in 1965 for use as a public park. With the cooperation of the Planning Commission, Parks, the Twenty-second Twenty-first Street Community Council, and local residents, plans were prepared by the architectural firm of Levine, Blumberg and Coffey. The playground opened on November 22, 1968, and it was named in memory of Clement Clarke Moore by local law in 1969.
Capital renovations to Clement Clarke Moore Park were completed in 1995. Improvements included a new perimeter fence, modular play equipment, safety surfacing, pavements, and transplanted trees. This lovely corner park is a favorite place for the people of Chelsea to celebrate one of the neighborhood’s most famous sons. Community members plant and maintain the flower beds, and the West 400 Block Association holds a variety of special events at the park. Every Christmastime, neighborhood residents gather to read the poem that begins with the familiar words:
Twas the night before Christmas,
when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse.
WRONG ANSWERS
Abingdon Square Park
Abingdon Square Park shares its lineage with some of Greenwich Village’s earliest European landowners and social figures. Sir Peter Warren entered the British Navy as a volunteer in 1717 and rose to the rank of vice-admiral after an impressive tour of duty in such locales as the African coast, the Baltic Sea, the West Indies, and North America, where he fought in the French and Indian War. By 1744 he had purchased a three hundred acre farm in the area known as Greenwich extending along the Hudson River from what is now Christopher Street north to about West 21st Street and bounded on the east by Minetta Brook and Bowery Lane (now Broadway). Sir Peter and his wife Susannah De Lancey lived in a manor house with a large formal garden in the area now bounded by West 4th, Bleecker, Charles, and Perry Streets.
Their eldest daughter Charlotte married Willoughby Bertie, the Fourth Earl of Abingdon, and a share of the Warren estate was part of her dowry. Her portion included the land that came to be known as Abingdon Square. In 1794 the City Council changed the designation of streets and places with British names in order to reflect American independence. Nonetheless, the name of Abingdon Square was preserved, because the Earl and his wife had sympathized with the American patriots, and he had argued in Parliament against British policy in the colonies. The Goodrich Plan of Manhattan drawn in 1827 depicts Abingdon Square as a trapezoidal parcel between Eighth Avenue and Bank, Hudson, and Troy (later West 12th) Streets.
On March 4, 1831 the Common Council resolved that the ground called Abingdon Square should be “enclosed as a public park” and appropriated $3000 “for the expense thereof.” The City acquired the parcel on April 22 and enclosed it with a cast iron fence in 1836. About fifty years later, Mayor Abram S. Hewitt promoted a citywide effort to improve public access to green spaces. Parks superintendent Samuel Parsons Jr. and consulting architect Calvert Vaux collaborated on a new design for Abingdon Square. The iron gateposts at the West 12th Street entrance may have been introduced at this time. “Abingdon Square has been so long crowded with fine trees that a winding walk ending in a little plaza, and bordered by a few shrubs and little bedding was all that could be satisfactorily done,” wrote Parsons in 1892, “Shrubs and flowers would not thrive in such deep shade.”
Nonetheless, school children planted a garden plot at Abingdon Square Park in 1913 and “took entire charge of the garden, raising the flower from seed.” In 1921, twenty thousand spectators gathered in and around the small park to hear former and future Governor Alfred E. Smith present the Abingdon Square Memorial (also known as the Abingdon Doughboy) in memory of local men who fought in World War I. Created by sculptor Philip Martiny, this monument was restored by Parks monument crew in 1993. The flagstaff was dedicated by the Private Michael J. Lynch Post No. 831 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1933.
.222 acres
Carl Schurz Park
Carl Schurz Park, named by the Board of Aldermen in 1910 for the soldier, statesman, and journalist Carl Schurz (1829-1906), overlooks the turbulent waters of Hell Gate. The first known Dutch owner of the land was Sybout Claessen who was granted the property in 1646 by the Dutch West India Company. Jacob Walton, a subsequent owner, built the first house on the site in 1770. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army built a fort surrounding the Walton residence to guard the strategic shipping passage of Hell Gate. After a British attack on September 8, 1776, the house was destroyed and the Americans were forced to retreat from the fort, which the British retained until the end of the war in 1783.
The land was purchased from Walton’s heirs in 1798 by Archibald Gracie, a Scottish shipping magnate. He built a mansion there in 1799, where his illustrious guests included future United States president John Quincy Adams and future French king Louis Phillippe. The estate, sold by Gracie in 1819, was acquired by the City from the Wheaton family in 1891. The first home of the Museum of the City of New York, from 1924-32, the mansion has served as the official residence of New York’s mayors since Fiorello LaGuardia moved there in 1942.
The southern portion of the park was set aside by the City as East River Park in 1876. The former Gracie estate was added in 1891 and a new landscape design by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons was completed in 1902. Maud Sargent relandscaped the park in 1939 when the East River Drive underpass was under construction. Charles Haffen’s sculpture of Peter Pan, created in 1928 for a fountain in the lobby of the old Paramount Theater, was installed in the park in 1975.
The park name honors Schurz, a native of Cologne, Germany. It was strongly supported by the large German community of adjacent Yorkville. After emigrating to the United States in 1852, Schurz quickly made his reputation as a skilled orator and proved to be instrumental to Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election campaign. His most significant political offices were that of United States Senator from Missouri (1869-1875), and Secretary of the Interior (1877-81) during the Hayes administration. In his later years, Schurz was editor of the New York Tribune and an editorial writer for Harper’s Weekly. Schurz is also honored by Karl Bitter’s statue of 1913, located at Morningside Drive and 116th Street.
Recent improvements include rebuilding of the stairs, the complete restoration of the playground and the opening of Carl’s Dog Run. These and other projects, including the planting of flowers, have been accomplished through a partnership between Parks and the Carl Schurz Park Association, which has demonstrated the community’s commitment to restoring, maintaining, and preserving this park since it formed in 1974.
14.9 acres
Samuel N. Bennerson Park
Samuel N. Bennerson (1923-1970) was a second generation resident of the Phipps Houses, an experiment in low-rent housing erected in the Lincoln Square neighborhood between 1907 and 1911. The son of parents from the Virgin Islands, Bennerson was educated in the New York City public school system and took special training courses in still photography. He spent four years in the Air Force, where he served in Japan. In 1946 Bennerson married Edna Deas of Charleston, South Carolina. Their four children were born in the Phipps Houses, becoming third generation Lincoln Square residents.
Bennerson was a dedicated participant in the political affairs of the Amsterdam-Phipps community, focusing his energies primarily on programs supporting children. An active member of the Lincoln Square Community Council, he served as an athletic coach, mentor, and neighborhood referee for Lincoln Square residents. Bennerson also founded and chaired the Betterment League, an organization that worked for a redesigned Amsterdam Playground which would more adequately service the recreational needs of the neighborhood.
The site for a new playground’s on the block bounded by West 63rd and West 64th Streets and Amsterdam and West End Avenues’s was acquired by the City of New York from the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York in 1941 as part of a package of land designated for the Amsterdam Houses. In 1945 Parks surrendered that site to the Board of Estimate and was assigned a new parcel immediately to the west. The new property, known as Amsterdam Playground for the nearby Amsterdam Houses, was designed by the landscape architecture firm of Cynthia Wiley and Alice Recknagel. The park featured swings, slides, a pipe frame exercise unit, a sand pit, seesaws, and perimeter trees.
The playground was reconstructed in 1982, in part due to the efforts of Bennerson’s Betterment League and the Community Council. The formerly rectilinear layout was shifted 45 degrees so as to suggest an alternative to the surrounding Manhattan grid. The new design featured play equipment and two basketball courts, now recreational centerpieces of the neighborhood.
In 1990 Council Member Ronnie Eldridge introduced the local law which changed the name of the playground from Amsterdam Playground to Samuel N. Bennerson Park. The name change was enacted upon the request of members of the Lincoln Square community. The City Parks Foundation donated new play equipment which was installed in 1998, along with new safety surfacing provided by a requirements contract.
Today Bennerson Park is home to the Morris Collins Duncan, Jr. Memorial Classic, an annual summer basketball tournament sponsored by the Amsterdam Sports Foundation. The playground is also the site of the annual Charles Davis basketball tournament for young residents of the Amsterdam Houses. Each summer, the neighborhood’s two tenant associations co-sponsor a street fair at the playground. Former residents of the neighborhood are invited to return for the street fair to visit friends and play Old Timers and Reunion Basketball.
#30 – D
Marcus Garvey Park
Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) was an advocate for economic independence within the black community and also became a proponent of black nationalism. He was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica on August 17, 1887 and immigrated to Harlem in 1916, where in 1918 Garvey established the headquarters of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At the UNIA’s first convention, held at Madison Square Garden in 1920, Garvey declared his plans to build an independent nation for black Americans in West Africa. The group promoted black economic self-sufficiency, publishing the Negro World newspaper and establishing black-owned businesses. Garvey founded his own shipping line, the Black Star Shipping Line, to finance these projects. Garvey’s plans foundered after his conviction for mail fraud in 1923 following the failure of his shipping line and increasing government scrutiny. After Garvey served two years in prison, President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence, and in 1927 he was deported to Jamaica.
The social and political history of this site reaches back into the early colonial period. Dutch settlers referred to the park as Slangberg, or Snake Hill, because of its reptile population. British fortifications on the site guarded the Harlem River during the Revolutionary War. The Common Council considered razing the hilly area in 1835 to accommodate new streets but local citizens successfully petitioned to preserve it as a public park. It opened as Mount Morris Park in 1840.
Although the park’s natural features have been preserved, a number of architectural elements have been added over time. A fire watchtower was designed by Julius Kroehl and erected in 1856 at a time when fire was capable of destroying a city largely constructed of wood. The 47-foot cast-iron tower is unique in the United States, and was designated a landmark in 1967. A reconstruction of Mount Morris Park in the 1930’s added a community center and a child health station. Current facilities include the Pelham Fritz Recreation Center, named for a re-knowned Parks employee, an amphitheater and a swimming pool. Capital projects completed in 2002, 2004 and 2005 have improved the pool entrance, added new safety surfaces and landscaped the park. The Marcus Garvey Park Alliance community gr31oup organizes a variety of cultural events in addition to supporting capital projects. Mount Morris Park was renamed for Marcus Garvey in 1973.
WRONG ANSWERS
Blake Hobbs Park
This park is named to honor Blake Hobbs (1911 & 1973), better known to local residents as The Music Man of East Harlem. A beloved musician, teacher, and volunteer, Hobbs dedicated his life to fostering the artistic growth of this neighborhood. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Hobbs graduated from John Hopkins University in 1933 with a degree in math. Back in Pennsylvania, Hobbs started a small answering service company, but after a divorce gave up the business and moved to East Harlem in 1958.
Soon after his arrival in northern Manhattan, Hobbs began working with the Union Settlement Association, a neighborhood housing, health, and advocacy organization, and ran the association’s music school. Despite a dearth of funds, Hobbs found ways to bring music to neighborhood residents. He worked from early morning, when he ran an early bird trumpet class, to mid-day, when he offered piano classes for mothers, to the afternoon, when he taught children’s classes, through the evening, when he conducted a young people’s orchestra. Under Hobbs’ leadership, the Union Settlement Association’s music school flourished. It eventually became a multifaceted cultural center that offered exhibition and storage space for artists and a forum for neighborhood discussions, as well as music instruction.
Hobbs’ work was not restricted to the settlement house, however. He found ways to bring music into Harlem’s under-funded public schools, often arriving to classrooms with a handful of plastic recorders. He took neighborhood residents on free bus trips to concerts, gave free music lessons to area children, and organized and promoted exhibitions for local artists. Deeply involved in community affairs, Hobbs was also the chairman of the loan committee of the Union Settlement Association’s credit union and ran discussion groups on housing, health, and other issues of neighborhood importance. He was a really warmhearted person, remembered Maria Rodriguez, who studied piano with Hobbs, He loved people, he believed in music, and in developing music in people, and in encouraging people with any form of art.
In 1970, Hobbs suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He continued his work for the neighborhood, giving music lessons and serving the community until his death on May 5, 1973.
This property, running from East 102nd to East 104th Streets on Second Avenue, was condemned in 1951 and leased at no charge to the city in 1958 as part of an agreement with the New York City Housing Authority to provide park space for the George Washington Houses. The housing project, part of a wave of public housing projects constructed in the 1950s and 1960s to serve East Harlem’s burgeoning population, was designed primarily to provide affordable housing for senior citizens. In 1976, a few years after Hobbs’ death, a local law named this park in his honor.
In October 1994, the playground was reconstructed under the Neighborhood Park Improvement Program. The reconstruction included new playground equipment with slides, ladders, and a flexible bridge, new handball and volleyball courts, and a renovated basketball court. The parkland is available for all to enjoy, and is a fitting tribute to The Music Man of East Harlem.
Johnny Hartman Plaza
Johnny Hartman (1923-1983) was a distinguished vocalist who is best remembered for his recordings of romantic ballads. Born and raised in Chicago, John Maurice Hartman began studying voice and piano at the age of eight, sang in his church choir and for his high school glee club, and won a scholarship to study voice at the Chicago Musical College. After serving in the army in World War II, Hartman returned home where he won an amateur singing contest which led him into a professional singing career, working with pianist and bandleader Earl Fatha Hines. In 1949, when Hines’ band folded, Hartman was recruited to sing with jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie; their collaboration was memorable because of the contrast between Gillespie’s hot trumpet playing and Hartman’s smooth cool baritone voice. Hartman sang briefly with the pianist Errol Garner and his trio.
Hartman’s attachment to the love ballad set him apart from other musical traditions of the time like bebop, and he tried to develop a solo career with some difficulty. As a serious vocalist who was trained in both classical and contemporary genres, he still could not overcome the prejudices of the 1950’s when clubs had fixed ideas about who could sing what; Hartman would lament the times he was prevented from entry unless he sang the gutbucket blues.
His career jumped in 1963 when he recorded with avant-garde saxophonist John Coltrane. The unlikely collaboration between Hartman’s more traditional vocal serenade and Coltrane’s far-reaching melodies was a huge success. Between 1947 and 1961 Hartman recorded eight albums, but his 1963 recording John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman was considered one of his greatest. The recording established Hartman as a jazz singer, despite his classical training and broad repertoire.
Hartman continued to record to the end of his life. In 1981, he was nominated for a Grammy for his album Once in Every Life. His last album, This One’s for Tedi, was dedicated to his wife Theodora, who lived on after Hartman in this West Harlem neighborhood until her passing.
This parcel of land was acquired by condemnation by the City of New York in 1876 and includes a portion of the adjacent Hamilton Place. In 1912, the parcel was transferred to the Parks Department. The parkland was originally called Hamilton Square, to honor Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), once a resident of the neighborhood that has become known as Harlem Heights. Hamilton was a founding father and one of America’s most influential statesmen for his articulation of Federalist principles. The square was renamed Johnny Hartman Plaza in 1984.
The gnarled Black Locust (Robinia pseudocacia) trees that adorn Johnny Hartman Plaza were planted in the early years of Robert Moses tenure as parks commissioner, in the mid 1930s. The native species ranges from Pennsylvania, southward into Georgia and westward into southern Illinois. The Black Locust is widely admired for its fragrant and beautiful flowers and is one of the most commonly planted ornamental trees in Europe and America. In addition, it is valued for its hard durable timber, once used by Native American tribes in the construction of bows and later the preferred material for the manufacture of treenails or pins used to fasten planks to the ribs of ships.
Parks, community resident groups, the Hamilton Heights West Harlem Community Preservation Organization, and the West Harlem Art Fund have all continuously worked to maintain and beautify Johnny Hartman Plaza.
There’s nothing you can do with a good song but sing it.
Johnny Hartman
.001 acre
Macarthur Park
In a career that spanned four wars and five decades, General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) established himself as an important, if controversial, figure in American history. MacArthur was born on January 26, 1880, in Little Rock Barracks, Arkansas, to General Arthur MacArthur, Jr. (1845-1912), a Civil War hero, and Mary Hardy MacArthur (1852-1935). In 1903, MacArthur graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
His first tour of duty as a Second Lieutenant was in the Philippine Islands, which MacArthur would come to love. After serving with General John Black Jack Pershing (1860-1948) in Mexico in 1916-1917, and with the famous Rainbow Division in France during the World War I (1914-1918), MacArthur returned to the Philippines twice in the 1920s. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) appointed MacArthur Chief of Staff of the Army. Following his retirement in 1935, MacArthur became a field marshal in the Philippine Army, serving until 1941.
Following America’s entry into the World War II (1939-1945) in 1941, the United States Army called MacArthur back into service. In April 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) named MacArthur the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific. MacArthur developed an innovative island-hopping strategy, which aimed to maximize Allied victories while minimizing the loss of life. On September 2, 1945, MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. He became the military governor of occupied Japan (1945-1950), facilitating that nation’s transition from imperial monarchy to democracy.
The Korean War (1950-1953) gave MacArthur his greatest triumph and his greatest humiliation. The war began on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, the dividing line between North and South Korea, and invaded South Korea. Within a month, the North Koreans had pushed the South Korean Army and supporting American forces to the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula. Appointed Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations forces at the outbreak of the war, MacArthur engineered the brilliant Inchon Landing, of September 1950. This risky amphibious attack called for traveling though a narrow channel to land on a beach whose tides would only allow ships six hours of the day. The mission’s success, which dramatically reversed the tide of the war, surprised Americans almost as much as it did the enemy.
Although MacArthur was publicly lauded for the bravery and ingenuity he demonstrated throughout his career, his aggressive approach in Korea ultimately led to conflicts with policy makers. MacArthur’s advocacy of an invasion of China as well as the use of atomic weapons against Chinese cities, despite the administration’s opposition to such an action, led to his dismissal by President Harry S. Truman (1888-1972) in 1951. That year, following his return to the United States, MacArthur again retired from the military and settled in New York City, residing at the Waldorf Towers.
In 1952, MacArthur ran for the Republican Presidential nomination, losing to fellow retired general Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969). Thereafter, he served as Chairman of the Board of Sperry Rand Corporation, and as an unofficial advisor to Presidents Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy (1917-1963). After his death in 1964, the General lay in state at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue at 66th Street and was buried at Norfolk, Virginia.
MacArthur Park is in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan. Originally, this area was surrounded by a small wetland cove, whose abundance of turtles gave the community its name. MacArthur Park is located on the F.D.R. Drive between 48th and 49th Streets. Alcoa Plaza Associates constructed the park as part of the United Nations Plaza (1947-53). Following its completion, Alcoa ceded the park to the Board of Estimate. The park opened under Parks jurisdiction on February 28, 1966.
In 1998, MacArthur Park received a $49,000 renovation. Sponsored by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the improvements provided for the installation of safety surfacing, modular playground equipment, and fencing. The park now boasts a flagpole with yardarm, and a variety of amenities, including a comfort station, benches, slides, swings, a spray shower, and numerous chess tables. The animal art portrays, naturally, a large turtle. Numerous trees provide shade for visitors, who enjoy unobstructed views of Queens and the East River.
#31 – A
Columbus Park
Columbus Park was named in 1911 after Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), the Italian explorer credited with discovering America, or at least with awakening Europe to the opportunities there. Bounded by Baxter (formerly Orange), Worth (formerly Anthony), Bayard, and Mulberry Streets, the site has alternatively been named Mulberry Bend Park, Five Points Park, and Paradise Park. Columbus Park is situated in the heart of one of the oldest residential areas in Manhattan, adjacent to the infamous “Five Points” and “The Bend.
Until 1808 the site for the park was a swampy area near the Collect Pond (now Foley Square) and hosted a set of tanneries. In 1808 the pond was filled and became Pearl Street. When the filling began to sink, a foul odor emerged which depressed the living conditions of that neighborhood. As a consequence, the area became host to one of the world’s most notorious tenements, known for its wretched living conditions and rampant crime, earning such names as “murderer’s alley” and “den of thieves.”
In 1842, on a visit to the United States, English author Charles Dickens made sure to visit the notorious Five Points, and he wrote about it in his American Notes in the most scathing terms. He described it as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” concluding that “all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.” But it was in the 1890’s, when plans for the construction of a park were already underway, that the area’s notoriety achieved new heights. Danish newspaperman Jacob Riis devoted an entire chapter of his epic How the Other Half Lives to “The Bend,” detailing the “foul core of New York’s slums.” He likened the filth and dearth of sunlight to a “vast human pig-sty,” claiming that “There is but one ‘Bend’ in the world, and that is enough.”
Despite its dangerous and difficult conditions, Five Points mixed the residential, commercial, and industrial elements in an unprecedented fashion, bringing together a wide array of immigrants. In the 1840’s, Baxter Street became host to German Jews and New York’s first garment district. Meanwhile, the neighborhood quickly grew to become the largest Irish community outside of Dublin itself. In the 1880s, the Italians began to arrive, populating an adjacent neighborhood that remains to this day.
Immigrants used Five Points as a stepping stone to a better life in a new land and, nowadays, one can view the area not as a wretched slum but as a microcosm of the young city’s burgeoning and complex demographic. As Walt Whitman wrote in 1842, (the same year that Charles Dickens wrote his American Notes), the inner-city residents are “not paupers and criminals, but the Republic’s most needed asset, the wealth of stout poor men who will work.”
In the 20th century, the area around Five Points was subsumed by a sprawling Chinatown, with the latest generation of immigrants beginning to create a new life afresh in Manhattan’s historic downtown. The residents of the area around Five Points have always served as a paragon of hard work and the drive to succeed.
Mulberry Bend Park was planned in the 1880’s by Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Vaux saw this park as an opportunity to bring new life and order into the depressed neighborhood. Riis remarked of Vaux’s newly designed park that it is “little less than a revolution” to see the slum housing replaced by trees and grass and flowers, and its dark hovels infused with light and sunshine and air. The park opened in the summer of 1897, with bench-lined curved walkways and an expansive, open grassy area.
Columbus Park is one of the city’s first major urban parks, and was home to such events as “Interpark Playground Basket Ball,” then played by youth segregated by weight class, as described by the Park Commission in 1913. Throughout its life, the dynamic park has undergone many changes and much reconstruction. In 1934 a limestone recreation center was erected, which is now a comfort station. In the 1980s the construction of new playground equipment and the addition of basketball courts were completed. In 1999 two new pieces of play equipment were installed, as well as new paving and safety surfacing. A medley of planting has been done regularly throughout the life of the park. The area continues to be a gathering place for people of different cultures and ages, and hosts a wide variety of events and assemblies.
2.76 acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Collect Pond Park
Located on Leonard Street between Centre and Lafayette Streets, this park occupies the eighteenth century site of Collect Pond. The pond was a large, sixty-foot deep pool fed by an underground spring. The waters derived their name from seventeenth century Dutch settlers, who called it kolch meaning small body of water. Following the English capture of New Amsterdam (1664), the name was corrupted to collect. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Collect Pond was a favorite spot for picnics and ice-skating. In 1796, John Fitch (1743-1798) launched one of the first experimental steamboats on the waters. During this time, the pond was still clean enough to use for the area’s drinking water. By the early nineteenth century, however, New York City had transformed the sparkling waters into a communal open sewer. Disgusted, local authorities initiated a project to fill the sewer with earth from an adjacent hill. In 1805, in order to drain the garbage-infested waters, designers opened a forty-foot wide canal that today is known as Canal Street.
By 1811, the City had completed the filling of Collect Pond. A neighborhood known as Paradise Square soon arose over the pond’s previous site. Unfortunately, due to the area’s extremely high water table, Paradise Square began to sink in the 1820’s. The neighborhood also began to emit a foul odor, prompting the most affluent residents to leave the community. By the 1830s, Paradise Square had become the notorious Five Points, an extremely poor and dangerous neighborhood renowned for its crime and filth.
Five streets comprised the Five Points, giving the neighborhood its name: Mulberry Street, Anthony (present-day Worth) Street, Cross (present-day Musco) Street, Orange (present-day Baxter) Street, and Little Water Street (no longer exists). Numerous criminal gangs roamed the neighborhood, extorting money from residents and running prostitution rings. Many early twentieth century criminals, such as Lucky Luciano (1897-1962) and Al Capone (1899-1947), had their start in Five Points street gangs. Crime was only one half of the story in the Five Points: the high population density of the neighborhood and the existence of a subterranean swamp precipitated the outbreak of disease. Throughout the nineteenth century, nearly all of the city’s cholera outbreaks originated in this neighborhood.
The squalid conditions of the Five Points soon began to end after the 1890 publication of How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Riis’ work was a revealing account of slum life on the Lower East Side that disturbed late-nineteenth century reformers. Within four years of the book’s appearance, the City of New York had condemned nearly all the tenements that comprised the area, ridding the community of crime and filth. This revived area is now known as Civic Center, due to the presence of many governmental offices.
On April 28, 1960, the Board of Estimate placed the property under Parks jurisdiction. The property was formerly known as Civil Court Park due to the plethora of judiciary institutions throughout the neighborhood; the Criminal Court, Civil Court, and Family Court are all visible from this parkland. The park boasts a large, green open area circumscribed by benches and trees. Commissioner Stern changed the property’s name from Civil Court Park to Collect Pond Park, thereby providing the area with a well-deserved sense of character and history.
Corlears Hook Park
This park takes its name from the geographic region of southeastern Manhattan that once had the shape of a hook. The Corlear family, 17th century Dutch landowners, controlled much of the property in this curving landmass.
Today this parkland, located at the intersection of Jackson and Cherry Streets along the East River Drive, affords stunning views of the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Originally a heavy marshland used by Lenape Native Americans to land their canoes, Dutch settlers of the mid-1600s swiftly took advantage of this area’s graded coastal incline for the loading and unloading of incoming transport vessels.
During the American Revolutionary War Battle of Brooklyn, the British landing and advance upon General George Washington’s (1732-1799) fleeing Colonial Army was impeded by a series of hastily erected earthen barricades on the site. In 1814 the Corlear neighborhood, as it was briefly called before gradually melding into the Lower East Side, underwent renovations as part of a relief project for thousands of Irish immigrants. By leveling the site’s hills for use in landfill along the waterfront, workers made possible the busy docks that soon encouraged industrial and residential growth in the area.
In the 1880s, with the rising tide of immigration, rapid local industrialization, and overburdened tenements, the need for a nearby park space increased. Though the City purchased the land for Corlears Hook Park in 1893, the park was not completed until 1905. Through the late 1930s, the park’s broad, tree-lined promenade held a comfort station, playground, and baseball diamond, but when the City began developing the East River’s shoreline in tandem with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1882-1945) Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.), Corlears Hook Park was reduced in size. Directly reacting to the construction of the F.D.R. Drive in the late 1930s, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) began to draw up and execute plans to take advantage of the new landfill over which the traffic thoroughfare wound.
Over the next few years, Moses’s addition of several properties along the eastern coastline of Manhattan, including East River Park, began to revitalize the Lower East Side. Though Corlears Hook Park initially lost a large portion of land, the addition of an adjoining 57 acre-long East River Park in the 1940s granted the East Side neighborhoods an even larger area in which to walk and play. Connected by several footbridges and winding paths, the adjoining parks now offer softball fields, areas for roller skating and public performances as well as riverfront walkways to the Lower East Side and the East Village.
In 1994 Parks Enforcement Patrol (P.E.P), a division of Parks responsible for ensuring the safe use of parkland, moved its Manhattan base of operations from Battery Park to Corlears Hook Park. From this base P.E.P. oversees parks south of 42nd Street.
In 1995 Corlears Hook Park’s playground underwent renovations. Sponsored by Council Member Antonio Pagan, the $79,000 renovation upgraded the play equipment and added safety surfacing to the play area.
Minetta Square
This small park is named for a not-quite-gone and not-quite-forgotten water feature of Lower Manhattan. When Dutch colonists settled in Manhattan in the 1620s, they learned from local Native Americans about a small brook that was full of trout. It originated near what is now Gramercy Square, burbled its way through (mostly beneath) Greenwich Village, and emptied into the Hudson at what is now West Houston Street.
Local Native Americans called the stream “Mannette,” which was translated as “Devil’s Water.” Over the years, this name was spelled and respelled and spelled again in a variety of configurations: Minnetta, Menitti, Manetta, Minetta, Mannette, and Minetto. The Dutch called the water Mintje Kill, meaning small stream. In Dutch, “min” translates as little, “the” is a diminuitive, and “kill” translates as stream. The water was also known as Bestavers Killitie, Bestevaas Kelletye, Bestavens Killitie, Bestavers Killatie, and Bestaver’s Killetje.
Several families of freed slaves, released by the Dutch, established farms and homes along the Minetta Brook as early as the 1640s. With African-Americans continuing to settle here in the 18th and 19th centuries, the area became known as “Little Africa.” Most of the brook has been covered over, though some Village residents can claim that it flows beneath their basements and sometimes causes flooding. In the lobby of the apartment building at 2 Fifth Avenue, there is a transparent tube that is said to contain murky water spouting up from Minetta Brook. The brook’s most recent claim to fame is providing the namesake for the Minetta Tavern, one of the original watering holes of the Beat generation.
Minetta Square, located at the northeast corner of the Avenue of the Americas and Minetta Lane, is one of three nearby parks named after the feisty brook. The City of New York acquired this parcel in 1925 as part of the southerly extension of Sixth Avenue (now Avenue of the Americas). The .075 acre was deemed excess and was assigned to Parks in 1945.
In 1998 the City Council and the Manhattan Borough President funded the $742,000 reconstruction of Minetta Green and two other nearby parks, Downing Playground and Minetta Square. The rigid geometry of Minetta Green was transformed with new trees and shrubs and the creation of a curvilinear bluestone path which features images of trout. The garden path is punctuated by small circular sitting areas with circular tree benches, world’s fair benches, boulders and fluted cast iron urns. Small mounds were built up in the interior of the path to add interest to the previously flat landscape and create more of a pastoral setting. The once predominantly concrete sitting areas have become green garden coves.
.075 Acre
#32 – C
Martin Luther King Playground
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement who became famous in the 1950s and 1960s for his advocacy of nonviolent, direct action in the struggle against racism. King was a child prodigy who entered Morehouse college at 15 and was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church at 19. As pastor of the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, King secured a reputation as an eloquent and committed opponent of intolerance. He was elected President of the Montgomery Improvement Association and was responsible for the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956.
King resigned from the Dexter Avenue Church in 1959 in order to found and direct the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization devoted to challenging racism with nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1963, he organized a march on Washington to support proposed civil rights legislation. There he delivered his famous I Had a Dream speech. The following year King, at age 35, became the youngest man, second American, and third black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, but his courage continues to inspire admirers all over the world. He is remembered as one of the great American heroes of twentieth century, a man who devoted his life to fostering tolerance and equity on the grounds that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
This property was acquired by the City of New York and authorized for use by the Board of Estimate on June 27, 1946 as part of the Stephen Foster Houses. The housing project was named for Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1824), the American composer who penned, among other well-known songs, O Susannah, Camptown Races, and Beautiful Dreamer. In November 1947 the city plan was officially changed and the property was designated a playground area. Five years later it was opened as the Stephen Foster Houses Playground, reflecting the name of the nearby housing complex. When the project that surrounds it was renamed the Martin Luther King Houses, the playground’s name was changed as well.
The Martin Luther King Playground’s most popular feature among neighborhood youth is its two full-courts for basketball. Other attractions include handball facilities, and both toddler and child play areas. There are also several swing sets, a comfort station, and a sprinkler for summer use. The playground has been a participating site in the City Parks Foundation’s Summer Fun in the Parks program. Summer Fun provides free day camp activities for children aged 6 to 14 and helps working parents to offer their children safe, outdoor diversions during the summer months. Parks recreation specialists supervise field trips, parties, basketball games, art projects and myriad other activities that make the Martin Luther King Playground a special place for neighborhood families.
WRONG ANSWERS
Anne Loftus Playground
Born in Manhattanville, Anne Susan Cahill Loftus (1925-1989) was a beloved resident and invaluable leader of Inwood. During a thirty-seven year business career, she developed an uncompromising work ethic and superb managerial skills, which contributed to her success as a neighborhood administrator. Loftus held the position of district manager of Community Board 12 from October 1980 until her death on September 28, 1989. She ensured the custody and safety of parks and playgrounds for the benefit of the children and senior citizens in the neighborhoods of Inwood and Washington Heights. On June 21, 1990, Community Board 12 in Manhattan unanimously passed a resolution to name the playground in the northeast corner of Fort Tryon Park in honor of Anne Loftus.
Early Dutch settlers referred to this densely forested high ground at the northern end of Manhattan as Lang Bergh or Long Hill. The Weckquaesgeek Indians lived in the area until 1715, when they quit their last holdings in exchange for goods delivered by Colonel Stephen Van Cortlandt. The Continental Army fortified this strategic site during the summer of 1776, but the outgunned and outnumbered Americans were ousted from their position a few months later by Hessian mercenaries fighting for the British. Subsequently the battlements were renamed for Sir William Tryon, Major General and the last British governor of colonial New York.
From 1901 to 1905, Cornelius K.G. Billings, an eminent horseman from a wealthy family in Chicago, reputedly spent more than $2 million building the Tryon Hill mansion. His 25-acre property was the most lavish of many elegant estates constructed around the Fort Tryon area. In 1917 John D. Rockefeller, Jr. bought the Billings mansion, which burned to the ground in 1925. Two years later, Rockefeller employed Olmsted Brothers as architects to develop the property into a public park. The land was acquired by the city through a deed of gift from Rockefeller and was designated parkland in 1931.
For the next four years, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, transformed the rocky topography and thin soil on this elevated ground into a stunning landscape. While preserving open areas with spectacular views of the Hudson River and New Jersey’s Palisades, Olmsted Jr. designed Fort Tryon Park with promenades, terraces, wooded slopes, a heather garden, and eight miles of pedestrian paths. The park opened on October 13, 1935, providing visitors a picturesque setting in which to enjoy leisurely activities. The Cloisters, which houses the medieval art collected by sculptor George Grey Bernard, was opened in the north end of Fort Tryon Park in 1938.
Olmsted Jr. also gave special consideration to create a place for active play within the 67 acres of this scenic and tranquil park. He created a children’s playground complete with open space for games, play equipment, a wading pool, and a field house. The site of this playground, in the northeast corner of Fort Tryon Park, was specifically chosen for its flat surface and ease of access from the street. The playground is lined with rows of London plane trees which provide shade, as well as a natural transition to the rest of the park.
The $1,438,000 capital reconstruction of the Anne Loftus Playground was funded by Council Member Stanley E. Michaels in 1995. This project included installing new pavement and safety surfacing, fencing, north arrow rosette, and picnic and game tables. The drainage supply and water system were also reconstructed. As this is the only playground designed by the firm of Olmsted Brothers, the reconstruction deliberately evokes the original plan. Restored benches, new trees and play equipment are arranged according to Olmsted’s linear design, and a new spray shower was built on the site of the former wading pool. A large handicapped-accessible play unit, two sets of swings for different age groups, animal sculptures, play houses, and an open performance space were introduced in the new design. The newly restored playground is a thoughtful tribute to one of Inwood’s most dedicated public servants.
Lillian Wald Playground
This playground on the grounds of P.S. 188 at Houston Street and Baruch Drive honors the humanitarian, public health pioneer, social reformer, and leader of the recreation movement Lillian D. Wald (1867-1940).
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 10, 1867, Wald grew up in Rochester, New York. She received a degree in nursing from New York Hospital in March 1891, and after further studies at the Women’s Medical College, Wald and her friend Mary Brewster opened an out-patient nursing service on the Lower East Side. It expanded into the Henry Street Settlement House in 1893, and moved to 265 Henry Street in buildings donated by Jacob Schiff. The settlement then adopted a mission to improve the quality of life for area residents, which it continues to follow today.
In her battle to alleviate the ills of crowded tenement life, Wald was a staunch advocate for children. In 1898, along with Parks Commissioner Charles Stover, Wald founded the Outdoor Recreation League, which sponsored playground construction as a substitute for unsupervised street play. In 1902 she helped launch the world’s first public school nursing program in New York City, and in 1912 she promoted the American Red Cross’s rural nursing service. Her work on various health boards and commissions also facilitated the creation of the federal Children’s Bureau and other health and social reforms. Wald retired from the Settlement House in 1933 and moved to Westport, Connecticut.
As someone who opened one of the nation’s earliest playgrounds in the backyard of the Settlement house in 1902, it is appropriate that there are two playgrounds named after Wald in New York City. In 1937 Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia cited Wald for her distinguished service to the city and the Board of Alderman made the rarest of exceptions to its legislative policy by naming a playground at Cherry and Montgomery Streets in her honor, three years before her death on September 2, 1940. This playground, at Houston Street and Baruch Drive, was acquired by the City in 1944 from the New York City Housing Authority which developed the Lillian Wald Houses. The playground received over $100,000 in renovations in 1997, including new play equipment and safety surfacing.
Poor Richard’s Playground
This playground bears the name of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most beloved aliases, Poor Richard Saunders. Born in Boston, Franklin (1706-1790) was apprenticed to his brother to learn the printing trade. In 1723 young Ben Franklin moved to Philadelphia, where he launched the Pennsylvania Gazette, soon the most popular newspaper in the colonies. Franklin was one of Philadelphia’s leading citizens, founding the first circulating library, proposing an Academy (which became the University of Pennsylvania), establishing the American Philosophical Society, and creating programs to pave, light, and clean the city streets. He invented the efficient “Franklin Stove” and experimented with a kite in a thunderstorm, proving the presence of electricity in lightning.
From 1733 to 1758, Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanac under the alias Richard Saunders. The Almanac was widely read in the American colonies, selling as many as 10,000 copies annually. It is considered one of the classic works of American colonial literature, and played a large part in uniting and molding the American character. The Almanac was prized for its witty aphorisms, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” “Snug as a bug in a rug,” and “Health is the way to man’s wealth.” From the pages of the Almanac, and in his personal life, Franklin promoted physical fitness; he was an active runner, swimmer, and weight lifter.
Franklin began his political career as clerk of the General Assembly in 1736 and was elected to the Assembly the following year. He served as Postmaster in Philadelphia (1737-53) and as Postmaster General for the colonies (1753-74). Franklin proposed a plan of union for the colonies at the Albany Congress (1754) and served as agent for several colonies in England. He returned to America in 1775 and was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In 1776 he helped to draft and he signed the Declaration of Independence. During the American Revolution, Franklin established the American alliance with France and in 1781 was appointed a commissioner to negotiate peace with Britain. He returned to Philadelphia in 1785 and served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. His last public act before his death in 1790 was to issue a memorial to Congress urging the abolition of slavery.
In 1956 the City of New York acquired property between E. 106th and E. 109th Streets, Second and Third Avenues for the Benjamin Franklin Houses. A .57-acre parcel at the corner of E. 109th Street and Third Avenue was put under Parks jurisdiction in 1959. Over the next year, this parcel and the adjacent 1.01-acre property were improved as a park for the use of children from neighboring J.H.S. 117, the Benjamin Franklin Houses, and the larger community. Jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education, the new playground opened in May 1960. It featured facilities for handball, basketball, volleyball, baseball, rollerskating, and shuffleboard as well as a benches, game tables, a comfort station, and a variety of play equipment for younger children.
The 1981 reconstruction of the playground provided new pavement on the softball fields, renovated the basketball courts, installed new benches and game tables, and rebuilt the fencing and comfort station. Between 1994 and 1996 another series of improvements included a new mural created by the local school, game tables, renovated basketball courts, and basketball clinics. In 1996 Poor Richard’s Playground received new playground equipment from the City Parks Foundation as part of their Modular Playground Equipment Program and new safety surfacing from Nike.
As Poor Richard said, “Employ time well if thou meanest to gain leisure.”
1.58 Acres
#33 – A
Foley Square
Foley Square is named for Thomas F. Big Tom Foley (1852-1925), a prominent Democratic Party leader from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Foley left school at the age of thirteen to support his widowed mother, working for a period as a blacksmith’s helper. In 1877 he began his active connection with politics as a Tammany election district captain and rose to be First Assembly District leader.
Although Foley served as a member of the old City Council, as Alderman, and as Sheriff, he generally avoided elected office, preferring to sponsor others. His lasting gift to his party and indeed his Nation was to choose young Alfred E. Smith as candidate for the New York State Assembly in 1903. Smith rose to be Speaker, then Governor. In 1928 Smith would be the first Catholic to run for President.
At Foley’s death in 1925 Smith stated, My personal and political welfare were as much a matter of concern to him as though I was his own son. The New York Times ran the following headline about the funeral: East Side Crowds Mourn the Passing of Almost the Last of Old-Time Leaders. In 1926 the Board of Aldermen offered Big Tom an enduring tribute, when they named this city park, in the heart of New York’s government district, in his memory.
WRONG ANSWERS
Fishbridge Park
FishBridge Park is located on the south side of Dover Street, from Pearl to Water Streets. It is between the Fulton Fish Market, to the south, and the Brooklyn Bridge, to the north. Of the two distinguished New York institutions, Fulton Fish Market is the older. In the 1820s several fish dealers set up shop in a few stalls in a corner of Fulton Market. In 1831 they moved across South Street to a shed along the river. Thirty-eight years later a building was erected as a permanent facility for the fish business.
In the early days most fish was delivered by fishing schooners and sloops. By the late 19th century new technologies such as refrigeration and express railroads made it possible to deliver fish from all over the United States, Canada, and even abroad. Fulton Fish Market became the largest in the country and one of the largest in the world. It is one of the last working areas of the Manhattan waterfront and one of the last examples of the city’s outdoor wholesale markets. Six days a week, from midnight until about 9 a.m., the Fulton Fish Market is a dynamic bedlam of rubber-booted workers cleaning, boning, icing, unpacking, and repacking fish from throughout the world.
The Brooklyn Bridge is an aesthetic masterpiece and one of the world’s most iconic structures. With its intricate web of cables and its massive arched piers, the bridge was one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century: the world’s longest suspension bridge. Engineer John Augustus Roebling proposed this great link between Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1867. After his father’s death in 1869, Washington Roebling took his place as chief engineer. Paralyzed by caisson disease in 1872, the younger Roebling supervised operations from his apartment window and relayed instructions via his wife Emily Warren Roebling. The Brooklyn Bridge opened with great fanfare on May 24, 1883.
Reveling in the glory of its two namesakes, FishBridge Park is a community oasis of blooming roses, golden cosmos, and soaring morning glories on the site of a former parking lot and rat-infested garbage dump. Between 1990 and 1992, local volunteers cleaned up the site and built a garden children’s play area, barbecue, and dog run. In 1991 the City of New York leased the lot to the Seaport Community Coalition under Operation Green Thumb. The South-Water-Front Neighborhood Association became the overseer and then lease-holder of the garden in 1995. With the financial support of neighborhood residents and local businesses, an annual flea market, and grants from the City Parks Foundation and the MacDonald’s/Mollie Parnis Dress Up Your Neighborhood Award Program, volunteers transformed the ugly dump into a thriving park.
FishBridge Park celebrated two milestones in 1997. The first was the completion of the renovation of the upper park. The neighboring Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York funded the reconstruction project, which provided raised planters, a wrought-iron perimeter fence, and a pavement. The second achievement was the official designation of FishBridge Park as New York City parkland. The park is a hub for neighborhood activity, from gardening to dog-exercising, from reading to film-watching, from barbecuing to daydreaming, and especially for enjoying the park’s spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge. FishBridge Park is an example of how perseverance and goodwill can create a fine public space out of leftover vacant land.
Grand Canal Courts
The name of this park salutes the New York City streets to its north and south. The name also refers to the extraordinary manmade waterways in China and Italy. New York’s Grand Street was originally laid out prior to 1766 and was known as the thoroughfare to Crown Point (now Corlears Hook). The street earned the name “Grand” due to its remarkable width of one hundred feet. In 1818 the Common Council resolved that a market house be constructed on Grand Street between Ludlow and Essex Streets to serve the needs of the families of local working men. Grand Street has served as a commercial destination ever since.
Canal Street takes its name from the forty foot-wide canal that was created by 1810 to drain the pestilent Collect Pond into the Hudson River. The street was laid out with an open ditch (the canal) flanked by trees, a picket fence, and a promenade. In 1818 the Common Council approved improvements that would cover the open canal. “By this regulation,” declared the Council, “Canal Street will be made one of the handsomest streets in the City.” By 1819 the Collect was drained, and the Canal was filled.
Two of the world’s most celebrated Grand Canals are located in China and Italy. Stretching 1114 miles from Tianjin (port of Beijing) to Hangzhou, the Grand Canal of China (Yunliang Ho or “transport river”) is the world’s oldest and longest canal. The earliest part of the waterway was constructed in the 6th century B.C.; the canal was lengthened in the 6th century A.D. and extended again in the 13th century. Venice’s Grand Canal (Canal Grande) is the city’s main traffic artery. Motorboats, watertaxis, and gondolas navigate the waterway’s 2.5 miles under more than 400 footbridges and past buildings from the 12th through the 18th centuries.
Considering the location of these two Grand Canals, it is fitting that New York’s Grand Canal Courts are located near thriving Chinese and Italian communities in Chinatown, Little Italy, and Greenwich Village. The site of Grand Canal Courts was transferred from the Bureau of Real Estate to Parks in 1955. Soon afterwards, the site was improved with facilities for active and passive recreation, including full and practice basketball courts, benches, and game tables.
.134 acre
Hamilton Fish Park
In 1900 the park, featuring the gymnasium and playground, was completed. The Hamilton Fish Park Gymnasium is among the most notable small civic buildings in New York City. Designed in 1898 by Carre & Hastings, architects of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, this exuberant Beaux-Arts style structure is the only survivor of the original park plan. The building was designed in the manner of a small garden pavilion inspired by Charles Girault’s Petit Palais in Paris. Behind the gymnasium was a pair of small sculpted water fountains and grass parterres, benches and trees, all arranged in straight rows to emphasize the formality of the park.
Only three years after its opening, the park was redesigned to accommodate more active outdoor recreation such as track and tennis. In 1936 it was overhauled once again, this time featuring swimming as the main attraction. Constructed by the Works Progress Administration, the pool at Hamilton Fish Park was one of eleven that opened throughout New York City in a single summer during the Great Depression. The influence of the pools extended through entire communities, attracting neighborhood children and aspiring athletes and changing the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time. Among the most remarkable public recreational facilities in the country, the pools represented the forefront of design and technology. Hamilton Fish Pool was so highly regarded that the U.S. Olympic Team used it for practice sessions on their way to the 1952 Helsinki Games.
An extensive $14 million restoration of Hamilton Fish Park was completed in 1992 by John Ciardullo Associates. The gymnasium was designated a New York City historic landmark in 1982, and it was converted into a community center containing classroom and meeting rooms for neighborhood groups by 1990. The restored pool reinvigorated a favorite New York summer tradition of outdoor swimming. Basketball courts, handball courts, and the children’s playground were also refurbished. The distinctly modern landscaping, such as paved terraces and cylindrical planters, was integrated with trees that survive from the early 20th century.
4.3 acres
#34 – A
Augustus Saint-Gaudens Playground
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was the preeminent sculptor of the Gilded Age of American art. He not only created some of the country’s finest landmarks but also helped to foster arts education and the collaboration between artists that flourished at the turn of the century. Soon after his birth in Dublin, Ireland on March 1, 1848, his family immigrated to Boston, eventually settling in New York. Saint-Gaudens was apprenticed to a cameo cutter at age 13, and began his artistic studies at Cooper Union with evening drawing classes. By 1866, he was studying full time at the National Academy of Design, where his teachers included the sculptor J.Q.A. Ward. He then completed his education at the cole des Beaux Arts, where he became one of the first Americans to study sculpture formally in Paris.
After establishing a career in Paris and in Rome with commissions from traveling Americans for busts and sculptures, Saint-Gaudens returned to New York in 1875. He drew on his associations with other artists to form the Society of American Artists (1876) and the National Sculpture Society (1893) which helped to professionalize the field of art. Saint-Gaudens served as an advisor to the highly influential World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. In 1904, he was appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Public Building, along with architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Saint-Gaudens also taught at the Art Students League (founded in 1875) from the year 1888 to 1897 and helped to gain funding for the American Academy in Rome (founded in 1897).
Saint-Gaudens received some of the most prominent commissions of his time. The Admiral Farragut Monument (1880), located in Madison Square Park, was his first major public sculpture as well as his first joint project with Stanford White, who designed the pedestal. A monument to another Civil War hero, General William Tecumseh Sherman, located in Grand Army Plaza (1892-1903), is considered to be among the most distinguished equestrian groups of Western art. Other public works by Saint-Gaudens include the Peter Cooper Monument (1894) in Cooper Square, and The Shaw Memorial (1897), in Boston Common. Saint-Gaudens was commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt to design ten and twenty dollar gold coins.
This site was acquired by Parks in 1954 and opened as a jointly operated playground in January 1966 to serve children from adjacent P.S. 40. A $720,000 renovation was funded in 1996 by Councilman Antonio Pagan. The design pays tribute to Saint-Gaudens through bronze and porcelain decorations that harmonize with the new gates, spray shower, garden area, and play equipment.
.643 Acre
WRONG ANSWERS
Howard Bennett Playground
Howard Bennett (1911-1981), a Harlem community leader, was the founder of the National Citizens Committee for a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. From the time of Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 until his own death 13 years later, Bennett campaigned persistently to make January 15, the birthday of the civil rights leader, a national holiday. Bennett and several friends conceived the idea while returning from Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta. After renting a storefront in Harlem, he enlisted the help of a few dedicated grassroots activists and began gathering signatures on petitions.
In April 1970, along with William Byrd and other members of the 131st Street Block Association, Bennett presented six million signatures to Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and Detroit Congressman John Conyers. Chisholm and Conyers introduced a bill in Congress, which was finally passed in 1983. On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the law making January 15 a national holiday in honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Since 1986, the holiday has been observed on the third Monday in January.
Bennett, one of 16 brothers and sisters, was born in Greenwich Village. After serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II, he became a leader of the 369th Veterans Association, the organization of members of the famous Harlem Hellfighters. He also served as Labor Chairman of the New York Branch of the N.A.A.C.P. and was a consultant and confidant of labor leader A. Phillip Randolph. In 1977, Southeastern University of Greenville, South Carolina, awarded him an honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities for his contribution to the civil rights movement. His last public act was to participate in the Solidarity March on Washington for Jobs on September 19, 1981.
Jointly operated by Parks and the Department of Education, this property was acquired by the City in 1954 when P.S. 197 was built. It was opened as a playground on October 3, 1958. It was named for Bennett in 1982 under a local law introduced by Council Member Fred Samuel and signed by Mayor Edward I. Koch. In 1998, the site received $79,000 in upgrades, including new play equipment for disabled children. This work was assisted by volunteers & from the Junior League of New York, P.S. 197 and the community & who worked with City Parks Foundation and the Horticultural Society of New York as well as Parks to improve this park. This site also hosts the annual Upper Manhattan Auto Show, a major attraction of the Harlem Week festivities.
Raoul Wallenberg Playground
Raoul Gustav Wallenberg (1912-?) grew up in one of Sweden’s wealthiest and most prominent families. His father, a Swedish naval officer, died three months before Raoul’s birth, leaving Raoul in the custody of his mother and grandmother. Gustav Wallenberg, his paternal grandfather and an ambassador to the Swedish embassy in Japan, was also instrumental in young Raoul’s upbringing. Fluent in English, French, German, and Russian, Raoul would put these languages to use when he became actively involved with the plight of the Hungarian Jews in World War II. Backed by the Swedish government at the request of the American War Refugee Board, he became a friend and savior to hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Nazi-occupied Budapest.
In June 1944, the War Refugee Board appointed Raoul Wallenberg first secretary at the Swedish legation in Budapest. Here, he used drafting skills he acquired at the University of Michigan to design counterfeit Swedish passports, which he distributed on trains bound for concentration camps. He purchased as many houses, villas, and buildings as possible and adorned them with the blue and yellow colors of Sweden’s flag, turning these properties into neutral diplomatic property and safe havens for Jews. Wallenberg also organized and set up warehouses stocked with food to be distributed both as rations to the needy and bribes for Nazi officers. It has been estimated that of the 120,000 Hungarian Jews who survived the Nazi extermination, at least 100,000 were saved by Wallenberg’s efforts.
On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg left Hungary to discuss relief plans with Russian commanders. This was the last time he would ever be seen in public. The Russian government claimed to have no knowledge of his whereabouts until 1957, when Russian documents were released that claimed Wallenberg died of a heart attack in a Russian prison in 1947. To this day, Wallenberg’s fate remains unknown; reports persist from released Russian prisoners who claim to have seen Wallenberg alive as recently as 1990.
Raoul Wallenberg Playground lies within the greater property of Highbridge Park, along Amsterdam Avenue from 188th Street to 190th Street. Highbridge Park derives its name from New York City’s oldest standing bridge, the High Bridge (1848), which was built to carry water from the Old Croton Aqueduct over the Harlem River. The Old Croton Aqueduct was the first reliable and uninterrupted water supply system in New York City and the first of its kind ever constructed in the United States.The innovative system used a gravity feed, running 41 miles into New York City through an enclosed masonry structure crossing ridges, valleys, and rivers.
The High Bridge soars 138 feet above the 620 foot-wide Harlem River, with a total length of 1450 feet. The area that is today’s Highbridge Park was assembled piecemeal between 1867 and the 1960s with the bulk being acquired through condemnation from 1895 to 1901. Raoul Wallenberg Playground offers a structured play area for children within Highbridge Park, is a neighborhood playground for Upper Washington Heights, and is also a playground for P.S. 189, located across Amsterdam Avenue. This playground underwent a comprehensive renovation, which was completed in May 1999. Funded by Council Member Stanley E. Michels, Council Member Guillermo Linares, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and the city’s Executive Budget, this playground received $2,085,000 in improvements. The project yielded new play equipment, basketball courts, safety surfacing, benches, repaving, landscaping, a spray shower, drinking fountains, and new fencing.
In addition to this playground, Wallenberg’s legacy graces three other Parks properties. Wallenberg Forest in the Bronx, Raoul Wallenberg Playground in Queen’s Forest Park, and the Raoul Wallenberg Monument adjacent to the United Nations in Manhattan were all named in his honor. Dedicated on November 9, 1998, the Raoul Wallenberg Monument lies on Raoul Wallenberg Walk at First Avenue and 47th Street. Commissioned by the Swedish consulate, Swedish sculptor Gustav Graitz is the designer of the monument. Kraitz’s piece, titled Hope, is comprised of a replica of Wallenberg’s briefcase, a sphere, five pillars of hewn black granite, and stones which once paved the streets of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. The stones were a gift from the city of Budapest. These Parks properties remain a testament to a man whose altruism ensured the safety and survival of many human beings.
1.45 acres
Vesuvio Playground, formerly known as Thompson Playground, takes its name from the popular Italian bakery on nearby Prince Street. The bakery is owned by community leader Anthony Dapolito and has been family operated since it was founded in 1920. Dapolito has played an important role in the Greenwich Village and SoHo Communities for decades both in the acquisition and development of open spaces. He has been an active member of Community Board 2 since 1955.
Land for this playground was acquired in three parcels over the course of twenty-eight years. In 1929 and 1930 Parks purchased two parcels mid-block on Thompson Street. The playground was developed with a comfort station, swings and benches arranged around a large central wading pool. In 1957 Parks expanded the property south to Spring Street and west to Sullivan Street. This additional land was the site of a warehouse, two commercial garages, and two buildings for business and residence, structures typical of the Little Italy-SoHo area.
The buildings were razed, and the entire playground was redeveloped. The improvements expanded the program of the playground from a tot lot for small children to a recreational facility for all ages. A spray shower was created in the place of the wading pool, more play equipment and gingko trees were added, and a new sandbox, handball courts, basketball courts, and boccie courts were built. The mini-pool was installed in the late 1960s.
In the mid-1980s Parks redesigned the Playground to redefine the athletic and play areas for different age groups. The west side of the park was made into a children’s play area with new climbing equipment, swings, benches and tables, and a new play unit was constructed near the spray shower area. The handball and basketball courts were reconstructed, and the low brick walls were extended to delineate courts from tot areas. The granite block walkway along Thompson Street was also reconstructed and extended. In addition, decorative squares of granite block pavement were placed throughout the park.
Acres: 0.64
#35 – B
Governor Alfred E. Smith Park
The greatest privilege that can come to any man
is to give himself to the nation which reared him.
-Alfred E. Smith, Governor
Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873-1944) was a great figure in New York State, New York City, and the Lower East Side. A son of Irish immigrants, Smith dropped out of St. James Parochial School to help support his family. However, his lack of formal education did not hinder Smith from becoming a renowned New York legislator and executive.
In 1904 Smith was elected to his first government office as a Democratic member of the State Assembly. While serving on the Assembly, Smith co-chaired the Factory Investigating Commission with State Senator Robert F. Wagner. Together they investigated labor conditions and passed laws to raise safety standards and limit work hours. In 1917 Smith was elected President of the Board of Aldermen. In 1918 he was elected the first Irish Catholic Governor of New York, a position he held for four two-year terms. A loyal supporter of improvements to the Lower East Side which he called “the old neighborhood”-Smith sponsored legislation for rent control, tenant protection, and low-cost housing. As Governor, he appointed Robert Moses as Chairman of the New York State Council on Parks in 1924, and as Secretary of State in 1927.
Smith made history in 1928 as the first Irish Catholic to be nominated for President. He ran as the Democratic nominee but lost the election to Herbert Hoover. Soon after his defeat, Smith and his family returned to New York City and moved into an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Smith became a central figure in municipal development. He supported the development of new housing and parkland that was eventually built near his birthplace, 174 South Street. The housing was to provide homes for the overpopulated Lower East Side, and to provide residents with open space and greenery on their doorstep. The Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses were erected in the early 1950s, and were named in memory of Smith, who had died in 1944.
Alfred E. Smith Park, located at the junction of Catherine Slip, Madison, and South Streets, was dedicated on June 1, 1950. The park features two memorials to Governor Smith, who was also known as “The Happy Warrior,” “The King of Oliver Street,” and “The First Citizen.” Charles Keck designed the nine-foot bronze figure of the Governor and the bas-relief of children at play. The relief represents “The Sidewalks of New York,” a song always played at Al Smith’s campaign rallies. Paul Manship created the flagpole base decorated with animals native to New York before colonial settlement. The park includes a large children’s playground and a plaza equipped with benches.
By 1963 the Lower East Side was suffering from a shortage of schools and recreational spaces. An agreement was reached between Parks and the Board of Education to relinquish a portion of the park for the new Public School 126. In exchange, the Board of Education would build a recreation center and cede the vocational school to Parks. The Alfred E. Smith Recreation Center was opened in 1967 with a new gymnasium and community rooms. The Human Resources Administration maintains the vocational school as a family shelter.
Today, the park is an oasis in a vibrant neighborhood. A capital reconstruction project, completed in 1997, brought new life to the playground. New modular play equipment, animal art, a spray shower, and a fire engine slide were installed in the playground, now the site of the City Parks Foundation’s “Summer Fun in the Playground” program. The park and recreation center have become what Smith hoped would be a “happier home for his neighbors.”
WRONG ANSWERS
Clinton Community Garden
During his lifetime, DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) held many illustrious jobs, serving as a U.S. Senator, Mayor of New York City and Governor of New York State. The statesman is probably best known for his part in building and opening the 363-mile Erie Canal, which expanded trade to the Midwest and made New York City the commercial hub of America.
One of Clinton’s most visionary and lasting initiatives, unveiled in 1811, was the Manhattan grid street system. This milestone in city planning promoted a systematic development of the island. The plan utilized rectangular blocks to maximize the city’s efficiency and ease of use. The layout arranged 12 north-south avenues perpendicular to 155 east-west cross streets in defiance of Manhattan’s rugged geography. The commission’s plan astutely predicted and accommodated the exponential growth that would occur during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The site that is now Clinton Community Garden was farmland until 1851 when a railroad station was built and brought in waves of Irish, Scotch, and German immigrants. After the Civil War, many African Americans settled in this neighborhood peppered with factories, warehouses, slaughterhouses, breweries, and tenements. Gangs dominated the neighborhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a violent era in which the area earned its nickname, Hell’s Kitchen. Immigrants from Greece, Eastern Europe, and Puerto Rico arrived in the 1940s, establishing the neighborhood as one of Manhattan’s most culturally diverse. Hoping to change the area’s image, community members in the 1960s pushed for the neighborhood to be renamed Clinton, which in turn supplied the name for this garden.
Owned by the City but left vacant for decades, this lot was once a haven for illegal activity and an eyesore for area residents. In 1978, the surrounding community decided to clean up the property and the Green Guerillas, a non-profit environmental group dedicated to preserving urban gardens, helped secure a lease the following year. The Green Guerillas dug garden plots, excavated and recycle thousands of bricks to serve as pathways, and grew vegetables and flowers. In 1981, the City proposed putting the property up for auction. The gardeners formed the Committee to Save Clinton Community Garden and ran a Square Inch Campaign, in which a $5.00 donation bought a piece of the garden. The story earned national attention in magazine, newspaper, and television features, as well as the support of Mayor Edward I. Koch, who bought the first square inch of the garden. One month before the auction was to take place, the garden was transferred to Parks, making it the first community garden to become parkland. The land is now licensed to the non-profit Clinton Community Garden, Inc., whose elected Steering Committee manages the Garden. The Vincent Astor Foundation, Trust for Public Land, Housing Conservation Coordinators, Green Guerrillas, Operation GreenThumb, Greenacre Foundation, City Parks Foundation, Ninth Avenue Association, Community Board No. 4, and the West 47th/48th Streets Block Association have all been instrumental to the growth of this beautiful oasis.
Highlights include a sun and shade rock garden, grape arbors, Italian honeybee hives, organic composting services, winding brick paths, an edible plant garden, and the North American native plants bed. Functions held in the Garden include potluck dinners, art shows, harvest festivals, weddings, chamber music picnics, gardening seminars, dance recitals, and memorials.
James J. Walker
James J. Walker (1881-1946) was a New York politician whose style and exploits made his name synonymous with the Jazz Age. Born on June 19, 1881, Walker attended St. Joseph’s Parochial School, St. Francis Xavier, and New York Law School. Instead of preparing for the bar on completion of his law classes in 1905, Walker tried his hand at song-writing. His biggest hit “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” sold well, but his entertainment career soon came to an end. Billed as the “Young Man’s Candidate,” Walker was elected Assemblyman to Manhattan’s Fifth District in 1910. The young politician both passed the bar and married Janet Allen in 1912.
In 1914 Walker was elected to the State Senate with the endorsement of Tammany Hall. As Senator, he lobbied successfully for the legalization of Sunday baseball and professional boxing, while continuing to work as a lawyer. Jimmy Walker also known as “Beau James” socialized with stars of the Broadway stage and the sports world and became known for his stylish dress. In 1925 he ran a victorious campaign for mayor, again with the endorsement of Tammany Hall. During his first term, he founded the Department of Hospitals, preserved the nickel subway fare, and rooted out corruption in the Police Department and Department of Health.
Shortly after Walker won a second term in 1929, an investigation led by Samuel Seabury was launched to determine if he had accepted bribes for municipal contracts; his relationship with the actress Betty Compton also caused a sensation. Resigning in 1932, after formal charges of corruption had been filed, Walker left for Europe, divorcing his wife and marrying Compton. Returning to New York in 1935, the couple adopted two children; they divorced six years later. In 1940 Mayor Fiorello D. LaGuardia appointed Walker labor arbitrator for the garment industry, and Jimmy became a popular speaker at banquets and rallies. James J. Walker died on November 18, 1946.
Bordered by Hudson Street, Clarkson Street, St. Luke’s Place, and the Carmine Street Recreation Center, James J. Walker Park has a colorful history to match the vivid life of its namesake. From 1812 to 1895, the land served as St. John’s Cemetery, the burial ground of Trinity Church. Parks acquired the land in 1895. Originally called St. John’s Park, the name changed to Hudson Park by 1896, for the bordering street to the west. Architects Carrere and Hastings provided an elegant park design, which included a sunken garden, lagoon, perimeter walk, and gazebo. In order to provide space for active recreation, a new playground open in 1903. A large, rectangular marble sarcophagus on the north side of the park, dedicated in 1834 to three fallen firemen, serves as the only reminder of the land’s former role as a cemetery.
Over the course of the past century, the park has evolved to serve the needs of its community. By 1935 a comfort station stood on the east end, a larger playground was sited atop the now-filled lagoon, and a baseball field dominated the west side. In 1946 the park was paved and a sandlot baseball diamond was built. In 1947 the City Council changed the name of the park to honor “Beau James,” whose family had moved to 6 St. Luke’s Place in 1886. The renovation of the playground in 1972 included the installation of slides, teeter-totters, benches, tire swings, a pipe tunnel, sand boxes, an arch climber, and a geodesic dome.
Spurred by community efforts, including ninety letters written by neighborhood children to the Mayor’s office, a $250,000 capital renovation project began on June 24, 1996. The installation of play equipment, a spray shower, benches, trees, an iron fence, and safety surfacing have made the park a mecca for neighborhood families. Animal art includes handmade tiles salvaged from the 1972 renovation and horse-head hitching posts. As a fitting tribute to the man who legalized Sunday baseball, the ballfield continues to draw athletes of all ages.
1.67 acres
Mitchel Square
Mitchel Square honors the memory of John Purroy Mitchel (1879-1918), the youngest mayor in the history of New York City, who was known for his uncompromising idealism and scrupulous honesty. Mitchel was born and raised in an Irish Catholic family in the Fordham section of the Bronx. His grandfather, John Mitchel, was a renowned writer and leader in the Irish independence movement. The younger Mitchel rose to prominence in 1906, just five years after his graduation from New York Law School, for leading the investigation of Manhattan Borough President John F. Ahern and Bronx Borough President Louis Haffen. Both of the Borough Presidents were ejected from their posts as a result of the investigation. The young politician’s reputation as a reformer garnered him the support of the anti-Tammany forces. In 1909, Mitchel was elected President of the Board of Alderman (an organization similar to the current City Council). Four years later, at the age of 34, Mitchel was elected Mayor.
Mitchel heeded the call of the First World War shortly after his four-year mayoral term ended and joined the Army aviation corps. On July 6, 1918, Mitchel fell 500 feet from his plane to the ground during a training flight in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He was killed instantly. New Yorkers responded to Mitchel’s death with a flurry of eulogies and memorials. An airfield in Long Island, now home to Hofstra University and Nassau Coliseum, was named in Mitchel’s honor. An elaborate memorial with a gilded bronze bust set in a two-level classical granite setting dedicated to Mitchel was erected in Central Park, at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street, where it still stands. On February 8, 1919, the Board of Alderman named this park for Mitchel.
The visual centerpiece of Mitchel Square is the Washington Heights-Inwood War Memorial, a striking bronze and granite group sculpture. Twenty inscribed bronze tablets listing the names of 357 local men killed during the war surround the base of the monument, alternating with images of torches. The monument was dedicated on May 30, 1923. The work was sculpted and donated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who dedicated much of her career to sculpting scenes of World War I. This monument won Whitney a gold medal from the New York Society of Architects and she received the French Legion of Honor Medal for a work in St. Nazaire. Whitney also established Manhattan’s Whitney Museum.
Parks acquired this triangular property, bounded by West 166th Street, Broadway, and Audubon Avenue, in 1908, and dedicated it as a public space in 1911. Originally, the property consisted of two triangular patches of land. In 1943, when the park’s jurisdiction was transferred from the Board of Estimate to Parks, city designers unified the two sections.
Mitchel Square features several benches surrounded by trees and shrubbery. A major 1998 reconstruction funded by Council Member Guillermo Linares included landscaping and the installation of a black wrought-iron fence and new benches. In 1999, the sculpture and base of the war memorial were cleaned, the patina replaced, protective coating applied, and a damaged bayonet was restored. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th President of the United States, wrote of this park’s namesake, No stauncher American, no abler and more disinterested public servant, and no finer natural soldier than Purroy Mitchel was to be found in all our country.
#36 – B
The Great Lawn
In the 1830s New York City was under tremendous pressure to develop a pure water system for its citizens. It was decided in 1838 to dam up the Croton River, 38 miles to the north of the city in Westchester as a source of clean water. Only the force of gravity was needed to run the water in open channels, iron pipes, and aqueducts to the great distributing reservoir at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. The 55-acre site here, a part of Yorkville, was chosen for the holding area-the rectangular-shaped receiving reservoir-and began use in 1842. Unlike the existing reservoir, there was no promenade or walkway surrounding the water’s edge. A reservoir keeper lived in a dwelling on the site of the two northern ballfields. A portion of the reservoir wall can still be seen at the base of this sign.
When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in 1858, they created thick plantings and earthen mounds to hide the high stone walls that they felt were unwelcome to their romantic landscape design. Nonetheless, they placed a miniature castle, called Belvedere (Italian for “beautiful view”) atop Vista Rock in order to view the two reservoirs.
When New York City was incorporated in 1898 into today’s five-borough metropolis, the existing water system was considered insufficient, and plans for a new water system rendered the old reservoir obsolete. Many proposals were generated, among them a water lagoon and a memorial to soldiers in World War I. The reservoir was filled in the 1930s, partially from excavation material for Rockefeller Center. Finally it was decided to use the area as a lawn and play area for children. The Beaux-Arts oval was designed by the New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, who gave the Great Lawn its name. It was built with slight modification under the administration of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and opened to the public in 1937. Baseball diamonds were added in the 1950s.
The small lake, originally designed as part of the Great Lawn and known as Belvedere Lake was renamed Turtle Pond by Parks Commissioner Stern in 1987 in honor of its reptilian residents. A nature blind has been added to the recent 1997 restoration of the pond so that park visitors might quietly observe the three species of turtles, dragonflies, and damselflies, and many varieties of waterfowl without disturbance.
The equestrian statue by Stanislaw Kazimierz Ostrowski on the eastern shore of Turtle Pond commemorates King Wladyslaw Jagiello, the first Christian Grand Duke of Lithuania who led Polish and Lithuanian forces against the Teutonic Knights of the Cross at the 1410 Battle of Grunewald. It was originally sited in front of the Polish pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The area in front of the statue has long been a gathering place for folk dancers.
In 1957 theater producer Joseph Papp offered free public performances of the works of William Shakespeare on the shores of the pond. Five years later the construction of the Delacorte Theatre was completed with funds provided by philanthropist George Delacorte. It is now the summer home of the Public Theatre/New York Shakepeare Festival. In the 1970s the Great Lawn became home to the free summer performances of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.
WRONG ANSWERS
Columbus Circle
Opposite the four corners of rectangular Central Park, four individual plazas and squares mark unique transition points between city and park. The northwest circle, named for author Frederick Douglass, is undergoing redevelopment. To the northeast stands the Duke Ellington Memorial, dedicated to the memory of the great musician in 1997. Grand Army Plaza, with its statue of General William T. Sherman and Pulitzer Fountain, is located to the southeast. In the southwest corner, across from the Maine Monument (1912-13) is the Columbus Circle rotary. In 1869 the Commissioners of the Board of Central Park reported that this open circular place was. . .laid out at the intersection of Fifty-ninth street, Eighth avenue, and Broadway, as a turnabout for horse-drawn vehicles.
About ten thousand people’s including Italian, Spanish, and American dignitaries’s gathered in Columbus Circle on October 12, 1892, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) in the New World. Together they dedicated the Columbus Monument, designed by Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Russo and donated to the City of New York by the Italian-American community. Gen. L.P. di Cesnola, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke at the event, reminding the audience that the great explorer’s true monument is this great land, its institutions, its prosperity, its blessing, its lessons of advance for all humanity.
The monument consists of a statue of Columbus posed on a column mounted on a base surrounded by fountains; an allegorical figure depicting the Genius of Discovery stands on the base. Both Columbus and the latter figure are carved of Carrara marble. Bronze elements include two bas-reliefs portraying Columbus’s journey, as well as an American bald eagle and lotus-shaped cresting. In addition, bronze ships’ prows and anchors adorn the granite column. The surrounding fountains, designed by Douglas Leigh, were inspired by water displays in Rome. A gift from the Delacorte Foundation, the fountains were dedicated on Columbus Day, October 12, 1965.
Columbus Circle is remarkable not only for its central monument but also for the subways beneath it and the collection of buildings clustered around it. Workers managed to dig around and beneath the monument’s 1.5 million-ton foundations in order to complete the IRT subway tunnel and Columbus Circle station in 1902. The present crop of buildings includes the Huntington Hartford Gallery building (Edward Durell Stone, 1965), the Gulf & Western Building (Thomas E. Stanley, 1970), and the New York Coliseum (Leon and Lionel Levy, 1965). Over the past two decades, plans to replace the Coliseum with a new office tower have been prepared, discarded, and revived.
Two recent projects have made Columbus Circle more inviting. The monument was restored in time for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s journey in 1992. In 1998 several city agencies including City Planning, Transportation, and Parks collaborated on an interim design for Columbus Circle. The roadways have been reconfigured, pedestrian walkways have been improved, and the public can now enjoy a beautiful and green sitting area in the middle of a major traffic hub. Transportation provided backfill, stone gravel, timbers, filter fabric, planter urns, and drainage pipe. Parks installed benches, added stone screenings around the fountain and sitting area, and planted topsoil, sod, trees, shrubs, ground cover, and flowering plants.
The Great Lawn
In the 1830s New York City was under tremendous pressure to develop a pure water system for its citizens. It was decided in 1838 to dam up the Croton River, 38 miles to the north of the city in Westchester as a source of clean water. Only the force of gravity was needed to run the water in open channels, iron pipes, and aqueducts to the great distributing reservoir at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. The 55-acre site here, a part of Yorkville, was chosen for the holding area-the rectangular-shaped receiving reservoir-and began use in 1842. Unlike the existing reservoir, there was no promenade or walkway surrounding the water’s edge. A reservoir keeper lived in a dwelling on the site of the two northern ballfields. A portion of the reservoir wall can still be seen at the base of this sign.
When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in 1858, they created thick plantings and earthen mounds to hide the high stone walls that they felt were unwelcome to their romantic landscape design. Nonetheless, they placed a miniature castle, called Belvedere (Italian for “beautiful view”) atop Vista Rock in order to view the two reservoirs.
When New York City was incorporated in 1898 into today’s five-borough metropolis, the existing water system was considered insufficient, and plans for a new water system rendered the old reservoir obsolete. Many proposals were generated, among them a water lagoon and a memorial to soldiers in World War I. The reservoir was filled in the 1930s, partially from excavation material for Rockefeller Center. Finally it was decided to use the area as a lawn and play area for children. The Beaux-Arts oval was designed by the New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, who gave the Great Lawn its name. It was built with slight modification under the administration of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and opened to the public in 1937. Baseball diamonds were added in the 1950s.
The small lake, originally designed as part of the Great Lawn and known as Belvedere Lake was renamed Turtle Pond by Parks Commissioner Stern in 1987 in honor of its reptilian residents. A nature blind has been added to the recent 1997 restoration of the pond so that park visitors might quietly observe the three species of turtles, dragonflies, and damselflies, and many varieties of waterfowl without disturbance.
The equestrian statue by Stanislaw Kazimierz Ostrowski on the eastern shore of Turtle Pond commemorates King Wladyslaw Jagiello, the first Christian Grand Duke of Lithuania who led Polish and Lithuanian forces against the Teutonic Knights of the Cross at the 1410 Battle of Grunewald. It was originally sited in front of the Polish pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The area in front of the statue has long been a gathering place for folk dancers.
In 1957 theater producer Joseph Papp offered free public performances of the works of William Shakespeare on the shores of the pond. Five years later the construction of the Delacorte Theatre was completed with funds provided by philanthropist George Delacorte. It is now the summer home of the Public Theatre/New York Shakepeare Festival. In the 1970s the Great Lawn became home to the free summer performances of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.
The Pond
When Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) created their design for Central Park in 1858, they transformed the low-lying swamplands into pastoral water bodies. The picturesque Pond, a 3.8-acre lake, was placed on the site of steep rock outcrops and a natural brook that came from the west side of Manhattan Island and emptied into the East River. In Olmsted and Vaux’s original plan, the area around the Pond was carefully designed to take the visitor through ever-changing scenery.
In the early 1860s, the Pond and the 72nd Street Lake provided an opportunity for ice-skating, previously unknown to New Yorkers since the rivers rarely froze and there was no natural water body in Manhattan suitable for the sport. In the 1860s and 70s, more people came to the Park in the winter than in any other season because of the ice-skating craze. A system of red flags was established as a signal for the public when the ice was frozen. A red ball on the trolleys downtown also let New Yorkers know when they could skate in the Park. In 1951, the northern arm of the Pond, which had been filled in by the early 1940s, became the site of Wollman Rink, which guaranteed good skating conditions throughout the winter.
The most popular feature on the Pond was undoubtedly the swan boats, which today are associated with the Boston Public Garden. The swan velocipede boats, first used in Boston, were a popular feature on Central Park’s Pond from 1877 until 1924.
In 1934, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) created a 3.4-acre nature sanctuary, known as the Promontory. It was renamed the Hallett Nature Sanctuary in 1986 by Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, in honor of George Hervey Hallett, Jr. (1895-1985), an assiduous civic reformer and an avid bird-watcher.
Gapstow Bridge is the second bridge on this site. The original, whose design is attributed to Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886), was built in 1874. One of the most unusual bridges in the Park, it was made of stone abutments, with cast-iron filigree and two semi-circular wooden arches. The wooden arches and flooring deteriorated, and the bridge was replaced in 1896 by a simple stone structure, designed by Howard and Caudwell. It was built of unadorned Manhattan schist.
In 2001, the Pond was completely restored by the Central Park Conservancy, the not-for-profit organization that manages Central Park in partnership with City of New York/Parks & Recreation. While most of the features of the original design were retained, improvements in design and were made. These include the creation of an island for a secure wildlife habitat, the construction of a series of picturesque pools and low cascades on the western arm of the Pond, and the addition of new wetland plantings and upland vegetation to provide seasonal color and texture.
Seneca Village
Although the reason for the name Seneca Village is unknown, recent historical and geophysical research has uncovered a great deal of information about this unique community and its inhabitants. Seneca Village, which was located from 81st to 89th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in what is now a section of Central Park, is important to the history of New York City because it may possibly be Manhattan’s first prominent community of African American property owners. Beginning in 1825, parcels of land were sold to individuals and to members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, described as the largest and wealthiest church of coloured people in this city, perhaps in this country. Within a few years the community developed into a stable settlement of over 250 working-class people, with African Americans owning more than half the households in the village ’s an unusually high percentage of property ownership for any New York community. The presence of an abundant natural spring near 82nd Street would have provided the fresh drinking water necessary for the maintenance and stability of a large community.
Religion played an enormous part in most communities in the nineteenth century, and Seneca Village was no exception. Two African Methodist churches, the African Union Methodist and the AME Zion (today known as Mother AME Zion) were constructed in the village near 85th Street. Their congregations were composed entirely of African Americans. Colored School No. 3, one of the few black schools in New York City, had been established in the 1840s and was housed in the basement of the African Union Methodist Church. All Angels’ Church, an affiliate of St. Michael’s on Broadway at 99th Street, was built in 1849. It had a racially integrated congregation of African Americans from Seneca Village and Irish and German parishioners living in the village and within a mile of the church. By the 1850s, Seneca Village had also gained many Irish and German immigrant families. There were also three or four large cemeteries affiliated with churches.
In 1853, the state legislature authorized the use of eminent domain, the taking of private property for public purposes. This unprecedented public acquisition of private land to create a major public park in the City of New York began in 1856, and at the time encompassed the land from 59th to 106th Streets between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. In 1863, additional parkland was annexed to include the area between 106th and 110th Streets. Those owners living within the boundaries of the proposed park were compensated for their property, though many protests were filed in New York State Supreme Court, as is often the case with eminent domain, when owners contest the amount of settlement.
In total, approximately 1600 people who owned, lived and/or worked on the 843-acre tract of land had to move when the Park was created. The residents and institutions of Seneca Village did not reestablish their long-standing community in another location.
#37 – C
Herald Square – the New York Herald
This park was named for the newspaper that was once published directly to its north. The City of New York acquired the area in 1846 as part of the opening of Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway). By the early 20th century, many printers and publishers had located in the area. The New York Herald, founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835, was best known for its sensational coverage of scandal and crime, and for its enormous circulation. Herald Square’s centerpiece – a monument to Bennett and his son – houses a sculpture and clock that formerly topped the Herald building. The bronze figures include Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and invention, and two bell-ringing blacksmiths. The clock and figures were installed on the monument in 1940, and blacksmiths Stuff and Guff or Gog and Magog have chimed the hours ever since.
WRONG ANSWERS
Chelsea Park
Since it was first acquired by Parks in 1906, Chelsea Park has been an open space for sports and games. The first playground on the site opened in 1910 as a space for leisure and exercise for residents of the crowded tenement district. Competitions organized by the newly formed Board of Recreation drew thousands of spectators and participants.
After a major reconstruction project, Chelsea Park reopened in 1940 for year round use with the addition of three basketball courts, three handball courts, softball diamonds with flood lighting, a horseshoe court as well as asphalt surfaces for rollerskating and hockey. The grounds of P. S. 33 were assigned to Parks in 1952, further expanding the park site. In the mid 1990s, the playground and basketball courts were restored. The park is one of the most popular and widely used in lower Manhattan.
3.9 Acres
Chelsea Waterside Park
Located at West 23rd Street and the West Side Highway, this park has undergone several transformations since its first portions were acquired by the City in 1907. Though its early history was connected to a working industrial waterfront, its current incarnation represents the reclamation of the Hudson River and the upland properties for recreational use.
In 1907, five years before the survivors of the Titanic disaster were brought to nearby Chelsea Piers, a parcel of land north and east of the piers was vested to the city’s Department of Docks, which oversaw waterfront commerce. In 1915, this parcel was transferred to Parks, and in 1923 this small park was named in memory of Thomas F. Smith (1863 & 1923).
Smith was born and raised in Chelsea, and studied at St. Xavier’s College on West 16th Street, before becoming a newspaper reporter. In 1892 he was appointed a stenographer for the Department of Buildings. Six years later he parlayed this experience into a promotion as Chief Clerk of the City Courts, a job he held until 1917. In that year he was elected a United States Congressman from Manhattan’s East Side, and in 1921 he became the Public Secretary.
It was as Secretary of the Tammany Hall democratic political machine, a role he held for 25 years, that Smith attained broad influence as chief patronage dispenser. On April 11, 1923, while on his way to dine with an insurance executive, Smith was struck and killed by a taxi. Thousands attended his funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; the funeral procession was headed by John R. Voorhis, Chief Sachem for Tammany Hall, and the pallbearers included Governor Alfred E. Smith (1873 & 1944) and Mayor John F. Hylan (1869 & 1936). An editorial in The New York Times commented of Smith: He had a marvelous genius–it was no art–for making friends. The gift of making everybody like you, the inexplicable charm, some unconscious efflorescence of a frank and winning character, a vital personality. Flags on all City buildings and Democratic clubhouses flew at half-mast. The Board of Alderman honored Smith with this park’s naming, and the following year a granite stele in his honor was erected here by the Seymour Democratic Club.
In 1931 the park was compromised by the opening of the West Side also known as the Miller Elevated Highway, which bisected the property. Improvements were made to the easterly portion in the mid-1930s, including the introduction of handball and shuffle-bard courts, horseshoe pits, and London planetrees (Platanus x acerifolia).
In October 2000 an expanded and renovated park reopened east of the highway, with its new name Chelsea Waterside Park. After years of lobbying for more recreational space by local residents, 23rd street was demapped between 11th and 12th Avenues, and park improvements were implemented by the State Department of Transportation, as part of the reconstruction of the adjacent highway.
Chelsea Waterside Park is under the jurisdiction of the Hudson River Park Trust. Designed by landscape architect Thomas Balsley, the park includes a dog run at the south end, a multi-use recreational field in the northwest corner, a basketball court to the north, and a children’s play area in the northeast quadrant. This latter area is slated for a comfort station and playground, to be designed by Vollmer Associates and landscape architect Donna Walcavage respectively. The central portion of the park includes a pedestrian walkway flanked by new lawns for passive recreation and lush mixed herbaceous planting beds.
Harlem River Park
The name Harlem comes from the Dutch city of Haarlem. When New York was New Amsterdam, this section in northern Manhattan was known as Nieuw Haarlem and the eight miles of waterway that flowed along its eastern shore between became the Harlem River. Governor General Peter Stuyvesant (1592-1672) of New Amsterdam offered newcomers between 40 and 50 acres per family to settle in the sparsely populated area, and a diverse group of settlers accepted. French, Walloon, Danish, Swedish, German, and Dutch colonists established farms on the fertile soil.
As the region became increasingly industrialized in the 19th century, the original farmers departed and new European immigrants and African Americans discovered affordable housing as construction of tenements in the area began. The Europeans began moving to the suburbs in the 1940’s and African Americans began arriving in great numbers from the South. Harlem soon became the largest, best known African American community in the world. In the 1950s newcomers from Puerto Rico settled in East Harlem below 116th Street in an area soon called El Barrio. During the 1960s much of the housing stock in Harlem deteriorated, but since the middle of the 1990s a transformation has been taking place with renovated town houses and apartment buildings changing the face of the community once again.
The nearly nine acres that are Harlem River Park once belonged to Jochem Pieter Kuyter, one of the original Danish colonists, and an employee of the Dutch West India Company. He had purchased the property on his arrival at New Amsterdam in 1639. Kuyter gained prominence as a champion of civil rights for Native Americans and often clashed with Governor Willem Kieft (1597-1647), whose abuse of the indigenous peoples was legendary. Parks acquired the land in 1867 and named it Kuyter Park. Today, as Harlem River Park, it is made up of smaller parks and ballfields that cluster around the Third Avenue Bridge on 130th Street and Lexington Avenue. The bridge, which connects the Bronx and Manhattan, was first built in 1790 and rebuilt for the second time in 1898.
Harlem River Park runs alongside the Harlem River Drive. During the 19th century, the road was known as the Harlem River Speedway and served horse-drawn and early motor traffic. When Robert Moses (1888-1981) became Parks Commissioner in 1934, he envisioned the thoroughfare as a link between the Triborough and George Washington Bridges. He accomplished this by means of the 178th Street Tunnel. It was not the first time the area had been reconfigured. In 1923, the river’s course was changed when the Harlem River Ship Canal was built, separating Marble Hill from Inwood in northern Manhattan.
In 1997 the Mayor’s office contributed $381,000 to explore the possibility of building a waterfront park. The City has also looked into constructing a bikeway along the water. Commissioner Stern said, We want to do as much for the waterfront facing the Bronx as we’ve done for the one facing New Jersey. In 2001, a three-phase reconstruction began extending the East River esplanade from 125th Street to 145th Street. For Phase I, Borough President C. Virginia Fields provided $870,000 in City Council funding, and $1.1 million in B.P. office funding. Additionally, the Federal Congestion Mitigation Air Quality Program provided $1,098,000 in funding for Phase I construction.
#38 – C
Margaret Corbin Circle
Margaret Corbin (1751 & 1800?), for whom Fort Tryon Park’s drive and entrance are named, took control of her fallen husband John’s cannon and fought during the 1776 battle at the site of what is now known as Fort Tryon Park. The only woman buried in the cemetery at West Point, Margaret Corbin was wounded during the clash; her story was largely buried until Washington Heights residents sought to commemorate her in the 1970s.
Corbin was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, in 1751. Her father was killed by Native Americans and her mother captured when she was five years old; she survived because she was away visiting an uncle, who then raised her. She married John Corbin in 1772. He later enlisted in the First Company of Pennsylvania Artillery, and she joined her husband in the Revolutionary War effort.
After American forces retreated into New Jersey following the Battle of Long Island and later the Battle of White Plains, about 3000 soldiers remained on the hill in present-day Fort Tryon Park. The Continental Army fortified the battlement during the summer of 1776, taking advantage of the site’s steep terrain.
On November 16, 1776, 4,000 Hessian mercenaries fighting on behalf of the British attacked the outnumbered Maryland and Virginia riflemen who were defending the position. It was here that John and Margaret Corbin fought. After John Corbin, a cannoneer, was shot and killed, Margaret, who had helped to clean and load the cannon, took over for her husband, continuing to fire shots until she was hit by gunfire as well and subsequently captured.
Though not fatal, the wounds in her shoulder crippled her for life. She received one-half of a soldier’s pension, as decreed by the Continental Congress in 1779. Corbin later moved near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where she worked until her death, around 1800. In 1926, Corbin’s body was disinterred and buried in the West Point Military Cemetery. A monument to her was erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
After capturing the American soldiers, the British renamed the spot for Major General Sir William Tryon (1729 & 1788), and the last British governor of colonial New York, and although the Continental Army ultimately prevailed, the site continued to be referred to as Fort Tryon. Noting this irony in the 1970s, in the wake of the bicentennial of American independence, a movement to rename the park for an American hero took shape, and Corbin’s story resurfaced. Ultimately a compromise was reached where the park’s plaza and drive were named for Corbin and the park retained the Tryon name.
In 1977, the City Council voted unanimously to name the drive for her. Councilman Henry J. Stern (b. 1935), who co-sponsored the bill to commemorate Corbin, noted that despite growing up in the neighborhood and using the park’s playground as a youth, he never realized he was honoring a Tory. Subsequently, local schools developed a curriculum about Corbin, and in 1982 a plaque honoring the heroine was placed at 190th Street and Fort Washington Avenue.
WRONG ANSWERS
Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly Playground
This parcel of land’s located one hundred feet west of Ninth Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets’s was granted to the Public School Society in 1853. It was the site of old P.S. 11 until 1933 when the school was demolished, and a new building was erected on 21st Street. Jurisdiction of the property then passed to the Department of Parks. In 1934 the site was developed as one of five model playgrounds in the five boroughs. According to a press release issued by Parks, Model playgrounds were built in five congested neighborhoods, and demonstrated the use of small areas for recreational purposes. These playgrounds were designed and equipped to meet the present-day needs of the children, and to enable directors to conduct a wide range of activities with a minimal amount of supervision.
On August 11, 1934 Parks Commissioner Robert Moses presided as Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia delivered an address to open this playground and ten others throughout the city via radio broadcast on WNYC, WNEW, and WOV. Following the speech the American flag was raised simultaneously at the various playgrounds. Every park but one was outfitted with a standard list of features: play house, flagpole, chlorinated footbath, wading pool, handball and basketball courts, play equipment, drinking fountains, shade trees, and shrubs.
In 1936 Mayor LaGuardia named the playground for Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly (1862-1934), a pioneering surgeon and philanthropist. Dr. Kelly was born in Ireland and emigrated to the United States in 1873. She studied at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which had been founded by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician in the United States. Dr. Kelly’s direction of a clinic for the poor and her outspoken support for Irish Independence made her a prominent figure in the Chelsea community. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement and was a member of the Irish Women’s Council.
Plans were drawn up in 1966 to remove the wading pool and add new play equipment, such as a helical slide and arch climbers. New curvilinear walls softened the harsh angles of the playground. In 1975 the comfort station was reconstructed. A 1984 renovation project focused on the east half of the park to provide new handball and basketball courts, showers, play equipment, community planting bed, and a rectilinear sitting area to the southeast.
In 1998-99 the playground was reconstructed at a cost of $553,000 funded by former Council Member (now State Senator) Thomas Duane. The new plan extends the design of the sitting area throughout the western portion of the site. The new spray shower is decorated with three elements that pay tribute to Dr. Kelly. Representing her place of birth are clover leaves and a Celtic-styled dog. Representing her career is the caduceus; the two snakes twined around a staff is an ancient Greek emblem adopted by the medical profession. Other improvements include play equipment, benches, security lighting, trees, water fountain, pavement, and drainage and water supply.
.52 acres
Loeb Playground
Born in Russia, Sophie Irene Simon Loeb (1876-1929) immigrated with her family to the United States when she was six years old. Soon after settling in Pennsylvania, Loeb’s father, Samuel Simon, died, leaving the family with no means of support. As the eldest of the six children, sixteen-year-old Sophie was forced to work in a store to help her mother support their large family. These financial struggles prompted Loeb’s later concern for social reform and welfare.
After graduating from high school, Sophie began teaching grade school. In 1896, she married Anselm Loeb, a storeowner and her former employer. Marriage freed Sophie from teaching and allowed her to pursue other interests such as art, poetry, and writing. Her writing came to the attention of several publishers, including the editors and publishers of the New York Evening World. In 1910, Loeb moved to New York City after divorcing her husband. Keeping the name Loeb, she began working at the Evening World as a reporter.
Loeb turned her attention toward welfare for widowed mothers. New York City had struggled for years over the idea of civic versus state economic relief for destitute mothers. The city maintained homes for children of widowed mothers, but many women refused to send their children to these homes, leaving them to the mercy of private charities. Believing that private aid was insufficient, Loeb sought state relief as well. She wrote several articles that argued for the establishment of a state relief system, and worked closely with Hannah Bachman Einstein who founded the Widowed Mothers’ Fund Association in 1909. Elected President of the New York City Welfare Board in 1923, Loeb helped found the Child Welfare Committee of America in 1924. She also fought for immigrant use of New York City schools as civic centers, cleaning and fireproofing movie theaters, the installation of public baths, the funding school lunches, and support for housing reform.
Ten years after Loeb’s death, Congress amended the Social Security Act of 1935 to include provisions for the protection of widows and children of laborers. Although she died childless, Loeb nevertheless was known as the godmother of American children. Housing reformer and former Parks Commissioner August Heckscher donated a memorial in Central Park to Loeb in recognition of her work. The motif of the memorial comes from Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland.
The City acquired the land for this playground in 1924. In 1933, the Board of Aldermen named this playground after Loeb, citing her tireless efforts on behalf of the city’s children. Recent improvements to the playground include the planting of several London Plane trees (Platanus x acerifolia) and the addition of safety features to the existing play equipment. A tree known for its ability to survive in harsh urban environments, the London Plane takes its name from London, England. Due to the tree’s enduring popularity, Parks uses the silhouette of a London Plane leaf as its official insignia.
.122 acres
Mary O’Connor Playground
Mary O’Connor (1911-1991) was a well-known community activist and resident of Tudor City. The preservation of Tudor City Parks from commercial development was one of O’Connor’s principal concerns in a life devoted to her neighborhood. She held a seat in Community Board Six for fifteen years and served one term (1983-1984) as chairwoman. Ever vigilant against commercial development, O’Connor was active in the successful campaign to win Landmark Designation for Tudor City.
Tudor City, which lies between Turtle Bay to the north and Murray Hill to the south, was named for the Tudor City apartment and hotel complexes — so named to evoke the majesty of England’s Tudor Dynasty — that were erected between 1925 and 1928. The Mary O’Connor Playground was built in 1950 as a sister site to the Tudor Grove Playground opposite it on the south side of East 42nd Street. Both playgrounds were condemned properties transferred to Parks in 1948. The year of the playgrounds’ completion coincided with the United Nations’ relocation to the East Side, ensuring that a large and diverse body of both tourists and Tudor City residents would frequent local attractions such as the two playgrounds.
This site was called Tudor City North Playground from its dedication in July 1950 until November 1991, when Community Board Six unanimously passed a resolution to rename the playground in honor of O’Connor. In 1993, Parks redesigned the playground. Among the improvements introduced by the renovation were the reconstruction of the brick wall around the property’s perimeter, the addition of bluestone pavement, and the installation of strip benches and a new play structure. It was rededicated in 1995 and has remained a cherished public space in the Tudor City neighborhood.
#39 – A
Minetta Playground
This small park is a memorial to a not-quite-gone and not-quite-forgotten water feature of Lower Manhattan. When Dutch colonists settled in Manhattan in the 1620s, they learned from local Native Americans about a small brook that was full of trout. It originated near what is now Gramercy Square, burbled its way through (mostly beneath) Greenwich Village, and emptied into the Hudson at what is now West Houston Street.
Local Native Americans called the stream “Mannette,” which was translated as “Devil’s Water.” Over the years, this name was spelled and respelled and spelled again in a variety of configurations: Minnetta, Menitti, Manetta, Minetta, Mannette, and Minetto. The Dutch called the water Mintje Kill, meaning small stream. In Dutch, “min” translates as little, “tje” is a diminuitive, and “kill” translates as stream. The water was also known as Bestavers Killitie, Bestevaas Kelletye, Bestavens Killitie, Bestavers Killatie, and Bestaver’s Killetje.
Several families of free African-Americans, released from slavery by the Dutch, established farms and settled along the Minetta Brook in the 1600s. With African-Americans continuing to settle here in the 18th and 19th centuries, the area became known as “Little Africa.” Most of the brook has been covered over, though some Village residents can claim that it flows beneath their basements and sometimes causes flooding. In the lobby of the apartment building at 2 Fifth Avenue, there is a transparent tube that is said to contain murky water spouting up from Minetta Brook.
Minetta Playground is located at Minetta Lane, West 3rd Street, and the Avenue of the Americas. In 1934 Board of Transportation granted the Department of Parks a permit to develop this parcel as a playground which opened the following year. In 1953 the Board of Estimate assigned the site to Parks. The northern side of park included a jungle gym, swings, a see-saw, and benches, and the area south of the open pavilion served as a sitting area, with two octagonal play houses, garden swings, and many benches. In 1996-97 the adjacent McDonalds installed new play equipment, safety surfacing, fences, and gates.
.206 acre
WRONG ANSWERS
Skaggerak
This abstract sculpture, consisting of three interlocking, identically sized oblongs made of Cor-Ten steel, is the work of contemporary artist Antoni Milkowski (b. 1935). A gift to the City by the Association for a Better New York, it was fabricated in 1969-70 and installed at the south end of Madison Square Park in 1972.
Milkowski was born October 7, 1935 in Evanston, Illinois, and his family moved to New York City in 1937. He graduated with a degree in biology from Kenyon College in 1957, took additional sciences classes at Columbia University, and considered medical school training. In 1958 he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Officers Candidate Program, and took drawing and art history classes at the University of California extension program, while stationed in San Diego.
In 1961, Milkowski was discharged from the Marine Corps, returned to New York, was hired as a recreation leader by Parks, and enrolled the following year in an M.A. program at Hunter College. Working on and off in the Queens parks, Milkowski taught art at the Lost Batallion Hall Recreation Center. At this time he began to explore modular constructions, and he studied with such artists as Ad Reinhardt, George Sugerman, and Tony Smith. In 1964 he received a Fulbright grant and worked and lectured at the Art Academy of the University of Warsaw in Poland.
In 1965, Milkowski returned to New York, rejoined Parks, and taught classes at Hunter College. The next year he moved to Salem, New York and was appointed to the faculty of Hunter College. He retired 33 years later in 1998 as full professor and graduate advisor. Milkowski’s first one-man exhibition was at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1967. That same year, the installation of his sculpture Diamond at Kips Bay Plaza was included in the City’s first foray into the display of outdoor contemporary art, a group show called Sculpture in Environment.
Milkowski received his first commissions of outdoor sculpture in 1968: Diamond at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and Salem 7 at the South Mall Project, in Albany. He has had numerous exhibits and commissions since, and continues to explore his minimalist, geometric sculptural imagery. Today he lives and works in East Chatham, New York.
In the early 1970s Skagerrak was one of six sculptures by different artists that were donated to the City by the Association for a Better New York — an organization whose mission is to beautify and enliven public spaces. Though abstract in form, the piece derives its name from an arm of the North Sea that separates Denmark and Norway. The strict geometry involves variations of the same form in space, represents a subtle physical balancing act, and is meant to contrast with the earth-toned patina which forms on the surface of Cor-Ten steel.
The piece was first placed at the triangle just north of the Flatiron building at 23rd Street, Fifth Avenue, and Broadway, and then was deposited in a grassy area in this park. It was relocated from the historic confines of the restored Madison Square Park and integrated into a more sympathetic, naturalistic landscape in Bellevue South Park at East 28th Street.
Spuyten Duyvil Creek
There has been much speculation concerning the origin of the name Spuyten Duyvil. Dutch in origin, Spuyten Duyvil can be translated in two ways, depending on the pronunciation. One translation is Devil’s whirlpool, and indeed, sections of the creek were sometimes turbulent during high tide. The second interpretation is to spite the Devil. This translation was popularized by Washington Irving’s story in which a Dutch trumpeter vowed to swim across the turbulent creek during the British attack on New Amsterdam en spijt den Duyvil (in spite of the Devil).
Running from the Hudson River to the Harlem River, the Spuyten Duyvil Creek marks the northernmost tip of Manhattan Island. The creek’s significance is revealed through local Native American legends, an era of Dutch settlement, and laborious years of altering its natural course for commercial purposes. Eventually renamed the Harlem River Ship Canal (also the U.S. Ship Canal), this tidal strait has splendid views, and a variety of wildlife that still thrives despite years of human-induced change.
Lenape Indians inhabited the area for thousands of years. A Lenape settlement once stood on the Bronx side of the creek, in the area above where Columbia’s huge letter C can be seen today. Columbia University rowers painted the letter C for themselves and for their school’s teams, which play at Baker Field/Wien Stadium across the creek. The Lenape Indians called the banks of the Spuyten Duyvil Shorakapok, which has commonly been translated as the sitting down place or the place between the ridges. With an abundance of oysters, fish, waterfowl, and a diversity of other creatures, this region was an ideal hunting and fishing ground for the Lenape. Additionally, they relied on the innumerable freshwater springs that meandered throughout the vast wetlands.
Written accounts of the creek first appear in the year 1609, when Henry Hudson and his crew may have briefly anchored their ship, Half Moon in the Spuyten Duyvil. During the colonial period, many Dutch farmers and merchants found it convenient to cross the Spuyten Duyvil rather than pay for ferry service across the Harlem River at 125th Street. In 1669, to prevent people from crossing for free, Johannes Verveelen moved his ferry to where West 231st Street and Broadway now intersect. In 1673, Frederick Philipse replaced the ferry with a toll bridge known as the King’s Bridge. Reacting to both the fee and the occasional inconvenience of using this bridge, a Dutch landowner named Jacob Dyckman raised funds to construct the Free Bridge in 1758, which was later destroyed by the Continental Army while fleeing the British during the Revolutionary War.
The present course of the Harlem River Ship Canal differs greatly from the Spuyten Duyvil Henry Hudson once visited. To make it more navigable, the Army Corps of Engineers began to modify both the creek and its adjacent land in the latter part of the 19th century. In 1876, the New York State Legislature decreed the construction of the Harlem River Shipping Canal. When completed in 1895, the canal severed Marble Hill from Manhattan, creating an island with Spuyten Duyvil Creek as its northern perimeter. The new channel effectively shortened the water route between the Hudson River and Long Island Sound by 14 miles. Soon after the canal’s completion, builders filled Spuyten Duyvil Creek, thereby connecting the island to mainland Bronx. Since the turn of the century, Marble Hill residents have successfully petitioned to remain within the governance of Manhattan; interestingly, for years telephone directories listed residents in both Manhattan and the Bronx.
Today, the Broadway Bridge, the Henry Hudson Memorial Bridge (opened on December 12, 1936 as part of Robert Moses’ controversial West Side Improvement project), and railroad swing bridge, used by Amtrak passenger trains, still span the waterway.
Ten Mile River Playground
Riverside Park, one of only eight officially designated scenic landmarks in the City of New York, has a long and storied history. The rugged bluffs and rocky outcroppings created through prehistoric glacial deposits once descended directly to the Hudson River shore and were densely wooded during the Native American habitation. In 1846 the Hudson River Railroad was cut through the forested hillside. Acknowledging the city’s expansion northward, Central Park Commissioner William R. Martin proposed in 1865 that a scenic drive and park be built on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The land between the heights and the railroad was bought by the City over the next two years.
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), renowned co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, was retained in 1873 and submitted a plan in 1875 combining park and parkway into a synthesized landscape which adhered to the general topographical contours of hill and dale. Over the next twenty-five years park designs developed under a succession of landscape architects, including Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) and Samuel Parsons (1844-1923). The result, stretching then from West 72nd to 125th Streets, was a grand tree-lined boulevard, an English-style rustic park with informally arranged trees and shrubs, contrasting natural enclosures and open vistas.
The development of the park encouraged the construction of mansions along the drive. At the turn of the century, a movement dubbed the “City Beautiful” sought to promote a more dignified civic architecture, and found expression in the formal neo-classical detailing of the park’s extension from the 125th Street viaduct to 155th Street. Monuments placed along the Drive during this era included Grant’s Tomb (1897), the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial (1902), the Firemen’s Memorial (1913), and Joan of Arc (1915).
The increased rail traffic and waterfront industries founded on landfill extending the shoreline led to an outcry by wealthy residents for municipal action against these uses as unpleasant to the park and community. After decades of discussion a massive park expansion plan, crafted by architect Clinton Lloyd with landscape architect Gilmore Clarke, was implemented between 1934 and 1937 under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. The park was widened westward by 148 acres, and the Henry Hudson Parkway, ball fields, esplanade, 79th Street marina and rotunda were added to it.
This playground is called Ten Mile River Playground because it is located approximately ten miles from the southern tip of Manhattan. A $450,000 renovation was funded in 1995 by Council member Stanley E. Michels. The new design includes a bicycle rack, swings, basketball and volleyball courts, and play equipment. Another feature is a pond-theme spray shower which serves as home to two bronze beavers, a reference to the extensive fur trading which took place along the Hudson River in the 17th and 18th centuries.
#40 – D
Robert Moses Playground
“Parks are the outward visible symbol of democracy.”
–Robert Moses, 1956
In five decades of public service, Robert Moses (1888-1981) had an extraordinary impact on the physical environment of New York. He played a primary role in the development of its parks, transportation, and housing. Moses was born on December 18, 1888 in New Haven, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale in 1909, received a jurisprudence degree from Oxford University in 1911, and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1914.
Moses began his career in the public interest in 1913 as a municipal investigator. Beginning in 1924, Moses held a dozen City and State positions, many concurrently, including: Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA), New York City Construction Coordinator, and sole member of the New York City Parkway Authority. Invested with this authority, Moses constructed 416 miles of highway and thirteen bridges, and thus reached his goal of bringing New York into the automobile era.
Moses entered into his legendary association with parks through Governor Alfred E. Smith. In 1924 he was appointed Chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission and President of the New York State Parks Council. On January 18, 1934, Moses was sworn in by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia as Commissioner of the first unified, citywide Department of Parks, a position he held for 26 years, until he resigned to head the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
In the course of his remarkable career, Moses was responsible for an unprecedented number of physical expansions and improvements. During the Depression year Moses successfully matched his vision for parks with the resources provided by the Works Progress Administration, a federal social program. With over 80,000 laborers and 1,840 architects and engineers at its disposal in 1935, Parks was able to launch projects such as the Riverside Park extension, Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the building of 11 swimming pools. From 1934 to 1960, park acreage more than doubled, to 34,673 acres. Other projects included the addition of 658 playgrounds, 17 miles of beach, zoos, recreation centers, and ballfields. Moses was removed from his last public office when the TBTA was abolished by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1968.
Situated just south of the United Nations , this full-block site was acquired by the city in 1937 as part of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel construction, another Moses undertaking. The playground, which was completed in 1941, shares the block with the tunnel’s ventilating tower. The site was named for Moses by the City Council in 1982, when there was a proposal to build an apartment tower on it.
1.344 Acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Carmansville Playground
In the July 1868 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, a poet named Charles Dawson Shanly (1811-1875) wrote an article about traveling the road along the Hudson River, in which he described the upper Manhattan countryside: The road that leads by Washington Heights to New York is the most picturesque route to the city. Trim hedges of beautiful flowering shrubs border the gravel walks that lead from the road to the villas. Cows of European lineage crop the velvet turf in the glades of the copses. Now and then the river is shut out from view, but only to appear again in scenic vistas. Another contemporary account called it the watering hole of the blue-blooded where social delights were the study and business of summer life.
Carmansville, from which Carmansville Playground takes its name, was one of several villages that lined the Hudson River along this road. It was named for Richard Carman (1801-1867) a wealthy landowner in the area who made his fortune rebuilding much of New York City after the Great Fire of 1835.
Each of the villages had its own smithy, grocery store, school, and church. The southern most village, Harsenville, occupied today’s Lincoln Center area. Striker’s Bay, a term still in use, encompassed the streets in the 80s and low 90s, and Bloomingdale Village extended from the 90s to 112th Street. The next village, between 112th and 140th Streets, continues to be known as Manhattanville, followed by Carmansville from 140th Street to 158th Street. Inwood Village -today’s Inwood- was the northernmost of the hamlets.
By the end of the 19th century, the scenic vistas had become urban landscape, and the watering hole of the blue-blooded was home to a more diverse population. Several wealthy residents remained, and the area consisted mostly of middle class apartment buildings and tenements for the very poor. The turn-of-the-century transformation of the picturesque, meandering Bloomingdale Road into Broadway, the ultimate urban thoroughfare, epitomized the change.
Today Carmansville Playground, located on Amsterdam Avenue between 151st and 152nd Streets, is one of the few reminders of its namesake. The Committee on Streets, Highways, and Sewers named the new property in December 1913, choosing Carmansville to preserve the former designation of this section of the City. The property consists of two parcels: one acquired by condemnation in 1906, and a larger parcel granted to Parks in 1911 by the Department of Water Supply.
A village atmosphere still permeates the neighborhood surrounding the playground. The buildings, many of them brownstones built in the early 20th century, are small in scale, and the gently sloping streets recall the undulating meadows that once characterized this section of Manhattan, now known as Hamilton Heights or West Harlem.
Dr. Ronald E. McNair Playground
This park honors astronaut Dr. Ronald Erwin McNair (1950-1986) who died in the Challenger space shuttle tragedy on January 28, 1986. Dr. McNair was a physicist, karate instructor, performing jazz saxophonist, husband, and father.
Born in Lake City, South Carolina on October 21, 1950, McNair graduated from North Carolina A&T State University and received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. NASA selected him as an astronaut candidate in 1978. His first and only complete space mission began on February 3, 1984. This was the first mission to use the space arm, which McNair operated. His second mission lasted only 73 seconds, before the shuttle exploded in the upper atmosphere, above the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven on board.
Parks acquired this land, located between Lexington and Third Avenues, East 122nd and East 123rd Streets, in 1986 through the efforts of Mayor Edward I. Koch, Commissioner Henry J. Stern, and Council Member Carolyn Maloney. The site was chosen because of its proximity to an auto repair shop once owned by McNair’s father, which he visited as a youth. Working from the ground up, parks designer Nancy Prince gave the site a full outer space and science theme. The nine planets can be found in the pavement and curbs of the park. For example, Jupiter is represented by a 77′8″ ring of pavement, incised with the planet’s name around a lawn area. Despite its 2006 change in status by the International Astronomical Union, Pluto is represented here with a 1′3″ granite disk paver.
The play equipment is designed to resemble a space station, with a shuttle approaching it. Black and white spheres atop a climbing structure represent the phases of the moon. A spinning play feature serves young and old children and provides practical lessons of centrifugal force. Even the spray shower’s custom design consists of a pre-cast concrete dome with moon-like craters. The New York City Art Commission recognized this project with a 2005 design award.
Council Member Philip Reed allocated $1.8 million and Mayor Bloomberg budgeted $154,000 to create Dr. Ronald E. McNair Playground. In addition to the space-styled play equipment, the landscape includes trees, shrubs, perennials, and ground cover. The plants selected are typical of McNair’s native South Carolina and yet well adapted to our northern urban setting. A synthetic turf lawn provides a soft place for play, relaxation, and special events, while those seeking a place to sit can do so on any of the benches located throughout the playground.
Jacob H. Schiff Playground
This parkland honors philanthropist and financier Jacob H. Schiff (1847-1920). Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, Schiff emigrated to the United States in 1865. Soon after his arrival in New York City, he found success as a Wall Street investment banker. In 1875, Schiff joined the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. As a partner in the firm, and later as its senior partner, Schiff helped Kuhn, Loeb and Company to become one of the most prominent investment companies in the world, second only to J. P. Morgan.
Conscious of the plight of many other Jewish immigrants, Schiff became involved in numerous charitable causes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1884, he helped found the Jewish Montefiore Home. Originally located on 84th Street and Avenue A (now York Avenue) in Manhattan, the hospital treated the chronically ill among the city’s poor. With Schiff as its second president and primary benefactor, Jewish Montefiore Home rapidly expanded and later moved to its present location in the Bronx. Throughout the 1890’s, Schiff also financed the work of Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster. Wald and Brewster, two nurses, provided medical care to the thousands of immigrants on the Lower East Side. With Schiff’s backing, they created the Henry Street Settlement in 1895. The settlement house offered food, shelter, and medical treatments for the poor, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs.
In addition to his charitable work for the poor and sick in New York, Schiff contributed to many educational institutions, including Columbia University, Harvard University, Cornell University and Barnard College. Schiff also helped found the Jewish Theological Seminary, and provided the funds for the establishment of the department of Semitic Literature at the New York Public Library. Five years after Schiff’s death, Harvard recognized his unstinting support of education by creating the first Jewish Studies department in the United States in his honor.
This parkland, which is shared by Public School 192, also known as Jacob H. Schiff School, was once home to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. By World War II, the orphan asylum closed and was transformed into army barracks. Shortly after the war, City College acquired the building for use as a classroom and dormitory, naming it Army Hall. The building eventually closed in 1952 and was demolished when Parks and the Board of Education jointly acquired the land in 1956.
In 1987, the Schiff School playground received a $918,623 renovation and was officially named Jacob H. Schiff Playground. In May 2000, the park underwent a $650,000 reconstruction funded by Council Member Stanley E. Michels. The renovation included new play equipment, safety surfacing, benches, new pavement, landscaping, and a spray shower. In 2004 parks completed a $895,000 renovation funded by Council Member Robert Jackson. Work included the installation of an artificial turf field, new bleachers, a drinking fountain.
#41 – C
Peter Cooper Park
For more than a century, Peter Cooper (1791-1883) philanthropist, industrialist and inventor has watched over the park and school that bear his name. Cooper was a native New Yorker and workingman’s son with less than a year of formal schooling, who became one of the most successful American businessmen of his day. He made his fortune in iron, glue, railroads, real estate and communications. His inventions include the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable and Tom Thumb, America’s first functioning steam engine. Cooper also invented Jello with help from his wife, Sarah, who added fruit to his clarified gelatin.
Despite his many successful ventures, Cooper failed in his bid for the presidency in 1876. Representing the Greenback party, he captured 81,737 popular votes. The real contest, however, was between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Jones Tilden. Although Tilden won a majority of the popular vote, he lost the electoral college vote, 185 to 184, to Hayes in a election that was widely regarded as being stolen by the Republicans.
Cooper dedicated his life and wealth to philanthropy, to ensure that immigrants and children of the working class would have access to the education which he never had. Believing that education should be As free as water or air, in 1859 he established the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a coeducational college which continues to provide students with full-tuition scholarships in architecture, art, and engineering. Celebrated features of the institution included a free reading room and the Great Hall. The latter provided the setting for one of Abraham Lincoln’s most important speeches in which he established his anti-slavery platform. He delivered it on February 27, 1860 during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Following Cooper’s death in 1883, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), the preeminent 19th century sculptor and one of the earliest alumni of Cooper Union (class of 1864), was commissioned to design a monument in honor of the great visionary. St. Gaudens collaborated with the renowned architect Stanford White (1853-1906) who created the marble and granite canopy. The official dedication took place on May 29, 1897 at the northern end of Cooper Park.
The park was deeded to the City in 1828 for use as a public space by Charles H. Hall, a descendant of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. Named Stuyvesant Square at the time it was acquired by Parks in 1850, it was referred to as Fourth Avenue Park when it was first planted in the late 1870s, and renamed Cooper Park in 1883. In the early 1900s, the park was redesigned, reconstructing the original walks, enclosing the park with an iron fence, and redesigning the stone periphery to form a continuous seat (this has since been eliminated). The reconstruction of the park in 1938 included destroying the underground comfort station and laying new walks.
More recent improvements have focused on making the park more beautiful and more accessible. The monument was restored in 1987 under the Adopt-a-Monument Program, a joint project of the Municipal Art Society, the Art Commission, and Parks & Recreation. In February 1999, Commissioner Stern and Cooper Union President John Jay Iselin celebrated the 140th anniversary of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commemorating the legacy of Peter Cooper. As of the summer of 1999, new benches and daytime access have reopened Cooper Square to all of its neighbors.
.229 acres
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Andrew Haswell Green
The name Andrew Haswell Green (1820-1903) is unfamiliar to most New Yorkers, yet he was extremely important to the history of both Central Park and New York City. The Greens of Green Hill were among the most prominent families in Worcester, Massachusetts, tracing their ancestry back to Thomas Green, who came to America in 1651. Andrew Green moved to New York in 1835. He was admitted to the bar in 1844 and practiced law with his mentor, Samuel Tilden (1814-1886), who became Governor of New York in 1874 and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1876, losing to Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893).
Green spent most of his life in public office. He was a member of Central Park’s Board of Commissioners during its existence from 1857 to 1871, where he served as president and comptroller. He also served from 1855 for six years on the Board of Education (three as president); and in 1871 he was appointed New York City Comptroller during an emergency precipitated by a fiscal crisis.
During the years that Central Park was under construction (1857-1873), Green had serious disagreements with its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), over fiscal and political matters concerning the Park. Nevertheless, it was Green who saw the brilliance of the Greensward Plan (Olmsted and Vaux’s name for their award-winning design for Central Park) when other commissioners were willing to dismiss it. It is because of Green’s support and protection of the Greensward Plan that so much of Central Park is true to its original design. In January 1858, he was the first commissioner to offer a resolution to extend the Park from 106th, its original northern boundary, to 110th Street.
Green also played an important role in the formation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Central Park Menagerie (the Zoo), and the New York Public Library. In 1868 he recommended that the many unincorporated areas and municipalities of southern Westchester (the Bronx), Kings, Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) counties be consolidated with Manhattan to form the five boroughs of a greater New York City. After making repeated requests to the legislature, his vision was realized when, as president of the Consolidation Inquiry Committee, he helped draft the Consolidation Law in 1895, which was enacted in 1897 and took effect on January 1, 1898.
On November 13, 1903, Green was fatally shot while entering his house on Park Avenue and 40th Street by a man who mistook him for someone else. On May 11, 1929, a bench in Central Park was dedicated to Andrew Haswell Green, the Father of New York City. Five trees representing the five boroughs of New York were planted next to it. The bench was originally placed on the site of Mount St. Vincent’s Academy, on the East Drive at 104th Street. When the composting operation was created in the early 1980s, the bench was moved to the site of Fort Fish, at East 106th Street, a fortification during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and now a knoll overlooking the woodland ravine in Central Park
Montefiore Park
Bounded by Broadway, Hamilton Place, and West 138th Street, this park honors Sir Moses Haim Montefiore (1784-1885), a distinguished nineteenth century Jewish philanthropist. Montefiore was born into a wealthy Italian Jewish merchant family in Livorno, Italy. Several years later, his family immigrated to Great Britain. In 1812, Montefiore married Judith Cohen (bef. 1812-bef. 1885), making him the brother-in-law of the noted British financier Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836). Soon after the marriage, he became Rothschild’s stockbroker as well. By 1824, Montefiore had amassed a considerable personal fortune on the London stock exchange. He used this money to help found the Imperial Continental Gas Association (which pioneered gas lighting for homes in Britain) and the Provincial Bank of Ireland.
At age forty-four, Montefiore retired from business and devoted his time and resources to civic and Jewish community affairs. From 1835 to 1874, he served as president of the Board of Deputies for British Jews, where he worked to end discriminatory practices against European and Middle Eastern Jews. Montefiore personally financed many efforts aimed at helping Jews living in Palestine, which today is the nation of Israel. There, he acquired land on behalf of several Jewish communities and attempted to bolster the region’s economy by introducing printing presses and factories. He inspired the founding of several agricultural settlements as well as Yemin Moshe, which today is located outside of Jerusalem’s Old City and is named for Montefiore. In 1846, Montefiore visited Russia to ask authorities to stop their persecution of Jews. In 1863 and 1867, he traveled to Morocco and Romania for the same purpose. On each of these visits, Montefiore was able to obtain better treatment for Jewish people.
Montefiore’s imposing physical stature (he stood at 6 feet, 3 inches tall) combined with his strong religious beliefs and his philanthropy earned him considerable respect throughout Great Britain and the rest of the world. In 1837, he was elected Sheriff of London. That year, in recognition of his humanitarian efforts, Queen Victoria (1819-1901) knighted Montefiore. In 1847, she bestowed upon him the title of baronet. In 1884, Montefiore’s 100th birthday was declared a public holiday in Jewish communities around the world. That year, the Montefiore Home for Chronic Individuals was formed on 84th Street and York Avenue (Avenue A) by prominent New York City Jewish philanthropists. Montefiore passed away the following year in his home outside of London; his legacy, however, lived on. In 1889, the Home relocated to Broadway between 138th and 139th Streets, to the north of this very park. In 1913, the institution, now known as Montefiore Medical Center, moved to its present location between Gun Hill Road and 210th Street in the Bronx.
In 1906, pursuant to a resolution of the Board of Aldermen, the City of New York acquired this property and designated it Montefiore Park. That same year, Parks assumed jurisdiction over the property. In 1991, a renovation of the park began that was completed in 1993, the rehabilitation project completely transformed the park. New benches and pavement were installed on the north side, and several new plantings were added. New species included the Sweetgum tree (Liquidambar stryaciflua), the Green Mountain Silver Linden tree (Tilia tomentosa green mountain’), the Regent Scholar tree (Sophora japonica regent’), as well as flowering bulbs, including the crocuses and the daffodils.
The Montefiore Park Neighborhood Association, established in 1996, assists Parks in maintaining this gently sloping triangle. The Association initiates new plantings, facilitates community involvement, and organizes events, including an annual Christmas tree lighting. Today, Montefiore Park serves as both a memorial to a dedicated humanitarian and a place to rest the body and restore the senses.
Ralph Bunche Park
This oasis opposite the United Nations honors a titan of 20th century diplomacy. It was named in 1979 for Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-1971), an American educator, political scientist, and United Nations mediator. The son of a barber and grandson of a former slave, Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles and in 1927 from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was valedictorian and a star athlete. Bunche received an M.A. in political science (1928) and a Ph.D. (1934) at Harvard University. He did postdoctoral research in anthropology at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and Capetown University in South Africa. From 1928 to 1950 Bunche served on the faculty of Howard University, where he established and chaired its political science department. He wrote A World View of Race (1936), and also collaborated with Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on a study of blacks in America titled An American Dilemma (1944).
During World War II Bunche served as chief research analyst of the Africa section of the Office of Strategic Services (1941-44). He then worked for the State Department from 1944 to 1947. In 1947 Bunche joined the United Nations Secretariat. After the assassination in September 1948 of Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, the Security Council appointed Bunche to succeed him. From January through July 1949 Bunche successfully brokered the armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab states; for his efforts he was accorded a ticker-tape parade up Broadway in New York City. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the first African-American to receive this celebrated award.
From 1950 to 1952 Bunche taught at Harvard University. Other appointments in the field of education included his service as a member of the New York City Board of Education, Board of Overseers of Harvard University, and Board of the Institute of International Education, as well as a trustee of Oberlin College, Lincoln University, and the New Lincoln School.
In 1955 Bunche was appointed undersecretary of the United Nations, and in 1957 secretary for special political affairs. In 1956 he was civilian supervisor of the UN peacekeeping forces in the Suez area. In 1960 he was part of a UN peacekeeping effort in the Congo, and in 1964 he helped to mediate differences between the Greeks, Cypriots, and Turks. For a lifetime of extraordinary achievement in the international arena, he was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. One year after he retired from the UN in 1970, he died in New York City.
This property is one of several in the Turtle Bay neighborhood acquired by the City of New York in 1948 in connection with the widening of First Avenue. In addition to the London Plane and locust trees, the park is distinguished by four monuments. Peace Form One at the north end is a 50-foot high stainless steel shaft by Daniel Larue Johnson dedicated in 1980. This latter-day obelisk is an homage to Bunche, who was a personal friend of the sculptor. The northwest granite staircase was designed around 1948 by the architectural firm of Andrews & Clark and inscribed in 1975 with a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares.” In 1981 the City Council named the western steps after Russian dissident Anatoly Sharansky. At the southern end of the park a commemorative plaque to civil rights crusader Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was dedicated by former Mayor Edward I. Koch on January 23, 1990.
On August 14, 1985 Mayor Koch joined community leaders, dignitaries from the United Nations, and the widow of Ralph Bunche, to designate this area as New York City’s first peace park. The designation was part of a worldwide effort by Ploughshares, a peace organization and by Architects, Planners and Designers for Social responsibility. The park, a place of public assembly and dissent, across from the United Nations, is the historical site of many demonstrations and protests against political oppression. It embodies in many ways the principles of human understanding and freedom of expression.
.231 acres
#42 – C
Poor Richard’s Playground
This playground bears the name of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most beloved aliases, Poor Richard Saunders. Born in Boston, Franklin (1706-1790) was apprenticed to his brother to learn the printing trade. In 1723 young Ben Franklin moved to Philadelphia, where he launched the Pennsylvania Gazette, soon the most popular newspaper in the colonies. Franklin was one of Philadelphia’s leading citizens, founding the first circulating library, proposing an Academy (which became the University of Pennsylvania), establishing the American Philosophical Society, and creating programs to pave, light, and clean the city streets. He invented the efficient “Franklin Stove” and experimented with a kite in a thunderstorm, proving the presence of electricity in lightning.
From 1733 to 1758, Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanac under the alias Richard Saunders. The Almanac was widely read in the American colonies, selling as many as 10,000 copies annually. It is considered one of the classic works of American colonial literature, and played a large part in uniting and molding the American character. The Almanac was prized for its witty aphorisms, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” “Snug as a bug in a rug,” and “Health is the way to man’s wealth.” From the pages of the Almanac, and in his personal life, Franklin promoted physical fitness; he was an active runner, swimmer, and weight lifter.
Franklin began his political career as clerk of the General Assembly in 1736 and was elected to the Assembly the following year. He served as Postmaster in Philadelphia (1737-53) and as Postmaster General for the colonies (1753-74). Franklin proposed a plan of union for the colonies at the Albany Congress (1754) and served as agent for several colonies in England. He returned to America in 1775 and was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In 1776 he helped to draft and he signed the Declaration of Independence. During the American Revolution, Franklin established the American alliance with France and in 1781 was appointed a commissioner to negotiate peace with Britain. He returned to Philadelphia in 1785 and served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. His last public act before his death in 1790 was to issue a memorial to Congress urging the abolition of slavery.
In 1956 the City of New York acquired property between E. 106th and E. 109th Streets, Second and Third Avenues for the Benjamin Franklin Houses. A .57-acre parcel at the corner of E. 109th Street and Third Avenue was put under Parks jurisdiction in 1959. Over the next year, this parcel and the adjacent 1.01-acre property were improved as a park for the use of children from neighboring J.H.S. 117, the Benjamin Franklin Houses, and the larger community. Jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education, the new playground opened in May 1960. It featured facilities for handball, basketball, volleyball, baseball, rollerskating, and shuffleboard as well as a benches, game tables, a comfort station, and a variety of play equipment for younger children.
The 1981 reconstruction of the playground provided new pavement on the softball fields, renovated the basketball courts, installed new benches and game tables, and rebuilt the fencing and comfort station. Between 1994 and 1996 another series of improvements included a new mural created by the local school, game tables, renovated basketball courts, and basketball clinics. In 1996 Poor Richard’s Playground received new playground equipment from the City Parks Foundation as part of their Modular Playground Equipment Program and new safety surfacing from Nike.
As Poor Richard said, “Employ time well if thou meanest to gain leisure.”
1.58 Acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Anibal Aviles Playground
This playground honors the memory of Anibal Aviles (1947-1966), a gifted athlete who attended nearby J.H.S. 54, where he was captain of the basketball and track teams. Raised on West 109th Street, Aviles belonged to a local Catholic Youth Organization and participated in other organized athletic programs in the neighborhood. He left school to enlist in the United States Marine Corps and fight in the Vietnam War (1964-1975). His brief life ended on March 5, 1966, when he was killed in action.
Anibal Aviles Playground is situated on West 108th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues within Manhattan Valley, the area south of Morningside Heights and north of the Upper West Side. The name Manhattan Valley came into use in the 1960s. It refers to the slope of Manhattan Avenue above 100th Street. The avenue grades down to the south from 104th Street to Morningside Park at 110th Street.
In the mid-19th century, this area was occupied by squatters and shantytowns, but construction of Central Park, beginning in 1859, cleared away the temporary dwellings. In the late 1870s, several asylums for the elderly and the disadvantaged were built here. The neighborhood was the original home of the New York Cancer Hospital, now the world-renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side.
The City acquired this property on March 8, 1943 by condemnation. Initially the proposed site for the Wendell Wilkie Vocational High School, plans for building the high school were abandoned due to budget constraints. The property was then given to the Board of Education for the building of J.H.S. 54 in 1948. The adjacent property, a joint operated playground, was acquired by Parks on July 20, 1950, and a local law was passed on December 29,1969, changing the name of the playground from J.H.S. 54 Playground to Anibal Aviles Playground.
In December of 1993, this site received a $224,000 renovation sponsored by Mayor David N. Dinkins. The playground contains modular play equipment, swings, benches, wide open play areas, and a flagpole with a yardarm. It features many London planetrees (Planatus x acerifolia), a species known for its ability to survive in urban environments.
Fred Samuel Playground
Frederick E. Samuel (1924-1985) devoted his career as a lawyer and politician to improving the quality of life of the people of Harlem. Samuel was born in Montserrat, West Indies on January 22, 1924. After graduating from the Montserrat Secondary School, he came to New York in 1943. Samuel received his B.S. from McGill University, Montreal, in 1949, his M.A. degree from New York University in 1950, and his J.D. from Fordham University in 1954.
Samuel earned a reputation as the “People’s Lawyer”, for the dedication he showed the clients of his Harlem practice. He began his political career as a Democratic Party district leader and was elected councilman for the Fifth District (now the Ninth District) in 1973. He held the office for three terms over the following twelve years. As Chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, Samuel was responsible for the adoption of influential legislation, including laws which created the Arson Strike Force and the Department of Juvenile Justice which have become national models. Another institution which Samuel helped to organize was Harlem Day, the annual observance in which volunteer lawyers, doctors and other professionals provide free services to residents.
Samuel died on September 12, 1985, just two days after he won the Democratic nomination for a fourth term. The playground was named in his memory later that same year by a local law introduced by Councilmember Walter Ward and signed by Mayor Edward I. Koch.
The playground is not far from Samuel’s home on Strivers Row, where he lived for 17 years. It was acquired in 1937 and was jointly operated by Parks and the adjacent P.S. 139 until the 1980s when the school was moved and the park expanded. The area became unofficially known as the Readers Digest Park in 1975 after the publishers donated funds for its reconstruction. It was redesigned by Henri Legendre, a graduate of P.S. 139.
In 1992 a $ 1.1 million reconstruction was completed that provided the park with new play equipment, a basketball court, a spray shower, benches, and landscaping. At this time the Unity Through Murals Program unveiled the playground-wide mural, a cityscape with Harlem buildings and a portrait of Fred Samuel, painted by neighborhood children.
.668 acres
Richard Tucker
Located in a small park triangle known formerly as Empire Park North and adjacent to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, this bronze portrait bust by Milton Hebald (b. 1917) depicts opera star Richard Tucker (1913 & 1975). The bust sits on an inverted, tapered and polished granite pedestal on which are inscribed the titles of 31 operas that Tucker performed.
Tucker was born in Brooklyn in 1913, and he worked as a cantor before making his debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1945. Tucker enjoyed a thirty-year career with the organization, specializing in Italian operatic works. The monument was a gift of Tucker’s wife, Sarah, and was unveiled in 1979. A similar bust was unveiled in Tel Aviv, Israel that same year.
Sculptor Hebald also created the bronze pieces The Tempest (1966) and Romeo and Juliet (1977) in front of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater that commemorate celebrated playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564 & 1616).
#43 – B
Jackie Robinson Playground
Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) is legendary for his pioneering role as the first black professional baseball player in the major leagues. He was born in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919 and raised in Pasadena, California. Robinson’s success was foretold at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he became the first student to earn letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. He then played football for the Los Angeles Bulldogs, before serving in the army during World War II. After the war, Robinson played baseball in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs. His talent was soon recognized by Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who signed Robinson on August 28, 1945 to join the Montreal Royals in the International League. The Royals were the Dodgers top farm team.
On April 15, 1947, Robinson made history as the first African-American to play in a major league baseball game. He paved the way for generations of black athletes to compete in America’s national pastime. Professional baseball, however, did not become fully integrated until 1959, when the Boston Red Sox signed Elijah Green.
Robinson went on to lead the Dodgers, as a second baseman, to six World Series appearances. He retired in 1956 with a lifetime batting average of .311. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. Robinson then became involved with the Chock-Full-O Nuts restaurant chain as well as a number of black-owned community enterprises such as Freedom National Bank (which he co-founded), and a land development firm. He was also active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and served as a special assistant to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. Robinson died of heart disease on October 24, 1972, at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
This playground is located on the former site of Ebbets Field which closed in 1957 after the Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles. It is jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education. It was acquired by the City when I.S. 320 was built in 1964, and opened to the public on October 16, 1969. It was named for Jackie Robinson by Commissioner Stern in 1985, in honor of his achievements on this very site.
1 Acre
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Bill Bojangles Robinson Park
This modestly sized park is named for an important figure in African-American culture: entertainer and philanthropist Bill Bojangles Robinson (1878-1949). Born Luther Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, he was orphaned when still an infant. His grandmother, a former slave, raised him and his two siblings. Robinson left home at the age of eight for Washington, D.C., where he worked as a stable boy at the Benning Race Track. Around this time he assumed the name of his brother William and earned his nickname Bojangles after stealing a beaver cap from a hat maker named Boujasson.
Captivated by dance and the vaudeville tradition, Robinson soon was performing publicly and appeared in a successful 1892 run of Eddie Leonard’s minstrel show, The South before the War. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Robinson enlisted, seeing action not in combat but as his regiment’s drummer. Robinson began traveling the vaudeville circuit and soon became its first major African-American star. His elaborate routines, including his unique stair dance made him a headline performer, and his extravagant habits ’s it was said that he enjoyed a quart of ice cream each day ’s helped create a larger-than-life persona. He also is credited for popularizing the phrase everything is copacetic.
Widespread publicity and his talents as a tap-dancer earned Robinson a starring role in the Broadway revue Blackbirds of 1928. In the 1930s, Robinson began acting in films. Several, such as The Little Colonel (1935), paired him with child-star Shirley Temple, and Stormy Weather (1943), his last of 14 motion pictures, co-starred singer Lena Horne. Robinson continued to perform in live theatrical productions, including The Hot Mikado at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40, held at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens.
Amassing great wealth, Robinson gave away most of his earnings to charities and local organizations. Robinson’s commitment to the community earned him the honorary title Mayor of Harlem. He used this influence to help save a remnant of the historical Tree of Hope that stood opposite the Lafayette Theater at 131st Street and Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard). The stump of the elm, the bark of which performers once rubbed for good luck, was preserved along with a commemorative plaque that Robinson funded.
When Robinson passed away on November 25, 1949, his body lay in state at the 369th Regiment Armory on Fifth Avenue at 142nd Street in Harlem. Luminaries such as Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Duke Ellington and Irving Berlin served as honorary pallbearers and local schools were closed for Robinson’s funeral. Thousands of citizens witnessed the procession as Robinson’s motorcade passed through Harlem and Times Square on the way to his final resting place in the actors’ section of Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn.
For years Robinson lived opposite this park at the Dunbar Apartments, home to many prominent African Americans, including W.E.B. DuBois and A. Phillip Randolph. Dismayed by the lack of play spaces for children, in 1934, Robinson persuaded John D. Rockefeller, Jr., owner of this property, to deed the land to the City as a public park. The playground opened in November of that year and included a jungle gym, swings, seesaws, and handball courts.
In 1992, Mayor David Dinkins funded a $375,000 renovation. The project added new Sentry Gingko (Ginko Biloba) trees, an improved seating area with decorative paving, a new toddler area, basketball court, fencing, lighting, stone veneer walls and a bronze commemorative plaque. The most significant addition was an 18-foot high illusionistic mural depicting Robinson step-dancing. Based on a James J. Kriegsmann photograph and designed by Brandon Adams, the piece features a shadow cast by an actual period street lamp of the type that existed in Harlem during Robinson’s heyday. This small park continues to serve the local community and is a testament to Robinson’s broad impact as an entertainer and humanitarian.
Peter Detmold Park
This park honors Peter Detmold (1923-1972), once a tenant of Turtle Bay Gardens, a conglomerate of 20 townhouses on East 48th and 49th Streets, between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. Detmold fought in World War II, serving under General Patton at the relief of Bastogne and during the climactic fighting of the Battle of the Bulge in France. According to friends, Peter always held himself like a military man, and retained the physical strength he acquired as a soldier.
After returning from the war in 1945, Detmold graduated from Cornell University with a major in history and a minor in music and continued on to earn a Master Degree in medieval history. Detmold was a man of diverse interests. He was fond of reading musical scores, collecting model trains, and working on the genealogy of his family name. Among his civic pursuits, Detmold served as president of the Turtle Bay Association and founded the Turtle Bay Gazette. Detmold lived in Turtle Bay Gardens on East 49th Street, and, with fellow activist Jim Amster, launched the Turtle Bay Association in response to plans to turn 49th Street into a major commercial thoroughfare. When landowners began to rent out office space in residentially-zoned areas, Detmold defended the rights of tenants and homeowners, protecting the quiet, neighborly spirit of the area, now a designated historic district.
On the night of January 6, 1972, after returning home from a meeting of the East Side Residential Association, Detmold was murdered. This park was named in honor of Detmold that same year.
Originally a crescent shaped inlet of the East River, Turtle Bay gets its name from the turtles that lived in it before 1868, when the City filled it in to make space for expansion. Parks acquired the property for Peter Detmold Park, located along the F.D.R. Drive from 49th to 51st Street, in three parts between 1942 and 1951. On October 21, 1986, community leaders and residents broke ground for the $794,000 restoration of the park that included a gazebo, a wooden entrance-way, World’s Fair benches, new asphalt and new lighting. Parks also constructed a wall to shield the park from the F.D.R. Drive. In 1999, City Council member A. Gifford Miller funded a $100,000 renovation, which included a complete reconstruction of sidewalks and fencing.
A plaque and gazebo in Peter Detmold Park honor Peter’s friend James Amster (1908-1986), a strong force in the development of the park. In 1944 Amster bought an aging tenement house, and a few other pieces of property containing run down structures east of Third Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. He improved the lots, creating offices, stores, and apartments. The area is now known as Amster Yard. Together, Amster and Detmold are largely responsible for the buildings that stand in Turtle Bay today.
Sutton Parks
Sutton Parks are five vest-pocket parks that run along the East River in the vicinity of Sutton Place, itself located on York Avenue between 53rd and 59th Streets. The parks were originally known as Five Parks, but were renamed in 1997 by Commissioner Stern for Effingham B. Sutton (1817 & 1891), the entrepreneur who developed this neighborhood.
Sutton was a shipping merchant and one of the few prospectors who succeeded in building a fortune in the California Gold Rush of 1849. In 1875 Sutton built brownstones between 57th and 58th Streets in hopes of establishing a residential community. By the turn of the century, however, the neighborhood along the waterfront had become neglected, suffering from poverty and blanketed with substandard tenement housing. During this era the neighborhood was infamous for gangs of street toughs, known as the Dead End Kids, who congregated at the end of these streets before Sutton Parks were built. Stanley Kingsley’s 1935 play about the area, Dead End, inspired several films depicting the area and the gangs.
Sutton’s venture was saved by the arrival of the Vanderbilts and Morgans in 1920, who began the neighborhood’s transformation into a wealthy enclave. Sutton Parks were created in 1938 following the construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, which runs next to and underneath the properties; the landfill the FDR Drive rests on is largely composed of the rubble of buildings destroyed by the German Luftwaffe’s blitz of London and Bristol during World War II. When the highway was built, some Sutton Place residents lost their access to the East River. The City built private backyards for them in compensation, and three of the five Sutton Parks are between these backyards. Parks took over maintenance and operation of Sutton Parks in 1942.
A $429,000 renovation of the parks, funded by Council Member A. Gifford Miller and Borough President C. Virginia Fields, was completed in 2001. The renovation expanded the horticultural beds, unified the overlook and the parks, and added new lighting, paving, fencing and park benches using plastic slats. Also in 2001 an endowment in the memory of Bronka Novak, a long-time resident of Sutton Place, was established by her husband Adam. The endowment will provide for the maintenance and care of the flowers, trees and shrubs in the parks.
#44 – C
Union Square
For nearly 170 years Union Square has been a gathering place for commerce, for entertainment, for labor and political events, and for recreation. The park owes its name to its location at the intersection or union of two major roads in New York City, Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and Bowery Road (now Fourth Avenue). When the Commissioner’s Plan, the famous gridiron of Manhattan streets and avenues, was projected in 1807, the former potter’s field at this intersection was designated as Union Place. The site was authorized by the State Legislature as a public place in 1831 and acquired by the City of New York in 1833.
On July 19, 1839 Union Square opened to the public. Its paths, situated among lushly planted grounds, were inspired by the fashionable residential squares of London. The design emphasized the park’s oval shape (enclosed by an iron picket fence) and focused on a large central fountain, which was installed for the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842. As New York City’s downtown expanded northward, Union Square became an important commercial and residential center. Around its borders sprang up houses, hotels, stores, banks, offices, manufacturing establishments, Tammany Hall, and a variety of cultural facilities, including music auditoria, theatres, and lecture halls. The grounds of Union Square have frequently served as a choice location for public meetings, including parades, labor protests, political rallies, and official celebrations such as the Great Metropolitan Fair of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in 1864.
In 1871 Parks Engineer in Chief M.A. Kellogg and Acting Landscape Gardener E.A. Pollard collaborated on a new plan for Union Square. A year later the park was redesigned by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. They removed the enclosing fence and hedge, planted a variety of hardy trees, widened the sidewalks, and created a muster ground and reviewing stand “to meet the public requirement of mass-meetings.”
Ten years later, Union Square played a central role in the first Labor Day celebration. On September 5, 1882, a crowd of at least 10,000 workers paraded up Broadway and filed past the reviewing stand at Union Square. As the procession passed the stand, Robert Price of Lonaconing, Maryland said to Richard Griffiths, the General Worthy Foreman of the Knights of Labor, “This is Labor Day in earnest, Uncle Dick.” On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed the legislation which made Labor Day a national holiday.
In 1928-29 Union Square was completely demolished to accommodate a new underground concourse for the subway. Alterations made in the 1920s and 1930s included the straightening of park paths, the construction of a colonnaded pavilion, and the dedication of the Independence (Charles F. Murphy Memorial) Flagstaff (1926, sculpted by Anthony de Francisci). Earlier monuments in the park include George Washington (1856, Henry Kirke Brown), Abraham Lincoln (1868, also Brown), Marquis de Lafayette (1873, by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi), and the James Fountain (1881, by Karl Adolph Donndorf). Since 1976 the Union Square Greenmarket has served as a local landmark, offering a cornucopia of fresh food and plants on the north side of the park, where a flower market flourished over a century ago.
Threatened by general misuse, deterioration, and the presence of drug dealers in the 1970s, Union Square has recently undergone a dramatic transformation. In 1985 major renovations under Mayor Edward I. Koch included creating a new plaza at the south end of the park, relocating paths to make the park more accessible, planting a central lawn, and installing new lighting and two subway kiosks. In 1986 a monument to Indian political leader and social reformer Mohandas Gandhi (1986, by Kantilal B. Patel) was dedicated on a traffic island southwest of the main park. Two new playgrounds were constructed in 1993-94, and a restaurant opened in the sunken courtyard outside the pavilion in 1994.
In 1997 the United States Department of the Interior designated Union Square Park as a National Historic Landmark because of its significance in American labor history. Plans are underway to extend the park line south 14th Street, and to incorporate in the park the traffic island on which the Gandhi statue now stands.
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Father Demo Square
Father Antonio Demo (1870-1936) was born on April 23, 1870, at Lazzaretto di Bassano in the province of Vicenza, Italy. His study at the diocesan and Scalabrinian seminaries was twice interrupted by mandatory military service. Father Demo immigrated to Boston to do missionary work in 1896 and arrived in New York to serve as assistant pastor of Our Lady of Pompei a few years later. In 1900 he was appointed pastor of the church, whose magnificent Italianate building stands northwest of the park at the corner of Bleecker and Carmine Streets.
As pastor, Father Demo was respected for his excellent organizational skills: record-keeping, establishing church groups, working with local charities, and raising funds. Under his leadership, Pompei expanded its liturgical music programs, opened a day care center, and held its first bazaar. In addition to serving as a spiritual counselor to his parishioners, Father Demo was active in social services -translating documents and conversations, finding jobs, making loans, aiding in the immigration process, and writing personal recommendations. His spiritual care was exemplified by his hard work and generosity of spirit in response to the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, which claimed the lives of 146 female employees on March 25, 1911.
In 1923 Father Demo learned that Sixth Avenue (now the Avenue of the Americas) was to be extended from West 3rd Street south to Canal Street to route traffic to the trans-Hudson River Holland Tunnel then under construction. Our Lady of Pompei’s building stood in the middle of the proposed street bed of Sixth Avenue. Father Demo organized the campaign to buy another property and to build a new church, rectory, and parochial school. Under the direction of general contractor and architect Matthew Del Gaudio, the cornerstone of the new building was laid on October 3, 1926, and the church was dedicated two years later, on October 7, 1928.
In 1935 Father Demo became Pompei’s pastor emeritus and superintendent of its parochial school. He died in 1936 in New York, and thousands of parishioners and friends, including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, paid their respects to their beloved pastor. In 1941 the public plaza southeast of Our Lady of Pompei was improved by the Manhattan Borough President and named in memory of Father Demo by local law. Attended by numerous Greenwich Village, Italian, and parish groups, the dedication ceremony included the singing of the national anthem, speeches by city authorities, a parade to Washington Square Park, and a memorial Mass at Pompei.
Fifty years after the cornerstone of the church building was laid, parishioners arranged for an inscription to be engraved on the base of the central lightpole in Father Demo Square. The site is assigned to Transportation and maintained by Parks. As in traditional town plans in Italy, Father Demo Square is a piazza – an open space surrounded by buildings and a gathering place for its community.
Sara Delano Roosevelt Park
When this park was named in 1934 after Sara Delano Roosevelt (1854 -1941), mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), she held the distinction of being the only Presidential mother, after Mary Washington, to live until her son took office.
Sara Delano married James Roosevelt (1828-1900) in 1880 at her family’s home in Newburgh, New York. The couple then resided at his Springwood estate, designed by Central Park architect Calvert Vaux, in nearby Hyde Park. Her philanthropic activities included serving on the board of the Gallaudet home for the deaf, teaching sewing classes to girls and volunteering at the Laura Delano Free Hospital for Children of New York City, founded by the Roosevelt family in 1885 in memory of her sister Laura. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote about her only child’s early years in her 1933 memoir: My Boy Franklin.
The City acquired the land for Sara D. Roosevelt Park in 1929, with the intention of widening Chrystie and Forsythe Streets and building low-cost housing. It was later designated for playgrounds and resting places for mothers and children. The construction of the park in 1934 was the largest park project on the Lower East Side since the acquisition of Tompkins Square Park a century earlier. Parts of four streets were closed (Hester, Broome, Rivington, and Stanton) to accommodate seven distinct play areas with separate playgrounds for boys and girls, as well as two wading pools, a roller skating rink, and a perimeter of benches and shade trees.
The park dedication ceremonies on September 14, 1934 demonstrated the Lower East Side’s reverence for Mrs. Roosevelt and its jubilant reception of America’s finest playground. A cannon salute and a performance by the Parks Department Orchestra were broadcast on radio stations from Maine to Virginia. In his opening address, Harry H. Schlacht, founder of the East Side Home News, proclaimed the day to be the birth of a new Lower East Side. Recent additions to the Sara D. Roosevelt Park include the Golden Age Center for senior citizens, a vendors market, and the Wah-Mei Bird Garden. Park facilities and security improved greatly in 1996, with the completion of a 2.7 million dollar capital project that elevated the sunken park to street level and provided a new playground, the Stanton Street basketball courts, and sidewalks.
Washington Square Park
Washington Square Park is named for George Washington (1732-1799), who served as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. On April 30, 1789, six years after the victory of the colonists, Washington was inaugurated in New York City as the first President of the United States. He served for two four-year terms.
The parkland was once a marsh fed by Minetta Brook. It was located near an Indian village known as Sapokanikan or Tobacco Field. In 1797 the Common Council acquired the land for use as a Potter’s Field or common burial ground. The field was also used for public executions, giving rise to the tale of the Hangman’s Elm which stands in the northwest corner of the park.
The site was used as the Washington Military Parade Ground in 1826, and became a public park in 1827. Following this designation, a number of wealthy and prominent families, escaping the disease and congestion of downtown Manhattan, moved into the area and built the distinguished Greek Revival mansions that still line the square’s north side. One of these provided the setting for Henry James’ 1880 novel, Washington Square. In 1835, the park also hosted the first public demonstration of the telegraph by Samuel F.B. Morse, a professor at New York University, which is adjacent to the park.
Soon after the creation of the Department of Public Parks in 1870, the square was redesigned and improved by M.A. Kellogg, Engineer-in-Chief, and I.A. Pilat, Chief Landscape Gardener. The marble Washington Arch was built between the years 1890 and 1892 to replace the popular wooden arch erected in 1889 to commemorate the centennial of Washington’s inauguration. The architect Stanford White modeled both structures on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Two statues of Washington were installed on the north face of the arch in 1918, Washington as Commander-in-Chief, Accompanied by Fame and Valor by Hermon MacNeil, and Washington as President, Accompanied by Wisdom and Justice by Alexander Stirling Calder.
Other monuments in this park are J.Q.A. Ward’s bust of steel manufacturer Alexander Lyman Holley (1890), Giovanni Turini’s statue of Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi (1888), a World War I flagpole, and the central fountain which was moved here from Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in the mid 1870s.
Use of public space in Washington Square Park has also been redefined throughout the 20th century. Fifth Avenue ran through the arch until 1964 when the park was redesigned and closed to traffic at the insistence of Village residents. With the addition of bocce courts, game tables, and playgrounds, the park has become an internationally known meeting ground for students, local residents, tourists, chess players, and performers. A $900,000 renovation was completed in 1995.
#45 – B
Father Duffy Square
The northern triangle of Times Square, located between 45th and 47th Streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Duffy Square, has been a magnet for tourists, a staging area for public rallies, the scene of victory celebrations, and since 1973 a destination point for those in search of reduced-price theater tickets. Dominated in 1909 by a temporary eight-ton, fifty-foot statue by Leo Lentelli entitled Purity (Defeat of Slander), today this square’s so central to the theater district–is defined by statues of George M. Cohan and Father Duffy, as well as a large public viewing grandstand along the north side.
At the base of this bleacher stands the statue honoring the park’s namesake. Father Francis Patrick Duffy (1871-1932) was a military chaplain and a priest in the Times Square area. Born in Cobourg, Canada, Father Duffy moved to New York City in 1893 to teach French at the College of St. Francis Xavier (now Xavier High School). He was later ordained as a priest and in 1898, he accepted a teaching position at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, New York, where he remained for the next fourteen years.
Father Duffy’s military service began in the Spanish-American War of 1898, serving as First Lieutenant and chaplain of the legendary Fighting 69th Infantry of the National Guard as well as Post Chaplain at the military hospital in Montauk Point, Long Island. In 1912, Father Duffy left St. Joseph’s Seminary and moved to New York City to establish the Parish of Our Savior in the Bronx.
In 1916, Father Duffy returned to the 69th Infantry, serving in Europe during World War I as part of the Rainbow Division and earning a number of medals. After the close of the war, Father Duffy returned to New York, and in 1920, was appointed pastor of the Holy Cross Church, located at 237 West 42nd Street. Serving the theater-district community for over a decade, Father Duffy died on June 26, 1932. In 1949 veteran character actor Pat O’Brien portrayed Duffy in the Hollywood film based on his life, The Fighting 69th, which also starred James Cagney.
This parkland was acquired by the City of New York in 1872 by condemnation for street purposes and transferred to Parks on January 31, 1934. Three years later, on what would have been Father Duffy’s sixty-sixth birthday, Parks dedicated this bronze statue of Father Duffy, standing in front of a granite Celtic cross and facing towards his old church, designed by sculptor Charles Keck (1875-1951). In 1939, a local law named this parkland in his honor.
The bronze statue at the park’s southern end depicts composer, playwright, and actor George M. Cohan (1878-1942). The statue was designed by Georg John Lober (1892-1961) and dedicated in 1959. Cohan is best known for his hit song whose opening line, Give my regards to Broadway / Remember me in Herald Square / Tell all the gang at 42nd Street that I will soon be there, captured the city’s spirit at the time. In 1942, James Cagney won an Academy Award as best actor for his portrayal of song and danceman Cohan in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy.
In 1973 the first TKTS booth, designed by Mayers and Schiff, was built at the square’s north end. The facility, sponsored by the Theater Development Fund, was intended to provide affordable theater admission, and boost the numbers attending Broadway shows–the lifeblood of the surrounding district. In 1997 the statues of Cohan and Duffy were conserved in a project financed by the Times Square Business Improvement District (later renamed the Times Square Alliance.) The rapidly increasing volume of tourists frequenting the revitalized Duffy Square spurred a comprehensive redesign, renovation and expansion. A world-wide competition to improve this public space, sponsored by the Van Alen Institute in 1999, generated 683 entries, from which a concept by Australian architects John Choi and Tai Ropiha was the winning entry. This conceptual plan was then developed by the Times Square Alliance in conjunction with the Theater Development Fund and Coalition for Father Duffy.
The firm of Perkins Eastman further refined the most significant feature of this improved Duffy Square–a new TKTS glassed-in sales center whose canopy doubles as a red staircase from which visitors may view the bustling activity at this crossroads of the world. Further improvements by architect William Fellows removed fencing and established a more open plaza of 3800 granite pavers, creating a more hospitable environment in which pedestrians may congregate. The newly designed Duffy Square reopened in the autumn of 2008. Subsequently the adjacent portions of Broadway were closed to vehicular traffic, and seating installed by the City in what was formerly roadbed, producing a greatly enlarged public plaza. Today, Duffy Square functions as an expansive piazza welcoming visitors from around the globe.
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Donnellan Square
This square honors Private First Class Timothy Donnellan (d. 1918), a local resident who died in World War I. Donnellan arrived in the United States from Ireland in 1916 and enlisted in the 69th New York Regiment from which the Army formed the 165th U.S. Infantry of the famous Rainbow Division.
On June 1, 1918, Donnellan’s sister, Mrs. Thomas Loonan, received a letter stating that her brother had been killed defending his post on May 30. On the same day, she received a letter from Donnellan, written a few days before his death. He reported that he was in good health and eager to face the enemy. He also reported that his chaplain, Father Duffy, a New York hero and namesake of Duffy Square, opposite of Times Square, was well. In the same batch of mail were letters from Donnellan’s friends, attesting that he had fought like a hero and died at his post.
Donnellan Square sits in the midst of Harlem’s Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill historic district. Sugar Hill developed as the most prosperous section of Harlem, and was given its nickname because its residents were said to live the sweet life. Its citizens have included entertainers such as Bill Bojangles Robinson and Cab Calloway, as well political leaders such as Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins.
At the request of the Hamilton Heights-West Harlem Community Preservation Organization, funding was secured by City Council Member Stanley Michels for Donnellan Square reconstruction. Designed by Gail Wittwer and completed in 2002, the enlarged park now lies between St. Nicholas Avenue and St. Nicholas Place, from 150th Street to just below 149th Street. Fourteen benches stand within the park, and because Donnellan Square falls in a historic district its three new lampposts are replicas of an old-fashion style.
One of the three expanded planting beds holds the community’s Christmas Tree, a Norway spruce surrounded by Carefree delight rosebushes and Upright yews. The smaller of the other two planting beds contain Scholar trees, Japanese tree lilacs, Inkberry bushes, Summersweets, Oakleaf hydrangeas, Carefree delight roses, and butterfly bushes. New Buchner Boxes provide onsite water sources so that the community residents that maintain the plantings will no longer have to carry water over by hand.
Sir Winston Churchill Square
This garden and sitting area borders Downing Street and the west side of Sixth Avenue. It was named by Parks in honor of British Prime Minister Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), whose official residence, located at 10 Downing Street in London, shares the name of one of the streets bordering this square. Churchill’s speeches from his official residence at London’s 10 Downing Street inspired the world during some of the twentieth century’s darkest hours during World War II. He is one of only three people made an honorary citizen of the United States by Congress. The others are Raoul Wallenberg and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Sir Winston Churchill’s career as an author, journalist, painter, politician and statesman spanned the late nineteenth century and a good deal of the twentieth century. Born on November 30, 1874, Churchill was the eldest son of Lord Randolph and Lady Jeannette Churchill. His mother, formerly Jeanette Jerome (1854-1921) was a New Yorker, a fact of which Winston was deeply proud. After graduating from the Royal Military College, Churchill was commissioned into the Royal Army in 1894. Five years later, as a war correspondent in the Boer War, he was captured. Following his subsequent escape, Churchill became a national hero, a role he would cultivate for the next sixty years through ceaseless, extraordinary service in the British government.
Churchill is best known for his role as Prime Minister of England during World War II. Always wary of the Nazi power, he refused to make peace until Hitler was defeated, a decision which proved instrumental to the ultimate Allied victory. His fortitude and wisdom in the War incidentally earned him the ultimate New York City honor, a ticker-tape parade up Broadway in 1946. That same year, on a visit to Fulton, Missouri, Churchill coined the phrase Iron Curtain in reference to the Soviet Union’s expansionist tendencies.
In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing and oratory, and in 1963, he was declared an honorary U.S. citizen by an Act of Congress. Although he refused a peerage, his wife, Clementine Ogilvy Hozier, whom he married in 1908, accepted one in 1965 for her public service. A member of parliament until the year before his death, Churchill will forever hold a place in annals of twentieth century history, for his vitality, imagination, boldness, and most of all, his ability to lead the world into peace.
Parks purchased this .05-acre parcel in 1943. The sitting area, designed by George Vellonakis, was rebuilt from 1998 to 1999 to incorporate garden spaces, a pedestal mounted armillary and a decorative, gated iron fence. The Bedford Downing Block Association continues to be an important force behind the maintenance and upkeep of Churchill Square, ensuring that it remains the peaceful oasis that it is now for years to come.
Verdi Square
Verdi Square was acquired by Parks in 1887 and was named in 1921. The area was formerly a part of the old village of Harsenville located on Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway). It was a popular choice for summer villas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the early 1900s the square served as a gathering place for musicians, including Enrico Caruso and Arturo Toscanini.
In 1974, Verdi Square was designated a Scenic Landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, one of only nine public parks to receive this distinction. The monument was restored in 1997 with funds from the Broadway/72nd Associates.
A permanent monument maintenance endowment has been established by Bertolli USA, Inc. Additional funds for new landscaping designed by Lynden Miller have been donated by Harry B. Fleetwood, and the Verdi Square landscape has been endowed in memory of James H. Fleetwood, a musician.
#46 – B
Luther Gulick Playground
Luther Halsey Gulick, III (1865-1918) was an educator, reformer, and community leader who is best remembered as the Godfather of Basketball. As a physical education director at the Springfield, Massachusetts Young Men’s Christian Association, he challenged colleague James Naismith in the autumn of 1891 to concoct a game that could be played indoors during the winter months. On December 21 of that year, Naismith presented Gulick with a soccer ball and two peach baskets, and the game of basketball was born. In 1959, Gulick was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame for his role as a contributor to the sport.
Gulick, whose belief in a trilogy of mind, body, and spirit inspired the YMCA’s inverted triangle design, vigorously promoted physical education in New York City public schools and supported the concept of city playgrounds. In 1903, he founded the Public School Athletic League to bring organized team sports to youths in New York City. In 1910, he and his wife Charlotte co-founded the Campfire Girls, an organization that extended to young women opportunities similar to those offered by the Boy Scouts, which had been formed one year earlier. This group was one of the first such organizations not affiliated with a religious institution and represented Gulick’s extensive and evenhanded interest in making outdoor and sporting pursuits available to all young people.
Gulick’s nephew Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick (1892-1993), who shared his uncle’s name, also shares the distinction of having this playground named for him. From 1921 to 1961, Dr. Gulick served as president of the Institute for Public Administration (IPA), the first American organization formed to promote scientific management of government. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Dr. Gulick to serve on the Committee on Administrative Management, a three-member advisory board that convened in 1936 and 1937 to reorganize the executive branch of the Federal Government. In addition to advising President Roosevelt and two New York City mayors, Dr. Gulick taught for eleven years at Columbia University, his alma mater. The IPA has established the title Luther Gulick Scholar in Residence to honor distinguished associates of the Institute.
Luther Gulick Playground borders historic Willett Street/Bialystoker Place, named after Marinus Willett, Revolutionary War hero and New York City mayor from 1807 to 1808, and Bialystoker Synagogue, a religious landmark up the block. Erected in 1826 as the Willett Street Methodist Episcopal Church, the building has served as the Bialystoker Synagogue since its sale in 1905 to an immigrant Jewish congregation from Bialystok, Poland. The history of the synagogue mirrors the changes occurring in the neighborhood at the turn of the century when thousands of Eastern European Jews moved to the area.
The park itself has met with significant changes since its acquisition in 1931. When the city purchased the site, Parks Commissioner John E. Sheehy proposed to name the property in honor of Gulick. However, at a 1933 convention the Board of Aldermen moved to name it after Bernard Downing, the recently deceased minority leader of the New York State Senate. The park was known as Bernard Downing Playground from its opening in 1933 until 1985 when the playground was renamed to honor both Gulicks’ civic contributions.
As well as undergoing a name change, the park has benefited from extensive renovations in recent years. In 1999, nearly $200,000 was allotted to a reconstruction effort that provided new asphalt pavement, modular play equipment, a sprinkler system, and a roller-skating area. Yet older attractions remain: visitors can still sit in the shade of the pin oak and London Plane trees, or, with the park’s first namesake in mind, play a game of basketball.
WRONG ANSWERS
Bounded by Lexington Avenue, East 105th Street, and East 106th Street, this park honors renowned civil rights activist and author Walter White (1893-1955). White was born in Atlanta, Georgia, a few decades after the Civil War. Considering his fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, it must have been tempting for White, an African American, to pass himself off as being white. Instead, White chose to live his life proudly as an African American, championing the cause of civil rights and exploiting his appearance to investigate lynchings and race riots.
At age 25, White became Executive Assistant Secretary of the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP). Eighteen years later, he was appointed the Executive Secretary of the organization. During his tenure, White expanded the number of NAACP branches, increased the membership to more than 500,000, and helped found the Legal Defense and Education Funds, which fought for social integration in the 1950s and 1960s. During World War II (1939-1945), White served as a special correspondent for the New York Post in Europe and Japan. He was also an accomplished author of both fiction and nonfiction. His most widely read works were two fictionalized accounts of Southern lynchings, Fire in the Flint (1924), Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), and his acclaimed autobiography, A Man Called White (1948). In 1937, White received the Spingarn Medal in recognition of his efforts to improve the lives of African Americans. Eight years later, he served as a consultant to the United States delegation at the organizational meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco. White died in New York in 1955.
This small playground has been a part of the Harlem community since the early part of the twentieth century. The Italian Benevolent Institute was the first organization to operate a playground on this site. In 1936, the City of New York acquired a 0.52-acre plot of land from the Institute and transferred jurisdiction over the property to Parks. In the following years, Parks lobbied to acquire more land because the small park could not accommodate the expanding community. In 1938, the park grew substantially after the successful purchase of a 0.118-acre plot adjacent to the northeast border of the park. Under the auspices of the Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947), the park took its current shape with the purchase of a 0.046-acre plot on the southeast corner of the original park property.
This playground was named in Walter White’s honor by Commissioner Stern in 1989. Six years later, the park underwent a $119,000 renovation. The project supplied new playground equipment, including a turtle sculpture surrounded by safety surfacing, which offers children a fun and safe climbing area. In 1996, Parks completed a $24,000 rehabilitation of White Playground, funded by City Council member Phillip Reed, which featured the installation of improved safety surfacing. Parks renovated the playground three years later, again funded by Council member Reed. The $81,617 project added two new basketball courts to the park.
White Playground currently features basketball and handball courts, swings, and two sets of slide equipment with safety surfacing. The playground is also a Police Athletic League (PAL) site, and hosts summer basketball tournaments. Today, White Playground is more than a welcome place of recreation; it is a memorial to a dedicated activist whose courage and belief in racial equality serves as an inspiration to all.
Holcombe Rucker Playground
Holcombe Rucker (1926-1965) dedicated his life to his community. Although he died young, his memory endures because of the major basketball tournament he founded. Rucker grew up in Manhattan, attended Benjamin Franklin High School, and between 1948 and 1964 worked for Parks as a playground director in numerous Harlem locales.
In 1947, the year that Rucker married Mary Thomas, he started a basketball tournament in Harlem. The Rucker League’s motto was each one, teach one, and it stressed education in combination with recreation. Rucker personally taught participants reading fundamentals, graded their homework, and let success on report cards influence who would play. Throughout the course of the tournaments, Rucker helped to obtain over 700 college athletic scholarships for the participants. Rucker continued his own education with a degree from the City College of New York in 1962, and then taught English classes at J.H.S. 139.
In the 1960s, Rucker transformed his local league into a basketball institution by organizing games where his best players shared the court with professionals such as Wilt Chamberlain. Although Rucker died at age 38 due to complications from cancer, the 1960s and 1970s represented a high point for the Pro Rucker League when greats such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came to play. By the early 1980s, professional athletes became reluctant to risk injury during non-season play, and the league returned to its amateur roots; Rucker’s original tournament, however, is still played today in Colonel Charles Young Playground.
A number of basketball tournaments for children, high school, college, and professional players now take place in Rucker Playground, including the Entertainers Basketball Classic and the Each One Teach One tournament. The Rucker court and the top players it attracts have also been the subject of two films, Above the Rim and On Hallowed Ground. Both films secure the park’s place in urban and basketball history.
Located north of 155th Street, and bounded by Frederick Douglass Boulevard and the Harlem River Drive, the park opened February 23, 1956, as P.S. 156 Playground. In 1974, a local law re-named it Holcombe Rucker. In 1993, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger sponsored a $423,000 renovation of the playground, reconstructing the facility as part of the Neighborhood Park Improvement Program (NPIP). The resulting facility contains play equipment, swings, safety surfacing, a spray shower, a flagpole with yardarm, a comfort station, four handball courts, seal animal art, and a baseball diamond. But, amongst an array of bleachers and stadium lights stands the Holcombe Rucker Basketball Court, the park’s main attraction, where both local players and national idols have come to play for four decades.
Sol Lain Playground
This playground, located on East Broadway, Gouverneur, and Henry Streets, is named to honor Sol Lain (1936-1971), a community activist who dedicated his life to serving the youth of this Lower East Side neighborhood. Lain lived in the nearby Vladeck Park Houses with his wife Betty, and ran youth sports programs at the Henry Street Settlement, and later at the Educational Alliance. He oversaw baseball and other recreational activities at these and other non-profit organizations, but his passion was basketball. Lain often brought teams he coached to sports tournaments as far away as the Catskills. In the 1960s, tournaments organized by Lain at this playground attracted professional basketball players including Fred Crawford and Bob McCullough, and rivaled the Harlem’s legendary Rucker tournaments for a time. When Sol Lain died of cancer in 1971, a local law passed naming this park, formerly Henry Street Playground, in his honor.
After Sol Lain’s death, community members formed an association to continue his work with children. The Sol Lain Association sponsors youth sports events at the playground, including double-dutch competitions, a wiffle-ball league, flag football, trophy ceremonies, and back-to-school block parties. The association also helps to maintain the playground, organizing paintings and cleanups, lobbying for renovations, and working with public officials to provide playground equipment and upkeep.
Public School 147 once stood on the site of Sol Lain Playground. The school was replaced by P.S. 134 in 1959, and a connecting playground was completed a year later. Public School 134 is also known as Henrietta Szold School, named in honor of the educator and activist who in 1912 founded Hadassah, a women’s Zionist and humanitarian organization. During the 1930s, Henrietta Szold (1860 & 1941) formed the Children’s Youth Aliyah, which rescued thousands of children from Nazi Germany and helped them resettle in Israel. A mural in the school’s lobby celebrates Szold’s achievements and philosophy. The school, which serves children in kindergarten through sixth grades, continues Szold’s dedication to children through its commitment to promoting the success of students of all backgrounds.
Henry Street, where this playground is located, is named for Henry Rutgers (1745 & 1830), a wealthy Dutch merchant and the namesake of Rutgers College in New Jersey. This street, one of two named in his honor (the other is nearby Rutgers Street), was named for him in the early 19th century, when Rutgers donated two lots to the City as a school site. Gouverneur Street is named for Abraham Gouverneur, a 17th century merchant and political activist.
Once populated by wealthy Dutch farmers and merchants, this Lower East Side neighborhood was by the turn of the 20th century largely a Jewish enclave. It was home to a flourishing Yiddish theatrical and artistic community, radical intellectuals, and tens of thousands of immigrant families. After World War II, the Lower East Side’s ethnic makeup shifted as the neighborhood became one of the first racially integrated communities in the City. In recent years, the neighborhood has attracted residents of all nationalities and walks of life.
Sol Lain Playground, jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education, contains a basketball court, climbing area, slides, swings, and volleyball and baseball playing surfaces. Mayor Giuliani contributed a total of $112,421 to pay for recent renovations including re-paving the baseball field in 1999, and installing new play equipment and safety surfacing in 1998. In 1994, P.S. 134 teachers and students started a small garden in the playground. Designed to teach children about plant life and gardening techniques, the garden is maintained by students and teachers and sponsored by GreenThumb’s Education in the Gardens program.
#47 – A
Battery Park
Located at the southern tip of Manhattan with ready access to the harbor and the Hudson River, Battery Park is where the history of New York City began. The area’s strategic location was recognized by Native Americans and Dutch settlers, who called it Capske Hook (from Kapsee, an Indian term for rocky ledge). Near this point, the colonists of the Dutch West India Company began the settlement of New Amsterdam in 1625. As the colony grew and its commerce expanded, piers, wharves, and slips rose along the coastline. The Dutch constructed Fort Amsterdam as early as 1626, and around 1683, the first of a series of gun batteries was constructed around the shore.
With its fine promenade and magnificent vista of the harbor, the Battery became a popular place for New Yorkers to visit in the early 18th century. Its development as a public park owes to its enlargement through landfill. Fort George (as Fort Amsterdam was then known) was completely razed in 1788, and its remnants were used to fill in the shore and expand the Battery. Between 1808 and 1811, a new circular fort known as the West Battery was erected 200 feet offshore. It was renamed Castle Clinton (for Governor De Witt Clinton) in 1815 and ceded to the City in 1823. Around this time, the park was extended further by landfills to an area of about ten acres. Another massive landfill project got underway in 1853 and was completed in 1872.
Meanwhile, the old fort was renamed Castle Garden and provided the setting for countless receptions, demonstrations, and performances for more than thirty years. General Lafayette was welcomed there in 1824 and Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth in 1851. Inventor Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrated his wireless telegraph in 1842, and singer Jenny Lind made her American debut in 1850. From 1855 to 1890 the building was used as the federal immigration center for the east coast, processing approximately eight million immigrants. In 1890 Castle Clinton was acquired by the New York City Department of Public Parks, which operated the New York Aquarium there from 1896 to 1941.
Portions of Battery Park were closed from 1940 to 1952, while the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the Battery Park Underpass were built beneath it. Although construction was delayed by World War II, New Yorkers were delighted with the dramatically transformed park, completely relandscaped and expanded by two acres. Subsequent alterations include the addition of Peter Minuit Plaza in 1955 and the dedication of the East Coast Memorial in 1963. Castle Clinton was ceded to the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1950 and designated a national monument. In 1982 New York State designated Battery Park as a part of Harbor Park, a group of historic waterfront sites.
Battery Park contains many monuments honoring soldiers, explorers, inventors, and immigrants. In 1995 this American Linden (Tilia Americana) tree was planted as a tribute to singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887), whose performance at Castle Garden on September 11, 1850 was billed as the musical event of the century. Thanks to promoter P.T. Barnum, the arrival of the Swedish Nightingale caused a sensation in New York. Thousands of fans purchased Jenny Lind cakes, hats, boots, opera glasses, parasols, and concert tickets. At the concert, Lind earned $12,600, all of which she donated to charitable and benevolent institutions in New York City. She concluded her American tour with a farewell performance at Castle Garden on May 24, 1852.
WRONG ANSWERS
Fort Washington Park
On June 20 1776, Pennsylvania battalions of the Continental Army began constructing a five-bastion fort for General George Washington (1732 & 1799) at the intersection of present-day Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street. Their quickly assembled, earthen-walled structure had no water supply and no significant barricade to repel attackers. The highest hill on Manhattan island was an ideal location for the fort, with its views overlooking the Hudson River to the east, the valley of Manhattan as far south as what is now 120th Street, and protection on the north side from Fort Tryon. Unfortunately, Fort Washington’s prime position did not spare it from British bombardiers. British, and Hessian forces captured this last American stronghold in Manhattan on November 16, 1776, as General Washington watched helplessly from Fort Lee on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. The overall battle of New York City, from Manhattan to Long Island, cost the Continentals several hundred lives and over four thousand prisoners of war.
The British army and its sympathizers then occupied the city until the American victory in 1783. Wilhelm, Baron von Knyphausen (1716 & 1800), a German general in British service, was commander of New York from 1779 to 1780 and what remained of the American fort was renamed Fort Knyphausen in his honor. After the war, vestiges of the Fort disappeared, and the surrounding area became known as Washington Heights. Granite paving outlines the former contours of Fort Washington in the southern portion of nearby Bennett Park. For the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Washington in 1976, the Washington Heights-Inwood Historical Society re-enacted the conflict on the site of the former fort.
The Laws of 1894 mapped this park, which now stretches from 155th Street to Dyckman Street and from Riverside Drive to the Hudson River, as parkland and named it Fort Washington Park. The City of New York officially acquired most of the property in five separate parcels between 1896 and 1927, all through condemnation. Parks was granted jurisdiction at the time of those acquisitions, but some additional parkland was added from the Port of New York Authority (1939), the Board of Estimate (1966), and the Department of Real Property (1989).
In the early 20th century, many construction plans circulated for this parkland. In 1912, the West End Hotel wished to build a sister facility with views of the majestic Hudson. Developers advanced plans to build an open-air stage and comfort station on the shore of the Hudson in 1913. The theatre was to be a reproduction of an ancient Greek theatre in Taormina, Sicily. Each time the threat of encroachment loomed, the neighborhood organizations of Washington Heights fought to protect their green space.
Inspiration Point Shelter, on Henry Hudson Parkway at 190th Street, opened in 1925 as a resting place for pedestrians and leisure drivers. Designed by architect Gustave Steinacher in 1924, the neoclassical sitting area opened a year later and quickly became a favorite of Hudson River tourists. In 1927, the Board of Estimate allowed Parks to relinquish control of a parcel of land at 179th Street for the Port of New York Authority’s construction of the George Washington Bridge. When it was completed in 1931, the steel-cabled beauty was the longest suspension bridge in the world.
The West 181st Street Beautification Project and the New York Restoration Project help Parks ensure that Fort Washington Park can provide diverse opportunities for rest and recreation. Baseball fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, and a playground welcome athletes of all ages. Benches are available for those who simply want to take in the views of the Hudson River and the Palisades Cliffs in New Jersey. Each September, the Little Red Lighthouse Festival brings hundreds of lovers of children’s literature and nautical history to Fort Washington Park and its most famous landmark, in the shadow of the Great Gray Bridge.
Harlem Hybrid
Harlem Hybrid was dedicated in 1976, and is a site-specific assemblage sculpture made of polished and welded industrial bronze by Richard Hunt (born 1935), one of the foremost African-American sculptors in the United States.
Based in Chicago, Hunt is known for his large-scale abstract works. Harlem Hybrid rises like a rock outcropping from its landscaped setting on busy west 125th Street. In 1998, Hunt described his working method as an overarching impulse to accomplish a synthesis of organic and industrial subject matter, hybridizing and layering it with a certain amount of ambiguity to open it up and make it thought-provoking.
Harlem Hybrid is one of many hybrid pieces by the artist combining references to natural, industrial and architectural elements. Others include Active Hybrid (1983) in Peoria, Illinois; Europa Hybrid (1977) at the Nassau County Museum of Art; Hybrid Construction (1983) at Ohio’s Miami University; Palmate Hybrid (1970) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Tower Hybrid (1975) in St. Louis, Missouri; and Fox Box Hybrid (1979) in his native Chicago.
Hunt is responsible for more than 80 public sculptures and has had numerous solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and Studio Museum of Harlem, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1972, not long after showing at MoMA, Hunt was commissioned to make Harlem Hybrid by art patron Peter Putnam, who also sponsored George Segal’s Gay Liberation Monument in Greenwich Village’s Christopher Park.
Roosevelt Square was at the time a small unadorned plaza, and Hunt sought to reference its urban context, taking inspiration for instance from a church directly north of the square. This creative process produced a robust abstract work that made use of the triangular space in its configuration. Four preparatory models of variations for the project are now in the collection of the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture, and similar works by Hunt may be found at the University of Illinois and Memphis.
In 2008, Parks’ Citywide Monuments Conservation Program, a public-private partnership, conserved the sculpture, and the triangle was landscaped with low-lying junipers and a gravel border to improve visibility of the artwork, and permit it to be seen from all vantage points. In April 2009 Richard Hunt was honored by the International Sculpture Center with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Tompkins Square Park
This park honors Daniel D. Tompkins (1774-1825), who served as Governor of New York from 1807 to 1817 and as Vice President of the United States under James Monroe (1758-1831) from 1817 to 1825. Peter Stuyvesant (1610-1672), director general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, owned this property during the 17th century. Tompkins later acquired it, and by the 19th century, it was marked for development as a public square.
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 proposed a large market on this land stretching from First Avenue to the East River, but plans for the market never materialized. Bordered today by Avenues A and B, and 7th and 10th Streets, Tompkins Square Park was acquired by the City in 1834. Originally swampland, this site was graded and landscaped between 1835 and 1850. In 1866, the New York State Legislature ordered the City to remove a number of trees that had been planted at the time of the park’s creation to allow for an open parade ground for the Seventh Regiment of New York. A few Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) trees were spared, and of those, three survived to the present day. Believed to be the oldest trees in the park, two of the Sycamores can be found along 10th Street and the other is located on Avenue A at 9th Street.
The New York State Legislature, bowing to pressure from city residents, redesignated the square as a public park in 1878, and it was redesigned the following year. Approximately 450 trees were planted and many of those remain in the park today. Species include Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), American elm (Ulmus americana), and Oriental plane (Platanus orientalis).
The park is home to several monuments, including the Temperance Memorial Fountain (1888), the Samuel S. Cox monument (1891), the Slocum Memorial Fountain (1906), several memorial plaques, and the Ukrainian-American Flagstaff (1942), which was donated by the Ukrainian Production Unit of the American Red Cross. A playground for girls was built in 1904, and in 1911, 10,000 people came here to witness the City’s first inter-park athletic championships. Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) expanded recreation opportunities in the park in the 1930s, adding handball courts and swing sets. A bandshell was completed in 1966 in time for frequent concerts and rallies, which characterized that period in history.
Since its beginnings in the 19th century, Tompkins Square Park has served as a place to voice dissent. Demonstrations in 1857 and 1875 about the lack of jobs and the poor economy gave way to local residents protests about gentrification in the 1980s and 1990s. In the late 1980s, police and East Village residents clashed after Parks began enforcing the park’s closing hours, in effect barring homeless from camping in the park. In 1991 the park was closed and dozens of homeless people who had been living in the park were relocated.
The park was reconstructed and reopened in the summer of 1992. During this renovation, the bandshell was removed, a state-of-the-art dog run and new playgrounds were built, several monuments conserved, and the turf and sidewalks replaced. Today Tompkins Square Park continues to serve a diverse community, providing a peaceful, meditative environment within the bustle of city life.
10.5 acres
#48 – B
Jefferson Market Garden
Where some went to market, and some went to jail, today’s Greenwich Villagers tend the Jefferson Market Garden in the shade of the landmark Jefferson Market Courthouse.
Named for Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, the Jefferson Market opened on this site in 1833, alongside a police court, a volunteer firehouse, and a jail. The market grew rapidly to include fishmongers, poultry vendors, and hucksters. It was razed in 1873 to make way for a new civic complex and courthouse.
The Jefferson Market Courthouse, with its fire-watch bell tower, and lighted clock dial, was designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux, and built in 1877. The ornate courthouse struck the New York Times as inappropriate for such a shoddy neighborhood’s a jewel in a pig’s snout. Nonetheless, architects polled in 1895 deemed the building to be the fifth most beautiful in the United States. While Vaux believed that the cells should be strong, secure, and entirely unattractive, he created a six-tiered structure that allowed some light to penetrate and air to circulate. At the turn of the century, the triangular parcel between Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, and 10th Street was thus entirely occupied, and connected to the rest of the city by the Gilbert Elevated Railway’s Sixth Avenue line, inaugurated in 1878.
In 1927 the jail, the market, and the firehouse were demolished and replaced by the City’s only House of Detention for Women, an 11-story building designed in the French Art Deco style by Benjamin W. Levitan. By the time the Women’s House of Detention opened in 1931, the adjacent courthouse heard only cases with female defendants. Corrections Commissioner Richard Patterson introduced the facility as undoubtedly the best institution of its kind in the United States if not indeed in the entire world. Contemporaries noted the facility’s modern equipment, one of its most striking features being a turntable altar in the chapel, with sections fitted respectively for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish services.
Use of public transportation declined during the Depression, and the clattering elevated railways were criticized for lowering property values. The 6th Avenue line was demolished in 1939. Amendments to the district court system in 1945 led to the abandonment of the courthouse, which was to be sold by auction in 1959. The Greenwich Village Association (GVA), led by Margot Gayle and Verna Small, campaigned forcefully to preserve the building, and won their first victory in 1961 by saving the four-sided clock in the tower. A year later Mayor Wagner agreed to establish a Village branch of the New York Public Library in the Jefferson Market Courthouse.
The Board of Estimate transferred the site to Parks in 1974, and the Jefferson Market Garden Committee, Inc., composed of Village neighborhood associations and homeowners, was entrusted with its care. Landscape architect Pamela Berdan originally designed the garden in the spirit of Frederick Law Olmsted, who co-designed Central and Prospect Parks with Calvert Vaux. The garden was planted with 10 Star and Saucer Magnolia trees, 7 Yoshino Cherry trees, 2 American Yellowwoods, 7 Thornless Honeylocusts, 10 Crabapple trees, 70 fairy hedge roses around the lawn, 60 pycarantha, and 56 holly bushes in clusters. Volunteers have since planted tulips, daffodils, and crocuses in the garden.
In the late 1960s, GVA and Community Board 2 held town meetings to discuss the removal of the Women’s House of Detention and the creation of a passive recreation area on the site. At the time, friends and families of inmates lingered outside the House at all hours of the day or night, yelling their news and greetings. Nearby residents were disturbed by the noise. Gawkers came to watch the scene. The facility was overcrowded and had become obsolete. The Women’s House of Detention was demolished in 1973, after 42 years of use.
A generous grant, one of the last made by the Vincent Astor Foundation, funded the new decorative steel fence, which recalls the design of the courthouse fence and unifies the site. On October 13, 1998 Mrs. Brooke Astor dedicated the fence at a ceremony attended by members of the Greenwich Village community.
WRONG ANSWERS
Christopher Park
The land that is now Christopher Park was developed from 1633 to 1638 as a tobacco farm by Wouter Van Twiller, Director-General of New Netherland. Following Van Twiller’s death, his land was divided into three farms: the Trinity Church and Elbert Herring farms to the south and Sir Peter Warren’s farm to the north. Skinner Road was laid out along the line separating the Warren farm from the other two. This road was later renamed Christopher Street, honoring Charles Christopher Amos, an heir of a trustee to the Warren estate
Between 1789 and 1829, Christopher Street was subdivided into lots, and blocks were laid out along its length. Due to the irregular configuration of streets in Greenwich Village, blocks were not laid out according to a standard grid plan, and many oddly-shaped blocks were created. In the early 1800s, the population of Greenwich Village expanded dramatically, and the area around Christopher Street began to suffer from overcrowding. When a devastating fire tore through the area in 1835, residents petitioned the City to condemn a triangular block at the intersection of Christopher, Grove, and West 4th Streets and establish a much-needed open space on the site. On April 5, 1837 the City condemned the parcel and created Christopher Park.
With the widening of Seventh Avenue and the construction of the IRT subway line in 1910, Greenwich Village became divided between the working-class neighborhood to the west and an artistic, Bohemian community to the east. The destruction of several blocks of Christopher Street in order to widen Seventh Avenue and the opening of the Christopher Street subway station placed Christopher Park at the center of this division. Tension developed among various groups in the Christopher Street area as the population of Greenwich Village began to decline in the 1940s.
On June 27, 1969, there was rioting on Christopher Street when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay establishment, in order to curb liquor law violations. Over the next few days, in what is known as the Stonewall Rebellion, several thousand rioters filled the streets to protest the police action. Thereafter, Christopher Park became a symbol of the gay liberation movement. In 1999 the site of the Stonewall uprising’s the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park, and the surrounding neighborhood streets’s were placed on the New York State Register of Historic Places and added to the National Register.
The restoration of Christopher Park was initiated in 1983 by the Friends of Christopher Park, a community volunteer group organized in the late 1970s to maintain and beautify the park. Under the direction of landscape architect Philip Winslow, over $130,000 was spent in order to restore the site to its 19th-century splendor. The renovated park, including a new gate, benches, lampposts, walkways, and numerous trees and shrubs, was officially reopened in 1986.
Christopher Park, which is graced with a 130-year-old fence, contains several monuments. The flagpole, erected in 1936, commemorates several of the 1861 Fire Zouaves, an elite Civil War unit that wore uniforms styled after North African tribesmen. A bronze statue by Joseph P. Pollia of General Philip H. Sheridan, a celebrated cavalry leader during the Civil War, was installed in 1936. George Segal’s statue Gay Liberation, a duplicate of the one installed at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, was placed in Christopher Park in 1992.
Minetta Green
This small park is a memorial to a not-quite-gone and not-quite-forgotten water feature of Lower Manhattan. When Dutch colonists settled in Manhattan in the 1620s, they learned from local Native Americans about a small brook that was full of trout. It originated near what is now Gramercy Square, burbled its way through (mostly beneath) Greenwich Village, and emptied into the Hudson at what is now West Houston Street.
Local Native Americans called the stream “Mannette,” which was translated as “Devil’s Water.” Over the years, this name was spelled and respelled and spelled again in a variety of configurations: Minnetta, Menitti, Manetta, Minetta, Mannette, and Minetto. The Dutch called the water Mintje Kill, meaning small stream. In Dutch, “min” translates as little, “the” is a diminuitive, and “kill” translates as stream. The water was also known as Bestavers Killitie, Bestevaas Kelletye, Bestavens Killitie, Bestavers Killatie, and Bestaver’s Killetje.
Several families of freed slaves, released by the Dutch, established farms and settled along the Minetta Brook as early as the 1640s. With African-Americans continuing to settle here in the 18th and 19th centuries, the area became known as “Little Africa.” Most of the brook has been covered over, though some Village residents can claim that it flows beneath their basements and sometimes causes flooding. In the lobby of the apartment building at 2 Fifth Avenue, there is a transparent tube that is said to contain murky water spouting up from Minetta Brook. The brook’s most recent claim to fame is providing the namesake for the Minetta Tavern, one of the original watering holes of the Beat generation.
Minetta Green is located at the southeast corner of Minetta Lane and the Avenue of the Americas. In 1934 Board of Transportation granted the Department of Parks a permit to develop this parcel for recreational purposes. A playground opened on the site the following year. After the Board of Estimate assigned this parcel to Parks in 1953, it was developed as a sitting area. Privet hedges were added around the existing pin oaks, and benches were installed.
In 1998 the City Council and the Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields funded the $742,000 reconstruction of Minetta Green and two other nearby parks, Churchill Square and Minetta Square. The rigid geometry of Minetta Green was transformed with the addition of many trees and shrubs and the creation of a curvilinear bluestone path which feature images of fish. The garden path is punctuated by small circular sitting areas with circular tree benches, world’s fair benches, boulders and fluted cast iron urns. Small mounds were built up in the interior of the path to add interest to the previously flat landscape and create more of a pastoral setting.
.056 acre
Minetta Triangle
This small park is named for a not-quite-gone and not-quite-forgotten water feature of Lower Manhattan. When Dutch colonists settled in Manhattan in the 1620s, they learned from local Native Americans about a small brook that was full of trout. It originated near what is now Gramercy Park, burbled its way over and beneath Greenwich Village, and emptied into the Hudson at what is now West Houston Street.
Local Native Americans called the stream Mannette, which was translated as Devil’s Water. Over the years, this name was spelled and respelled and spelled again in a variety of configurations: Minnetta, Menitti, Manetta, Minetta, Mannette, and Minetto. The Dutch called the water Mintje Kill, meaning small stream. In Dutch, min translates as little, tje is a diminuitive, and kill translates as stream. The water was also known as Bestavers Killitie, Bestevaas Kelletye, Bestavens Killitie, Bestavers Killatie, and Bestaver’s Killetje.
Several families of freed slaves, released by the Dutch, established farms and homes along the Minetta Brook as early as the 1640s. With African Americans continuing to settle here in the 18th and 19th centuries, the area became known as Little Africa. Most of the brook has been covered over, though some Village residents claim that it flows beneath their basements and sometimes causes flooding. In the lobby of the apartment building at 2 Fifth Avenue, there is a transparent tube that is said to contain murky water spouting up from Minetta Brook. The brook’s most recent claim to fame is providing the namesake for the Minetta Tavern, one of the original watering holes of the Beat generation.
Minetta Triangle, located at the northeast corner of the Avenue of the Americas and Minetta Street, is one of three nearby parks named after the feisty brook. The City of New York acquired this parcel in 1925 as part of the southerly extension of Sixth Avenue (now Avenue of the Americas) and assigned it to Parks in 1945 after deeming the .075 acre excess.
In 1992, community members formed the Bleecker Area Merchant and Resident Association, or B.A.M.R.A. Along with the Bedford Downing Block Association, or B.D.B.A., they began the process of revitalizing Minetta Triangle and nearby Sir Winston Churchill Square and Minetta Green. With the help of Community Board #2, B.A.M.R.A. and B.D.B.A developed a successful proposal for the renovation of all three parks. In 1998 State Senator Tom Duane, who was then their council member, and Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields funded the $742,000 reconstruction of the parks.
New trees and shrubs, along with the creation of a curvilinear bluestone path featuring images of trout, transformed the rigid geometry of Minetta Triangle. The garden path is punctuated by small circular sitting areas surrounding trees, world’s fair benches, boulders and fluted cast iron urns. Small mounds, built up in the interior of the path, add depth to the previously flat landscape and create more of a pastoral setting. Once predominantly concrete, the sitting areas have become green garden coves.
#49 – B
Inwood Hill Park
Inwood Hill Park contains the last natural forest and salt marsh in Manhattan. It is unclear how the park received its present name. Before becoming parkland in 1916, it was known during the Colonial and post-Revolutionary War period as Cock or Cox Hill. The name could be a variant of the Native American name for the area, Shorakapok, meaning either the wading place, the edge of the river, or the place between the ridges.
Human activity has been present in Inwood Hill Park from prehistoric times. Through the 17th century, Native Americans known as the Lenape (Delawares) inhabited the area. There is evidence of a main encampment along the eastern edge of the park. The Lenape relied on both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers as sources for food. Artifacts and the remains of old campfires were found in Inwood’s rock shelters, suggesting their use for shelter and temporary living quarters.
In 1954 the Peter Minuit Post of the American Legion dedicated a plaque at the southwest corner of the ballfield (at 214th Street) to mark the location of a historic tree and a legendary real estate transaction. A living link with the local Indians who resided in the area, a magnificent tulip tree stood and grew on that site for 280 years until its death in 1938. The marker also honors Peter Minuit’s reputed purchase of Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626. The celebrated sale has also been linked to sites in Lower Manhattan.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, colonists from Europe settled and farmed here. During the Revolutionary War, American forces built a five-sided earthwork fort (known as Fort Cock or Fort Cox) in the northwestern corner of the park. It fell to British and Hessian troops in November 1776 and was held until the war ended in 1783. After the Revolutionary War, families returned to the area to resume farming.
In the 1800s much of present-day Inwood Hill Park contained country homes and philanthropic institutions. There was a charity house for women, and a free public library (later the Dyckman Institute) was formed. The Straus family (who owned Macy’s) enjoyed a country estate in Inwood; its foundation is still present. Isidor and Ida Straus lost their lives on the S.S. Titanic’s maiden voyage. When the Department of Parks bought land for the park in 1916, the salt marsh was saved and landscaped; a portion of the marsh was later landfilled. The buildings on the property were demolished. During the Depression the City employed WPA workers to build many of the roads and trails of Inwood Hill Park.
In 1992 Council Member Stanley E. Michels introduced legislation, which was enacted, to name the natural areas of Inwood Hill Park Shorakapok in honor of the Lenape who once resided here. In 1995 the Inwood Hill Park Urban Ecology Center was opened. It provides information to the public about the natural and cultural history of this beautiful park. Today the Urban Park Rangers work with school children on restoration projects to improve the health and appearance of the park. Complementing the work of the Rangers is that of dozens of Inwood Vols (Volunteers), who assist with park restoration and beautification.
WRONG ANSWERS
Highbridge Park
Highbridge Park derives its name from New York City’s oldest standing bridge, the High Bridge (1848), which was built to carry the Old Croton Aqueduct over the Harlem River. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, the area was sparsely populated with scattered farms and private estates. During the American Revolution, the Battle of Fort Washington took place in the vicinity. General George Washington used the Morris-Jumel Mansion, adjacent to the southern end of the park near Edgecombe Avenue and West 160th Street, as his headquarters in September and October of 1776.
The High Bridge was once part of the first reliable and uninterrupted water supply system in New York City. As the City was devastated by fire and disease in 1830s, the inadequacy of the water system of wells-and-cisterns became apparent. Numerous corrective measures were examined. In the final analysis only the Croton River, located in northern Westchester County was found to be sufficient in quantity and quality to serve the needs of the City. The delivery system was begun in 1837, and was completed in 1848.
The Old Croton Aqueduct was the first of its kind ever constructed in the United States. The innovative system used a gravity feed, running 41 miles into New York City through an enclosed masonry structure crossing ridges, valleys, and rivers. The High Bridge soars 138 feet above the 620 foot-wide Harlem River, with a total length of 1450 feet. The bridge was designed with a pedestrian walkway atop the Aqueduct and was not used for vehicular traffic. In the 1920s the bridge’s center masonry arches were declared a hazard to navigation and replaced by a single steel span.
The area that is today’s Highbridge Park was assembled piecemeal between 1867 and the 1960s, with the bulk being acquired through condemnation from 1895 to 1901. The cliffside area from West 181st Street to Dyckman Street was acquired in 1902, and the parcel including Fort George Hill was acquired in 1928. In 1934 the Department of Parks obtained the majestic Highbridge Tower and the site of old High Bridge Reservoir.
One of Manhattan’s most picturesque landmarks, the water tower has looked over old High Bridge and the Harlem River valley since 1872. In 1958 the tower was rehabilitated and outfitted with a five-octave carillon in memory of Benjamin Altman. The Highbridge Recreation Center and Pool were erected on the site of the former reservoir in 1936. The facility at Highbridge Park was one of eleven city pools built with labor supplied by the Works Progress Association and opened during the hot summer of 1936. The High Bridge and surrounding land came under Parks jurisdiction in 1960.
In addition to the High Bridge, water tower, and recreation center, Highbridge Park boasts important natural assets including open vistas and an unusual geologic makeup. Among its strongest features are the magnificent cliffs and large rock outcroppings that dominate the park. Today, community groups such as the Friends of Highbridge Park and the New York Restoration Project work in conjunction with the Urban Park Rangers to improve the park for everyone.
Sutton Place Park
Effingham B. Sutton (1817 & 1891), a shipping merchant and entrepreneur, was one of the few prospectors who succeeded in building a fortune during the California Gold Rush of 1849. In 1875, Sutton built brownstones between 57th and 58th Streets in hopes of re-establishing a residential community. By the turn of the century, however, the neighborhood along the waterfront had become neglected, suffering from poverty and blanketed with substandard tenement housing. During this era, the neighborhood was infamous for gangs of street toughs, known as the Dead End Kids, who congregated at the end of these streets before Sutton Parks were built. Stanley Kingsley’s 1935 play about the area, Dead End, inspired several films depicting the area and the gangs.
Sutton’s venture was saved by the arrival of the Vanderbilts and Morgans in 1920, which began the neighborhood’s transformation into a wealthy enclave. Sutton Parks were created in 1938 following the construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, which runs next to and underneath the properties. When the highway was built, some Sutton Place residents lost their access to the East River. The City built private backyards for them in compensation, and three of the five Sutton Parks are between these backyards. Today, the Sutton Parks are a series of five vest-pocket parks along the East River waterfront near Sutton Place. In 1942, Parks took over maintenance and operation of the Five Parks. In 1997, an Executive Decree renamed the properties for Sutton. The bi-level design of Sutton Place Park includes a sandbox and playground equipment, as well as breathtaking views of the Queensboro Bridge.
The park and its vistas of the Queensboro Bridge were featured prominently in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979). The park contains the Wild Boar statue, which is a replica of the bronze wild boar completed in 1634 by Renaissance sculptor Pietro Tacca (1557 & 1640) that stands in Florence, Italy. This replica, alternately known as Porcellino, is in fact a copy of a replica. Tacca himself modeled his boar upon a marble statue now displayed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Vista Rock & Tunnel
Vista Rock is the second highest Manhattan schist outcrop in Central Park (the highest being the 137.5 foot Summit Rock at Central Park West and 83rd Street). At a height of 130 feet, Vista Rock is named for its excellent views of the entire park. When the Board of Commissioners of Central Park held the park design competition in 1858, their rules stipulated that each entry include four transverse roads to carry cross-town traffic through the park. The winners, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), proposed to sink these transverse roads below the grade of the park; this brilliant idea was one of the distinguishing features of their winning Greensward Plan and one likely reason for their success. Vista Rock was a major impediment to the construction of the 79th Street transverse road. Creating a tunnel required a major feat of engineering, and blasting had to be done with gunpowder, as dynamite had not yet been invented.
Clarence Cook described the tunnel in his 1869 book A Description of New York Central Park: Under that portion of the rock that lies just south of the Belvedere is the tunnel, constructed at great expense, for carrying the second of the traffic-roads.This tunnel was completed in January 1861, and, after a careful examination, the roof was found to be sound and firm. The length of the tunnel is one hundred and forty-six feet, and the height of the roof above the center of the roadway is seventeen feet ten inches. Its width of forty feet is the same as that of the road it spans, all traffic-roads having the same dimensions.
The tunnel so delighted 19th century park visitors that builders added steps leading to the transverse road, a feature unique among the park’s roads. The rock dome of the tunnel still inspires visitors to appreciate the difficulties builders faced working with limited technology in the creation of Central Park.
#50 – D
Tribeca Park
The site of this triangular park was once part of the Lispenard Swamp, roughly bounded to the north by Spring Street, to the east by Wooster Street, to the south by Duane Street, and to the west by Greenwich Street. In 1735 Anthony Rutgers, the owner of an adjacent farm, arranged to acquire much of this land in return for draining the swampy ground. In 1741 Rutgers’s daughter Elsie married local landowner Leonard Lispenard, who leased another nearby parcel from Trinity Church. When Rutgers died nine years later, most of his holdings passed to Elsie and Leonard Lispenard. By 1755 all of Rutgers’s property was held by the Lispenards. The area became known as Lispenard Swamp or Lispenard Meadows.
Beach Street (to the north) was so named as early as 1790, when the Vestry of Trinity Church resolved that Streets upon the Church Lands to the Northward [are to] be successively named as follows’s vizt’s Duane Street’s Jay Street’s Harison Street’s Provoost Street’s Moore Street’s Beach Street’s Hubert Street. Beach Street was named for a son-in-law of Elsie and Leonard Lispenard named Paul Bache, and the street was alternatively called Bache Street or Beach Street in the late 18th century. In 1809 the Common Council agreed that the intersection of Beach, Walker, and Chapel (now West Broadway) should be converted to a Park. The following year the City of New York purchased the land from William I. and Elizabeth Waldon for a sum of $3950.
For over a century the park was known as Beach Street Park. Although the original design is not known, the Department of Parks Annual Report from 1871 details the expansion and reconstruction of the park at that time. The site was excavated, and a new stone foundation was laid down. The interior plot was planted and surrounded by an iron railing and a twelve-foot-wide sidewalk. By 1936 Beach Street Park featured six trees and six benches inside the iron railing, and ten trees and a water trough on the perimeter. Of note, the granite pavers on the site were laid in earth, and the joints were seeded with grass.
Since 1985 the site has been known as TriBeCa Park in tribute to the surrounding neighborhood, which in turn takes its name from its geographical location. The neighborhood of TriBeCa, a name coined by real-estate developers in the mid-1970s, encompasses the triangle below Canal Street. The area was once part of New York’s most important district for wholesale commodities, produce, and dairy products. Many of the nearby warehouses and store-and-loft buildings were erected in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After market activity moved to Hunts Point and the Washington Market Urban Renewal Project was approved in the 1960s, the area was reinvented as a residential neighborhood. The short, diagonal streets and historic green spaces (like Duane and TriBeCa Parks) provide evidence of TriBeCa’s Colonial and Federal past.
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Convent Garden
On December 17, 1909, the triangular parcel bounded by Convent Avenue, West 151st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue was designated a public park by the Board of Estimate. While researching the 1985 reconstruction of Convent Avenue, the consulting engineer discovered that the site was never formally acquired by Parks. On November 22, 1985, the lot was transferred to Parks for development as a landscaped sitting area. The garden is named for Convent Avenue, where the Convent of the Sacred Heart was located until a fire destroyed it on August 13, 1888.
In 1985 a gas station occupying the site was demolished. The empty lot was an eyesore to the community until local activist Luana Robinson and a small group of female volunteers from the Coalition of Hamilton Heights Tenants Associations helped to establish the Convent Garden to Women. In 1989 Convent Garden was the pilot location for the new GreenStreets program, which was launched by Parks and the Department of Transportation to transform traffic triangles and other paved areas into green spaces. When the site was heavily disturbed by the removal of underground gas tanks in 1998, Juliette Davis and other local residents began to rebuild the garden. The gazebo, donated by the Marriott Corporation, was installed in November 1998. In the spring of 1999 the Convent Garden Community Association added three wooden benches and a new lawn.
Convent Garden lies in the heart of the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, so named because of the sweet life of its residents during the first half of the 20th century. Many notable African-Americans have lived in the area stretching from 145th to 155th streets between Amsterdam and Edgecombe Avenues. Writer and scholar W.E.B. DuBois lived at 409 Edgecombe as did poet William Stanley Braithewaite. Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, who formed one of the most important collaborations in jazz history, both lived in the neighborhood, as did Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To this day, the neighborhood remains a center for cultural and artistic excellence. Located just south of Convent Garden is St. Nick’s Pub, a well-known venue for jazz music. The Dance Theater of Harlem, at 152nd street between St. Nicholas and Amsterdam Avenues, celebrated its 30th anniversary in 1999. The Convent Garden Community Association continues to work with its neighbors to maintain and to beautify this unique green space.
Juan Pablo Duarte Square
In the late 1600s the land that is now Juan Pablo Duarte Square was developed as a farm by Trinity Church. A forty-foot-wide canal was built to the south in 1810 to drain the pestilent Collect Pond into the Hudson River. The canal was filled in 1819 and now forms Canal Street. As the city spread northward, this became an important commercial thoroughfare. Canal Street achieved further prominence with the construction of the Holland Tunnel at its western end in 1927.
Juan Pablo Duarte Square was officially dedicated in 1945, when Sixth Avenue was renamed Avenue of the Americas in celebration of Pan-American unity. The name of the square, located near the southern end of the Avenue of the Americas, honors Juan Pablo Duarte (1813-1876), the liberator of the Dominican Republic.
As a young man, Duarte founded a society called La Trinitaria which sought to promote democratic ideals among the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Hispaniola Island, most of whom were clustered around the city of Santo Domingo. In 1843 Duarte launched an attempt to free the eastern half of the island from Haitian rule. When the rebellion failed, Duarte fled Hispaniola. However, when a new revolution succeeded in winning independence for the Dominican Republic in February 1844, Duarte was invited to return as President of the new republic. Although he eventually lost control to a military dictator and died in exile, Duarte was instrumental in developing the Pan-American traditions of democracy and self-government celebrated by the Avenue of the Americas.
Duarte Square, a triangular plot bounded by Sullivan Street, Grand Street, and the Avenue of the Americas at the intersection with Canal Street, was initially developed and maintained by the Department of Transportation. The square was improved in 1975 with the addition of benches, trees, and sidewalks.
On May 26, 1977, Duarte Square was transferred to the Department of Parks. A statue of Juan Pablo Duarte, donated by the Consulate of the Dominican Republic, was dedicated in the square on the 165th anniversary of Duarte’s birth, January 26, 1978. The thirteen-foot bronze figure, which rests atop an eight-foot granite base, was designed by the Italian sculptor Nicola Arrighini. It is one of a pantheon of six monuments to Latin American leaders which overlook the Avenue of the Americas.
Riverbank State Park
Resting 69 feet above the Hudson River, with a captivating view of the Palisades and the George Washington Bridge, Riverbank State Park is one of the city’s most unique and beautiful facilities. The only park in the Western Hemisphere modeled after Tokyo’s rooftop gardens, Riverbank emphasizes the Japanese tradition of bringing rusticity and nature into the city. With its pedestrian paths, fountains and benches, community gardens, a greenhouse, the waterfront amphitheater, and a picnic area, Riverbank’s design is a careful balance of natural disorder in an ordered environment.
The park runs from West 137 Street to West 145 Street, between the Hudson River and Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The Board of Estimate (a now defunct municipal body) approved the site on October 4, 1985, and construction began in 1992; New York State and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection provided $130 million for the project. Riverbank State Park opened to the public on May 27, 1993, and is now operated by the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.
Riverbank State Park annually receives over 2 million visitors, the third highest attendance of any New York State park–after the Niagara Reservation State Park and Jones Beach State Park. Host to many sports youth leagues, programs and events each year, the park’s outdoor athletic facilities include a baseball field, four basketball courts, four handball courts, four tennis courts, a soccer field with night lighting, and an eight-lane running track.
Of the many facilities at Riverbank State Park, the skating rink, roller in the summer and ice in the winter, is one of the most popular. The Cultural Center contains a theater, two rehearsal rooms, and men’s and women’s dressing rooms. The Athletic Building facilities include a gym, a game room, a fitness room, and men’s and women’s locker rooms; two playgrounds hold play equipment with safety surfacing. There is also a Water Play Area, and the Riverbank Cafi and Snack Bar. The Totally Kid Carousel ride, created by Milo Mottola for the children of New York State, was designed by New York City school children. A floating dock, for improved boat access to the Hudson River, will open in the spring of 2002 with funding from the New York State Clear Water/Clean Air Bond Act.
#51 – C
Peter Minuit Playground
This playground, adjacent to P.S. 108, also known as the Peter Minuit School, is named after one of the most important figures in the history of New York City. Peter Minuit (1580-1638), born in Wesel, Germany, was a French-speaking Protestant (his name means midnight in French) whose family had fled to the Netherlands to escape the persecution of the Spanish Army. Minuit worked for the Dutch West India Company, a powerful corporation that had monopolized all Dutch trade with North and South America and West Africa. In 1626, Minuit landed at the mouth of the Hudson River to begin his position as the third director of the New Netherland Colony. New Netherland, the Dutch settlement established two years earlier in 1624 around Manhattan’s southern tip, was then populated by Mohican and Lenape Native Americans as well as Dutch farmers.
As legend has it, Minuit signed a treaty with the Lenapes in 1626 at what is now Inwood Hill Park, transferring ownership of the island to the Dutch West India Company for twenty-four dollars. A plaque imbedded in a stone in Inwood Park commemorates the treaty and a giant tulip tree that stood on the site for more than 200 years. Minuit served as leader of the 270 residents of New Amsterdam until 1633. During those seven years, Minuit established trade and diplomatic relations with many of the New England settlements to the north, including Plymouth. Before his death in 1638 during a hurricane on the Caribbean Sea, he also established the New Sweden settlement on the lower Delaware River. In addition to this playground and school, Minuit is also honored by Peter Minuit Plaza at the foot of Manhattan and by a granite flagstaff base in Battery Park depicting his purchase.
The land for this East Harlem playground was acquired in 1941 for recreational use by the adjacent school, P.S. 108. The original playground included a comfort station, volleyball, basketball and handball courts, and a softball diamond. In 1948, the City added a shower basin, swings, slides, seesaws, a sandpit, junior paddle tennis courts, and more basketball hoops. The playground facility was revamped again in 1957 in conjunction with the adjacent public housing project under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
In the late 1990s, Parks targeted Peter Minuit Playground for improvements as part of the Requirements Contracts initiative, which combined in-kind replacements with innovative funding techniques to improve many deteriorating parks and playgrounds. At Peter Minuit, a series of three renovations totaling $240,000 in 1995, 1996 and 1998, provided new handball court walls, perimeter sidewalks, asphalt paving, safety surfacing, modular play equipment and a concrete dolphin sculpture. In 1997, this modern and colorful playground served as a model for the Parks on the Move Program, which highlights improved City playgrounds.
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Harlem Lane Playground
This playground is named for Harlem Lane, an old road in the area that served as a popular racecourse for horse-drawn carriages in the 19th century. Harlem Lane is the predecessor of Saint Nicholas Avenue, which extends from Central Park and meanders up through northern Manhattan. At 168th Street, the Harlem Lane racecourse met with another horse carriage track that traversed along the Harlem River up to the High Bridge at 174th Street. This offshoot of Harlem Lane became known as the Harlem River Speedway, and as it evolved into a highway, the Harlem River Drive. This playground is located along the Harlem River Drive, between 151st and 154th Streets.
As with many of Manhattan’s early roads, Harlem Lane began as a Native American trail. European settlers began to utilize the trail in 1676 to access the Spuyten Duyvil Ferry, which had been constructed in 1669. The route was officially laid out as a road on June 16, 1707. A racetrack was constructed at the end of the lane around 1782. Throughout its history, the road was known as King’s Way, Great Post Road, Albany Post Road, Queens Road, and Kingsbridge Road, before being given its present name, Saint Nicholas Avenue, in 1901. Saint Nicholas, a 4th century saint from Asia who throughout the ages has grown to be associated with Santa Claus, was the patron saint of New Amsterdam, New York’s Dutch Colonial name.
The racing of carriages pulled by one or two horses, known as trotting, was a popular sport for New York’s elite in the latter half of the 19th century. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was among the numerous lawyers, bankers, and politicians who participated in the afternoon races at Harlem Lane. Wealthy sportsmen often paid exorbitant prices for a fast team; one was the publisher Robert Bonner, who paid $30,000 for a single horse. The sportsmen displayed their fine teams on the ride through Central Park towards the starting line at the north edge of the park. When the race commenced, spectators cheered from windows and doorways of inns lining the southern half of Harlem Lane. The carriages passed through this small developed area and into open meadows, where the race grew faster and more aggressive. Many of the races were well publicized throughout Wall Street, where betting and bragging were common.
This offshoot of Harlem Lane was named the Harlem Speedway and opened for carriage traffic on July 5, 1898. The Speedway, as it came to be known, ran along the Harlem River from Macomb’s Dam at 155th Street up to Dyckman Street. The road was used predominantly as a racecourse until it was turned into a parkway in 1915. The new Harlem River Parkway experienced low traffic volume until it merged with the northern end of the East River Drive, now known as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, in 1937. With the roads linked, it became easy for automobiles to travel from eastern Manhattan and connect to the Triborough Bridge and the Cross Bronx Expressway (Interstate 95). The playground is bound on the eastern side by the southbound portion of the Drive, which was built on a viaduct to assure both lanes an unobstructed view of the river.
This property was acquired in three parcels. The original half-acre plot of land was acquired by the City on November 1, 1893, by condemnation, and given to Parks a month later. The second parcel, acquired by deed of gift by Parks in 1947, added another acre of land around where the comfort station now sits. The third parcel, which now contains the basketball courts, was acquired at the same time as parcel two, but was proposed to be part of West 153rd Street before being reassigned to Parks.
Capital renovations to Harlem Lane Playground were completed in 1993. Improvements included resurfaced basketball courts, new fencing, and the refurbishment of the children’s play area with modular play equipment, safety surfacing, and the installation of a spray shower. Trees were planted and new benches were installed along the playground’s central promenade, from which visitors can enjoy a view of the Macombs Bridge and Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River. Where the ground once thundered with the noise of horse’s hooves, Harlem Lane Playground now provides a peaceful atmosphere for play and relaxation.
Jacob Joseph Playground
This playground, bounded by Henry and Rutgers Streets, is named in memory of Captain Jacob Joseph (1920-1942), a member of the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, and scion of a family devoted to religious education and civic affairs. Born and raised in New York, Joseph left Columbia University as a junior in 1938 to enlist in the Marines. Joseph died in action at Guadalcanal on October 22, 1942. Five years later, a local law named this playground in his honor. The dedication ceremony was attended by Mayor William O’Dwyer, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Councilman Stanley Isaacs, and Joseph’s father, City Comptroller, Lazarus Joseph. Parks also unveiled a bronze commemorative plaque on the flagstaff, which celebrates the life and bravery of Capt. Joseph.
This playground was built in part to meet the needs of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, named after Capt. Joseph’s great-grandfather. Rabbi Jacob Joseph (1840-1902) was the first Chief Rabbi in New York City. Born in Vilna, Poland, he came to the United States at the request of the New York Jewish community. After his death in 1902, Rabbi Joseph’s son, Raphael Joseph, and Samuel I. Andron obtained a charter from the Board of Regents in 1903 to establish the school. The Rabbi Jacob Joseph School was known for its rigorous Tamuldic curriculum and remains open to students from nursery age through the eighth grade. Its founders originally established the school on Manhattan’s Orchard Street but later moved it to Henry Street. In 1976, the school moved to the Graniteville area of Staten Island with separate boys’ and girls’ school facilities.
The city obtained the land that is now the site of this playground in 1930 for easement purposes for the construction of the Independent Subway (IND), now known as the F line. Parks acquired the land by permit from the Board of Transportation in 1934, but did not gain official jurisdiction until 1961. The Board of Estimate transferred the land to Parks to ensure the continuance of the playground. Constructed in a neighborhood with a great need for open space, the playground now provides play space for the children of Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
In 1996, Parks completed a $59,000 renovation of this playground. Sponsored by the mayor’s executive budget, this reconstruction included new safety surfacing and colorful modular play equipment. In addition, the new turtle animal art provides a playful aesthetic and a functional climbing structure for the children. This playground serves as a lasting memorial to a World War II hero, as well as to notable members of the Joseph family who have contributed to the surrounding neighborhood and to the larger New York City community.
Tudor Grove Playground
Built by Fred F. French (1883-1936), a prominent New York developer after World War I, Tudor City was a pioneering venture in urban renewal. Tudor City was designed as a city within a city, and adapted what was called Garden City design to high-density Manhattan. The Garden City concept combined the best aspects of country and city, emphasizing the integration of green space in urban living areas, and was advocated by the Englishman Ebenezer Howard in his 1898 book To-Morrow, A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, (later retitled Garden Cities of To-Morrow). His ideas laid the foundation for such communally oriented suburbs in the United States as Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, designed in 1910 by Olmsted’s sons and Grosvenor Atterbury.
Tudor City was built between 1925 and 1928, in an area of tenements and slaughterhouses. It assembled more land than any previous development in Manhattan, and the success of this middle class development came to serve as a model for others across the country. Its design concept, elaborated by architect H. Douglas Ives, was based on the use of green space and the Tudor Revival architecture that gives it its name. Tudor City is built around a core of privately owned parks, includes 12 cooperatively owned buildings and provides about 3,000 apartments and 600 hotel rooms.
The Tudor Revival style is a fusion of Gothic and rustic English architecture that emerged in the 19th century. Using colorful materials and exposed wooden beams from rustic homes, the style incorporated Gothic details and appointments. Already being used in suburban developments at the time, Tudor City introduced the Tudor Revival into an urban setting, and brought the qualities of an English manor into the city. In addition to its aesthetic and symbolic attributes, Tudor Revival was easily accommodated within New York City’s zoning ordinances; in 1916, New York became the first city in the United States to introduce a zoning ordinance that regulated the shape of buildings. Architectural details were not allowed to project more than eighteen inches, and at times were restricted to just four.
The shallow details of the Tudor Revival style easily fit these guidelines. While people often associate Tudor City with gargoyles, the sculptures that grace the tops of the buildings are actually grotesques. A true gargoyle is an elaborate waterspout to keep rainwater off a building’s roof, and projects horizontally from the building’s facade. The grotesques in Tudor City, like the other stylized architectural details, do not project from the facade, but rather rise above it. Because of its architectural and historical significance, Tudor City was designated a historic district in 1988.
The City of New York bought the site for this park in 1948. Located on East 42nd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, it was acquired with other parks to improve the approach to the United Nations. Both Mary O’Connor and Tudor Grove playgrounds serve as extensions to the open space provided by the Tudor City green.
This park was completely reconstructed in 1995 with $190,184 provided by Council Member Andrew S. Eristoff. The improvements included drainage, lighting, bluestone pavement, curbs, benches, and new play equipment with safety surfacing. The playground offers play equipment with safety surfacing, planters, and benches and ornamental street lamps, all under the shade of large London planetrees (Platanus x acerifolia).
#52 – A
Audubon Playground
This Washington Heights Playground, which stands across the street from the Audubon School, stretches from 169th to 170th Streets on Audubon Avenue. The playground, school and avenue are all named for John James Audubon (1785-1851), legendary observer of nature and illustrator of birds. Born in Les Cayes, Haiti to Captain Jean Audubon, a French naval officer in command of a plantation, and Jeanne Rabine, Captain Audubon’s French mistress, Audubon moved with his father to France in 1788. As a child, Audubon was so enchanted by birds that he snuck out of the classroom to watch them. At the age of seventeen, he went to Paris to study art and one year later, in 1803, he was sent to the United States to look after his father’s new Pennsylvania estate. There he cultivated his interest in birds: painting them, hunting them and experimenting with bird banding techniques to track migration. In 1808, Audubon married Lucy Bakewell who would be his lifelong support and the mother of his two sons, Victor and John, Jr.
After briefly residing in Louisville, Kentucky, the Audubons returned to Pennsylvania after John Audubon became an American citizen in 1812. Unfortunately, Audubon’s sketches of birds, remarkable as they were, could not keep the family out of bankruptcy in 1819. After moving to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1820, Audubon became a taxidermist, and continued creating his vast collection of bird illustrations. In 1827, he took his paintings to Scotland where they were published over the next decade under the title Birds of America. The accompanying text, Ornithological Biography, was published shortly thereafter.
Following the publication of his 435 bird illustrations, Audubon turned to mammals, employing his sons in this endeavor. Although the task was more difficult because of the nocturnal nature of many of the animals, Audubon is nevertheless still famous today for his documentation of all kinds of American wildlife. The beauty, detail, and accuracy of his paintings are unmatched, and his writing preserved the essence of America before heavy settlement altered it forever. Audubon died on January 27, 1851, after one final adventure chasing buffalo out west in the 1840s. The Audubon Society, one of the oldest and largest conservation groups in the world, was founded in his honor in 1905.
The City acquired the land for Audubon Playground by condemnation in 1958, and the playground, jointly operated by the Board of Education and Parks, opened in 1962. Originally named P.S. 128 Playground after the adjacent school, it was renamed in 1986 to reflect the school’s new name. Council Member Stanley E. Michels provided $54,000 in 1995 for renovations, including new play equipment and safety surfacing. A yardarm flagpole stands in the playground near a larger-than-life, black, cast-stone turtle, and London Planetrees surrounding the playground provide welcome shade.
WRONG ANSWERS
Margaret Mead Green
In 1979, the City Council enacted a law naming the northwest portion of Theodore Roosevelt Park Margaret Mead Green in honor of the distinguished anthropologist. Mead (1901-1978) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but spent most of her life in New York City. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in psychology (1923), and then studied with Franz Boas (1858-1942) and Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) at Columbia University where she earned her doctorate in anthropology (1929).
Mead had begun her doctoral dissertation research in 1925, heading off on her own to American Samoa to study adolescent girls. She soon achieved international renown with the publication of the resultant text Coming of Age in Samoa, a success she followed four years later with another study of younger children titled Growing Up in New Guinea. Mead conducted fieldwork throughout her life in such locations as New Guinea, Samoa, Bali, the Admiralty Islands, and even North America. The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Pacific Peoples owes many of its exhibits to Mead’s research in that area.
During World War II, Mead had to postpone her studies in the South Pacific; she did not, however, abandon research altogether. Mead and her colleague Ruth Benedict founded the Institute for Intercultural Studies in 1944 as a place for scholars to analyze contemporary American culture with the same critical eye they turned on primitive cultures. Mead was the author of twenty-three books, not all of which were strictly scientific. She published a great number of academic essays and lectures, contributed a column to Redbook magazine and made appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Her areas of expertise were diverse, ranging from population control to women’s liberation to a space probe. Mead often spoke before the United States Congress on behalf of women, the aging, and the mentally ill.
Mead worked as a research fellow and curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1926 until her death in 1978. She was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and several other professional organizations. She received 28 honorary doctorates. One year after her death, Mead’s scholarship was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the United States grants to a civilian. The Museum commemorates Mead with an annual festival of anthropology films and videos in the spring. Mead’s only daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (1939-), is an anthropologist and English professor who has written and co-authored eight books and serves as the current president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies.
This park area is a lasting tribute to a woman whose legacy of groundbreaking scholarship and progressive social consciousness endures beyond her years. This park is appropriately situated between the Museum tower that once held Mead’s office and the apartment building on 81st Street where she lived for many years.
The Friends of Museum Park, a neighborhood organization, has helped to maintain Margaret Mead Green in the past. In 2000, the Margaret Mead Green was renovated along with the rest of Theodore Roosevelt Park. In addition to a new irrigation system, the paths and lawns were restored, and new benches were added. Beds of native wildflowers and new groundcover enhance the natural beauty of the Green. With the help of Parks & Recreation, the Central Park Conservancy, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Friends of Museum Park, Margaret Mead Green’s future will be greener than ever.
Stanley Isaacs Playground
This playground honors Stanley Myer Isaacs (1882-1962), a dedicated lawyer, civic leader, and independent thinker. Born and raised in New York City, Isaacs graduated from Columbia College and New York Law School, and then embarked on a career in public service. During World War I, he served as chairman of a local draft board on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Between 1938 and 1941, as Borough President of Manhattan, Isaacs worked with Parks Commissioner Robert Moses to complete one of the most significant feats of urban construction New York had ever seen: the building of the East River Drive, now known as Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. This expressway borders Stanley Isaacs Playground between East 95th and East 97th Streets.
Controversy swirled shortly after Isaacs’ election as Borough President, when the public realized that Isaacs had hired an avowed Communist named Simon Gerson to handle his press relations. Isaacs, a leader of the liberal wing of the Republican party, admitted that hiring Gerson had been a mistake, but refused to fire him based on his political leanings. Even though Gerson wound up resigning in 1940, the Republican party chose not to support Isaacs in his run for a second term as Borough President. Although Isaacs lost the Borough Presidency, the controversy did not end his political career. Isaacs was elected to the New York City Council five times as a representative of the Upper East Side, serving until his death in 1962. For years, Isaacs was the only Republican member of a Democratic City Council, and crusaded against injustices such as racial discrimination in New York City housing. Isaacs also served as the president of United Neighborhood Houses, an organization of settlement houses, and participated actively in various Jewish organizations such as the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the United Jewish Appeal, and the American Jewish Committee.
Isaacs was a true advocate of parks. In 1956, he organized a rally protesting a Robert Moses plan for a parking lot expansion at Central Park’s Tavern on the Green restaurant, and the resulting public outcry was the plan’s demise. A playground, now known as the Tot Playground at West 67th Street, opened on the half-acre site the following year.
In 1941, the land on which this playground is located was condemned by the City in conjunction with the construction of the East River Drive. The Drive ultimately did not use the property, which was assigned to Parks on March 26, 1946. When the playground opened, it included a play area for children, softball diamond with a hooded backstop, areas for horseshoe pitching and paddle tennis, and handball, volleyball, and basketball courts. The City Council and Mayor Edward I. Koch named this park, where Isaacs strolled each week, to honor the former Borough President and City Councilman in 1974, twelve years after he died.
The Stanley M. Isaacs Park Association (SIPA), founded in 1996, raised $200,000 for the renovation of the roller hockey rink, which was originally built in 1974. The renovation was completed and dedicated as the Paul L. McDermott Rink in October 2000. McDermott (1953-1996) was a long-time coach and volunteer at the rink. Known to tell participants, Play hard, always give a good fight, but most of all have fun, McDermott exemplified sportsmanship, fair play, and good moral character. Tragically, McDermott lost a battle with cancer and died at the age of 43.
In 1995, mayoral funds were used to pay for a $31,674 capital requirements contract reconstruction of the playground’s safety surfacing. A $220,000 capital contract renovation, funded by Mayor Giuliani in 2000, included the installation of new benches, play equipment, planting areas and safety surfacing, as well as expansion of the park by moving fences to the edge of the property lines. Today, Stanley Isaacs Park is a welcome place of sport and recreation, proudly bearing the name of the man who The New York Times once called the conscience of our city government.
Tecumseh Playground
One of the Civil War’s best-known generals, William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) was born in Lancaster, Ohio in 1820. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1840 and served in California and the Mexican War. Appointed brigadier general of volunteers in 1861, Sherman fought at Bull Run and Shiloh. Promoted to major general in 1862, he distinguished himself in the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns of 1863. Sherman blazed a trail of destruction as his troops seized Atlanta, marched to the sea, and headed north through the Carolinas. He received the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston on April 26, 1865, seventeen days after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, Virginia.
General Sherman retired to New York and resided near what is now called Sherman Square on W. 70th Street and Broadway. He died in New York in 1884. The saying War is hell is attributed to Sherman. His younger brother, Senator John Sherman (1823-1900) of Ohio, was the author of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.
In 1952 the City of New York acquired additional property on the block bounded by Amsterdam Avenue, West 78th Street, Columbus, and West 77th Street for school and recreational purposes. The old P.S. 87 building on the site was razed, and the new William T. Sherman School opened in 1954. Plans were drawn up for a playground for school and community use, to be jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education. The design incorporated play equipment and facilities for rollerskating and basketball, and maintained the old school garden.
The site was updated as an adventure playground by architect M. Paul Friedberg by 1970. When that arrangement became obsolete, Operation Playground, a 1500-member neighborhood organization of parents and children, was established to raise funds, design, and construct new facilities for the site. The group raised $55,000 in private contributions, and Parks added more than $30,000. Nationally known playground architect Robert Leathers designed the facility with a maze, fire engine, tire bridge and swing, treehouse, roller coaster obstacle bridge, and suspension bridge with tunnels. Over the course of seven days in May 1987, community volunteers and Parks laborers worked side by side to build Wood Park. A short segment about the playground construction runs periodically on the beloved children’s television show Sesame Street.
In 1997 Council Member Ronnie Eldridge funded, for $760,000, the fourth incarnation of Tecumseh Playground. The new design allows children to imagine a journey between New York City and the West in the 1870s. The entrance is marked by a train silhouette on the fence and colored pavement train tracks which lead into the playground. On the east side of the playground, playhouses and tot play equipment represent cosmopolitan shops and the Grand Central Depot. On the west side, a Conestoga wagon climber, buffalo play sculptures, spray shower, and fortress play equipment suggest the thrill of the frontier. In the center a decorative paved area depicts leaf shapes and animal footprints from the eastern and western United States. Other features include new safety surfacing, drinking fountain, drainage and water supply. A new weather-vane signals the cavalry charge of school children from P.S. 87 scrambling into Tecumseh Playground to have some fun.
#53 – B
Frederick Douglass Playground
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (1817?-1895) was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland. The son of a slave named Harriet Bailey, Frederick spent his early years on Aaron Anthony’s plantation. Following his master’s death, Frederick was sent to Anthony’s son-in-law Hugh Auld, who lived in Baltimore, Maryland. While in Baltimore, Frederick was introduced to reading and writing by other slaves. Although literacy among slaves was illegal, Frederick developed a passion for the written word and educated himself by reading abolitionist literature. In 1834, Auld sold Frederick to a rural farmer in Talbot County, Maryland, who was a notorious slave-breaker. After four years of abuse and one unsuccessful escape attempt, Frederick managed to run away to New York City during 1838. Frederick viewed his escape as a rebirth and so changed his last name from Bailey to Douglass.
In 1838, Douglass married a free black woman from Maryland named Anna Murray. The couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass became involved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Within the congregation, Douglass preached abolitionism. In 1841, the renowned abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison witnessed Douglass deliver a riveting, heartfelt anti-slavery speech in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Garrison immediately enlisted Douglass as an abolitionist lecturer. By 1843 Douglass had become well known throughout the Northern United States for his fiery and credible oratory.
At Garrison’s urging, Douglass wrote an autobiography entitled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass that was published in Boston in 1845. The publication proved to be a mixed blessing. Although the book sold thousands of copies, it publicly identified Frederick Douglass as an escaped slave subject to the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the return of escaped slaves. Fortunately, while lecturing in Britain Douglass encountered several prominent abolitionists who purchased his freedom.
Douglass continued to use writing as a way of spreading abolitionist messages. In 1847, he served as publisher for the abolitionist periodical North Star. Eight years later, he completed his second biography entitled My Bondage and My Freedom. During the 1850s, Douglass supported John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and backed Abraham Lincoln’s presidential bid. In 1872 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he lived with his wife until her death ten years later. That same year, Douglass controversially married a white woman named Helen Pitts. Douglass completed his final work, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1892.
Frederick Douglass Playground is located on Amsterdam Avenue between 100th and 102nd Streets. In 1954, the City of New York acquired this parcel via condemnation for the benefit of the nearby Frederick Douglass Houses. The playground opened on September 10, 1958. In August 1962, the Board of Estimate transferred the property from the New York City Housing Authority to Parks.
In 1998, Frederick Douglass Playground received a $150,000 renovation sponsored by City Council Member Philip Reed. This renovation allowed the installation of modular play equipment and safety surfacing as well as the repair of handball courts. In 1999, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani sponsored an additional $44,000 to complete the renovation. The playground now features a mini pool, a handball court, a basketball court, a comfort station, an asphalt baseball diamond, three basketball standards, swings, and camel animal art.
WRONG ANSWERS
Baruch Playground
This large, unadorned park pays tribute to two generations of New Yorkers whose work, directly and indirectly, helped bring health and recreation amenities to the masses. By the late nineteenth century, New York City’s population had reached 1.4 million, and was growing rapidly. New immigrants were forced into congested tenement districts where overcrowding threatened their health and welfare. Epidemics of cholera and typhoid raged through these downtown slums in the 1880s and 1890s, owing mainly to the lack of basic sanitation facilities such as toilets and baths. At the turn of the century, these overcrowded neighborhoods averaged one bathtub for every 79 families, while on some blocks the proportion was a staggering one bathtub for every 440 families.
Dr. Simon Baruch (1840-1921), a former surgeon in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, moved to New York in 1881 and established himself as physician in the tenement-laden Lower East Side. Witnessing firsthand the debilitating effects of poor sanitation on the battlefield and in slums, Baruch became convinced that municipally-run public bathing facilities were necessary. He voiced the first public plea for bathhouses in this country in an 1889 New York Times editorial. The public’s reaction was skeptical, with even Mayor Hugh J. Grant (1852-1910) scoffing The people won’t bathe. In 1895, despite opposition, Baruch secured legislation requiring local health boards to build public baths.
In 1901, the city completed and opened its first free public bathhouse on this site. The bathhouse featured an indoor and an outdoor bathing pool, 45 showers and 5 tubs for men, as well as 22 showers and 5 tubs for women. Because of its location, city officials designated it the Rivington Street Bath. In 1917, the city changed the name of the bathhouse, dedicating it to Dr. Baruch for his unswerving commitment to public health.
In 1939, Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), son of Dr. Baruch and noted financier, donated most of the land for this park to the city. Parks assumed jurisdiction over the land that same year. Overrun by tenements, the area surrounding the bathhouse had again become a haven for overcrowding. Bernard hoped that his gift would restore his father’s vision for the bathhouse. In 1940, Parks renovated the bathhouse and constructed a playground on this site. Originally, the playground featured two handball courts, a basketball court, a softball field, a comfort station, a memorial flagpole, and play equipment.
Since 1951, Parks has operated the park through an arrangement with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). In 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947) established the NYCHA as the first public housing authority in the nation, and charged it with building low income housing in New York. The NYCHA today holds title to the land surrounding and incorporating the park. Parks therefore administers this parkland for the NYCHA. In recognition of Bernard Baruch’s generosity, both the park and the housing development were named in his honor in 1951.
In 1975, during the depths of a long fiscal crisis, the City closed and sealed the bathhouse, which had become too dilapidated to operate. That same year, Baruch Playground underwent a renovation that included the installation of metal frame timber climbing equipment and black-top surfacing. Today, the playground features benches underneath the shade of London planetrees (Platanus x acerifolia), as well as spaces for league and recreational softball, flag-football, basketball and handball. In 2000, as part of the Handball Court Initiative, the handball courts were renovated.
Martin F. Tanahey Playground
Located between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, this playground was named for local civic and political leader Martin F. Tanahey (1874-1930). Born and raised in this Lower East Side neighborhood, Tanahey held various public offices over 22 years. He served as chief clerk in the Labor Department of the State of New York and later became assistant appraiser of the Port of New York, the busiest port in the world for the first half of the 20th century. He also was an assistant government appraiser in President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. In 1922, Tanahey was elected to the Board of Alderman from District 1, which includes the Lower East Side, and remained an alderman the rest of his life. Tanahey was a chief lieutenant of Democratic Party leader Thomas F. Foley (1852-1925), a saloonkeeper and politician associated with Tammany Hall for whom nearby Foley Square is named. Martin F. Tanahey died of pneumonia at his home at 177 Cherry Street in 1930.
The land occupied by this playground was acquired by condemnation for park purposes on October 17, 1949. The park opened on October 11, 1952, and was named Martin F. Tanahey Playground by local law. When built, the playground was divided into separate sections. The sides facing Market and Catherine Slips were originally constructed as sitting areas with chess and checker tables, while the center section was reserved for active recreation, with spaces for basketball, volleyball, paddle tennis, shuffle board, and horseshoe pitching.
Martin F. Tanahey Playground was the third recreational facility to be constructed for the use of residents in the Governor Alfred E. Smith Housing Projects. Smith (1873-1944), known as the Happy Warrior, served as a Democrat in the State Assembly from 1904 to 1915 and was named vice-chairman of the Factory Investigating Commission, formed in 1911 after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. During his two terms as governor, Smith was known for his involvement in progressive politics and social reform. He worked to improve worker’s compensation and increase government aid to mothers, infants and dependant children. The statesman also sponsored laws to construct low-cost housing like the Alfred E. Smith Houses, which were built on Smith’s birthplace at 174 South Street.
Since its original construction this playground has gone through several changes and renovations. A 1972 local law transferred a 10-foot wide strip of parkland on the south side of Tanahey Playground from Parks to the Manhattan Borough President’s office to provide for the widening and improvement of Water Street. A 1975 renovation added a roller hockey rink, bocci courts, benches, and a basketball court to the park, and removed an old comfort station. The park maintains three distinct sections. The side near Market Slip is still a sitting area with benches, game tables, and picnic tables. The other end of the park features play equipment for children and black iron art work of swordfish, lobsters, eels, and fish along the gate. Three basketball courts and Rev. Joseph Moffo Rink occupy the middle of the park. New play equipment was added throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and a $433,000 reconstruction of a portion of the playground along Catherine Slip was completed in March 1998
White Playground
Bounded by Lexington Avenue, East 105th Street, and East 106th Street, this park honors renowned civil rights activist and author Walter White (1893-1955). White was born in Atlanta, Georgia, a few decades after the Civil War. Considering his fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, it must have been tempting for White, an African American, to pass himself off as being white. Instead, White chose to live his life proudly as an African American, championing the cause of civil rights and exploiting his appearance to investigate lynchings and race riots.
At age 25, White became Executive Assistant Secretary of the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP). Eighteen years later, he was appointed the Executive Secretary of the organization. During his tenure, White expanded the number of NAACP branches, increased the membership to more than 500,000, and helped found the Legal Defense and Education Funds, which fought for social integration in the 1950s and 1960s. During World War II (1939-1945), White served as a special correspondent for the New York Post in Europe and Japan. He was also an accomplished author of both fiction and nonfiction. His most widely read works were two fictionalized accounts of Southern lynchings, Fire in the Flint (1924), Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), and his acclaimed autobiography, A Man Called White (1948). In 1937, White received the Spingarn Medal in recognition of his efforts to improve the lives of African Americans. Eight years later, he served as a consultant to the United States delegation at the organizational meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco. White died in New York in 1955.
This small playground has been a part of the Harlem community since the early part of the twentieth century. The Italian Benevolent Institute was the first organization to operate a playground on this site. In 1936, the City of New York acquired a 0.52-acre plot of land from the Institute and transferred jurisdiction over the property to Parks. In the following years, Parks lobbied to acquire more land because the small park could not accommodate the expanding community. In 1938, the park grew substantially after the successful purchase of a 0.118-acre plot adjacent to the northeast border of the park. Under the auspices of the Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947), the park took its current shape with the purchase of a 0.046-acre plot on the southeast corner of the original park property.
This playground was named in Walter White’s honor by Commissioner Stern in 1989. Six years later, the park underwent a $119,000 renovation. The project supplied new playground equipment, including a turtle sculpture surrounded by safety surfacing, which offers children a fun and safe climbing area. In 1996, Parks completed a $24,000 rehabilitation of White Playground, funded by City Council member Phillip Reed, which featured the installation of improved safety surfacing. Parks renovated the playground three years later, again funded by Council member Reed. The $81,617 project added two new basketball courts to the park.
White Playground currently features basketball and handball courts, swings, and two sets of slide equipment with safety surfacing. The playground is also a Police Athletic League (PAL) site, and hosts summer basketball tournaments. Today, White Playground is more than a welcome place of recreation; it is a memorial to a dedicated activist whose courage and belief in racial equality serves as an inspiration to all.
#54 – B
Henry M. Jackson Playground
This playground’s clever name was coined by Commissioner Stern in 1997. It combines the street names that surround it: Henry, Madison and Jackson Streets, all of which were named for important political leaders. The playground’s name also specifically honors Henry M. Scoop Jackson (1912-1983) who served as a U.S. Senator from Washington (1953-1983) and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1941 to 1953. Jackson took a strong stance against Communism, but at the same time criticized Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s campaign in the 1950s to out Communist sympathizers. In retrospect, most regard McCarthy’s campaign as a 1950s witch hunt. Jackson supported organized labor and civil rights, and in 1972 and 1976 unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination.
Henry Street was named for Henry Rutgers (1745-1830), a philanthropist, legislator, and Revolutionary War patriot. A descendent of Dutch immigrants, Rutgers was born in New York City. He graduated from Kings College (Columbia University) in 1766, and quickly became active in New York politics. Though he served as both a colonel in the American Revolution and as a state assemblyman, Rutgers is best known for his generosity to schools, churches, and children of the poor. New Jersey’s Rutgers University, formerly Rutgers College, was named after this philanthropist in 1825.
Madison Street honors James Madison (1751-1836), the fourth President of the United States, and one of the founding fathers of this country. Born in Montpelier, Virginia, Madison was educated at the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) and pursued the study of law on his own. He became active in politics and was very influential during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, where he sponsored the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights and became known as the Father of the Constitution. Madison served as Secretary of State under President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), and then became President himself for two terms starting in 1809. Under Madison’s leadership, the United States fought and won the War of 1812.
Jackson Street was named for Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), a revered military hero and the seventh President of the United States. Born in South Carolina, Jackson’s formal education was interrupted by the British invasion in 1780 during the Revolutionary War. At 13, he joined the American Revolution. After the U.S. War of Independence, Jackson studied law in an office in Salisbury, North Carolina, and was admitted to the bar in 1787. He moved to a frontier settlement in Tennessee, and soon became a respected lawyer and politician. In 1796 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and was elected to the U.S. Senate the following year. He fought successfully as a military commander in the War of 1812, and became a national hero. In 1824, Jackson became the first President of the United States not born into a wealthy family. Reelected for a second term, Jackson’s political rise marked a shift in the balance of political power in the country.
This playground is located in the historic Lower East Side neighborhood, directly across from the Henry Street Settlement House. Under the direction of Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster in the late 19th Century, the settlement house became a center for medical care, as well as civic, social, and philanthropic work. Today, the building also houses a youth center, and it remains an important part of the neighborhood.
The City bought the site for the adjacent school, P.S. 134, in 1956. On October 14, 1958, the City opened the playground for school children, and in 1978, it became accessible to the public. In 1998, $24,956 was spent to renovate and refurbish the handball and basketball courts. Today, the park houses a colorful and lively play area for the community, and its name honors four individuals for their dedicated and patriotic service to the founding of this nation.
WRONG ANSWERS
Abc Playground
The name of ABC Playground reflects both its location at the northern edge of Alphabet City and its proximity to Public School 20, the Anna Silver School. The newer, more imaginative appellation was bestowed upon the playground after a $250,000 improvement was made to the playground in October 1998. This improved playground now consists of modern play units, animal art, painted line games, a spray shower area, basketball hoops, and new safety surfacing. ABC Playground is in a historically significant location for park development in New York City. The first permanent playground was built by the City in 1903, and was located in nearby Seward Park at Essex Street and East Broadway. The Lower East Side has served as a gateway to America, and is rich in cultural traditions. It was first settled by free black farmers, and since the 19th century, an influx of Irish, German, Italian, Eastern European Jews, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles added to the cultural mix of the area. The neighborhood became the first racially integrated section of the city after World War II, when many African Americans and Puerto Ricans moved to the Lower East Side, and in the 1980s, a new influx of immigrants from China, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, India, and Bangladesh joined the neighborhood to render the Lower East Side a veritable cornucopia of cultures. The land on which the ABC Playground was built was bought by the City of New York from the Public School Society for one dollar in 1853, and was assigned to the Department of Parks in 1934 to be used as a playground for small children. In 1960 the adjacent land was acquired for Public School 181. The number of the school was changed to Public School 20, by action of the Board of Education on July 21, 1960, due to citizen petitions and civic groups who were eager to perpetuate the number of a discontinued elementary school, which was known as one of the Lower East Side’s best known public educational institutions. Graduates from the original P.S. 20 include Senator Jacob K. Javits, actors Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni, and humanist and writer Harry Golden. The school was named for Anna Silver shortly after her death in 1960, an immigrant who lived on the Lower East Side. Her son Charles H. Silver, a businessman, served as the President of the Board of Education from 1959 to 1962.
.451 acre
James Madison Plaza
James Madison Plaza takes its name from the combination of the two street names that bound it, St. James Place and Madison Street. St. James Place is named for nearby St. James Roman Catholic Church, located on Oliver Street. Madison Street was originally known as Bancker Street, after a son-in-law of the noted philanthropist Henry Rutgers (1745-1830). In 1826, after the Banckers asked that their family name be withdrawn from the street, the City of New York renamed the thoroughfare Madison Street in honor of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison (1751-1836).
James Madison was born to a prominent family in Orange County, Virginia in 1751. He attended the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, graduated in 1772, and returned to Virginia. Madison first became involved in local politics in 1774 when he joined the Orange County Committee of Safety. Two years later, he was elected to the Virginia Assembly. His intelligence and skill earned him a place in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where he helped to draft much of our current Federal Constitution. Madison also played a large role in securing the ratification of the Constitution after the Convention. Along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, he wrote several essays, now known as the Federalist Papers, which argued for the adoption of the Constitution. Historians have long since recognized Madison’s involvement in the creation of our national government, naming him the Father of the Constitution.
Following the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, Madison continued his involvement in national politics. He served as Virginia’s Congressman from 1789 to 1797, and helped draft the Bill of Rights. From 1801 to 1809, Madison served as Secretary of State under President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Together with Jefferson, he formed the Democratic-Republican Party. The party formed largely in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s national plan for economic development. For Madison, Jefferson, and other Democratic-Republicans, this plan endangered the nation’s future.
Elected President of the United States in 1808, Madison fought to preserve the new nation’s autonomy. When Great Britain and France began seizing American trade ships and impressing sailors into their respective navies in the 1800s, Madison instituted a trade embargo against both nations. Great Britain nevertheless increased its harassment. On June 1, 1812, Madison secured a congressional declaration of war, signaling the start of the War of 1812. While most historians consider the war a draw, few dispute that the new United States of America emerged from the conflict with a newfound patriotism and pride.
Following his presidency, Madison retired to his home in Virginia in 1817. He continued his involvement in public affairs advising President James Monroe (1758-1831), and serving as a delegate to the 1829 Virginia Constitutional Convention. In 1836, after years of public service, Madison died in his home.
This land was deeded to the City of New York in 1964 as part of the Chatham Green Towers project, and came under Parks jurisdiction that same year. The triangle remained undeveloped until the late 1970s when Parks planted trees and installed planters around the triangle’s edges. In 1993, the City Council renamed the traffic triangle surrounding the plaza after Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917 ), a Roman Catholic missionary and the first American citizen to be canonized.
Playground 123
This playground is located on the northeast corner of Morningside Park, facing 123rd Street, for which it is named. The site lies within the area settled following the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811. New York City Mayor De Witt Clinton (1769-1828) created the commission, which was charged with planning the orderly development of Manhattan north of Houston Street. The planners agreed on a system of rectangular blocks, extending from 14th Street through Washington Heights, designed to maximize the efficiency of construction and travel throughout Manhattan. Known as the grid system, the plan arranged 12 north-south avenues perpendicular to 155 east-west cross streets.
The plan provided for parks to be located on 53rd, 66th, 77th, and 120th Streets. The Commissioners Plan of 1811 astutely predicted the exponential residential growth that would occur during the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the plan failed to include the park acreage necessary to provide adequate recreation for the growing population.
In 1867 Andrew Haswell Green, Commissioner and Comptroller of Central Park, recommended that a park be located in Morningside Heights. He argued that it would be very expensive and very inconvenient to extend the Manhattan street grid over the area’s severe topography. The City of New York gained jurisdiction over this property in 1870, and employed architect Jacob Wrey Mould and landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (co-designers of Central and Prospect Parks) to transform its raw topography into a place for public recreation. The name Morningside Park is a reference to the park’s location on the eastern side of the Manhattan schist, which separates Morningside Heights on the west from the Harlem Plain to the east. It is from this side of the cliff that the sunrise can be viewed in the morning.
The 1887 plan for Morningside Park, as envisioned by landscape architects Olmsted and Vaux, designated three entrances to the park from 123rd Street, one at each corner and another in the middle. The two easternmost entrances led to meandering paths that convened in a trail circling the field that once dominated the northeastern region of the park. In a renovation initiated by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981), the two trails were straightened, dividing the field into three smaller areas. A playground was constructed on the eastern section, the land on which Playground 123 stands today. It was named Morningside Playground and opened on November 20, 1935. The stone recreation building on this site is the only existing element of the original playground.
Today, it houses an after-school program, which provides local schoolchildren with tutoring and homework assistance, as well as organized recreational activities. Many of the program’s participants include students of the Margaret Douglas Elementary School (P.S. 36), situated on the northwestern corner of Morningside Park, and the Ralph Bunche School (P.S. 125), located across 123rd Street from this site. In 2000, Commissioner Henry J. Stern renamed this site Playground 123 and the mayor provided $131,319 towards a renovation of the playground.
#55 – A
Catherine Mall
This parkland is named for Catherine Rutgers (1711 & 1779), wife of Hendrick Rutgers (b. 1712) and mother of Henry Rutgers (1745 & 1830), for whom Rutgers and Henry Streets in Manhattan and a university in New Jersey are named. Hendrick Rutgers named Catherine Street and Catherine Slip after his wife when this area was part of the Rutgers family estate. Daughter of Johannes De Peyster (1666 & 1711) and Anna Bancker (1670 & 1740), Catherine Rutgers gave birth to seven children including Henry, four of whom died young. In Catherine’s time, the surrounding area was home to the city’s elite Dutch mercantile families.
As with much of the land south of Pearl and Cherry Streets, Catherine Slip was originally under water. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the edges of Manhattan were slowly extended through various landfill projects. A slip is a spot for sea vessels to dock, and Catherine Slip was once a port for boats and ferries. In the early 1800s, ferries carried passengers and carriages from Catherine Slip to Brooklyn.
The De Peysters were prominent, wealthy members of New York’s Dutch community. Johannes, Catherine’s father, was appointed mayor in 1698 and served four terms on the Board of Aldermen. Catherine’s uncle, Abraham De Peyster (1657 & 1728), one of the city’s wealthiest merchants, served as mayor from 1691 to 1693. Abraham also donated the land for the site of the second City Hall, built at Wall and Nassau Streets in 1704.
In 1732, Catherine married Hendrick Rutgers, son of a wealthy merchant and an ensign in one of New York’s six militia companies. Their youngest child Henry fought as a captain in the American army at the Battle of White Plains. Later in life, Henry Rutgers served as an assemblyman. In 1825, the former Queens College in New Jersey changed its name to honor the wealthy landowner, who donated $200 for a bell and a $5,000 endowment for the school. When Rutgers died in 1830, he left a third of his money to charity, but gave nothing to Rutgers College (later Rutgers University).
After his parents’ deaths, Henry remained in the Rutgers family mansion, dividing and leasing out much of the surrounding estate. Merchants and professionals, as well as shipbuilders, artisans, and craftsmen, moved into the area. As the neighborhood’s population increased, the runoff from the Fresh Water Pond to the west began to choke the streets with refuse. City officials filled in Fresh Water Pond in 1808, but problems persisted. Absentee landowners bought artisans’ former homes, subdivided them and packed them with tenants. In the late nineteenth century, works such as Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives exposed the squalid tenement conditions along the Lower East Side. The resulting public outcry prompted the City to acquire and condemn many of the tenements. Today, the area boasts a number of courthouses and City buildings.
The title to the land now known as Catherine Mall was first vested in the City between 1686 and 1730. In the late nineteenth century, it served as a public market under the jurisdiction of the Manhattan Borough President. Workers from the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era program aimed at reinvigorating the economy, planted London planetrees, installed benches, paved the lots, and reconstructed the park as a central mall space in 1939. Parks has maintained this parkland, officially named Catherine Slip Mall though commonly called Catherine Mall, ever since.
WRONG ANSWERS
Charlton Plaza
Charlton Plaza is bounded by the Avenue of the Americas, King Street, and Charlton Street. The plaza is named in honor of Dr. John Charlton (1731?-1801), a celebrated English surgeon who arrived in New York with British troops during the Revolutionary War. Following England’s defeat, Charlton remained in the newly independent colonies and became the president of the Medical Society of the State of New York. This respected organization, begun in 1749, struggled through the Revolutionary period due to poor organization. In 1794, Charlton reorganized the group, and by 1796, the Society had begun to influence local and state health policy. As president of the Society, Dr. Charlton fought for the inclusion of educational standards in the licensing requirements for medical practitioners. Under his guidance, the Society also provided guidance to the New York City and State governments during a series of yellow fever epidemics. The Society’s recommendations led to the creation of a permanent State Health Office that established quarantines and appointed state health commissioners. In 1807, Trinity Church (which owned the thoroughfare) named Charlton Street for the eminent doctor who contributed to the formalization and organization of American medicine.
Charlton Plaza lies in the Manhattan neighborhood known as SoHo (south of Houston Street). The neighborhood was first settled by a group of freed slaves who were released from the Dutch West India Company in 1644. Unbeknownst to many, the area once had large, rolling hills. In 1815, city planners used the soil from the hills to fill the ditch on Canal Street that now forms SoHo’s southern boundary. The removal of the hills facilitated the development of the neighborhood, and by 1825, the area had become the most populous in Manhattan. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the region had emerged as a center of commerce. The new factories used cast iron facades to ornament their warehouses; these facades were relatively inexpensive and easy to install. Around the turn of the century, the neighborhood went through a prolonged depression when local factories began to fail. The area was revitalized during the 1960s and 1970s, following an influx of artists who sought low-rent studio space. In 1973, the New York City Landmarks Commission designated 26 SoHo blocks as part of an historic landmark district.
The City of New York acquired this property in October 1959 and transferred jurisdiction to Parks in April 1965. Commissioner Stern gave the plaza its current name in 1996, giving the area a well-deserved sense of history. Before 1996, the property had been known simply as Park. Charlton Plaza boasts game tables, benches, planters, mural artwork, and three London planetrees. London planetrees are known for their ability to survive harsh urban environments, and they are the most commonly planted street tree.
Mary Collins Playscape
This play area honors a devoted community activist, Mary Collins (1937-1997). Active in community and church affairs, Collins served on Community Board 6 and the 13th Precinct Community Council. She directed her efforts into improving conditions in this neighborhood, specifically Albano Playground. She also spoke out to politicians and police in the attempt clear Lexington Avenue of prostitution. As co-founder of the Lower East Twenties Society (LETS), she spearheaded the Take Back Albano Park initiative in 1996. LETS and the 13th Precinct Community Council donated funds for a Playground Associate to facilitate recreational and arts and crafts programs at the park. This new position was commissioned to bring parents and children to the park, reclaiming the space that had become the province of loiterers.
In 1966 the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (now part of the MTA) extended a permit for Parks to operate the .346-acre parcel that now serves as Vincent Albano Playground and contributed $25,000 towards its development. The playground was designed by noted architect M. Paul Friedberg in the late 1960s. In its early years, the playground was informally known as Nathan Straus Playground for the distinguished department store magnate and philanthropist.
In 1989, community members celebrated the refurbishing and Council Member Carol Greitzer’s official naming of this site for Vincent Albano (1914-1981), a local politician whose efforts were instrumental in saving the land from construction. The $722,000 capital restoration provided a handicapped accessible play area for both children and adults along with new game tables and benches. The new design introduced brick herringbone paving, raised granite curbs, a granite information kiosk, and an ornamental steel panel fence with bronzed ginkgo and oak leaf castings
This site was substantially upgraded in 1998, as a result of a grant from the City Parks Foundation and a $61,000 fund from Mayor Giuliani. It was part of improvements that included the play equipment, safety surfacing, handball courts, and pavements. Like the work of its namesake, Mary Collins, this playground continues to provide the play space required for healthy living in a healthy community.
St. Catherine’S Park
Both St. Catherine’s Park and the nearby church were named for Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). St. Catherine was widely respected for her devotion to the poor and sick and for her incessant zealous labor. The youngest daughter in a large family, she lost many of her brothers and sisters in various plagues and thus gained a great appreciation for life and curing the sick. Eventually this dedication was recognized and she was named patron saint of those who heal the sick. Involved in public affairs, she was instrumental in returning the papacy from Avignon to Rome. She was commonly known for her visions of spiritual encounters with Christ, the most noted being when she saw Christ and herself engage in matrimony.
Across 68th Street and east toward York Avenue stands the park’s namesake, St. Catherine of Siena Church, founded in 1897, just ten years before the parkland was acquired. The church was originally built to serve the largely Irish community on the Upper East Side. A parochial school was established in 1906 in the basement of the church. A new era for the church came in 1932 when hospitals were built in the neighborhood and the church began to serve patients and staff.
The property for St. Catherine’s Park was purchased by the city of New York in February 1907 for use as a public playground. In 1914, it came under jurisdiction of the Parks Department and was given its current name by the Board of Aldermen in 1918. Originally built in 1917, the park was redesigned by the Parks Department in 1941 and reconstructed the same year by the Works Progress Administration. All that remains from the 1941 renovations are the flagpole, comfort station, and sycamore trees. A cement perimeter wall constructed in 1971 was removed when the park was renovated in 1988.
In 1996 $510,000 in funds was allocated by Council Member Charles Millard for the reconstruction of St. Catherine’s Park. An additional $618,000 has been appropriated by Council Member A. Gifford Miller. The current design is largely modeled after the Florentine floor pattern of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (1280) in Rome, where the body of St. Catherine of Siena rests.
The spray shower area stands in for the center aisle, leading to what would be the altar where the flagpole stands. The play areas to each side represent the pews, and the paving pattern throughout the park resembles the actual floor of the church in Rome. The elephant spray shower makes reference to Bernini’s sculpture of an elephant that supports a 6th-century Egyptian obelisk and stands outside the church. Because St. Catherine was often depicted holding a lily, a symbol of new life, lilies have been planted throughout, symbolizing the rejuvenation of the park. St. Catherine’s Park not only has a long history within the neighborhood, but also has religious and art historical associations that live on in the subtle park design.
#56 – B
Bloomingdale Playground
Formerly known as P.S. 145 Playground, this parkland was renamed in 1997 to reflect the rich history of the area. The Upper West Side was named Bloomingdale by 17th century Dutch and Flemish settlers after a town near Haarlem in the Netherlands. The word bloomingdale is an adaptation of the Dutch word bloomendaal, or vale of flowers, which reflected the geography of the area before it was leveled and developed. In Knickerbocker’s History of New York, Washington Irving described the area as a sweet rural valley, beautiful with many a bright flower, refreshed by many a pure streamlet, and enlivened here and there by a delectable little Dutch cottage, sheltered under some sloping hill; and almost buried in embowering trees.
Amsterdam Avenue, which forms one of this park’s borders, is another reminder of the Dutch presence. Amsterdam, the capital of Holland, had played an important role in the New World economy during the 1700’s. The street was originally part of Tenth Avenue, but residents renamed it Amsterdam Avenue in 1890 to honor the area’s first settlers, and also in the hopes that the name change would increase neighborhood property values.
Other historic landmarks in Manhattan take the Bloomingdale name as well. Bloomingdale Road, which opened in 1703, ran from 23rd Street to 147th Street along what is now Broadway. The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was the first mental hospital in New York State. It opened in Morningside Heights in 1821 as part of New York Hospital. Current institutions using the name include the Bloomingdale Branch Public Library and the Bloomingdale School of Music.
Bloomingdale Playground and P.S. 145 replaced the old P.S. 105 in 1958 when City officials deemed the building substandard. The playground opened on September 12, 1962, under the jurisdiction of the Board of Estimate. In November 1963, the playground was transferred from the Board of Estimate to the joint operation of Parks and the Board of Education. Its facilities originally included a roller skating court, a ball court, swings, seesaws, slides, a comfort station, and a spray shower. In 1989, the playground underwent a comprehensive renovation. The new facilities include a bridge, a climbing structure with a slide, and swing sets. In 1998, the playground’s safety surfacing and play equipment was replaced.
P.S. 145, also called the Bloomingdale School, serves approximately 800 children in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. Its special programs include a magnet program for gifted and talented children, a dual-language program for students learning in English and Spanish, and dance and choral training. The school also runs after-school parent clubs and workshops, and is involved in outreach programs with many organizations including Grosvenor House, the Jewish Home for the Aged, Lincoln Center, and Columbia University.
WRONG ANSWERS
Bellevue South Park
The park is named after Bellevue Hospital, one of the world’s leading medical institutions for more than two centuries. The original hospital opened as an almshouse in 1736 on the lot now occupied by City Hall. In 1811, New York City purchased Belle Vue farms, which is located at 27th Street and 1st Avenue. The land became the Bellevue Institution, in effect, a community center with an almshouse, a pesthouse, a soap factory, a greenhouse, a penitentiary, a school, a morgue, a bakehouse, an icehouse, and a shop for carpenters and blacksmiths. The institution was dedicated in its entirety in1816.
Bellevue had already established a reputation for innovative medical technology by the mid-1800s, and treated soldiers from both the Civil War and the Spanish American War. Bellevue doctors pioneered the use of hypodermic syringes (1856), performed the nation’s first cesarean section (1867), and developed the first hospital-based ambulance service (1869). Specialized units holding 2,700 total beds, a variety of outpatient clinics, and four schools were founded as the hospital expanded. During World War I and II, Bellevue organized hospital units to serve overseas. Today, the hospital is affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine.
This park actually lies to the west of the hospital complex, not to its south. The misleading name stems from the fact that the original Bellevue Urban Renewal Area was located at Kips Bay Plaza on East 30th Street, and this park lies just to the south of that site. The Bellevue South Urban Renewal Project, which began in 1959, dramatically changed the face of a 17-block area on Manhattan’s East Side, running from 23rd to 30th Streets between First and Second Avenues. This project was a source of much controversy among area residents, some of whom desired rehabilitation of older structures, rather than complete razing and rebuilding. Ultimately, tenements and old factory buildings gave way to a new, vibrant community centered on a complex of eight mixed-income apartment buildings known as Phipps Plaza.
Bellevue South Park was mapped in 1966, a welcomed green space for the increasingly residential neighborhood. The park fell victim to New York City’s severe fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and was left undeveloped for some time. In the late 1970s, the city agreed to pay for the construction of the park after Community Board Six and residents of the neighborhood promised to cover all of the expenses needed for its maintenance. The park opened in November 1979, and the Better Bellevue Association saw to its maintenance for the next seven years. The Association, a coalition of residents and nearby institutions including the Phipps Plaza Community Center, the Parks Council, the New York City Environmental Fund, and Community Board Six, organizes senior activities, lunchtime concerts, and children’s programs.
The city took control of the park after the worst of the fiscal crisis had passed, and Parks assumed jurisdiction over Bellevue South Park in 1986. A $2 million renovation sponsored by Councilman Antonio Pagan was completed in 1997, transforming the park into its current shape. Improvements included the removal of a concrete wall that had surrounded the park, a significant greening of the interior that replaced concrete and asphalt with trees and plant beds, and the installation of two new playgrounds with safety surfacing. A basketball court, numerous game tables, and new benches were added as well. Designers gave the park a lively and playful atmosphere by including fanciful sculptures of flowers, elves, turtles, and frogs, with sculpted animal tracks laid in the ground.
Dry Dock Playground
The lower Manhattan neighborhood surrounding this playground was once known as the Dry Dock District. The area received its nickname in the mid-19th century from the iron works and ship fitters that bustled with the activity of more than 2,000 local workers. Dock workers, mechanics and shipbuilders worked at companies such as Novelty Iron Works, the Sector Iron Works, Young and Cutter, and Cornelius H. Delameter.
The City of New York was assigned this property as a part of the Tompkins Square Urban Renewal Area project in 1964, and Dry Dock Playground opened in June 1975. The renewal project began in 1961 and sought to improve the neighborhood by replacing tenement housing, warehouses, and abandoned factories with shops, artist studios, and 900 units of middle-income housing. The City added parks and off-street parking, and widened streets to entice new residents. Only St. Emeric’s Church on East 13th Street and P.S. 34 were left untouched during the renovation. To this day the playground is jointly operated by Parks and P.S. 34.
This parkland has also been known as the Szold Playground. Like Szold Place, which forms the park’s border with Avenue D and East 10th Street, Szold Playground was named for Henrietta Szold (1860-1945), a founder of Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization. In 1988, the park was renamed Dry Dock Playground. The park’s swimming area, which retains the name Szold Pool, includes both a three-and-a-half foot deep outdoor pool measuring 60 feet wide by 75 feet long and a one and a half foot deep wading pool measuring 15 feet wide by 30 feet long. The pools are open from July 1 to Labor Day.
Across from the park on Avenue D stand the Jacob Riis Houses, a housing project built in the 1949, named in honor of Riis, a crusading journalist, author, and photographer. Born in Denmark, Jacob August Riis (1849-1914) immigrated to New York in 1870 and worked odd jobs, sometimes sleeping in doorways when money was scarce. In 1877, the New York Tribune hired Riis as a police reporter, and he soon began documenting poverty even more dire than he had experienced, particularly in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Five Points. Around 1887, Riis developed an interest in photography and took his camera on trips inside overcrowded tenements and seedy drinking holes. How the Other Half Lives, Riis’ book of essays and photographs detailing the lives of various immigrant groups in the Lower East Side, was released in 1890 and became a national sensation. Reformers, most notably then City Police Commissioner and soon to be the 26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), hailed Riis as a hero, and pushed for legislation aimed at improving living conditions in the slums.
In 1991, the park underwent a $500,000 renovation. Pathways were repaved, curbs were built, and an old comfort station was removed. New basketball backboards, chain link fences, benches, game tables, and play equipment with safety surfacing were added. A new lighting system was installed, and young trees, including many maples, were planted. In 1999, new fencing and interior lights were installed at the pool.
Woman’s Health Protective Association Fountain
Located along Riverside Drive at 116th Street, this marble stele and drinking fountain was designed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Woman’s Health Protective Association (WHPA) of New York City in 1909.
Bruno Louis Zimm (1876 & 1943), who also created the Slocum Memorial Fountain in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, received the commission to sculpt this monument. Dedicated in 1910, the stele depicts two female figures holding a lamp. These forms were representative of the Association’s commitment to shedding light on the public health issues facing women. The names of its members are inscribed along the benches to the right and left of the stele.
Members of the WHPA were usually part of the city’s elite, and Charlotte Wilbour, one of the names inscribed along the Riverside Park benches, helped to found the first New York City Woman Suffrage Association in 1870. This more radical branch of the movement (in comparison with the relatively conservative chapter in Boston) lobbied against the passage of the 15th amendment, which proposed to give suffrage to African-American men. Leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the male focus of the bill and suggested a new, 16th amendment in its place, one that would offer universal suffrage to all races, genders, and religions.
The dream of the founding suffragettes finally actualized on August 16, 1920, eleven years after this fountain was commissioned. With the vote in hand, the National Woman Suffrage Association disbanded, but its surviving members went on to become the core of the League of Women Voters and to continue the focus on women’s health issues in New York City.
#57 – C
McNally Plaza
This tiny park which serves as part of the approach to the Washington Bridge is named in honor of World War I soldier Corporal Richard J. McNally. McNally lived at 392 Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights. He served in Company M of the 107th Infantry, and was killed in action on September 29, 1918, shortly before hostilities ceased.
The original design for the Washington Bridge was determined by a competition in the 1880s, which was won by Charles Conrad Schneider. After reviewing Schneider’s plans, however, the project was deemed too expensive, and his proposal was combined with the simpler design of second-place finisher William Hildebrand. The result was what many consider the finest steel-arched bridge of the 19th century, a bridge that was described as the glory of the Harlem River. Approaches to the bridge were made of arched masonry, which gave way to two broad steel spans, one across the Harlem River and the other across the tracks of the New York Central Railroad. The bridge also includes a decorative cast-iron cornice and balustrade. Aside from its aesthetic appeal, the bridge was also technically innovative, as it was the first arched bridge to use plated girders. Opened in 1889, the bridge was named in honor of the centennial of George Washington’s (1732-1799) inauguration as president. Washington Bridge is the third oldest surviving bridge in the city, after the High Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.
The surrounding neighborhood of Washington Heights was named for the brilliant military leader and our nation’s first president because of the history of the area. Nearby Laurel Hill Terrace dates back to the time before the Revolution when it was covered with Laurel bushes. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army constructed a fort on a westerly ridge at what is now Fort Washington Avenue, between 181st and 186th Streets. Washington’s outnumbered troops lost the fort on November 16, 1776, as part of his unsuccessful defense of Manhattan. On November 25, 1783, exactly seven years after the city was evacuated by the Americans, Washington and his army returned triumphantly to watch the British retreat. Washington later lived in Manhattan from 1789-90 when the city served as the fledgling nation’s capital.
During the mid-18th century, Washington Heights became an exclusive retreat for prominent New Yorkers. By 1904, the Broadway subway line stretched up to the southern portion of the neighborhood, and was extended northward in 1906. This transportation improvement led to the widespread growth of the area. In 1912, developers built the Polo Grounds stadium on 155th Street, at Coogan’s Bluff, where the New York Giants played baseball from 1913 until 1957, when they left for San Francisco. In 1931, the George Washington Bridge was completed, thereby linking New Jersey with 181st Street in Manhattan. In 1932, the 8th Avenue subway opened on the west side to serve the growing community. The population of Washington Heights continued to swell in the 1980s, when it attracted the largest number of immigrants of any neighborhood in New York City.
Parcels of land in the area, including this site, were acquired by the City between 1876 and 1895 to create Highbridge Park which boasts important natural assets including open vistas and an unusual geologic makeup. Among its strongest features are the magnificent cliffs and large rock outcroppings that dominate the park. On December 14, 1920, the Board of Aldermen named this small section of the park McNally Plaza and erected a plaque to honor the local soldier who had recently been killed in World War I.
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Fort Washington Link
This small park between 155th and 158th Streets links two long stretches of public waterfront, Riverside Park and Fort Washington Park, providing continuous parkland along the Hudson River from 145th Street to Manhattan’s northern tip.
Parks Commissioner Robert Moses’ (1888-1981) West Side Improvement Project (1934-37) involved various city and state agencies in the construction of major public works including the Henry Hudson Parkway, extensions of Riverside Park, and the Henry Hudson Bridge. All the projects were linked. When the New York Central began digging underground tracks to make way for the parkway, the earth and rock they removed was recycled as the landfill for this parkland.
The Department of Ports, International Trade, and Commerce turned this inactive site over to Parks in 1989. The transfer became official the following year, after the Division of Real Property mapped the area as parkland. Prior to Parks’ involvement, the vicinity of 156th Street and the Hudson was known as the Salt because the Department of Sanitation’s salt spreaders used it as a refill station during the winter months. Between the barrage of truck traffic and the abandonment of the waterfront piers, the site was in disrepair. It was a rough dirt road with occasional broken asphalt pavement. Rainwater draining from the road above splashed down directly onto the dirt, causing occasional flooding and leaving eroded gullies crossing the site.
In 1997, just over two million dollars was allocated for the construction of Fort Washington Link. The 1999 project was funded by the City and by a matching grant from the New York State Environmental Quality Bond Act. This riverside improvement is a vital link in the Hudson River Greenway.
In addition to providing unprecedented public access to the waterfront, the new park provides an innovative method for treating non-point source pollution from the roadway above. Non-point source pollution is the most common type of water pollution in the country, and also in the Hudson River. It occurs when toxic materials, floatable debris, and water-borne bacteria wash off urban surfaces — especially roadways and parking lots — and flow into the water during rainstorms. At Fort Washington Link, the design includes an underground trench running parallel to the highway’s edge. This trench catches rainwater from downspouts and directs it through layers of porous materials, beginning with a layer of rounded gravel and ending with activated charcoal. This filtering process removes pollution, particularly hydrocarbons and oils, before letting the cleansed water flow into the river.
The design mimics the Hudson’s native shoreline ecosystem, with meadow grasses and wildflowers, natural boulders of local types of schist and granite stone, and native trees and shrubs. The bike path has a meandering form, encouraging people to appreciate the great views of the river from different angles. There is a portion of the site with a traditional lawn for picnicking or sunbathing. The arrangement and selection of the plantings is intended to support the use of this river corridor by a great variety of wildlife, including the Monarch butterflies which migrate through every fall. The designers aimed to allow the plantings to eventually seed themselves and spread over the lawns, making the parkland self-sustainable.
J. Hood Wright Park
Located between 173rd and 176th Streets, from Fort Washington Avenue to Haven Avenue, J. Hood Wright Park is named for the former owner of the site. Wright (1836-1894), a wealthy banker and financier from Philadelphia, lived in a mansion at 175th Street and Haven Avenue. He made large anonymous contributions to what is now the Washington Heights Branch of the New York Public Library. A plaque at the branch entrance honors Wright for his role in changing the status of the library from a subscription library to a free library in 1883. He also was instrumental in the founding of a hospital in New York’s Manhattanville neighborhood.
The land was acquired by condemnation on October 26, 1925 by the City of New York for the specific purpose of creating a much-needed park and playground, since the nearest playground was over a mile away. The original deed included a clause that required part of the park to be used as a facility for the recreation of senior citizens. The octagonal room and rest rooms connected by a curved loggia were constructed in 1935. Until the late 1960s there had been a concession stand located near the Danziger Senior Center, which is named for Frederick J. Danziger, president of the center in the late 1940s and early 1950s. J. Hood Wright Park is mentioned in Florry of Washington Heights (1987) by Steve Katz, a book about a teenager growing up in the neighborhood in the post-war years.
The park has handball, volleyball, and basketball courts, a multi-purpose playing field, and a dog-walking area. Vistas of the Hudson River and of the George Washington Bridge beckon visitors to the overlook at the northwest corner of the park. Additionally, the overlook features 3000 A.D. Diffusion Piece, a sculpture by Terry Fugate-Wilcox installed in 1974. Made of magnesium and aluminum plates bolted together, the artwork is expected to diffuse, or mix, by the year 3000. Other notable park aspects are the rock formations at Haven Avenue that include a cave similar to the rock shelters at Inwood Hill Park, and an outcropping of Manhattan schist at the park’s southwest corner.
J. Hood Wright Park has recently undergone substantial capital improvements. The playground and court game area were reconstructed under a $2,051,000 project funded by former Manhattan Borough President Ruth W. Messinger and Council Member Guillermo Linares. Improvements included new safety surfacing, wrought-iron gates, spray-shower, benches, trees, and pavement. The adventure playground equipment was custom-designed to resemble the George Washington Bridge. Council Member Guillermo Linares funded the $1,820,000 reconstruction of the recreation center and comfort stations. The Friends of J. Hood Wright Park are neighborhood residents who are involved with community events, clean-ups, and gardening within the park.
Paterno Trivium
This trivium (Latin for a place where three roads meet), at the juncture of Cabrini Boulevard, Pinehurst Avenue, and West 187th Street, is named for Dr. Charles V. Paterno (1877-1946), the person most responsible for the residential development of this section of the Fort Washington neighborhood. The Paterno family arrived in New York from southern Italy and became involved in apartment house construction. Paterno trained as a medical doctor, but after his father’s death in 1899, became an active builder throughout Manhattan. In 1905, he purchased land along the Hudson River, south of 187th Street, and constructed a grand mansion known as .Paterno’s Castle. Paterno acquired additional land in the 1920s, on which he erected the picturesque English Tudor style Hudson View Gardens complex in 1923-24, one of New York City’s earliest middle-class cooperatives. In 1938-39, after moving to Connecticut, Paterno replaced the castle with the Castle Village apartment complex. This series of five buildings was the first in America to employ the progressive European idea of setting tall residential towers in a park-like setting. In the spring of 2000, Paterno Trivium became a Greenstreet site. Greenstreets is a joint project of Parks and Transportation begun in 1986 and revived in 1994. Its goal is to convert paved street properties, such as triangles and malls, into green spaces. Winter King Hawthorn trees (Crataegus viridis) and a ground cover of Cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea magnus) adorn Paterno Trivium.
#58 – C
Orville & Wilbur Playground
This playground is named to honor American aeronautical pioneers Orville (1871-1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867-1912). Susan and Milton Wright, a United Brethen Bishop, raised the Wright brothers in Dayton, Ohio. As students, the brothers displayed a passion for mathematics, engineering, and mechanical devices. After graduating high school the siblings incorporated the Wright Cycle Company in 1892. The company designed, built, and sold bicycles. The experience gained in bicycle design would advance the brothers’ quest to build a flying machine.
During the 1890s, aeronautical design was in its infancy. The Wright brothers intently followed the work of German engineer Otto Lilienthal. Based on his designs, the siblings produced several of their own one-person gliders. In 1896, Lilienthal lost control of a test glider and died in the ensuing crash. The accident illustrated the importance of pilot control in aeronautical maneuvers. Proper stability and control became the primary concerns of the Wright brothers’ research. The tandem tested unmanned kites and gliders at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, using various wingspans and wing shapes. The research intensified following their construction of a wind tunnel. The tunnel created a controlled environment that provided constant winds and protection from the elements and it also provided the world’s first accurate table of lift and drag. By 1902, the siblings began to perfect their design, employing a rear rudder to increase control. Later that year, they began developing and testing engine designs for their aircraft. They eventually settled on a 12 horsepower engine and a self-constructed propeller.
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first heavier-than-air flight near Kill Devil Hills in Kitty Hawk. The Wright biplane had a 12-foot wingspan, and including the pilot, weighed 750 pounds. The flight lasted 12 seconds and began a worldwide revolution in transportation. In 1905, the brothers presented their design to the United States War Department. Although they spent the next several years patenting and finding markets for their design, the public was not presented with the Wright biplane until 1908. The brothers gave air shows throughout Europe and the United States. In 1909, they incorporated the Wright Company, which manufactured airplanes.
Orville & Wilbur Playground is located on 156th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, adjacent to Public School 28 (The Wright Brothers School). In July 1957, the City of New York acquired this property through condemnation for school and recreational purposes. Since November 21, 1963, Parks and the Board of Education have jointly operated the playground. In 1986, Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern changed the property’s name from P.S. 28 Playground to its present title. In 1994, City Council Member Stanley E. Michels sponsored a $223,803 reconstruction of the playground. It now boasts 2 handball and basketball courts, a spray shower, swings, a comfort station, a flagpole with yardarm, assorted play equipment, and shady London plane trees.
WRONG ANSWERS
Collyer Brothers Park
The reclusive Collyer brothers’s Langley (1886-1947), a concert pianist, and Homer (1883-1947), a former admiralty lawyer who had been blinded and paralyzed by a stroke’s made headlines after their deaths for their eccentric, junk-collecting lifestyle. The brothers spent their retirement secluded in the brownstone they owned at West 128th Street and Fifth Avenue, now the site of this park. Langley, Homer’s caretaker, saved old newspapers for his brother in the hope that he would regain his sight. The younger brother also booby-trapped their house to ward away thieves and curiosity seekers. On March 21st, 1947, the police, responding to an anonymous call reporting Homer’s death, broke into the brownstone through a top-story window. They found Homer’s body, but no trace of Langley. After several weeks of clearing out the house with much attention from the press, the police discovered his body under a pile of suitcases, breadboxes, and newspapers. Presumably, Langley was felled by one of his own traps, leaving his brother to die of neglect several days afterward. The housecleaning unearthed, among much other bric-a-brac, fourteen grand pianos and the chassis of an automobile. Later that year the house was demolished and the site became a vacant lot.
The urban unrest of the early 1960s led federal, state, and local officials to focus their attention on living conditions in America’s inner cities. In New York City, the Harlem riots of 1964 gave special urgency to the need for alleviating the congestion and blight plaguing low-income neighborhoods. This urgency was reflected in the 1965 mayoral campaign of Congressman John Lindsay. His campaign’s White Paper on reforming park and recreational facilities, drafted by Thomas P. F. Hoving, Lindsay’s soon-to-be Parks Commissioner, fired the imagination of urban planners across the country.
In the White Paper, Hoving called for a radical departure from the traditional concept of large, centrally-located urban parks. He argued for the creation of open-space and green areas as small as one building lot (typically 100 feet by 20 feet). At that time, Parks restricted the development of new parks to properties of 3 or more acres. Hoving proposed an expansion of the city’s parks resources into the very heart of inner-city neighborhoods, most of which were in need of open spaces. The term vest-pocket park soon came into vogue to describe these lot-size parks.
The White Paper influenced public policy even before Lindsay took office; late in 1964, the Parks Association of New York City (now the Parks Council), a nonprofit parks advocacy group, began to assemble private support to purchase property on which to construct the very first vest-pocket parks. Three lots on 128th Street were selected to inaugurate the project under the sponsorship of the Christ Community Church of Harlem and philanthropist Jacob Kaplan. Each lot was earmarked for a different constituency of parkgoers: a tot lot for children under 10; a playground, with space for basketball and ping-pong, for older children; finally’s the former site of the Collyer brothers’ brownstone’s a sitting area for adults.
The creation of the first three vest-pocket parks received extensive local and national media attention which resulted in a boom in the planning and construction of similar parks throughout the city. Thanks to national publicity, the West 128th Street vest-pocket parks and their progeny in New York City spurred a movement in park design across the country. No lot, it seemed, was too small to build a recreational area or patch of green in America’s inner cities. The vest-pocket movement became one of several critical approaches adopted by government and the private sector to combat the urban crisis of the 1960s and beyond.
By the mid-1990s, the site, still privately owned but no longer in the hands of the Parks Council, had fallen into neglect. The city purchased the property and on May 11th, 1998, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development transferred ownership to Parks. With the help of Operation GreenThumb, a Parks initiative that facilitates the transformation of vacant city lots into community gardens, the neighborhood groups that now maintain the site received landscaping advice and planting materials to refashion the lot into a park. More than a public space, Collyer Brothers Park is an emblem of Harlem’s rich history.
Gutenberg Playground
This playground is named in honor of Johann Gutenberg (c. 1397-1468), the German pioneer in the field of printing who is widely regarded as the European inventor of movable type. The Chinese are credited with the invention of printing type’s a block of wood, metal, or other material bearing a raised letter or character on one end, that, when inked and pressed upon paper, leaves a printed impression. Movable metal type was used in Korea as early as 1403; however, it was Gutenberg who developed this technology in Europe.
Details about Gutenberg’s life are few. He probably trained as a goldsmith or a gem cutter and polisher. While Gutenberg may have invented movable type in Strasbourg in 1436 or 1437, the work attributed to him was done in Mainz, including the famous Mazarin Bible, popularly known as the Gutenberg Bible. Completed by 1455, it was the first European book to be printed from movable type. The text was in Latin, composed in a Gothic type, illuminated by hand, on vellum and paper. Gutenberg’s landmark contribution to the printing trades has endured to the present day. Most printers used a form of Gutenberg’s hand press until the 19th century, and generations of printing students and artists continue to learn and experiment with the technology he invented.
Gutenberg Playground is located adjacent to the High School for Graphic Communication Arts, formerly known as the New York School of Printing. This vocational institution was founded in 1925 to prepare students for careers in the printing trades. When the school outgrew its quarters, plans were made to relocate to a dedicated facility near the heart of the printing industry in midtown Manhattan. Designed by the architectural firm of Kelly and Gruzen, the new seven-story building was the largest printing school in the United States when it opened in 1958. It showcases several significant works of art, including Hans Hofmann’s Abstraction mosaic (1957) on the auditorium’s south facade and Ernst Plassmann’s bronze sculptures of celebrated printers Benjamin Franklin and Johann Gutenberg (both c. 1872), located in the lobby.
The schoolyard was built by the Board of Education, and it opened with the school in 1958. Since 1959 the playground has been jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education. The smooth paved surface provided a favorite rollerhockey spot for National Hockey League all-stars Brian and Joey Mullen, whose childhood home was across the street from the playground.
In 1996 community groups and high school officials secured the city’s support for a total reconstruction of Gutenberg Playground. The $677,000 renovation was funded by State Senator Tom Duane, who was then a council member, and current Council Member Christine Quinn. Completed in 2001, the renovation added a new handball court, benches, pavement, fencing, and plantings.
Pelham Fritz Recreation Center
This center honors Pelham Fritz (1920 & 1988), an esteemed Parks official, former basketball player and coach, and Harlem resident for most of his life. Opened in 1969, its facilities include performance spaces, a children’s playroom, a weightlifting area, a reading room, a computer center, and a game room.
A native of Trinidad, Fritz moved to Harlem at age seven and spent his free time in what was then called Mount Morris Park. Fritz first met his wife Betty while both were serving abroad during World War II (1939-1941). When both realized that they lived just blocks away from each other back in Harlem, Fritz promised to meet Betty back at Mount Morris Park when they returned.
Before embarking on a 38-year career with Parks which culminated in the post of Assistant Commissioner for Recreation, Fritz’s career in recreation began at a City juvenile detention center. His first job with Parks was as an athletic coach at the Hamilton Houses Playground at 140th Street. Fritz was one of the original organizers of the Holcombe Rucker Community Basketball League and is remembered for being kind yet firm with the children he worked with and for his perpetual optimism.
Fritz was involved with many organizations in addition to Parks, including the Harlem YMCA, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and the Children’s Aid Society, where he served as a trustee. Fritz was honored many times throughout his career for his exceptional community service. After he died, it was noted that he had collected no fewer than 102 different plaques for his service to the community. In 1988 the center was named after Fritz. In addition, a housing facility, the Pelham Fritz Apartments at 21 West 118th Street, is also named for him.
Construction of the recreation center and amphitheater project began in 1967, at a cost of approximately $1.25 million. Composer Richard Rodgers, who grew up nearby at 3 West 120th Street contributed $150,000 towards the cost of the amphitheater. The original plan for the center, designed by Lundquist and Stonehill Architects, included a Senior Citizen area, multi-purpose room, club room, rehearsal area, and dressing rooms. Today the center also has a day care center and an indoor playground.
The fitness room at the center is named for Eugene L. McCabe, a local health care pioneer who expanded quality health care service in Harlem. After Harlem was left without a local hospital in the late 1970s, McCabe was instrumental in the 1979 opening of North General Hospital. Currently at 121st Street and Madison Avenue, the facility brought jobs and quality health care back to Harlem, and as president of the hospital, McCabe was known for his unique approach, which included, among other things, extensive staff input in decorating the facility. The Eugene L. McCabe Fitness Room at the Pelham Fritz Recreation Center was expanded and renovated in 1999 with help from North General Hospital and Rahedlin Medical Center, and the facility was equipped with new free weights, cardiovascular machines, and a space for aerobics.
The center, located at 122nd Street and Mount Morris Park West in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, is one of many features in the park named after Marcus Garvey (1887 & 1940), including a swimming pool built in 1969-71, and two playgrounds built in 1993 designed especially for infants and disabled children.
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Penn South Playground
This playground, located on 26th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, takes its name from Pennsylvania Station, commonly known as Penn Station. The original Penn Station was an above-ground structure designed by the eminent New York architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, and was located between 7th and 8th Avenue from 31st to 33rd Street. Built over a span of eight years, from 1902 to 1910, Pennsylvania Station would compete for traffic with Grand Central Station on the East Side. The eight-acre site on which the railroad was to build its new station contained 500 buildings, all of which had to be torn down before construction could begin.
McKim, Mead and White designed Penn Station during the peak of the City Beautiful movement as a gateway to the metropolis of New York City. Begun in San Francisco, the movement married civic function with classical design, restoring the architectural splendor that industrialization had rejected. Penn Station, which was modeled after the Baths built by Roman Emperor Caracalla, was one of the city’s most beautiful, ethereal monuments. Exalted by architects and revered by the public, Penn Station set the stamp of excellence on the city, according to The New York Times. Its unfortunate destruction in 1965, to create a new office tower and Madison Square Garden, spurred the formation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the passing of some of the most stringent landmark protection laws in the world.
The new Penn Station, built on the same site in 1968, is an underground structure that also houses offices and Madison Square Garden. With twenty-one tracks and 600,000 passengers traveling through it daily, Penn Station is the busiest station in North America. In the new millennium, New York may well see a third Penn Station. Significant federal funds were allocated by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to create a new station within the landmarked Farley Post Office building at 34th Street, which was also designed by McKim, Mead and White to compliment the original train station.
This playground, contained within the Penn Station South Houses, opened in 1961 bearing the same name as the housing complex. Parks renamed it Penn South Playground in 1989. Council Member Tom Duane provided $330,000 in 1996 for a complete reconstruction of the playground that included new elementary school-age equipment on new safety surfacing, and new benches which sit beneath the shade of the London plane trees and ginkgo trees that line the park.
WRONG ANSWERS
The Blockhouse
During the War of 1812 New Yorkers constructed fortifications along the waterfront at the Battery and Ellis Island, assuming that a British attack would come from the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Therefore, when the British stormed Stonington, Connecticut on Long Island Sound on August 10, 1814, the city was quite unprepared to defend itself from an attack from the east or the north.
Under the direction of General Joseph Swift, citizens from New York, New Jersey, and Long Island banded together in patriotic zeal to construct a line of defense running through this area of Manhattan. According to Edward H. Hall in McGown’s Pass and Vicinity, they came from every conceivable class of men: the Society of Tammany, the students of Columbia College, medical students, the Marine Society, the Society of Tallow Chandlers, butchers, members of the bar, Free Masons, firemen, Sons of Erin, colored citizens. The unevenness of the stonework is testimony to the haste in which these fortifications were constructed. In September 1814, less than a month after construction, The New York Columbian commented: The works at Harlem heights are numerous, compact and judiciously placed, and form a romantic and picturesque view.
This is the only remaining blockhouse, officially called Blockhouse #1; three others were on the site of Harlem Heights, now known as Morningside Heights. In his report to the Common Council, General Swift explained his military strategy: [In this area] commences a chain of almost perpendicular rocks, and wooded heights, of difficult ascent, except in one place, and accessible only to the lightest of troops. On these heights have been erected block houses .within supporting distance of each other, and near enough for the interchange of grape shot; all of them to mount heavy cannon on their terrace. Although soldiers were certainly stationed at the Blockhouse and surrounding fortifications, there was not any military action in the area. The British did not attack New York City, and in 1815, one year after the completion of these fortifications, the Treaty of Ghent was signed.
According to recent studies of the Blockhouse, there was formerly a heavy timber floor which supported a heavy cannon. All four sides of the structure have two small gunports. A timber stair used to connect the ground entrance to the terrace level. The current entrance and staircase are not original and were probably added at the turn of the century. The upper two feet of the Blockhouse walls are noticeably different in color, composition and stonework. They were added at a later date, perhaps during peacetime when the Blockhouse was used as a powder magazine or storage building for ammunition.
In 1858 the design competition for Central Park only included the land from 59th Street to 106th Street as these rocky bluffs and their surrounding swamp (now the Harlem Meer) were considered unsuitable for park terrain. Nonetheless, the area was added to the Park in 1863, when the land was deemed too difficult to develop for commercial or residential purposes. When the team of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux designed this area, the Blockhouse was treated as a picturesque ruin with vines covering portions of the walls, and landscaped with alpine plants and evergreens.
Mayor Wagner Pool
This pool and recreation area, located on East 124th Street between First and Second Avenues, is named for Mayor Robert F. Wagner (1910-1991), one of only three mayors of post-consolidation New York City to hold office for three terms (Fiorello H. LaGuardia [1882-1947] and Edward I. Koch [1924- ] were the other two). Wagner’s administrations were marked by a great deal of construction, much of it under the direction of Robert Moses (1888-1981, Parks Commissioner 1934-60). The Harlem River Drive, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and many public housing projects were all built while Wagner was mayor. He is also remembered for hiring minorities for prominent city positions (a rarity at the time), passing legislation aimed at ending housing discrimination, and forging a consensus among lawmakers and union leaders.
Wagner was born in New York City, and graduated from Yale College, Yale Law School, and Harvard Business School. He was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1937 but resigned in 1941 to join the Army Air Corps. After serving in North Africa during World War II, he was appointed tax commissioner and later commissioner of housing and buildings under Mayor William O’Dwyer (1890-1964). In 1949, Wagner was elected Manhattan Borough President with the support of the Democratic and Liberal parties. With the support of the Democratic county machine, Wagner was elected mayor in 1953, and was reelected in 1957. After breaking with Tammany, Wagner again won reelection in 1961 as a reformer.
The Wagner Houses, the huge residential complex sitting to the northeast, are named for Mayor Wagner’s father, U.S. Senator Robert F. Wagner (1877-1953). Born in Nastatten, Germany, Wagner immigrated with his family to the United States in 1886. He graduated from City College of New York in 1898 and from New York Law School two years later. After law school, Wagner joined the Tammany Society and became a staunch Democrat. In 1904, he was elected to the State Assembly, and was a major supporter of the reform policies of Governor Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944).
Wagner was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926, and during his service co-sponsored the Wagner-Peyser Act, which created the United States Employment Service that later became part of the Social Security board. His other notable legislation included the Wagner-Connery Act, which established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and the Wagner-Steagall Act, which set up the United States Housing Authority (USHA), forerunner to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Wagner continued to fight for social causes in the Senate until 1949, when poor health forced him to retire. He died four years later at the age of 75. Because of his important role in creating public housing, this complex, built in the early 1950s and originally known as the Triborough Houses because of the nearby bridge, was renamed to honor Senator Wagner.
Mayor Wagner’s son, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (1944-1993), continued the family tradition with a career in government. A graduate of Exeter, Harvard College, and the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton, he was elected a New York City Council Member representing Manhattan (1974-77). Mayor Koch appointed him Chairman of the City Planning Commission (1978-79), Deputy Mayor for Policy (1979-86), and President of the New York City Board of Education (1986-90).
The New York City Housing Authority leased this property to the city in 1969 to develop a public pool for the community. The 3′6 deep square pool, changing rooms, and comfort stations were all built using modular construction techniques. The buildings, pool siding, and filtering equipment were all prefabricated in a factory, shipped on trucks, and bolted and sealed together at the site. Recently, a garden was planted next to the pool’s entrance, supplementing an already existing apple tree, which bears edible fruit every year (largely for the benefit of local squirrels). In 1999, this property, also known as the Hilda E. Stokely Recreation Center, underwent a $43,891 renovation funded by Mayor Giuliani. The rehabilitation project featured the installation of new steel fences with bear claw extensions, and new concrete and asphalt pavements. Today, Mayor Wagner Pool serves as a memorial to a dedicated political leader and a refreshing place for rest and recreation.
Queensboro Oval
The Queensboro Bridge, which provides both a ceiling and a name for this park, opened in 1909, connecting Manhattan and Queens by way of an intermediary link on Roosevelt Island, was once known as Welfare Island. The two-leveled steel bridge is one of eight New York City bridges that span the East River. Designed by engineer and architect Gustav Lindenthal (1850-1935), it is the first major structural project to reject the suspension technique in favor of cantilevering. The upper level once carried wooden railway cars, and five-cent trolleys shared the lower level with automobiles until 1955. In addition to his work on the Queensboro Bridge, Lindenthal prepared plans for the Manhattan Bridge, helped to complete work on the Williamsburg Bridge, and directed the reconstruction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The National Register of Historic Places added the Queensboro Bridge, also known as the 59th Street Bridge, to the list of City landmarks in 1978.
This area was originally inhabited by the Reekgawawanck Indians, who were displaced as early colonists spread northward from lower Manhattan. During the 18th and 19th centuries, extreme poverty characterized the area now known as Sutton Place. A brewery, coal yards, lumberyards, and brickyards stood amidst tenements and shacks. The area was home to many street gangs, including the notorious Dead End Kids, who were brought into the public consciousness by a Broadway play and a series of movies in the 1930s and 1940s. In one of the films, Dead End, the Queensboro Bridge provides a dramatic backdrop for clashes between the wealthy and the poor from the neighborhood. The bridge is also the title of a 1966 Simon & Garfunkel song, The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy).
In 1875, Effingham B. Sutton, an entrepreneur who made his fortunes in the California gold rush of 1849, built brownstones between 57th and 58th Streets in hopes of establishing a residential neighborhood. Sutton’s real estate venture, however, suffered from the overwhelming industrial presence in the area. The neighborhood was transformed into an exclusive enclave of the wealthy in the 1920s when the Vanderbilt and Morgan families each established residences in the area. Development of the neighborhood continued throughout the 1990s as co-ops, condominiums, and apartment buildings replaced factories and tenements.
This park, bounded by York Avenue and 59th and 60th Streets, is built on land that the City of New York initially acquired for use as an alternative bridge approach. The Board of Aldermen set it aside as a playground on January 19, 1909.
During the spring and summer, the Queensboro Oval serves nearby residents as a ballfield. Teams from around the city compete in leagues sponsored by St. Stephen of Hungary’s Roman Catholic Church and Bethany Memorial Reformed Church. Throughout the rest of the year, the Queensboro Tennis Club covers the park with an inflatable bubble, and converts the land into a tennis facility, which is run under a concession license. With opportunities for sport and recreation, Queensboro Oval is a thriving oasis beneath a major thoroughfare.
#60 – D
Peter’s Field
Peter’s Field, located between 20th and 21st streets and First and Second Avenues, is named for two of the city’s most prominent historical figures – Peter Stuyvesant (1610-1672) and Peter Cooper (1791-1905). Nearby Stuyvesant Town, located between Avenue C and First Avenue from 14th to 20th Street, and Peter Cooper Village, located between Avenue C and First Avenue from 20th Street to 23rd Street, also bear their names.
Peter Stuyvesant, a Calvinist minister’s son born in The Netherlands, joined the Dutch West India Company at the age of 22. After becoming the director of the company’s Caribbean colonies of Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire in 1643, Stuyvesant led a victorious attack on the island of Saint Martin; he gravely injured his right leg and was forced to have it amputated. The wooden leg he wore from then on earned him the nickname Old Peg-Leg. Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam in 1647 as the Director General of New Netherland and quickly worked to limit the sale of liquor, enforce his own church’s domination, and persecute Lutherans, Quakers, and Jews. Stuyvesant bought a farm, the Bouwerie (the namesake of the Bowery), in 1651, and built his home, White Hall, in 1655 at what is now the intersection of Whitehall and State Streets. Often remembered as a violent despot, Stuyvesant also encouraged commerce and helped form New Amsterdam’s municipal government until the British seized New Netherland in 1664. Following his withdrawal from public life, he retired to his farm, until his death in February 1672. Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, located in Battery Park City, and Stuyvesant Square Park, from 15th to 17th Streets between Livingston Place and Rutherford Place, are named for him.
New York City native Peter Cooper, an inventor with little formal education, began his career as a cloth cutter during the War of 1812. After becoming a prosperous glue manufacturer, Cooper built the country’s first steam engine, the Tom Thumb, at his Canton Iron Works factory in Baltimore. Deeply involved in New York City politics, he worked to disentangle the fire and police departments from their political connections, to supply better water and sanitation, to improve prison conditions and to provide the poor with public education. The namesake of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (formed between 1857 and 1859), Cooper was an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1876, when he ran on the Greenback ticket.
Peter’s Field serves the children of J.H.S. 104, which replaced P.S. 50 in 1956 as part of a comprehensive plan to provide better school facilities for Manhattan’s East Side between Houston and 34th Streets. After Bellevue Medical Center on First Avenue was completed, the post-graduate hospital then on this site was obsolete. The hospital’s demolition in 1963 allowed room for the expansion of Peter’s Field. The park officially opened in 1965, and is jointly operated by Parks and the Board of Education.
In 1997, Councilman Antonio Pagan funded a $517,000 renovation to the playground. The improvements, completed in October 1998, included the addition of tennis courts on the side bordering the school and replacement of basketball courts with more hoops bordering Second Avenue, as well the planting of several London planetrees. A variety of plants decorate the park today including meidland roses, oakleaf hydrangeas, japanese barberries, landy’s mantle and a host of tulips.
A series of new cast concrete plaques, placed in pairs off Second Avenue, depicts other famous Peters: Peter Pan; Peter Parker, Spider Man’s alter ego, shown as half man, half spider; Peter Piper, picking pickled peppers; Peter Pumpkin Eater; Peter Rabbit; and Peter of Peter and the Wolf.
WRONG ANSWERS
Catbird Playground
One of the fanciful pieces of animal artwork in this playground is a sitting cat adorned with wings, which led to the playground’s name, Catbird. The name is also a veiled reference to the catbird seat, an expression meaning an advantageous position, which is appropriate considering the power held by residents of nearby Gracie Mansion. Also in the neighborhood is 2 Gracie Square, former residence of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who helped with the creation of this very playground.
The catbird is a songbird indigenous to North and South America belonging to the mockingbird family. The gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) grows to about nine inches long, and is characterized by slate gray feathers, a black-feathered crown, and chestnut-colored area underneath the tail. The catbird’s name refers to the call it makes, which can sound similar to the meow of a cat. The bird usually sits on a high perch overlooking the world below, hence the derivation of the expression catbird seat.
Carl Schurz Park, named by the Board of Aldermen in 1910 for the soldier, statesman, and journalist Carl Schurz (1829-1906), overlooks the turbulent waters of Hell Gate, where the waters of the Long Island Sound and the East River meet. Schurz was born in Cologne, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in 1852. He quickly earned a reputation as a skilled orator, and proved to be instrumental in Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election campaign. Schurz’s most significant political offices were that of United States Senator from Missouri, and Secretary of the Interior (1877-81) during the Hayes administration. In his later years, Schurz was editor of The New York Tribune and an editorial writer for Harper’s Weekly. Schurz is also honored with a statue sculpted by Karl Bitter in 1913, which is located at Morningside Drive and 116th Street.
The first known Dutch owner of this land was Sybout Claessen, who was granted the property in 1646 from the Dutch West India Company. Jacob Walton, a subsequent owner, built the first house on the site in 1770. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army built a fort surrounding the Walton residence to guard the strategic shipping passage of Hell Gate. After a British attack on September 8, 1776, the house was destroyed and the Americans were forced to retreat from the fort, which the British retained until the end of the war in 1783. Archibald Gracie, a Scottish shipping magnate, purchased the land from Walton’s heirs in 1798. He built a mansion there in 1799, where his illustrious guests included future United States president John Quincy Adams and future French king Louis Phillippe. The estate, sold by Gracie in 1819, was acquired by the City from the Wheaton family in 1891. The first home of the Museum of the City of New York, from 1924-32, the mansion has served as the official residence of New York City’s mayors since Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947) moved there in 1942.
The playground that exists today was originally designed in 1935 by Gilmore D. Clark. The newly redesigned Catbird Playground occupies the semi-circular space at the north end of the rectangular play space. This area was originally used as a separate seating area and flower garden. In 1965, play equipment was introduced and steps were added to connect it to the playground. After receiving suggestions from Community Board 8, Parks decided to remove old timber play equipment from the site and replace it with a new steel unit that meets current safety and accessibility standards. Council Member A. Gifford Miller funded a $567,000 renovation to the playground in 2000, and the site was named Catbird Playground. The steel play unit features an ensemble of high platforms, challenging climbers, slides, and overhead ladders and rings. Under the decks, another series of play activities is accessible from ground level. The renovation also included adding new benches, trees, and pavement, as well as the imaginative animal artwork, sculpted by Carol Zaloom, that earned the playground its name.
Crack Is Wack Playground
Crack is Wack Playground earned its distinctive name after artist Keith Haring (1958 & 1990) painted the now-famous Crack Is Wack mural in 1986 on the handball court walls. The mural, done in Haring’s signature style of thick black outlines, bright colors and intermingling, cartoon-like bodies, was painted to send a serious anti-drug message to the community.
Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. His father, an amateur cartoonist, sparked his son’s early interest in art. After high school, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, but soon grew dissatisfied with the commercialism of his illustration and graphic design coursework. He withdrew from school and hitchhiked across the United States. He returned to Pittsburgh in 1976 where he became involved with the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center and hosted his first art show at age 19.
In 1978, Haring came to New York with a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts. The graffiti he saw throughout the city immediately appealed to Haring’s artistic sense of spontaneity and the possibilities for political messages. Soon Haring began using building facades and subway walls as canvases for his own graffiti art. Most of his subway graffiti was benign, as it was done in white chalk on the blank black background of unused advertising panels. Though Haring was arrested several times for illegally spray painting building walls, Haring continued to create his distinctive murals. Haring believed that art should be accessible to everyone, and his philosophy is reflected in both the simplicity of his figures and the public medium through which he chose to express himself. As his signature chalk outlines of interlocking bodies grew in fame, Haring gained the respect of the international art community and the appreciation of the public. One interpretation of Haring’s work holds that he is suggesting how diverse groups of people can live together in harmony.
Haring painted this playground’s mural on October 3, 1986 to call attention to the damage drugs can inflict on community welfare. He continued to create murals, sculptures, drawings, and paintings until he died of AIDS on February 16, 1990, at the age of 32. His artwork is highly prized throughout the world. The Keith Haring Foundation, which Haring created shortly before his death, continues to educate the public about Haring’s life and work and raises money for children’s and AIDS charities.
Crack Is Wack Playground, located on Second Avenue, 127th Street, and Harlem River Drive, is one of six parcels of land that collectively form Harlem River Park. The park is located along a 3.9-mile strip of Harlem River Drive, from East 125th Street to East 155th Street. Harlem River Drive was built in 1941, one of a number of transportation projects conceived by legendary political figure Robert Moses, Parks Commissioner from 1934 until 1960. Moses also built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Major Deegan Expressway, and the Alexander Hamilton Bridge at the same time. Harlem River Drive was designed to provide a link between the East River Drive (now FDR Drive) and the Harlem River Speedway (now the Harlem River Driveway) while allowing for the preservation and rehabilitation of the Harlem River waterfront.
This parcel of land was transferred to Parks in 1956 from the Board of Estimate. The handball court, basketball courts, and trees were added the following year. To ensure that the message of Haring’s mural will continue to reach parkgoers, Parks and the Keith Haring Foundation restored the mural in July 1995.
Netherlands Monument
This monumental flagstaff commemorates the Dutch establishment of New Amsterdam and the seventeenth century European settlement which launched the modern metropolis of New York City. Designed by H.A.van den Eijnde (1869-1939), a sculptor from Haarlem in the Netherlands, the monument was dedicated in 1926 to mark the tercentenary of Dutch settlement, and the purchase of the island of Manhattan from Native Americans.
In 1609, the Dutch East India Company ship De Halve Maen (The Half Moon) entered the harbor. The river still carries the name of the ship’s commander, an Englishman named Henry Hudson. Subsequent trading missions led to the formation in 1614 of the New Netherland Company which stretched from Delaware to Connecticut. In 1621, the States General of the Netherlands established the Dutch West India Company. Around this time, Dutch and Walloon families formed a small community at the southern end of the island, though the precise date and circumstances of New Amsterdam’s creation remain the subject of debate. Also in question is the location of the almost mythical purchase of the land now known as Manhattan by Dutch provincial Director General Peter Minuit from the Lenape people, an event depicted on the south-west facade of the monument.
New Amsterdam grew in size and prosperity over the ensuing decades, and became its own municipality in 1653’s the same year that a fortification wall was built between the Hudson and East Rivers at what is now Wall Street. This wall was built to defend against an invasion from New England during the First Anglo-Dutch war. Opposite today’s monument site, and the present-day location of the National Museum of the American Indian (formerly the Old Custom House), stood Fort Amsterdam. The waters of the harbor lapped at a shoreline, which has been extended repeatedly over the past three centuries. New Amsterdam was surrendered to the British in 1664 and renamed New York.
Though comprising about three tenths of one percent of the citizenry in the year 2000, the Dutch have had far-reaching influence on local culture. Two boroughs’s the Bronx and Brooklyn (Breuckelen)’s numerous streets, and the New York Knickerbockers professional basketball team derive their names from the Dutch. Old Dutch-style Houses such as the Dyckman Farmhouse (circa 1785) in northern Manhattan and the Wyckoff House (circa 1652) in Flatbush, Brooklyn survive a bygone era. Monuments to the Dutch legacy dot the landscape, and include Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s statue of Dutch director general Peter Stuyvesant, commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which has stood on the western side of Stuyvesant Square Park since 1941. Above all, New York City’s preeminence in commerce is a direct outgrowth of its origins as a Dutch mercantile trading outpost.
On Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, 1926 the Netherlands Monument, a gift of the people of Holland, was formally accepted by Mayor James J. Walker and Parks Commissioner Francis D. Gallatin. At that time it stood south of Castle Clinton, then the site of the New York Aquarium. In 1939 the monument underwent restoration and the inscriptions were recut. Subsequently, a fire caused damage to the monument. When the park was closed from 1940 to 1952 for renovations and to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the monument was relocated to its present site at the northeast entrance.
In 2000 the monument was conserved by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program, with the financial support of individual and corporate donors under the auspices of the Netherlands Memorial Foundation and the Netherlands Consulate General. The stone was cleaned and poulticed. Bronze emblems were cleaned, repainted, and coated. The map of New Amsterdam was polished, and the Dutch and English inscriptions were repaired and regilded. A new flagstaff will be installed by the City of New York.
The monument was rededicated by the Honorable Pieter van Vollenhoven, Parks Commissioner Stern, and other dignitaries in a ceremony held on November 16, 2000. The date marks Dutch-American Heritage Day, which commemorates the Dutch people’s first salute in 1776 of the United States flag on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. The restored monument remains a symbol of the longstanding Dutch presence in American life.
#61 – D
Unity Gardens
Unity Gardens is one of the many parcels of land that was converted from vacant lots into vest pocket parks. In the wake of the urban unrest of 1965, Mayor Robert F. Wagner (mayor from 1954 to 1965) and his successor Mayor John V. Lindsay (mayor from 1966 to 1973) established the Vest Pocket Park program. Through this program, land seized by the City for delinquent taxes could be leased to community organizations, which would then be responsible for the upkeep of the land. Small vacant lots wedged between buildings were transformed into beautiful escapes from the crowded city.
With the help of Parks’ GreenThumb program, citizen groups receive landscaping advice as well as planting materials. In some cases, properties can then be transferred from other city agencies to Parks, which protects the community land in perpetuity while maintenance is remains largely the responsibility of community groups.
Prior to its designation as a public garden, Unity Gardens housed a tenement building, which was seized by the City for unpaid taxes. The abandoned building was demolished and the small lot was reclaimed by the neighbors who planted small, individual gardens. This open space was proposed for development in the early 1990s. On July 15, 1997, the area was designated parkland and transferred to the protection of Parks.
Residents of this East Harlem neighborhood gave this garden its name to celebrate the ethnic mix of their community, which includes Hispanics, African Americans, and recent immigrants from the Caribbean. The land is maintained by volunteers with the assistance of the Trust for Public Land and the 128th Street Block Association. There are two long rows of planting boxes for vegetables, flowers, and spices, and in warm weather colorful annuals line the entrance on 128th Street. The gardens are used as a neighborhood meeting place, and community members sponsor clean-up and flower planting events twice a year.
WRONG ANSWERS
Allen Malls
This Parks property and the underlying street are named for Navy Captain William Henry Allen (1784-1813). Allen was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Sarah and Major William Allen. Major William Allen had served in the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War, and at age 15, William Henry Allen also joined the military. William Henry Allen joined the United States Navy, and during the first twelve years of his career, traveled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. When the War of 1812 erupted, the Navy made Allen a Lieutenant on the Chesapeake under the celebrated Captain Stephen Decatur. On New Year’s Day, 1813, the crew of the Chesapeake brought the captured British ship Macedonian into New York Harbor and received a hero’s welcome.
The New York victory earned Allen the command of the Argus, thereby making him the youngest Navy skipper during the War of 1812. The Argus patrolled the coast of Brazil with a mixed degree of success. In April of 1813, the Argus left Brazil to transport the American diplomat William H. Crawford. After arriving in Europe, the Argus prowled the English Channel in search of enemy vessels. The ship’s new campaign was extremely successful, capturing 20 English ships in one month. On August 14, 1813, the British brig Pelican, captained by John Fordyce Maples, engaged the Argus. The Pelican’s opening cannon blast severed one of Allen’s legs. The gallant captain refused to surrender and continued to give orders until his death four days later on August 18. Six American sailors died during battle and another six died as a result of wounds received in battle. This death rate of 8 percent was the highest on any ship during the War of 1812.
After such remarkable success, the Argus’ rapid defeat startled many. The U.S. Navy blamed the defeat on Captain Allen’s injury and the crew’s general fatigue. The Navy also noted that the Pelican was a larger vessel, its crew was equally well trained, and its captain was skilled. Former President Theodore Roosevelt offered a different explanation for the defeat. Roosevelt claimed that, while performing operations in St. George’s Channel on the previous day, the Argus sank a vessel from Oporto laden with wine. Many of Allen’s crew succeeded in repossessing the cargo and were unfit to fight the following morning. The truth may well lie somewhere in between.
Allen Malls extend along Allen Street between East Houston and East Broadway and pass through the Lower East Side, the Bowery, and Chinatown. The City of New York named this street after William Henry Allen in 1817. Since August 1929, Parks has maintained the property as the result of an agreement with the Manhattan Borough President Julius Miller. The City of New York legally acquired the title to this parcel in May 1930 through condemnation. The malls are divided into eight sections, each containing a walkway and assigned a number one through eight. A comfort station stands at the intersection of Allen and Delancey Street, and benches and trees flank the full extension of the malls.
Bobby Wagner Walk
Robert F. Bobby Wagner Jr. (1944-1993), son of a three-term mayor and grandson of a United States Senator, earned distinction in his own right for his thoughtful dedication to public service. Although his life was short, he worked to formulate long-term solutions to the problems and challenges of running New York City.
Politics infused Bobby Wagner’s life from before its start. His grandfather, Senator Robert F. Wagner (1877-1953), was beloved as a reform politician, first in the New York State Assembly and Senate, and later in the United States Senate, where he lead the fight for New Deal reforms, including labor rights and public housing. Senator Wagner’s son was Mayor Robert F. Wagner (1910-1991), mayor of New York from 1954-1966 and considered by many to be the city’s first modern mayor. The future mayor was overseas fighting World War II when his son Bobby was born, and they did not meet until Bobby was 11/2 years old. Bobby performed his first official function at age 7, when he cut a ribbon opening a tunnel under Battery Park. At age 9, he moved into Gracie Mansion, which was the family residence for the next 12 years. This set the tone for what many were convinced would be a political career. However, Bobby was less certain. At Harvard, he wrote editorials for the Harvard Crimson and was class orator at graduation. He later worked for The New York Post, and wavered for some time between journalism and politics. His interest in public service eventually won out, and in 1973 he was elected Councilman at Large from Manhattan.
Beginning in 1977, Mayor Ed Koch (b. 1924) appointed Wagner to a series of important city posts, including deputy mayor, president of the board of education, and chairman of the city planning commission, his favorite position. Wagner fought hard to allocate more funds for capital infrastructure, rebuild mass transit, and revise the public school system, leaving a legacy that, while unnoticed to all but the keenest observers, has had a lasting effect on the city’s development. Although many saw him as a rising political star, he never showed any interest in running for mayor, saying, After all, I’ve already lived in Gracie Mansion for 12 years.
In 1993, he agreed to co-write a book on the future of American cities. Sadly, in November of that year, while on a research trip in San Antonio, Texas, he passed away at the age of 49. His personal library was donated to the Parks Library in the Arsenal, Parks headquarters in Central Park, where it remains available to the public. The library demonstrates Wagner’s breadth and depth of interest, including subjects such as architecture, political history, sports, gardening and writing.
Bobby Wagner Walk is the part of the East River Esplanade that extends from 90th to 125th Street, in honor of Bobby’s home on 89th Street between York and East End Avenues. The East River Esplanade was acquired in 1939 as part of the construction of East River Drive (now the FDR Drive). The only highway in New York City not built entirely under the direction of Robert Moses, construction of the East River Drive was overseen by Stanley Isaacs (1882-1962), the Manhattan Borough President from 1938-41. When portions of the highway needed to be built over landfill, the landfill used was masonry rubble from buildings in London destroyed by German bombs during World War II. The rubble was carried across the ocean by convoy ships as ballast. The esplanade is bordered on the left with the endless traffic of the FDR Drive and on the right by the serene, rippling expanse of the East River. The walk features wide-open views of Roosevelt Island and the Triborough and Hell Gate Bridges, and passes the estate of Gracie Mansion, the abode of the mayor of New York. The path is often serpentine, with garden-lined sections. All this honors one of New York’s most distinguished public servants, who helped to guide the city along the path to success.
Scan Community Playground
The Supportive Children’s Advocacy Network (SCAN) of New York, a citywide youth services agency operating out of East Harlem and the South Bronx, has provided community-based services since it was founded in 1977. In mid-1996, SCAN became the third New York City community group to build a playground with the assistance of the City Spaces program. City Spaces, a partnership between the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and the City of New York, was formed in early 1996 to develop playgrounds in neighborhoods with sparse local park space.
Sites developed by the City Spaces program become permanent additions to Parks, while participating community groups are responsible for long-term maintenance and supervision of the playgrounds. Neighborhood volunteers perform all the duties that are essential to keeping the SCAN Community Playground in operation, including opening and closing the park, maintaining the greenery, attending to litter, and watching over the children.
Before the site was acquired by City Spaces, it was a vacant tract that had once served as a parking lot for the local police precinct. The land was transferred to Parks in September 1996 after a committee of local residents, organized by TPL and SCAN, had arrived at a design that satisfied the community’s needs. Through the combined efforts of City Spaces, private sponsors, and SCAN volunteers, the playground was completed in late 1997 and dedicated on August 5, 1998.
The SCAN Community Playground is a lot, exactly 100 feet square, on East 101st Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues. It features a play area and several rest spots, including a gazebo. A ramp on the western boundary of the park provides access for all members of the community. In June of 1999, 31 local children painted the mural, which now adorns the interior wall of the park. In addition, trees and flowers have been planted, completing the transformation of the once-vacant lot into a green park.
#62 – A
Coleman Square Playground
Bounded by Cherry, Pike, and Monroe Streets, Coleman Square Playground lies on the border between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. It is named in honor of U.S. Army Corporal Joseph Francis Coleman (d. 1919), son of Thomas Coleman and Mary Hurley. Before World War I, the Coleman family resided on nearby Madison Street. Coleman fought in France as a member of the 321st Field Artillery, the 82nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). He died on June 16, 1919 at Base Hospital in Hoboken, New Jersey, after contracting tuberculosis in the trenches. Exactly six months after Coleman’s death, the Board of Alderman named this playground in tribute to him.
The land that Coleman Square Playground now occupies was once the graveyard of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. Founded in 1804, the church once stood at the corner of Chrystie Street and Broome Street. Sixty-two years after it was built, with a declining congregation and insufficient funds, St. Stephen’s was sold. After being exhumed from the cemetery, two thousand bodies were moved across the East River by boat and reburied in Cypress Hills Cemetery. Unfortunately, because only 250 families paid to have the names of their deceased relatives listed, most of the names have been lost to posterity.
Part of Coleman Square Playground stands under the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, a two-level steel suspension bridge designed by Leon Moisseiff (1872-1943) and completed in 1909. The Manhattan Bridge connects Canal Street in Manhattan to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Its design is often mistakenly attributed to Gustav Lindenthal (1850-1935), designer of the Queensboro and Hell Gate bridges, who submitted a plan for the Manhattan Bridge in 1903 that was rejected by city administrators. The architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings designed the grand arch and flanking colonnades that mark the entrance to the bridge on Canal Street. The bridge is 6,855 feet long, with a main span of 1,470 feet, and clears the East River at 135 feet. The upper level has four lanes for traffic in addition to a pedestrian walkway. The lower level has three lanes for traffic, as well as four subway tracks.
Acquired by condemnation and by purchase in six parcels between 1897 and 1950, Coleman Square Playground includes a large playground and a grassy ballfield. Between 1907 and 1969, Parks assumed jurisdiction over the various parcels of land. By 1970, the park reached its present size. In 1994, the ballfield was named Phylis M. Ammirati Ballfield in honor of the founder of thepark’s women’s softball league. The playground, which was reconstructed in 1974, was renovated again in 2000. Funded by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the $180,000 capital contract renovation provided new play equipment, animal art, spray showers, and new safety surfacing. Today, Coleman Square Playground is not only a place of rest and recreation for people of all ages, but also a memorial to a neighborhood boy who fought in the Great War.
WRONG ANSWERS
Emerson Playground
This playground is named for Emerson Street, a westward extension of 207th Street, which once curved into a semi-circle and connected to Isham Street. It was largely demapped and integrated into Inwood Hill Park in 1925 when Parks acquired the parcel of land on which this play area stands.
Emerson Street was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the influential American writer, lecturer, and poet. Emerson followed in the footsteps of his father, a prominent Unitarian minister in Boston, and enrolled at Harvard Divinity School in 1825. In 1829 he was ordained as a junior minister at the 2nd Unitarian Church in Boston, but he did not last long in the pulpit. Already conflicted internally, Emerson resigned his pastorate when his young wife, Ellen Tucker, died in 1831. He sailed the next year for Europe, and stayed there for two years, meeting such prominent writers and thinkers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), and Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). Their influence was instrumental in the formulation of his own philosophy. Upon his return, he remarried and settled in Concord, Massachusetts.
Essays such as Nature (1836) and Self-Reliance (1841) earned Emerson acclaim as a writer and broadened his popularity as a lecturer. Emerson also published a journal, The Dial, which provided another platform from which he spread his philosophical ideals and became a chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist school of thought. At its core, Transcendentalism held that man and nature and the universe are essentially the same, and are ordered by a Supreme Mind or Over-Soul; therefore, humanity is divine, and humans should learn to Trust thyself, which became a central motto of the movement. …the world globes itself in a drop of dew, is one expression of the Transcendentalist view.
In 1843, The Dial published the essay A Winter Walk, by writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), most famous for Walden (1854). Thoreau, a friend and neighbor of Emerson’s, had been a teacher until Emerson introduced him to Transcendentalism. Emerson encouraged Thoreau’s career & and Walden Pond, where Thoreau lived for two years, two months, and two days, was on property owned by Emerson.
This playground is located on the periphery of Inwood Hill Park – a fitting place to bear Emerson’s name. Inwood Hill Park contains the last natural forest and salt marsh in Manhattan, and human activity has been documented in its environs since prehistoric times. Lenape (Delaware) Native Americans inhabited the area through the 17th century, and there is evidence of a main encampment along the eastern edge of the park.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, colonists from Europe settled and farmed here. During the Revolutionary War, American forces built a five-sided earthwork fort (known as Fort Cock or Fort Cox) in the northwestern corner of the park. It fell to British and Hessian troops in November 1776 and was held until the war ended in 1783.
In the 1800s, much of the park contained country homes and philanthropic institutions, including a charity house for women and a free public library which became the Dyckman Institute. When Parks bought the land in 1916, the salt marsh was saved and landscaped, and a portion was later filled. During the Depression, the city employed Works Progress Administration laborers to build many of the roads and trails of Inwood Hill Park and demolish all remaining structures. Emerson Playground was created in 1939, one of many 255 playgrounds built in the 1930s by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981).
Located on the corner of Isham Street and Seaman Avenue, Emerson Playground provides an area for organized play in the wilderness of Inwood Hill Park. In 1997, Council Member Stanley Michels funded a $520,000 reconstruction of the playground. The site now features benches, game tables, two sets of swings- and modular play equipment with safety surfacing. In addition, two pieces of animal art grace the playground – a spray shower in the form of a frog, and a wolf sculpture in iron bas-relief
Payson Playground
George Shipman Payson (1845-1923) was born in Harpersfield, New York, the son of a minister. Two years after graduating from Yale University in 1862, Payson began his own theological studies at the Union Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1871. Three years later, Payson was ordained and installed as the Pastor of Mount Washington Presbyterian Church in Inwood. In 1883, Payson married an Englishwoman named Sara Armour, and they took up residence in the church’s parsonage. Because of the seventy-one apple trees that surrounded it at the time, the home was called Paradise Parsonage.
As minister, Payson wrote several papers and articles on history and theology. A member of the Philothean Society of Ministers, Payson served as its secretary from 1882 until the penultimate year of his life. In 1898, he received his Divinity Doctorate from New York University. In 1914, the 40th anniversary of Payson’s service to Mount Washington Church and the people of Inwood, the church built a parish house in order to assist in the care of the area’s growing population. He worked especially hard for the care of retired ministers, their widows, and orphans. In 1920, nearly half a century after first becoming minister at Mount Washington, Payson asked that his pastoral relationship be dissolved, effective the first of April. After a trip to England, the Paysons returned to Mount Washington in the fall and remained active church members. In the summer of 1921, George Payson’s health began to fail; he died in February two years later.
Payson Playground stands in the southeastern corner of Inwood Hill Park, at the junction of Dyckman Street and Payson Avenue. Dyckman Street is named for the prominent Dyckman family who first arrived in New York in the mid-17th century. By the time of the Civil War, the family farm covered 400 acres of Northern Manhattan, making it the largest on the island. The homestead still stands at 204th Street and Broadway where it is open as a museum managed by the Historic House Trust. Payson Avenue, from which this playground takes its name, was itself named for Reverend Payson. Until 1921, it had been known as Prescott Avenue. When the original church was created on August 18, 1844, there was no Presbyterian church within 4 miles. It was located just across from where this playground now stands’s near the present day intersection of Broadway and Dyckman Street. When Payson served the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, the church was located on this site. In 1929 the church moved to the northeast, to 84 Vermilyea Avenue. It has since grown tremendously, and continues to serve the community, offering a senior center and daycare center for local residents.
Parks acquired this site in 1925, but the playground was not actually built until 1939, under the administration of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981). During this time, the beautiful stone park house that stands near the playground was constructed. In addition to benches for leisure and picnics, the park features play equipment and swings for children of all ages, yardarm, and a spray shower. Council member Stanley Michels funded a $423,000 general reconstruction of the playground, which was completed in November 1994. Payson Playground provides local residents with an opportunity for organized play adjacent to the natural beauty of Inwood Hill Park.
Ramon Aponte Playground
This playground honors Ramon Aponte who as president of the West 47th (now 47th/48th) Street Block Association initiated the long process of transforming this property from an empty lot (the site of a police station for a century) into the small, unassuming, and tranquil playground you see today.
Ramon Aponte Playground fits seamlessly into the surrounding streetscape and imparts its visitors with a strong sense of history, but that aura of established respectability is not the product of age. It is the product fortuity and the community’s unrelenting drive to create a playground for their neighborhood.
The concept of building small parks designed especially for children to play in did not evolve until the 1880s, but by that time there was very little open space remaining in Manhattan. Therefore, the majority of existing playgrounds occupy land that originally served another function. Tax maps indicate that the southwest corner of Ramon Aponte Playground was once the land of John Jacob Astor, but the majority of the playground belonged to a farmer named Charles Kelley. The playground’s odd, diagonal northwest boundary follows the original property line of the Kelley farm.
In 1860 the New York City Police Department built a station house at 345 West 47th Street, the eastern half of this property, and a residence was built in the adjacent lot. Due to its location in Hell’s Kitchen and proximity to the theater district, the station house remained quite busy. Local lore says Mae West was brought here when arrested for her 1926 play titled Sex. With the development of new midtown police facilities in the 1960s, the old police station, which was known over the course of 100 years as the 26th, 9th, 18th, and 16th precinct, and finally Traffic Station D, was demolished. It is also approximated that the three cottonwood trees (<em>Populus spp.) at the front of the property were planted at that time.
The City transferred the property to the Fire Department in 1962 as a potential site for a firehouse, but by the mid-1970s this land stood empty and unused. At the same time however, Hell’s Kitchen suffered with high crime rates and a dire shortage of public space. Ramon Aponte, who had lived nearby since 1950, organized a group of concerned citizens that saw the transformation of this lot into a park as an integral step in the rejuvenation of their neighborhood. With the financial support of local developer Lewis Futterman, the playground opened in 1979. Aponte retired to his native Puerto Rico that same year, but the community recognized the impact of his efforts and named the new playground in his honor.
For ten years Ramon Aponte playground was maintained through community efforts organized by the 47th Street Block Association, Community Board #4, Fountain House, and the Green Guerillas. By 1987 it became apparent that successful upkeep of the park required making the playground an official Parks property, therefore the 47th Street Block Association organized the Save Ramon Aponte Park Committee, which launched a major letter-writing campaign. At the same time however, the City was considering redeveloping the site, which had been managed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) since August of 1981. Nevertheless, the community won the support of Mayor Edward I. Koch who saw to it that Ramon Aponte Playground became an official Parks property.
In 1989, then Manhattan Borough President David N. Dinkins granted HPD $250,000 to construct a new playground to Parks Department specifications. Work began on June 20, 1990 and included the installation of the spray shower, drinking fountains, basketball court, play equipment, benches, and plantings that, with the existing, mature cottonwoods, make this playground refined and complete.
On April 23, 1991, Parks Commissioner Betsy Gotbaum presided over the opening ceremony of Ramon Aponte Playground. Mr. Aponte and many of his family made the trip up from Puerto Rico to attend, making this one of the few Parks properties whose namesake was alive at the time of its dedication.
#63 – B
Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino Park
This small park is at a crossroads of several dynamic New York neighborhoods: Little Italy and the Bowery to the east, Chinatown to the south, and SoHo to the west and north. The site/area became parkland as a result of the City Charter of 1938, which turned over all public places and squares to the Department of Parks.
The site was formerly known as Kenmare Square, for the street that runs east to Delancey. Around the turn of the century, Tammany Hall leader Big Tim Sullivan of the Lower East Side named Kenmare Street in honor of his mother’s birthplace, a village in County Kerry, Ireland. Kenmare Square was renamed in memory of Police Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino (1860-1909) by a local law, introduced by Council Member Miriam Friedlander, passed by the City Council, and signed by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1987.
Giuseppe (Joseph) Petrosino was born in Salerno, Italy, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1873. As a boy, he shined shoes outside Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street. At the age of eighteen, he began his career in the public service with the Department of Sanitation (then under the jurisdiction of the Police Department). Fluent in many Italian dialects, Petrosino aided the police by working undercover as an informer in Little Italy.
When he joined the Police Department in 1883, Petrosino was the city’s shortest officer, at five feet and three inches tall. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt personally promoted him to Sergeant of Detectives in 1895. While investigating anarchists in the United States, Petrosino warned President McKinley of threats against his life; however, the warning was not heeded and the President was assassinated in 1901.
Within ten years, Petrosino was named lieutenant and given command of the new Italian Squad, a unit created to combat the crime organization known as the Black Hand. Under his leadership, several thousand arrests were made, and more than 500 offenders were sent to prison. Crimes against Italian-Americans dropped by fifty percent. Petrosino was killed while on assignment to Palermo, Sicily.
When his body was returned to New York, thousands of mourners formed a funeral procession which marched from Little Italy to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Lt. Petrosino was the only New York police officer who had died in the line of duty outside the United States. The park named in his honor is located just north of the Renaissance Revival edifice at 240 Centre Street, which served as Police Headquarters from 1910 to 1971.
WRONG ANSWERS
Desalvio Playground
This park honors two generations of leaders in New York City’s Italian-American community & John DeSalvio (1881-1948), and his son Louis (1913-1972). John DeSalvio was a first-generation American; his parents, Luigi DeSalvio and Maria Rosa Vozzo, were both born in Italy. John was raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he became interested in boxing at an early age after watching fights in local clubs. The majority of prizefighters at that time were Irish, so John adopted the name of his manager, Jimmy Kelley, when he began to compete. He became a local welterweight champion, but never achieved national success in the ring. Following the conclusion of his boxing career, John opened a saloon just down the street from 202 Hester Street, where he lived most of his adult life. In 1910, he married Stella Formachelli and their marriage produced his son Louis and two daughters, Lillian and Viola. As the owner of a successful business and a family man, John soon became an influential member of New York’s Little Italy community.
When John Desalvio was elected district leader of the Second Assembly District (West), he became one of only a few Italian-American members of the notorious Tammany Hall political organization. Tammany Hall may have ended in a blaze of corruption scandal, but it originally drew support by addressing the concerns of New York City immigrants. Notably progressive, Tammany Hall addressed employment, legal aid, and naturalization issues through elected or appointed neighborhood politicians such as district leaders and precinct captains. As a political boss, DeSalvio proved to be a great humanitarian and earned the affectionate nickname Captain in Little Italy. When he opened a second, more exclusive restaurant and club, Jimmy Kelley’s Momart, it attracted clientele such as New York State Governor Al Smith, Mayor Jimmy Walker, and entertainers Jimmy Durante and Eddy Cantor. John used a portion of his profits from the club to prepare Christmas baskets of canned goods and to pay bills for the neighborhood’s poorest residents. His weekly attendance at Yankees and Giants baseball games convinced Yankees’ slugger Joe DiMaggio to aid in the distribution of the Christmas baskets. DeSalvio died in the Bronx and was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
Louis DeSalvio followed in father’s political footsteps, and was elected Second District New York State Assemblyman. In that capacity, he sponsored the creation of this playground on the corner of Spring and Mulberry Streets, in the heart of Little Italy. The neighborhood is bounded to the south by Canal Street, to the west by Broadway, to the north by Houston Street, and to the east by Mulberry Street. Northern Italians first settled in the area in small numbers during the 1850s. These early immigrants were predominantly Roman Catholics, and some of the first Italian cultural activities centered on the parish at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua founded in 1866. The parish’s current church stands at 153-157 Sullivan Street. The unification of Italy in 1870 caused widespread political changes that particularly affected Southern Italians, therefore the second wave of immigrants hailed primarily from Sicily or south of Rome. The small community had firmly established itself by 1880, when Carolo Barsotti founded the Italian-language daily newspaper Il Progresso. Though a small vestige of its teeming heyday, Little Italy is still known as an enclave of Italian culture and is best known for its shops, restaurants, and bakeries.
The City of New York acquired the property in 1954 by condemnation and assigned it to Parks that same year. In 1955, Louis DeSalvio saw the City Council enact a local law naming the property John DeSalvio Park, later shortened. When the playground opened on December 15, 1955, it was equipped with swings, slides, seesaws, play equipment a shower basin, game tables, and benches. In 1995, it was renovated with $289,000 allocated by Council Member Kathryn Freed. DeSalvio Playground now features modular play equipment in the colors of the Italian flag (red, white, and green), a basketball half-court, benches and game tables. In 1997, the playground hosted the Citywide Bocce Ball Championships.
P.O. David Willis Basketball Court
Chelsea Park Basketball Court, located in Chelsea Park on West 28th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, was dedicated in honor of Police Officer David Willis (1964-1995) on July 25, 1996 at the direction of Mayor Giuliani.
Born in Brooklyn on September 10, 1964 and raised in the Farragut Houses, David attended All Saints School in Brooklyn and Beach Channel High School in Queens. He pursued his interest in oceanography at the University of New England and later at LaGuardia Community College. A member of the National Guard from 1982 to 1988, Willis completed his military service in Texas.
Willis graduated from the Police Academy in 1991, at which time he joined the 10th precinct on 20th Street in Chelsea. In patrolling Chelsea Park, he developed a good relationship with the adults and children who used the park. In off duty hours, Willis also frequented the basketball courts, where he enjoyed watching and playing basketball with fellow officers and young people.
Officer Willis’s life was tragically cut short when his police vehicle was hit by a truck on West 30th Street and 11th Avenue while he was responding to a report that shots had been fired on 28th Street. He died two days later, on September 25, 1995.
Theodore Roosevelt Park
This Upper West Side park surrounding the American Museum of Natural History is named to honor Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Roosevelt served as New York City Police Commissioner, Governor of New York State, Vice-President under William McKinley, and following McKinley’s assassination, the youngest man to serve as President of the United States.
Americans most often remember him as the aggressive politician who advised the nation to speak softly and carry a big stick, but the only native of New York City to sit in the Oval Office was also a scholar of natural history and a devoted environmentalist. As president, he was instrumental in the creation of the National Zoo, the formation of 51 national bird sanctuaries, and the preservation of 18 natural wonders including the Grand Canyon. The magna cum laude Harvard graduate (Class of 1880) and Nobel laureate (Peace Prize 1906) wrote three dozen books, ranging in subject from Charles Dickens to African big game hunting. The Museum contains specimens that Roosevelt shot and collected during his family’s visit to Egypt in 1872.
In 1807, the City of New York mapped this land as a public park but did not officially own it until it was acquired by condemnation in 1839. It was later assigned to the Board of Commissioners of Central Park (a precursor to the Department of Parks, which was not established until 1870) who controlled it as an annex of Central Park. Before the Museum was built here, planners considered using the site for a zoo or a botanical garden. The Museum, founded in 1869, was temporarily housed in what is now Parks’ headquarters, the Arsenal at 64th Street and 5th Avenue in Central Park, before it moved to the West Side.
In the late 1860s, financiers abandoned a museum project only months after it began on the site that now houses Tavern on the Green. Molds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals remain buried there to this day. Construction for the American Museum of Natural History began on this site in 1874 under the direction of Calvert Vaux (1824 -1895) and Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886) and the Museum opened in 1877. Even after the Museum took up permanent residence, a group of evangelical ministers proposed to build a large tabernacle here in 1916. Fortunately for the ever-expanding Museum, their proposal was rejected.
In 1929, the State obtained access to the land facing Central Park West for a Theodore Roosevelt Memorial. In 1936, many public officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), gathered to dedicate the indoor portions of the monument. In 1940, the State added a bronze statue by sculptor James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) intended to depict a bold, progressive Roosevelt symbolically uniting the races of America. Distinguished architect John Russell Pope (1874-1937) designed the neoclassical granite pedestal. The park was known as Manhattan Square until 1958, when a local law renamed it Theodore Roosevelt Park. Neighborhood residents have traditionally referred to the parkland as Museum Park or Dinosaur Park.
Since 1990, the dog run has been a boon to the community, providing a safe haven for dogs and their owners. It is one of the largest dog runs in the Parks system. Parks maintains Roosevelt Park with help from the Friends of Museum Park, a neighborhood group. The renovation of the park areas adjacent to 81st Street and Columbus Avenue in 2000 included the relocation of the dog run, as well as improvement of the drainage and irrigation systems, the renovation of the lawn and paths, and the addition of new benches and fencing. The dog run, once called Teddy’s Dog Run, was renamed Bull Moose Dog Run after Roosevelt’s Progressive Party. Today, Theodore Roosevelt Park pays tribute to a dedicated conservationist and serves as a place of rest and recreation for local residents and museum visitors alike.
#64 – B
The Bridges of Central Park
When Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) designed Central Park in 1858, they developed an innovative, interwoven transportation system of pedestrian paths, bridle trails, and carriage drives. Since the park is only one-half mile wide, the designers had to create a compact system of bridges and arches that allowed separate levels of pathways. Vaux and his assistant Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886) created 35 uniquely ornamented bridges of varying materials: brick, granite, marble, cast-iron, rustic wood, and rusticated schist boulders fashioned from rock outcropping. Modification to the path system since the park’s construction has created four additional arches and the destruction of three original ones.
Huddlestone Arch, named for its piled boulder design, carries the West Drive near Harlem Meer. Vaux designed and supervised construction of this rustic bridge in 1866, fashioning it from boulders found in the park. The naturalistic effect made Huddlestone unique among its more ornate companions, though its general character and function is the same as the other arches in the Ravine slightly sunken into the park landscape in order to preserve the integrity of its forest setting.
WRONG ANSWERS
The Blockhouse
During the War of 1812 New Yorkers constructed fortifications along the waterfront at the Battery and Ellis Island, assuming that a British attack would come from the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Therefore, when the British stormed Stonington, Connecticut on Long Island Sound on August 10, 1814, the city was quite unprepared to defend itself from an attack from the east or the north.
Under the direction of General Joseph Swift, citizens from New York, New Jersey, and Long Island banded together in patriotic zeal to construct a line of defense running through this area of Manhattan. According to Edward H. Hall in McGown’s Pass and Vicinity, they came from every conceivable class of men: the Society of Tammany, the students of Columbia College, medical students, the Marine Society, the Society of Tallow Chandlers, butchers, members of the bar, Free Masons, firemen, Sons of Erin, colored citizens. The unevenness of the stonework is testimony to the haste in which these fortifications were constructed. In September 1814, less than a month after construction, The New York Columbian commented: The works at Harlem heights are numerous, compact and judiciously placed, and form a romantic and picturesque view.
This is the only remaining blockhouse, officially called Blockhouse #1; three others were on the site of Harlem Heights, now known as Morningside Heights. In his report to the Common Council, General Swift explained his military strategy: [In this area] commences a chain of almost perpendicular rocks, and wooded heights, of difficult ascent, except in one place, and accessible only to the lightest of troops. On these heights have been erected block houses .within supporting distance of each other, and near enough for the interchange of grape shot; all of them to mount heavy cannon on their terrace. Although soldiers were certainly stationed at the Blockhouse and surrounding fortifications, there was not any military action in the area. The British did not attack New York City, and in 1815, one year after the completion of these fortifications, the Treaty of Ghent was signed.
According to recent studies of the Blockhouse, there was formerly a heavy timber floor which supported a heavy cannon. All four sides of the structure have two small gunports. A timber stair used to connect the ground entrance to the terrace level. The current entrance and staircase are not original and were probably added at the turn of the century. The upper two feet of the Blockhouse walls are noticeably different in color, composition and stonework. They were added at a later date, perhaps during peacetime when the Blockhouse was used as a powder magazine or storage building for ammunition.
In 1858 the design competition for Central Park only included the land from 59th Street to 106th Street as these rocky bluffs and their surrounding swamp (now the Harlem Meer) were considered unsuitable for park terrain. Nonetheless, the area was added to the Park in 1863, when the land was deemed too difficult to develop for commercial or residential purposes. When the team of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux designed this area, the Blockhouse was treated as a picturesque ruin with vines covering portions of the walls, and landscaped with alpine plants and evergreens.
Mount Morris Fire Watchtower
A prominent feature of Marcus Garvey Park and its neighborhood, the Mount Morris Fire Watchtower serves as an important community landmark. In the 19th century efforts to contain fire in New York City included the construction of an extensive reservoir system and the Croton Aqueduct, as well as the placement of round-the-clock watchmen at strategic vantage points. These men directed fire companies through an alarm code, corresponding to the severity of the fire and to numbered districts, transmitted by bells, flags and lanterns. City Hall, constructed in 1812 with a bell in its cupola, became the city’s first and main alarm. After a devastating fire in 1835 the Fire Department built dedicated towers across the city.
Ironically, these early structures were made of wood, and fire consumed several of them. Fortunately, fireproof construction became possible in the late 1840s when inventor James Bogardus perfected the use of cast-iron as a structural material. The Board of Aldermen commissioned Bogardus to erect the world’s first cast-iron fire watchtower in 1851 on Ninth Avenue at West 33rd Street and a second in 1853 on Spring Street. Two years later, after petitioning by Harlem residents, the City announced a third tower, atop Mount Morris. Julius B. Kroehl won the contract with a $2300 bid (Bogardus wanted $5750), but followed the pioneer’s theory and design. He completed the structure in 1857. Employing then-revolutionary building technology, these early examples of post-and-lintel cast-iron architecture inspired the steel cages developed in the 1880s to support skyscrapers. The Mount Morris Watchtower is the only surviving example of this type of structure.
The 10,000-pound bell in the tower is not the original one. Cast by founders E.A. & G.R. Meneeley of West Troy, NY in 1865, it replaced an earlier bell furnished by Jones & Hitchcock of Troy, NY. Manufacturing flaws may have destroyed the first bell; more likely improper striking caused the damage. Originally watchmen struck the bell manually by pulling a lever on the observation deck, one tier above the bell. The four-legged iron frame standing beneath the tower today is the remains of an electro-mechanical striker that permitted remote operation; it was first installed in the 1870s and replaced after 1905.
The firetower network, which at its peak included eleven towers, fell into disuse in the 1870s as the Fire Department began to install telegraphic alarms on street corners and taller buildings rendered these early perches obsolete. At the request of neighbors, however, the Mount Morris tower continued to sound at noon and 9:00 pm weekdays, and at 9:00 am and pm on Sundays, for timekeeping and churchgoing purposes until about 1909. The Fire Department retained ownership of the tower until 1913.
Mount Morris Fire Watchtower still stands due to its protected location on parkland. The tower was designated a New York City landmark in 1967 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Through the support of the Marcus Garvey Park Conservancy and the Manhattan Borough President, Parks undertook a major stabilization of the structure in 1994.
Smokehouse
Built in 1916, this reproduction smokehouse represents an important aspect of 19th- century life: the preservation of food. Before the invention of electricity, people needed to preserve meat in ways that did not require refrigerators or freezers. Small, chimney-less buildings like this one were used to smoke meats so that they could last up to a year at room temperature.
The process of smoking meat was time consuming. First, the meat had to be soaked in brine (very salty water) because salt effectively keeps bacteria from reproducing. Next, the meat was hung from the smokehouse rafters and a low fire was lit on the floor of the smokehouse. The farmer had to maintain the fire carefully, checking it every two or three hours, day and night, to make sure it did not go out. After about three days, the meat was cooked through and had a blackened shell around the outside. It could be wrapped in paper or cloth and hung in a dry space to be eaten later.
We continue to eat smoked meats today because of the particular taste the smoking process creates. Bacon remains a staple breakfast food, and smoked turkey and ham are sold as sandwich meats in delis and often served during the holidays. Other less tasty methods of preservation, such as simply leaving raw meat soaking in a barrel of brine until it was needed, did not survive into the era of refrigeration.
#65 – A
American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial
Commissioned by the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, Inc., this memorial was conceived in 1976. In 1988, after an extensive competition, the artist Marisol Escobar (b. 1930), known as Marisol, was chosen to develop her design. Situated off-shore from the north end of Battery Park and just south of Pier A, the monument stands on a rebuilt stone breakwater in the harbor. The bronze figural group and boat are based on an actual historical event; during World War II, a Nazi U-boat attacked a merchant marine vessel, and while the mariners clung to their sinking vessel, the Germans photographed their victims. Marisol developed a series of studio sketches from this photograph, then fashioned a clay maquette as her winning design proposal for the monument. The work was dedicated on October 8, 1991.
Marisol was born in Paris, and spent most of her childhood in Venezuela. After studying art in Paris and Los Angeles she moved to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where she was first influenced by abstract expressionism, and then developed a reputation for her highly stylized boxy sculptured figures. She was inspired by pre-Columbian and American folk art, as well as the growing pop-art movement, and by the 1960s, her style had evolved into satirical assemblages which commented on American society. Her diverse work defies simplistic classification, as she has explored particular themes and aesthetic criteria as they related to specific commissions.
In 1967, Marisol exhibited a piece entitled Three Figures in the group outdoor exhibition in the city’s parks entitled Sculpture in Environment. That work was minimalist and geometric. Since then, Marisol has exhibited in numerous public settings, often employing traditional figurative techniques, as in her designs for an unrealized monument to the Brooklyn Bridge’s engineers, the Roeblings, and in the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial.
The American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial Inc., chaired by the president of the AFL-CIO, Lane Kirkland, sought to commemorate the thousands of merchant ships and crews pressed into military service since the Revolutionary War. In World War II alone it is estimated that 700 American merchant ships were lost, and 6,600 mariners gave their lives in this global conflict.
Marisol has captured an unsettling realism, drawn from the faded photograph, but also dependent on the ebb and flow of the harbor’s tides. One figure, struggling beside the boat, is submerged each tidal cycle, a technical motif that compounds the work’s emotional dynamic. Though specific in its imagery, the monument honors the thousands of merchant mariners who have died at sea in the course of our nation’s history.
WRONG ANSWERS
Coast Guard Memorial
The Coast Guard Memorial near the southern entrance path on the south side of Battery Park is by Norman Millet Thomas (born 1915). The sculpture was created in 1947 and dedicated in 1955.
The United States Coast Guard was established in 1915 when the United States Revenue Cutter Service and Life Saving service were combined into one administrative entity. Subsequently, functions formerly conducted by the Lighthouse Service, the Steamboat Inspection Service, and the Bureau of Navigation were incorporated into the mission of the Coast Guard. This venerable maritime agency is charged with broad seaboard duties such as coastal safety, environmental protection, the enforcement of navigation rules, and the interdiction of illegal freight. Under the United States Department of the Treasury until 1967, the Coast Guard is during peacetime now under the jurisdiction of the federal Department of Transportation; in time of war it is under the control of the United States Navy.
The monument depicts an inter-racial three-figure group in which two soldiers in fatigues and bearing rifles support a wounded soldier, and is intended to honor those from the Coast Guard who served their country during World War II (1941-1945). Thomas, a non-professional sculptor, was a painter and combat veteran, who studied at the American Academy in Rome and with Paul Manship at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He based his composition on a rescue he had witnessed at the Luzon beachhead. Relying on a sketch which Thomas submitted, the United States Coast Guard, which maintains an administrative facility just south of Battery Park, and which until the late 1990s had a base on Governors Island in New York Harbor, commissioned the sculpture.
First proposed in 1945, Thomas’s design, though supported by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (born 1888, died 1981; Parks Commissioner, 1934-1960), was initially declined by the New York City Art Commission, criticizing its conception and modeling as substandard. In 1954 the Commission approved a refined design, and on Memorial Day, May 30, 1955 the inspirational sculpture was unveiled. At the ceremony Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey and Admiral A. C. Richmond delivered remarks, and Commissioner Moses, after bemoaning the “pointless controversies” and “yapping critics” which had almost scuttled the project, praised the artwork for its “manifest identity of sculptor and subject,” while noting that, “It was conceived in war and dedicated to actual heroism.”
The memorial has been temporarily placed in storage to accommodate the redesign of Battery Park and the construction of the South Ferry subway station, and will be placed on Heroes Walk at State and Pearl Streets near the Coast Guard Building. It is anticipated that this work will take place around 2009.
Eleanor Roosevelt Monument
Riverside Park, one of only eight officially designated scenic landmarks in the City of New York, has a long and storied history. The rugged bluffs and rocky outcroppings created through prehistoric glacial deposits once descended directly to the Hudson River shore and were densely wooded during the Native American habitation. In 1846 the Hudson River Railroad was cut through the forested hillside. Acknowledging the city’s expansion northward, Central Park Commissioner William R. Martin proposed in 1865 that a scenic drive and park be built on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The land between the heights and the railroad was bought by the City over the next two years.
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), renowned co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, was retained in 1873 and submitted a plan in 1875 combining park and parkway into a synthesized landscape which adhered to the general topographical contours of hill and dale. Over the next twenty-five years park designs developed under a succession of landscape architects, including Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) and Samuel Parsons (1844-1923). The result, stretching then from West 72nd to 125th Streets, was a grand tree-lined boulevard, an English-style rustic park with informally arranged trees and shrubs, contrasting natural enclosures and open vistas.
The development of the park encouraged the construction of mansions along the drive. At the turn of the century, a movement dubbed the “City Beautiful” sought to promote a more dignified civic architecture, and found expression in the formal neo-classical detailing of the park’s extension from the 125th Street viaduct to 155th Street. Monuments placed along the Drive during this era included Grant’s Tomb (1897), the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial (1902), the Firemen’s Memorial (1913), and Joan of Arc (1915).
The increased rail traffic and waterfront industries founded on landfill extending the shoreline led to an outcry by wealthy residents for municipal action against these uses as unpleasant to the park and community. After decades of discussion a massive park expansion plan, crafted by architect Clinton Lloyd with landscape architect Gilmore Clarke, was implemented between 1934 and 1937 under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. The park was widened westward by 148 acres, and the Henry Hudson Parkway, ball fields, esplanade, 79th Street marina and rotunda were added to it.
The monument, honoring humanitarian and First Lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), was dedicated at 72nd Street on October 5, 1996 in the presence of Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States. Penelope Jencks was the sculptor. A new landscape on the site of a former West Side Highway access ramp was designed by Bruce Kelly/David Varnell Landscape Architects. Funding for the $1.3 million Eleanor Roosevelt Monument project, which included a renovated entranceway, was provided by the City of New York, the State of New York, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument Fund, which has established an endowment for the ongoing maintenance of the sculpture.
Vietnam Veterans Plaza
On May 4, 1985, Mayor Edward I. Koch dedicated this plaza in honor of the 250,000 men and women of New York City who served in the United States armed forces from 1964 to 1975, especially those 1,741 who died fighting the Vietnam War. On November 9, 2001 Mayor Giuliani rededicated the extensively redesigned plaza.
This plaza consists of two parcels of land, each with a distinct origin and history of uses. The City of New York acquired the northern section of this plaza in 1686 and 1730 by virtue of the Dongan and Montgomerie Charters, which assigned all unused or excess properties to the City. At that time, the remainder of the property was in the East River and was known as Coenties Slip. When the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid out Manhattan’s grid, the island contained hundreds of piers, but as the City’s population grew, the waterfront was filled in to make more land.
Coenties Slip was filled in 1835. In 1884 the trapezoidal parcel created by filling in Coenties Slip was named Jeannette Park in honor of The Jeannette, the flagship of the ill-fated Arctic Expedition (1879-1881) sponsored by New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who named the ship after his sister.
In 1886, Horticulturist Samuel Parsons Jr., who served as Superintendent of Parks, designed Jeannette Park. More than 60 years later, Commissioner Robert Moses rebuilt the park with horseshoe pitches and tennis, paddleball, handball, and shuffleboard courts all arranged around a tear-shaped asphalt plaza with a flagpole. In 1967 the small square north of this property, which had belonged to the City since the 18th century, was designated parkland.
In 1971 Paul Friedberg redesigned the enlarged, triangular property in brick, with an amphitheater fountain. The owners of the skyscraper at 55 Water Street maintain the site in exchange for receiving permission to build over what was once Coenties Slip. In the early 1980s Mayor Koch campaigned forcefully for a memorial to honor those who fought and died in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission raised $1 million from private donations to finance the memorial, as well as to provide counseling and employment services for Vietnam veterans. In 1982 a mayoral task force selected Jeannette Park as the future site for the memorial, and the property was renamed by a local law which Mayor Koch signed that year.
The winning design, by architects Peter Wormser, William Fellows, and writer/veteran Joseph Ferrandino, is a wall of translucent glass blocks, on which are engraved excerpts of letters, poems, and diary entries written by men and women of the armed forces, as well as news dispatches. A granite shelf runs along the base of the monument, onto which visitors from time to time have placed tokens of remembrance, such as baby shoes, military patches, pictures, plaques, and American flags
In 2001 Vietnam Veterans Plaza underwent a $7 million restoration that transformed the site, creating an attractive and dignified setting for this important memorial. A public/private coalition including the New Water Street Corporation, Vietnam Veterans of America, City of New York/Parks & Recreation, City Parks Foundation, the United War Veterans Council, and the Alliance for Downtown New York was formed to lead the plaza’s redesign and reconstruction. Mayor Giuliani, Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and the City Council provided $2.5 million of the total cost of the project.
The completely redesigned plaza features a new ceremonial entrance that provides access through the site from Water to South Street as well as new plantings and a new round, black granite fountain that forms a curtain of water. Visitors to the park are now guided through the site with a series of new features that educate and inform. An etched stainless-steel map that provides a geographical perspective of the war and details battle zones in South Vietnam greets visitors.
The Walk of Honor, a series of twelve polished granite pylons with the names of all 1,741 United States military personnel from New York who died as a result of their service in Vietnam, leads to the refurbished memorial, which was cleaned and repaired during the park’s renovation. Today the redesigned plaza and restored memorial serve as a timeless tribute to the Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
#66 – C
Hessian Hut
This building is a reconstructed military hut that was occupied by Hessian officers who were fighting on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War (1776 to 1783). It was one of more than sixty huts from an encampment between present-day 201st and 204th Streets along Prescott Avenue.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the British invaded New York City, forcing George Washington and the American army out of Manhattan in a series of crushing defeats. The British then used Manhattan as a base from which to launch further campaigns and station troops. Hundreds of huts like this one were built in Northern Manhattan, each one housing up to eight men.
Most of the soldiers camped in Northern Manhattan were Hessians, from the German principality Hesse-Cassel. They had been forced into the army by their prince, Frederick II, who had sold their services to the British without their consent. Many were weak and old, and few had any desire to come to America to fight another country’s war.
Amateur archaeologist Reginald Pelham Bolton excavated the site of the hut camp in the early 20th century, uncovering valuable information about the lives of the soldiers who lived there. He dismantled this hut and rebuilt its foundation here in 1915. The rest were demolished to make way for apartment houses.
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Asphalt Green
The City first mixed asphalt for its roads on this site in 1914. The modernist landmark that serves as this park’s namesake and centerpiece stands as the sole survivor of the former Municipal Asphalt Plant.
Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert A. Jacobs designed the plant and constructed it during World War II (1939-1945). Jacobs drew inspiration from the old airports outside Paris that he once passed while biking to work for French design innovator LeCorbusier in the mid 1930s. Reinforced concrete covers the parabola-shaped building’s 90-foot arches.
Debate over the Cathedral of Asphalt ensued when former Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) called the plant the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. The Museum of Modern Art hailed the plant as a masterpiece of functional design. The plant’s prime location at 90th Street between York Avenue and F.D.R. Drive, allowed materials to reach the site by ship rather than by truck. Barges dredged up the sand and gravel from the East River for mixing into pavement at the asphalt plant until operations ceased in 1968. The City now mixes the substance at a plant in Queens.
In 1970, Parks acquired this land from the Department of Highways. In the early 1970s, neighborhood activists from the Stanley Isaacs Senior Center and locals George and Annette Murphy saved the site from conversion into two 45-story apartment buildings and a public school. George Murphy (1919-1987), a pathologist at Cornell University Medical College, founded Asphalt Green Incorporated to build a state of the art creative and physical health facility dedicated to providing affordable access to the community.
Asphalt Green Incorporated annexed the fire-boathouse at the 90th Street pier near Mill Rock Island in the hopes of developing a nautical and environmental education center. This plan never came to fruition, however, after several collisions and a fire damaged the pier beyond repair. In 1984, Asphalt Green dedicated the main plant as the four-level Murphy Center, housing art and photography studios, a gym with an elevated track, gymnastic equipment, and the 100 seat Mazur Theater. Robert Adzema’s 1984 sundial sculpture marks the entry. The 1993 Aquacenter, which houses the $20 million Olympic-size Delacorte pool, and professional gym for members, replaced old play equipment, handball courts, and a wading pool.
Although Asphalt Green provides many of its services for a fee, one third of its programs are free to the public. Providing school children with swimming lessons, and granting pool access for physical rehabilitation, community sports leagues, and summer camps, fulfills the Asphalt Green mission as stated in their bylaws; to foster the skills and benefits that it brings to its users to help combat community deterioration, mitigate neighborhood tensions, and help eliminate prejudice and discrimination through its programs.
The Blockhouse
During the War of 1812 New Yorkers constructed fortifications along the waterfront at the Battery and Ellis Island, assuming that a British attack would come from the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Therefore, when the British stormed Stonington, Connecticut on Long Island Sound on August 10, 1814, the city was quite unprepared to defend itself from an attack from the east or the north.
Under the direction of General Joseph Swift, citizens from New York, New Jersey, and Long Island banded together in patriotic zeal to construct a line of defense running through this area of Manhattan. According to Edward H. Hall in McGown’s Pass and Vicinity, they came from every conceivable class of men: the Society of Tammany, the students of Columbia College, medical students, the Marine Society, the Society of Tallow Chandlers, butchers, members of the bar, Free Masons, firemen, Sons of Erin, colored citizens. The unevenness of the stonework is testimony to the haste in which these fortifications were constructed. In September 1814, less than a month after construction, The New York Columbian commented: The works at Harlem heights are numerous, compact and judiciously placed, and form a romantic and picturesque view.
This is the only remaining blockhouse, officially called Blockhouse #1; three others were on the site of Harlem Heights, now known as Morningside Heights. In his report to the Common Council, General Swift explained his military strategy: [In this area] commences a chain of almost perpendicular rocks, and wooded heights, of difficult ascent, except in one place, and accessible only to the lightest of troops. On these heights have been erected block houses .within supporting distance of each other, and near enough for the interchange of grape shot; all of them to mount heavy cannon on their terrace. Although soldiers were certainly stationed at the Blockhouse and surrounding fortifications, there was not any military action in the area. The British did not attack New York City, and in 1815, one year after the completion of these fortifications, the Treaty of Ghent was signed.
According to recent studies of the Blockhouse, there was formerly a heavy timber floor which supported a heavy cannon. All four sides of the structure have two small gunports. A timber stair used to connect the ground entrance to the terrace level. The current entrance and staircase are not original and were probably added at the turn of the century. The upper two feet of the Blockhouse walls are noticeably different in color, composition and stonework. They were added at a later date, perhaps during peacetime when the Blockhouse was used as a powder magazine or storage building for ammunition.
In 1858 the design competition for Central Park only included the land from 59th Street to 106th Street as these rocky bluffs and their surrounding swamp (now the Harlem Meer) were considered unsuitable for park terrain. Nonetheless, the area was added to the Park in 1863, when the land was deemed too difficult to develop for commercial or residential purposes. When the team of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux designed this area, the Blockhouse was treated as a picturesque ruin with vines covering portions of the walls, and landscaped with alpine plants and evergreens.
Johann Von Schiller Monument
This bronze portrait bust depicts German dramatist, poet and historian Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 & 1805), and was the first sculpture installed in Central Park. A gift of New York’s German-American community, the bust was dedicated in November 1859, the centennial of Schiller’s birth, during a three-day festival in New York commemorating Schiller.
Sculpted by C.L. Richter, the piece is based on an earlier marble bust sculpted by German artist Heinrich Dannecker in 1805. In 1955 the bust was moved from its original location in Central park’s wooded Ramble to its present site on the Mall opposite the bandshell, and its fragile brownstone pedestal was replaced with a more durable granite base. In 1992 the Central Park Conservancy conserved the Schiller Monument.
#67 – B
Mill Rock Island
Mill Rock Island, originally two smaller islands, lies about 1,000 feet off the eastern edge of 96th Street, in the East River. In 1664, William Hallet bought the two islands, later named Great Mill Rock and Little Mill Rock, as well as a nearby point of land on the other side of the river (known as Hallet’s Point in present-day Astoria, Queens) from local Indians. He apparently never occupied the islands, and sometime between 1701 and 1707, John Marsh is believed to have built a tidal mill on one of them, which may explain how Mill Rock got its name.
At the start of the War of 1812, the War Department built a blockhouse with two cannons on Great Mill Rock. Along with fortifications at Hallet’s Point and at Horn’s Hook (site of Gracie Mansion), this chain of blockhouses was hoped to bolster the defenses of New York Harbor and guard the passage into Long Island Sound from the British Navy. In 1821, the blockhouse was destroyed by fire, and for the next 40 or so years squatters took over the island. One squatter, John Clark, is said to have conducted a lively business selling food and drink to the crews and passengers of passing ships.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set up facilities on Great and Little Mill Rock to experiment with explosives for the planned clearing of large obstructions in the East River. On October 10, 1885, the largest planned explosion prior to the atomic bomb annihilated Flood Rock, a nine acre obstacle that had long frustrated East River ship traffic. 300,000 pounds of explosives & prepared at the Army’s island facilities- were detonated, and shocks from the concussion were felt as far away as Princeton, New Jersey. In 1890, rock fill from the blast was used to close the gap between the two islands. Until 1949, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continued to use the now unified island of Mill Rock as a work and storage base for the surveying and removing of hazards in the East River and New York Harbor. With the closing of operations that year, the Superintendent of the base, John Smith, became the last person known to have lived on Mill Rock.
In 1953, the federal government sold the island to the Parks Department for $25,000. Commissioner Robert Moses was concerned that if it were sold at public auction, the island might be acquired by commercial interests and huge billboards would be erected there. He arranged for the demolition of the existing buildings and dilapidated docks, and a new dock was constructed. Large amounts of rock were placed along the shore to prevent erosion. Topsoil was brought in, and trees and shrubs were planted.
Mill Rock Island has been used for educational and arts events. In 1969, Commissioner August Heckscher issued a permit for an Avant Garde Festival on the island, which included a hot air balloon ascension, special light displays, and giant sculptures. At the conclusion of the festival, Mill Rock Island was allowed to return to its natural state. In 1978, Parks placed the island under the care of The Neighborhood Committee for Asphalt Green, and granted the Committee consent to use the island as an educational resource. Today, Mill Rock Island serves as a scenic resource. Visible from bustling Manhattan, this natural space stands as a historic landmark and a source of tranquility.
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Bushman Steps
The Bushman Steps play a role in baseball history due to their proximity to the Polo Grounds ticket booth and playing fields, which once stood nearby. This staircase leads towards Highbridge Park and the Coogan’s Bluff staircase.
Sports fans once used these convenient steps to get to the old Polo Grounds ballfield. Traveling over the steps of Coogan’s Bluff, thousands of fans enjoyed free baseball, boxing matches, and football games. The New York Giants team-owner John T. Brush (1845-1912) built the bathtub-shaped Polo Grounds. The ball field stadium came to stand for its record-breaking crowds, a sign of the renaissance of New York baseball.
From it’s opening in 1912, the 155th Street Polo Grounds was home to the New York Giants (who played there until they moved to San Francisco in 1957) the New York Yankees (who later moved into The House That Ruth Built, Yankee Stadium.) and the New York Mets from 1962 to 1963 (before moving to Shea Stadium in Queens). These stairs once led to a ticket booth where fans could watch such sports legends as Jack Dempsey (1895-1983), Sugar Ray Robinson (1921-1989), and Babe Ruth (1895-1948). Developers razed the stadium in 1964 to build a housing complex called the Polo Grounds Towers. They now stand on the site, along with a playground named for baseball great, Willie Mays (b.1931).
Bushman Steps now serve pedestrians walking to the 157th Street Subway Station. The steps were acquired by the City in 1934 through a permit in a letter from former Borough President Samuel Levy. The landscaped area within the wrought iron fence contains plants, trees, and shrubs. Neighboring residents tend the plants providing some green and some shade for passersby.
Readers of this sign who have any information on Bushman’s identity should contact the Parks Library at (212) 360-8240.
Randall’s Island
Dutch Governor Wouter Van Twiller purchased Randall’s Island, then known as Minnahanonck, from Native Americans in 1637. Over the next 200 years, Randall’s Island was used for farming, as a station for British soldiers, and as a quarantine area for smallpox victims. The island was purchased by Jonathan Randel (or Randal) in 1784, for whom it is named (although with a different spelling). His heirs sold it to the city for $60,000 in 1835.
Randall’s Island is located along the East River between Northern Manhattan and Queens. After its purchase, the city built a burial ground for the poor, a poorhouse, a House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents, an Idiot Asylum, a homeopathic hospital, an Inebriate Asylum, and a rest home for Civil War veterans on the island. The physical isolation of the island provided distance between the public and the institutions for the sick and the poor. In 1930 the Metropolitan Conference on Parks recommended that the island be cleared of its institutions and be used solely for recreation. In 1933 the state acted on the Conference’s recommendation by transferring ownership to Parks & Recreation. This began the island’s transformation into a recreational hub.
Access to Randall’s Island was made much easier with the opening the Triborough Bridge by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Parks Commissioner Robert Moses launched a comprehensive program to build recreational spaces such as ballfields, playgrounds, and a stadium (named Downing Stadium in 1955 for former Director of Recreation John J. Downing). Moses evacuated the original children’s hospital and closed the House of Refuge. Over the following three decades, Commissioner Moses gradually filled in the space between Randall’s and Wards Islands to allow for even greater recreational area.
For many years, Downing Stadium was the centerpiece of activity on the island. It held a number of unforgettable sporting events beginning with Jesse Owens’ victory in the 100-yard dash at the 1936 Olympic Trials with President Franklin Roosevelt in attendance. The stadium was named in memory. Soccer star Pele made his American debut for the New York Cosmos at Downing in 1975, and Tiger Woods hosted a golf clinic for city kids there in 1996. Downing Stadium held large music festivals — the Duke Ellington Orchestra performed a memorial concert of composer George Gershwin in 1938. Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, and Grand Funk Railroad played at the three-day New York Pop Festival of 1970.
In 1992, the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation was formed to support capital projects and programming on Randall’s Island. Downing Stadium was demolished in 2002 to make way for Icahn Stadium, a $42 million facility that opened in April 2005. The sole International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) Class 1-certified, championship-quality track-and-field facility in North America, the stadium was financed with $18 million in private donations, including a generous gift of $10 million from Randall’s Island Sports Foundation (RISF) trustees and donors Carl and Gail Icahn, who made the largest gift ever from a private donor to a New York City park facility. At the opening of Icahn Stadium, 2004 Olympic Gold medalist Justin Gatlin recreated Jesse Owens victory in front of Jesse Owens’ daughter, Marlene Owens Rankin, who was in attendance. The symbol of Randall’s Island is The Discus Thrower statue (1926) which stood on the Downing Stadium plaza from 1936 until the 1970s. The bronze by Greek sculptor Kostas Dimitriadis, donated to the City of New York by Ery W. Kehaya, was returned to Randall’s Island in July 1999. The statue was restored with major funding from RISF Board Member Michael Bloomberg and friends of RISF.
Wards Island Park
Wards Island Park is located on Wards Island, a 255-acre landmass lying in the northern end of the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. Known as Tenkenas (Wild Lands) Island at the time of its appropriation from its native inhabitants to the Dutch in 1637, the island’s name has changed several times. Both Buchanan’s Island and Great Barn Island were likely corruptions of Barendt, an early owner’s name.
Always sparsely populated, the strategically placed island was used as a British military post during the Revolutionary War. After the war ended in 1783, the brothers Jaspar and Bartholomew Ward took proprietorship of the island that would carry their name. Though houses had already been constructed on the island as early as the 17th century, the Wards made settlement on the island more attractive by opening a cotton mill and building the first bridge crossing the East River (connecting the island with Manhattan at 114th Street) in 1807. After the War of 1812, the Wards’ cotton mill closed and in 1821 the bridge was destroyed in a brutal storm.
The island lay largely abandoned until 1840, when overcrowded Manhattan sought convenient locations for almshouses, mental health facilities, and potter’s fields (graveyards for the poor). Hundreds of thousands of bodies were relocated to Wards Island from the Madison Square Park and Bryant Park potter’s fields. The State Emigrant Refuge, a hospital for sick and destitute immigrants, opened in 1847 and it was the biggest hospital complex in the world during the 1850s. The predominance of public works led the City to purchase Wards Island outright in 1851. Twelve years later, the New York City Asylum for the Insane opened on the island. From 1860 until the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, Wards Island along with Castle Clinton on Manhattan’s southern tip welcomed America’s newcomers at its immigration station.
The New York State Department of Mental Hygiene took over the immigration and asylum buildings in 1899, opening Manhattan State Hospital. With 4,400 patients, it was the largest psychiatric institution in the world. It later became the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. When the 1930 Metropolitan Conference of Parks recommended transforming Randall’s and Wards Islands into recreational parks, everything changed. Shortly after taking the office of Parks Commissioner in 1934, Robert Moses (1888-1981) announced his plans for developing Wards Island. The City would connect it to Randall’s Island, a 195-acre island at the convergence of the East and Harlem Rivers just to the north. The two islands joined by landfill were to be cleared for playing fields and promenades that would take advantage of the Mid-Manhattan skyline views. The City transferred the parcels of land designated for the new Wards Island Park to Parks in 1936 and 1939. However, the project that eventually altered the landscape of Wards Island forever was the construction of the Triborough Bridge.
The T-shaped Triborough Bridge opened up the first roadway connecting Upper Manhattan with both The Bronx and Queens, with its massive concrete piles and steel towers rising straight out of Wards Island soil. Acting as Triborough Bridge Authority President, Robert Moses’s first great engineering project opened in 1936 after seven years of construction. Using 5,000 workers and 50 million dollars, it was largest public works venture in the City’s history. Other pubic works operating on Wards Island include the world’s highest capacity sewage treatment center, the Wards Island Water Pollution Control Plant. It was built in 1937 and currently occupies about one quarter of the island.
In recent years, the Fire Department of New York has also used a part of the island as a training center. A local law of 1949 authorized the construction of the 103rd Street footbridge, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1951, which finally accommodated pedestrian traffic from East Harlem. The footbridge leads directly into Wards Island Park and provides easy access to the playing fields, bicycle paths, and scenic waterfront. While the west coast faces Manhattan, the east side of the park overlooks Hell Gate, the narrow section of the East River between the island and Astoria, Queens. The Dutch word hellegat, meaning hell’s gate,’ originally applied to the whole East River. The name stuck in the minds of later 17th century navigators of this particular stretch of water because of its narrowness and tendency for violent tides.
#68 – D
Riverside Park South
In the 17th century the Riverside Park area was called Bloemendal, Dutch for vale of flowers. Its rolling topography and river views attracted country estates and farms. The countryside changed to bustling neighborhood after the Civil War (1861-1865), and the construction of the Interborough Rapid Transit subway line in 1902 attracted a surge of residential buildings.
Beginning in October 1851, steam rail service by the Hudson River Railroad followed the shoreline of the Hudson River, connecting to the Bronx and taking passengers as far north as Rensselaer in upstate New York. In 1869, Cornelius Vanderbilt merged the New York Central Railroad with the Hudson River Railroad to form the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. This piece of land was acquired to serve as the New York Central Railroad yard; it was the primary departure, receiving, and classification area for the sole all-freight line on the island of Manhattan. Gantry ramps permitted boxcars to be rolled on and off barges that traversed the Hudson River. In 1939, this yard was one of the two largest privately owned properties in the City of New York. In 1968, the New York Central Railroad merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad (founded in 1863); two years later, though, in 1970, the new Penn Central Railroad declared bankruptcy.
Developers had been eyeing the property since at least 1961; Edward Swayduck, then president of Local 1 of the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, envisioned Litho City, intended to be a self-contained urban community. His plan never materialized, and in 1984, Donald Trump bought the rights to the property. His initial proposals for Lincoln West and Television City, including the world’s tallest building, were offered, but never came to fruition. Opposition by community groups and elected officials, as well as economic conditions, prevented the construction of these projects.
In 1991, six non-profit civic groups–the Regional Plan Association, the Municipal Art Society, The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Parks Council, Riverside Park Fund, and Westpride, working with elected officials and city agencies, offered an alternative plan. It reduced the size of the development, proposed moving the elevated highway under a new Riverside Boulevard, and created a dramatic sweep of waterfront park. In 1992, Riverside South was approved by the city on the condition that the developer, Hudson Waterfront Associates, would pay for the creation of a 21.5-acre park and fund its maintenance in perpetuity. Sixteen buildings are scheduled to be erected, and the land along the Hudson River waterfront deeded to the City of New York. Plans to relocate the elevated highway were put on hold in response to concerns by elected officials.
Phase I includes the erection of three buildings and a southern extension of Riverside Park, stretching from 68th street to 72nd street. Phases II through VII will follow as more buildings are erected, extending Riverside Park to 59th Street. This will connect Hudson River Park to Riverside Park, joining the two bike paths to create a greenway from the Battery to 125th Street, part of the Hudson River Valley Greenway that will eventually stretch from Battery Park, Manhattan to Battery Park in Watervliet, in upstate New York.
The park, designed by Thomas Balsley Associates and funded by Hudson Waterfront Associates, retains the industrial flavor of the railroad yard. Angular paths, created out of the old concrete relieving platforms, evoke the old railroad tracks. Abandoned ramps and piers, as well as a rusting gantry, remain as a remembrance of times and technologies past. Among the collapsing structures, an ecosystem flourishes; weeds and wildflowers grow through the wooden planks of dilapidated piers, crickets chirp, birds nest, and mallards and geese float about. On the shoreline, the elevated highway, a giant snakelike pergola, shades arcs of benches and seashore grasses.
A 715-foot long recreational pier, built atop the remains of the original wooden shipping Pier I, stretches out into the Hudson. Standing on the new pier in a brisk breeze, watching the current pass or the sun set, may inspire daydreams of river travel and the busy working waterfront of yore.
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Lafayette Square
Lafayette Square is named in honor of the prominent French statesman and military leader Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Montier Lafayette (1757-1834). Also known as Marquis de Lafayette, he is best remembered for his role in the Revolutionary War. Sympathetic to the American cause, he aided the colonists through the provision of experienced military leadership. The Frenchman quickly became a favorite of General George Washington, who appointed him Major General in the Continental Army during 1777. The next year, Lafayette returned to France following the formal agreement of the France/United States alliance against Great Britain. Once in France, he actively lobbied for the allotment of increased military and financial aid for the Colonies. In 1780, Marquis de Lafayette returned to America and served valorously in the Virginia campaign, which forced the surrender of Lord Charles Cornwallis in 1781.
As a true proponent of democracy, Lafayette assumed a leading role in the French Revolution of 1789. He became a member of the National Assembly, from which position he prepared a bill of rights based on the American Declaration of Independence. He commanded the French National Guard and joined the Feuillants, a moderate political party that advocated a constitutional monarchy. He gained leadership of a French division in 1792 in the war against Austria. Chastised by the Jacobins within his unit (who were far more radical than the Feuillants) Lafayette fled to Flanders where Austrian authorities imprisoned him for five years. Upon his return to France, he avoided the dictatorial politics of Napoleon Bonaparte. Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Lafayette resumed his political career as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1815 and from 1818 to 1824. He toured the United States in 1824 during which time Congress voted him a gift of $200,000 and a large tract of land. Marquis de Lafayette, the statesman and general, maintained the convictions of democracy, social equality, and religious freedom throughout the remainder of his life.
Manhattan Avenue, 114th Street, and Morningside Avenue bound Lafayette Square, which is located in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan. The City of New York acquired this property by condemnation on July 28, 1870 along with the land used to build Morningside Park. The square contains large, shady sycamore trees and a monument entitled Lafayette and Washington. French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) designed the bronze statue, which depicts both figures on a marble pedestal, clothed in colonial uniforms, and shaking hands with the flags of their respective countries behind them. Famed publisher, Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) commissioned the sculpture based on the artist’s previous major accomplishment: the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor. Bartholdi completed the original Lafayette and Washington, which was dedicated in Paris in 1895. At the turn of the century, department store owner Charles Broadway Rouss bequeathed this fine replica to the residents of Morningside Heights.
Paterno Trivium
This trivium (Latin for a place where three roads meet), at the juncture of Cabrini Boulevard, Pinehurst Avenue, and West 187th Street, is named for Dr. Charles V. Paterno (1877-1946), the person most responsible for the residential development of this section of the Fort Washington neighborhood. The Paterno family arrived in New York from southern Italy and became involved in apartment house construction. Paterno trained as a medical doctor, but after his father’s death in 1899, became an active builder throughout Manhattan. In 1905, he purchased land along the Hudson River, south of 187th Street, and constructed a grand mansion known as .Paterno’s Castle. Paterno acquired additional land in the 1920s, on which he erected the picturesque English Tudor style Hudson View Gardens complex in 1923-24, one of New York City’s earliest middle-class cooperatives. In 1938-39, after moving to Connecticut, Paterno replaced the castle with the Castle Village apartment complex. This series of five buildings was the first in America to employ the progressive European idea of setting tall residential towers in a park-like setting. In the spring of 2000, Paterno Trivium became a Greenstreet site. Greenstreets is a joint project of Parks and Transportation begun in 1986 and revived in 1994. Its goal is to convert paved street properties, such as triangles and malls, into green spaces. Winter King Hawthorn trees (Crataegus viridis) and a ground cover of Cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea magnus) adorn Paterno Trivium.
Plaza Lafayette
This plaza honors the prominent French statesman and military leader Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834). Lafayette is best remembered for his role in the Revolutionary War. Sympathetic to the American cause, he aided the colonists through the provision of experienced military leadership. The Frenchman quickly became a favorite of General George Washington, who appointed him Major General in the Continental Army during 1777. In 1778, Lafayette returned to France following the formal agreement of the France/United States alliance against Great Britain. Once in France, he actively lobbied for the allotment of increased military and financial aid. In 1780, Marquis de Lafayette returned to America and served valorously in the Virginia campaign, which forced the surrender of Lord Charles Cornwallis and Great Britain in 1781.
As a true proponent of democracy, Lafayette assumed a leading role in the French Revolution of 1789. He became a member of the National Assembly, from which he propagated a bill of rights based on the American Declaration of Independence. He commanded the French National Guard and the Feuillants, a moderate political party that advocated a constitutional monarchy. He gained leadership of a French division, during 1792, in the war against Austria. Chastised by the Jacobins, the radical opponents of the Feuillants, Lafayette fled to Flanders where Austrian authorities imprisoned him for five years. Upon his return to France, he avoided the politics of Dictator Napolean Bonaparte. Following Napolean’s defeat at Waterloo, Lafayette resumed his political career as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1815 and again, from 1818 to 1824. He toured the United States in 1824 during which time Congress presented him with a gift of $200,000 and a large tract of land. Marquis de Lafayette spent the remainder of his life in France and withheld the values of democracy, social equality, and religious freedom.
From its hillside location, Plaza Lafayette offers an unobstructed view of the George Washington Bridge. Located on 179th Street, the bridge is the city’s only above-water Hudson River crossing. The structure is composed of two 600 foot, arched towers that suspend the roadway 212 feet using four 4 foot steel cables. Massive anchorages located in Fort Washington Park and Fort Lee, New Jersey secure the cables. Designed by Othmar H. Ammann, the bridge opened in 1931 as the longest suspension span in the world. Originally, Ammann intened the arched towers to be encased in stone. The designer also proposed plans for a second, lower roadway. Although the planned masonry was never added, the Port of New York Authority added the lower roadway in 1962 to accommodate increased traffic. The George Washington Bridge serves as Interstate 95’s vital connection between New York and New Jersey, carrying the majority of mid-Atlantic traffic to New England. A graceful, light appearance and majestic nighttime illumination disguise the bridge’s tremendous traffic capacity. Renowned modernist architect Le Corbusier described the span as the most beautiful in the world.
Plaza Lafayette is located on 181st Street and is bounded by Riverside Drive and Haven Avenue. The City of New York acquired the property and placed it under Parks jurisdiction on February 23, 1918. The narrow strip is lined with five trees and lush greenery.
#69 – C
The Mall
When landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in 1858, their Greensward Plan included a grand formal area that they called the Mall or the Promenade. Modeled on the formal allies of the great European parks, like Versailles, it was designed to be the great walkway where the parade of parkgoers, dressed in their Sunday best, would come to see and to be seen.
The elaborate flower display at the southern end of the Mall, known as the Olmsted Bed, was created in 1972 to memorialize the 150th anniversary of Olmsted’s birth. The lower end of the Mall is known informally as Literary Walk or Poets’ Walk, as four of the five statues memorialize poets and writers: William Shakespeare (1870), Robert Burns (ca. 1880), Sir Walter Scott (1871), and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1876); the fifth represents Christopher Columbus (1892).
In the Greensward Plan, the designers intended the Mall to be the only straight pathway in Central Park. Since the Mall was one of the first areas of the park to be constructed, the landscape architects were eager to plant large trees in order to provide visitors with a broad canopy of shade as soon as possible. They used American elms, which were the trees chosen to line almost every Main Street and college campus in the country in the 19th century. Unfortunately the large elm trees proved much too large to survive transplantation. Most did not survive their first year. Nonetheless, two English elms to the east and west of the Mall did survive and date from that time. The wall of straight trunks resembling columns and the arabesque branches overhead create an architectural space fit for ceremonies and processions.
The second planting of much smaller trees grew and thrived until the turn of the century. The trees had been planted in poor soil and began to show signs of decay in the 1920s. The elms you see today were planted by 1920 and other trees have been replaced as needed. The elms also line the perimeter of the park on Fifth Avenue. During the Dutch elm disease season of June and July, the Central Park Conservancy tree crew monitor on a weekly basis; symptoms of the disease are identified and treated promptly.
The elms on the Mall have been endowed through the Tree Trust of the Central Park Conservancy’s Women’s Committee, which provides funds for the proper care and maintenance of Central Park’s 26,000 trees. The paving stones embedded at the southern end of Literary Walk commemorate specific trees endowed all over the park. For information about the Tree Trust and endowing a tree or grove of trees in Central Park, please consult the Conservancy’ s website, www.centralparknyc.org.
WRONG ANSWERS
Belvedere Castle
In 1867, Central Park designer and architect Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) created an observation tower atop Vista Rock to overlook the old reservoir that is now the Great Lawn. The Gothic-style Castle was designed as a landmark for the pedestrian park visitor. The castle’s United States flag could be seen from the Mall, drawing the walkers down to Bethesda Terrace, over Bow Bridge, and through the Ramble to the castle itself.
The original plans for the building included another elaborate two-story structure on the site of today’s pavilion, but financial concerns halted construction and left the castle in its present state. Portions of the castle are made from the same type of schist as the Vista Rock, creating the illusion of a castle rising out of the park itself. Its light colored stone trim is made of granite quarried from Quincy, Massachusetts. Its roofs are made of colored slate from Vermont, Virginia, and New York.
Belvedere Castle was once an open-air structure, with no doors or windows. This changed in 1919 when the United States Weather Bureau moved the Central Park Observatory to the castle. Until that time, weather measurements were taken from the Arsenal at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street where Dr. Daniel Draper founded a meteorological observatory in 1869. The Weather Bureau took over the operation in 1911, and moved it here eight years later, enclosing the castle and altering the turret’s shape to accommodate their scientific instruments.
In the early 1960s, the Weather Bureau replaced the lab with automated instruments and closed the castle offices. The empty building was left to deteriorate until 1983, when the Central Park Conservancy replaced the original turret, rebuilt the pavilions, and converted the castle into a visitor’s center. The Henry Luce Nature Observatory in the castle, created in 1996, provides interactive nature exhibits inside the castle as well as bird-watching kits, which can be used throughout the park.
Great Hill
At 135 feet above sea level, Great Hill is one of the highest points in Central Park. It is part of a chain of rock outcrops that stretches across the park at 106th Street, an area that was originally part of the town of Harlem. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Great Hill was called Mount Prospect because it offered unobstructed views of the Hudson River, then known as the North River. The hill provided an excellent place to protect Manhattan from a western attack during the Revolutionary War (1776-1783). Evidence of British and Hessian military encampments, such as pot hooks, bayonets, and even sod breastwork walls, surfaced while the park was under construction in the 1860s.
When the Board of Commissioners of Central Park held the park design competition in 1858, their rules stipulated that each entry include an observation tower. The winners, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), initially chose to put their tower on Great Hill. The tower was never built. Instead, they redesigned Great Hill as a northern destination for visits by horse carriage, offering cool breezes and beautiful views.
In the 1940s, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981) turned Great Hill into a recreation area with tennis, horseshoe, and volleyball courts, as well as an oval track. Aside from the comfort station, the track is the only original feature that remains. In 1985, the Central Park Conservancy, a non-profit agency which co-manages Central Park along with Parks, restored the area as the green lawn of Olmsted and Vaux’s design. The Conservancy replanted the woodland edge, and reconstructed the steps and paths leading down to the pool, using the 1858 plan as their guide.
Sheep Meadow
Like all the landscapes in Central Park, this beautiful 15 acre lawn known as Sheep Meadow is man-made. The Greensward Plan of 1858, the winning entry in the design competition for Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), featured broad open lawns, known in nineteenth-century terminology as greensward. Sheep Meadow was naturally rocky and swampy, and the designers converted the terrain into a smooth meadow by blasting the rock outcrops and adding two feet of new surface soil. Sheep Meadow was the most costly construction undertaken in the new park.
The original stipulations of the design competition required that Central Park include a parade ground for military reviews, drills, and practice. Reluctantly, Olmsted and Vaux included such a feature in the plan that they submitted. However, since military use conflicted with the vision of a quiet and serene atmosphere, the park commissioners later decided to eliminate the parade ground. The name of the meadow was changed from the Parade to the Green, and visitors were usually not allowed to walk on it. Instead, they were to view and appreciate the vast green expanse from the paths.
Sheep Meadow takes its name from the flock of Southdown and Dorset sheep that were kept on the meadow from 1864 until 1934. Olmsted and Vaux believed that the sheep enhanced the Romantic English quality of the park. The animals served a practical purpose as well’s they trimmed the grass and fertilized the lawn. In 1871, Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886) designed an elaborate sheepfold to house both the flock and its shepherd. Twice a day, the shepherd stopped traffic on the west drive so that the flock could travel to and from the meadow. In the 1910s and 1920s, the flock shared space with a variety of folk-dancing festivals, children’s pageants, and patriotic celebrations. In 1934, when the sheep were transferred to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the sheepfold was converted into Tavern on the Green, a restaurant that has grown in size and popularity over the years.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, thousands of people were attracted to Sheep Meadow for large-scale concerts. The first landing on the moon was televised to a large crowd in the meadow on July 20, 1969. These events and lack of maintenance severely eroded the lawn. Sheep Meadow was the first area in Central Park to be restored.
Since the completion of the restoration in 1981, Sheep Meadow has been cared for by the Central Park Conservancy, which installed a new irrigation system in 2001. The unique partnership between the Central Park Conservancy and City of New York/Parks & Recreation ensures that the meadow will remain the pastoral lawn that Olmsted and Vaux had originally envisioned and designed.
#70 – C
Sidney Hillman Playground
Located at the intersection of Lewis and Delancey Streets, Sidney Hillman Playground takes its name from the housing development that surrounds it and the man who inspired the development, Sidney Hillman (1887-1946). Hillman was born into a Jewish rabbinical family in Russia in 1887. In 1907, Hillman fled violent anti-Semitic pogroms in his homeland and immigrated to the United States. His experiences growing up as a Russian Jewish peasant would lead him to become an activist in the American labor movement.
Employed as a garment worker in Chicago soon after his arrival, Hillman first became involved in the American labor movement after leading his fellow workers in a successful strike in 1910. Four years later, he was elected president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW). During his tenure, Hillman introduced numerous initiatives. The most successful of these was a form of collective bargaining known as industrial democracy, which encouraged workers to resolve issues on the shop floor. Hillman also encouraged the participation of immigrants, whom had previously been frowned upon by the leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). AFL president Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) subsequently attempted to alienate Hillman and his organization from the AFL.
Hillman revitalized a social movement beset by many problems. Labor unions in the early 20th century were losing the public support and influence they had achieved in the late 19th century. Internal strife over whether or not to support the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, extensive graft exposed by government investigations of unions, and reactions against labor radicalism all marred the American labor movement in the early 20th century.
Hillman gained the support of eminent social reformers such as Lillian Wald (1867-1940), New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947), and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (1882-1965). In 1938, Hillman formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), along with John L. Lewis (1880-1969), leader of the United Mine Workers Union. Hillman also helped found the American Labor Party, which served as a third-party alternative to the Republicans and Democrats from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Affordable cooperative housing was one of Hillman’s most lasting achievements. In 1926, under the auspices of the ACW, the Amalgamated Housing Corporation (AHC) was formed. Initially, the AHC was to provide low-cost, quality housing for the ACW’s members. The AHC built several cooperative housing developments along Grand Street on the Lower East Side, and along Norman Avenue (now know as Hillman Avenue), in the Bronx. These developments fostered a sense of community by virtue of their design, their cooperative boards, and their newsletters. The housing complex adjacent to Hillman playground was an AHC project. Sixty-five tenement buildings were torn down for the project, which changed the face of low to middle income housing. Upon its completion in 1951, the housing development was named in honor of Hillman.
In 1948, Parks acquired Sidney Hillman Playground. In 1993, a 10-foot wall separating the playground and P.S. 110, also known as Theodore Shoenfeld School, was demolished. New fences were installed and trees were planted. New planting pots, benches, bridges, and a colorful archway, which serves as the entrance to the children’s play area and the basketball courts, were added. In 2000, as part of the Mayor’s Executive Budget, the basketball courts were resurfaced. Today, the playground serves both neighboring P.S. 110 and the local community.
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Josephine Shaw Lowell Memorial Fountain
Architect Charles A. Platt (1861 & 1933) designed this elegant black granite ornamental fountain to commemorate social worker and reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843 & 1905). Shaw, who is said to be the first woman to be honored by a major monument in New York City, was the first female member of the New York State Board of Charities, serving from 1876 to 1889.
The Memorial Committee that worked to build the fountain originally wanted it placed in Corlear’s Hook Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, near where Shaw focused her energies. Instead, the fountain, with its 32-foot-wide lower basin and 13-foot-wide upper basin, was ultimately installed at the east side of Bryant Park in 1913. In 1936 the fountain was moved to the west side of the park. The fountain was refurbished as part of an overall restoration of the park by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, completed in 1992.
Seward Park
Over one hundred years ago, settlement workers Lillian D. Wald and Charles B. Stover founded the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL) to promote organized games in public playgrounds as an alternative to play in city streets. Between 1898 and 1902 ORL opened nine privately sponsored playgrounds on municipal parkland. Soon after the City of New York assumed operations of ORL playgrounds in 1902, the facility at Seward Park became the first permanent, municipally built playground in the United States. It opened on October 17, 1903, in the north corner of the park. With its cinder surfacing, fences, recreation pavilion, and play and gymnastic equipment, the facility became a model for playground programming and design.
The city had acquired the land for Seward Park by condemnation in 1897. Due to lack of funds, the site remained largely unimproved until the intervention of the ORL. In addition to the playground, the 1903 plan featured a large running track with an open play area in the center and a children’s farm garden in the southeast corner. Curving paths and a north-south mall divided the park into recreational areas. The limestone and terra cotta Seward Park Pavilion was equipped with marble baths, a gymnasium, and meeting rooms. Rocking chairs were placed on the broad porch for the use of mothers tending their small children.
Seward Park underwent a major transformation in the 1930s and 1940s. First, a sliver of land on the east side of the site was surrendered to the city and reassigned to the Manhattan Borough President for street purposes. The Schiff Fountain (1895), designed by architect Arnold W. Brunner, was moved from nearby Rutgers Park to Seward Park in 1936. It was the gift of Jacob H. Schiff, a banker and philanthropist, to the people of the Lower East Side. Seward Park’s pavilion was demolished in the same year, and a new recreation building was erected in 1941. New facilities focused on active play: a basketball court, playgrounds, horseshoe-pitching and shuffleboard courts, and a large paved area adaptable for roller skating, paddle tennis, and ice skating.
The Lower East Side neighborhood around Seward Park continued to evolve. In the late 1950s a triangular swath of land to the east and north of the park was condemned and redeveloped by the city. Most of the intersecting streets were closed, and the Seward Park houses were built where crowded tenements once stood.
The 1999 renovation of Seward Park has revived several features from the 1903 plan. There is a new center oval with a large spray shower and marble mosaic map of the neighborhood. The various quotations by historic local residents were provided by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Other revivals of the park’s original appearance include fencing modeled after the historic fences, as well as period lighting and site furniture.
The new design also considers the legacy of park namesake William Henry Seward (1801-1872), an American statesman. As senator from New York (1849-1861), Seward was an outspoken critic of slavery. As Secretary of State under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, he arranged the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. This famous bargain, once denounced as Seward’s folly, inspired playground equipment such as the seal spray shower and Mount McKinley play unit. Standing proudly in park’s tot lot is a bronze statue of the husky named Togo. A contemporary of Balto (whose statue is located in Central Park), Togo played a heroic role in the 1925 dash to bring an antidiptheria serum to Nome, Alaska. In 2001 the park benefited from a $1.56 million reconstruction funded by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani with Council Members Kathryn E. Freed and Margarita Lopez. The reconstruction added a new playground, spray showers, fencing, plantings, benches, pavement, a historic fence, and a mosaic.
Vladeck Park
Bounded by Madison, Water, Jackson, and Gouverneur Streets, this park honors the Jewish political activist, writer, and New York City Alderman Baruch Charney Vladeck (1886-1938). Vladeck was born Baruch Nachman Charney in Russia, the fifth of six children. His father owned a small leather supply store and left it to the family when he died of tuberculosis in 1889. Vladeck’s mother raised the children on her own, working at a synagogue as a reader for other women. In the early 1900s, Vladeck joined the radical Poale Zion, or Workers of Zion, movement, a group of dedicated Jewish socialists who advocated the return of all Polish Jews to Israel. In 1904, Russian officials imprisoned Vladeck for his participation in the movement. Though he had spent several years in school, it was in prison that he received his greatest education.
Vladeck organized classes in arithmetic and literature for his fellow prisoners. Meanwhile, he studied politics, social sciences, and history from books borrowed from jailed intellectuals. As a result of his prison experience, Vladeck abandoned the Poale Zion movement and joined the Bund, the Jewish workers’ branch of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Vladeck soon became known in the organization for his exceptional oratory and leadership skills. His affiliation with the Bund forced him to flee to Poland, where he adopted the name Vladeck to evade Russian officials. In 1908, Vladeck immigrated to the United States.
Upon his arrival, the renowned New York Jewish newspaper The Forward greeted Vladeck with a front-page story detailing his accomplishments. He went on a tour of the United States and Canada before marrying Clara Richman, a nurse in the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, in 1911. One year later, the couple moved to Philadelphia, where Vladeck worked as a business manager for The Forward . While working, he took classes at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English, American history, and literature. In 1916, Vladeck moved back to New York City and briefly served as the city editor of The Forward before becoming the general business manager.
Politics once again took center stage in Vladeck’s life when, in 1917, he was elected to the Board of Aldermen (the predecessor of the current City Council) as a Socialist from Brooklyn. He took a keen interest in the city’s housing problem, and sponsored several local laws aimed at creating low-cost housing. In 1934, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia (1882-1945) appointed Vladeck to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). That same year, in an effort to improve the lives of Jewish workers and to build anti-Nazi sentiment in the United States, Vladeck founded the Jewish Labor Committee. In 1936, he helped found the American Labor Party (ALP), an organization created by Jewish-American Socialists and trade unionists to win support for both President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1882-1945) New Deal policies and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s municipal reforms. Throughout his political career, Vladeck successfully promoted low-cost public housing for working people, and consequently the city named the development bordering this park the Vladeck Houses in his honor. In 1938, Vladeck suffered a severe heart attack and died here in New York.
One year after Vladeck’s death, Parks acquired jurisdiction over this property at the center of the Vladeck Houses complex, and it was named in Vladeck’s honor. Today, with benches along the outer edges of the mall and a playground in the center, Vladeck Park is both a memorial to the tireless efforts of one individual and a place of rest and relaxation for all.
#71 – D
Morris-Jumel Mansion
Located within Roger Morris Park, Manhattan’s oldest surviving house, Morris-Jumel Mansion, is a monument to colonial grandeur. Built in 1765 as a summer retreat for British colonel Roger Morris and his American wife Mary Philipse, this house is the only survivor of a number of similar country houses built by wealthy New Yorkers. Morris, the nephew of a successful English architect, was greatly influenced by the designs of the 16th-century Italian architect Palladio. His sophisticated residence includes a monumental portico and pediment, supported by grand Tuscan columns, and a large, two-story octagonal addition at the rear, one of the first of its kind in the country.
Before Harlem Heights developed into the vibrant community it is today, this site commanded views of lower Manhattan as well as of New Jersey and Westchester. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Morris, a Loyalist, left for England. His home, which he called Mount Morris, was then occupied successively by George Washington, British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton, and the Hessian commander Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen. Washington’s use of this house as his temporary headquarters between September 14 and October 20, 1776, is well documented by his daily correspondence and official papers.
After the war, the Morris’s property was confiscated and sold by the new American government. It became Calumet Hall, a popular tavern along the Albany Post Road. In 1810 Stephen and Eliza Jumel bought the property. Madame Jumel was from an impoverished Rhode Island family. Her marriage to Stephen Jumel, a wealthy French merchant who had made his fortune in the wine trade, gave her entry to New York’s highest social circles. The Jumels spent several years in France, where they made friends in the elite circle around Napoleon’s court. They returned to the United States in 1828 to settle in the mansion. Inspired by cutting-edge French fashion, Madame Jumel bought new furniture and redecorated her home in the elegant Empire style.
One year after her husband’s death in 1832 from injuries sustained in a carriage accident, Madame Jumel married former Vice President Aaron Burr in the mansion’s front parlor. The marriage was not a success, and the couple formally divorced in 1836. The immensely wealthy Madame Jumel became increasingly eccentric as time passed, and lived in the mansion until her death in 1865. The City bought the house from later owners, the Earles, in 1903. With the assistance of the Daughters of the American Revolution, it opened as a public museum the next year.
Today, Morris-Jumel Mansion and Roger Morris Park are part of the Jumel Terrace Historic District. The house features nine restored, period rooms including George Washington’s office, a dining room glittering with 19th century ceramics and glass, and Eliza Jumel’s chamber, with a bed that she maintained had belonged to Napoleon. The third floor houses an archive and reference library. Morris-Jumel Mansion is owned by Parks & Recreation, is a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City, and operated by Morris-Jumel Mansion, Inc.
WRONG ANSWERS
The Blockhouse
During the War of 1812 New Yorkers constructed fortifications along the waterfront at the Battery and Ellis Island, assuming that a British attack would come from the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Therefore, when the British stormed Stonington, Connecticut on Long Island Sound on August 10, 1814, the city was quite unprepared to defend itself from an attack from the east or the north.
Under the direction of General Joseph Swift, citizens from New York, New Jersey, and Long Island banded together in patriotic zeal to construct a line of defense running through this area of Manhattan. According to Edward H. Hall in McGown’s Pass and Vicinity, they came from every conceivable class of men: the Society of Tammany, the students of Columbia College, medical students, the Marine Society, the Society of Tallow Chandlers, butchers, members of the bar, Free Masons, firemen, Sons of Erin, colored citizens. The unevenness of the stonework is testimony to the haste in which these fortifications were constructed. In September 1814, less than a month after construction, The New York Columbian commented: The works at Harlem heights are numerous, compact and judiciously placed, and form a romantic and picturesque view.
This is the only remaining blockhouse, officially called Blockhouse #1; three others were on the site of Harlem Heights, now known as Morningside Heights. In his report to the Common Council, General Swift explained his military strategy: [In this area] commences a chain of almost perpendicular rocks, and wooded heights, of difficult ascent, except in one place, and accessible only to the lightest of troops. On these heights have been erected block houses .within supporting distance of each other, and near enough for the interchange of grape shot; all of them to mount heavy cannon on their terrace. Although soldiers were certainly stationed at the Blockhouse and surrounding fortifications, there was not any military action in the area. The British did not attack New York City, and in 1815, one year after the completion of these fortifications, the Treaty of Ghent was signed.
According to recent studies of the Blockhouse, there was formerly a heavy timber floor which supported a heavy cannon. All four sides of the structure have two small gunports. A timber stair used to connect the ground entrance to the terrace level. The current entrance and staircase are not original and were probably added at the turn of the century. The upper two feet of the Blockhouse walls are noticeably different in color, composition and stonework. They were added at a later date, perhaps during peacetime when the Blockhouse was used as a powder magazine or storage building for ammunition.
In 1858 the design competition for Central Park only included the land from 59th Street to 106th Street as these rocky bluffs and their surrounding swamp (now the Harlem Meer) were considered unsuitable for park terrain. Nonetheless, the area was added to the Park in 1863, when the land was deemed too difficult to develop for commercial or residential purposes. When the team of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux designed this area, the Blockhouse was treated as a picturesque ruin with vines covering portions of the walls, and landscaped with alpine plants and evergreens.
Dyckman Farmhouse Museum
Built by William Dyckman in approximately 1784, this farmhouse was once the center of a thriving farm more than 250 acres in size. Dyckman Farmhouse, along with the smokehouse and reconstructed Hessian Hut, has been a public museum since 1916. Jan Dyckman arrived in New Amsterdam in the 1660s and began acquiring land in northern Manhattan. At the time of the American Revolution, Jan’s grandson William had inherited the Dyckman estate and the family homestead stood near present-day 210th Street and the Harlem River.
During the British occupation of Manhattan (1776-83), William Dyckman and his wife Mary fled their home and sought refuge in upstate New York. When the war ended, William returned to find his family’s home destroyed. It is believed that he immediately began building this new farmhouse, choosing a location further inland and on the newly re-routed Kingsbridge Road (now Broadway). The small, two-story Dutch Colonial style home that William built served three generations of the Dyckman family. William’s son Jacobus took over in the 1790s, re-established the farm, and saw it prosper. After his death, Jacobus’ two bachelor sons Isaac and Michael inherited the farmhouse. By the 1850s, Isaac, Michael and their nephew Isaac Michael Dyckman moved away, marking the end of Dyckman family residency here. Following Isaac’s death in 1868, Isaac Michael inherited much of the property.
The farmhouse left family ownership by the 1870s and served primarily as rental housing for the next several decades. By the early 20th century, the farmhouse was in disrepair and the rural character of the neighborhood was changing. To ensure the farmhouse’s preservation, Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch, daughters of Isaac Michael, bought the property in 1915. With their husbands, curator Bashford Dean and architect Alexander McMillan Welch, they undertook a major restoration project to bring the farmhouse back to what they believed was its earliest appearance. They furnished the interiors and landscaped the property. Also, a reproduction smokehouse and reconstructed Hessian Hut were added to the site. The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum is owned by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and is a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City.
Merchant’s House Museum
Both a New York City and a National Historic Landmark, this 1832 rowhouse is among the finest surviving examples of late-Federal and Greek Revival architecture. It remains virtually unchanged from the time when it was the home of the affluent 19th century merchant family of Seabury (1780-1865) and Eliza (1797-1882) Tredwell and their eight children. The Merchant’s House, as it is now known, is the only family home in New York City to survive intact, inside and out, from the 1830’s.
The Tredwell family moved into this house in 1835. Over the years, as the City continued to grow, the Tredwells’s neighbors gradually abandoned the popular Bond Street area, building even more elegant homes uptown. For reasons unknown, the Tredwells remained where they were. The youngest Tredwell child, Gertrude (1840-1933), never married; when she died in the upstairs bedroom in 1933 at the age of 93, the family had occupied this house for almost 100 years.
The formal Greek Revival parlors with their black and gold marble masterpieces, Ionic columns, mahogany pocket doors, and matching plaster ceiling medallions, reflect and convey the prevailing taste of a bygone era. Three floors of the house are available for viewing: the ground floor, comprising the family dining room and kitchen, the parlor floor, and a bedroom floor.
The unaltered interior of the house is filled with the family’s furniture and belongings. Everything one would expect to find in a well-appointed 19th-century home is here: period furniture from New York’s finest cabinet makers (including Duncan Phyfe and Joseph Meeks), opulent decorative accessories such as Argand oil lamps with crystal prisms, original oil paintings of European vistas, porcelains, and silver decorative arts.
Personal possessions, from unfinished needlework, family photographs, and books, to a shaving mirror and sewing boxes, leave the impression that the family has just stepped out and will return shortly. Dresses belonging to the Tredwell women, along with gloves, hats, shoes, parasols, shawls, and undergarments are displayed on a rotating basis. These items span over 60 years and illustrate the changing profile of American fashion in the 19th century.
The Museum, located on East 4th Street between the Bowery and Lafayette Street, offers educational programs for adults and schoolchildren, guided tours, lectures, readings, concerts, exhibitions, performances, and other events throughout the year. In 1997, the Museum formed an alliance with The Historic House Trust of New York City, which works in partnership with Parks to preserve, enhance, and support the historic houses located in parks in all five boroughs. Considered together, these houses provide a visible link to more than 250 years of New York City history.
#72 – C
Madison Square Park
Madison Square Park is named for James Madison (1751-1836), a Virginian who was the fourth President of the United States (1809-17). Madison earned the title father of the Constitution, from his peers in the Constitutional Convention. He also co-authored The Federalist Papers (1787-88) with New Yorkers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Madison was Secretary of State from 1801-09, serving through both of President Thomas Jefferson’s terms. As President, he was Commander-in-Chief during the War of 1812 with the British. Madison was the rector of the University of Virginia from 1827 until he died in 1836.
The largest parcel of this land was first designated as public property when Royal Governor Thomas Dongan revised the City Charter in 1686. Since then, this area has been used for a variety of public purposes. A potter’s field was established here in 1794, and then was moved in 1797 to Washington Square. By 1811 the land was home to a United States Army Arsenal (1806) and laid out as part of a military parade ground (named for Madison in 1814), bounded by 3rd and 7th Avenues and 23rd and 34th Streets. The arsenal fell out of military use, and served as a House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents from 1825 until 1839, when it was destroyed by fire.
After being leveled, sodded, and enclosed, Madison Square Park opened to the public on May 10, 1847, with boundaries of Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenues and 23rd and 26th Streets. Citizens quickly claimed the public park as their own. Their protests against plans to erect the Crystal Palace here in 1853 resulted in its relocation to Bryant Park. Nevertheless, the park has been host to grand celebrations, replete with temporary decorative arches, to commemorate historic occasions and anniversaries such as the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 and the triumphant return of Admiral Dewey from the Spanish American War in 1899.
The original Madison Square Garden was located adjacent to the park at Madison Avenue and 26th Street. It was owned by William Vanderbilt, and opened in 1879. The building was razed in 1899 and replaced with a Moorish style building designed by Stanford White. The second Madison Square Garden stood until 1925 when it was demolished and replaced by the headquarters of the New York Life Insurance Company. Promoter Tex Rickard built the third Garden that same year at 8th Avenue and 50th Street.
Soon after the creation of the Department of Public Parks in 1870, the square was relandscaped by Ignatz Pilat, Chief Landscape Architect, and William Grant. The new design brought in the sculptures that now highlight the park. One of the works capturing a politician in bronze is Randolph Ranger’s statue of William H. Seward (1876), the Secretary of State who purchased Alaska in 1867. He was the first New Yorker to have a monument erected in his honor. Others include J.Q.A. Ward’s sculpture of Roscoe Conkling (1893), a reconstructionist politician; and George Edwin Bissell’s monument to Chester Alan Arthur (1898), the 21st American President. War heroes are represented by James Goodwin Batterson’s monument to General Worth (1854-1857), the Mexican War veteran who is buried just west of Madison Square, and the Admiral Farragut monument, Augustus St. Gaudens first major work that was dedicated in 1881 to the Civil War naval officer. Other features are the ornamental fountain (1867) and the Eternal Light Flagpole (1923).
6.234 acres
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Frederick Johnson Park
Frederick Johnson (1891-1963) was an inspirational tennis player, coach, teacher and Harlem native who enriched the lives of countless members of this community. Johnson was a gifted sportsman from his earliest years, but an accident from his youth claimed his left arm just above the elbow. Determined to remain active, he soon taught himself to play tennis, defying everyone’s expectations about his apparent disability. After developing his own unique style of play, Johnson eventually competed professionally.
The highlight of Johnson’s career came later in his life when he began promoting tennis in Harlem, sharing his love of the game by teaching it to others, often on the very courts in this park. For half a century, until his death in 1963, Johnson was at the forefront of the Harlem tennis scene, teaching and mentoring the area’s youth. Perhaps his most notable success was his discovery of star player Althea Gibson. Johnson gave Gibson her first lesson in the summer of 1941 and entered her in her first tournament in 1942. Under his guidance, Gibson went on to become one of tennis’s most accomplished competitors despite the segregation then prevalent in the tennis world. In 1950, Gibson became the first African-American tennis player to compete at the National Championships (later known as the U.S. Open) in Forest Hills. In 1957 and 1958, she won both the Championships at Wimbledon and the United States National Championships.
Parks acquired this land, bounded by 150th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, in three separate parcels from the Department of Transportation and the United States Housing Authority in 1937 and 1947. Frederick Johnson Park, featuring eight tennis courts, was unofficially named for Johnson on October 23, 1971. In announcing the program at the ceremony that day, Parks Commissioner August Heckscher (1914-1997) remembered that Johnson did not allow his handicap to keep him from reaching his goal, nor did it deter him from making significant contributions in promoting and teaching tennis in the Harlem community. In dedicating this park we are paying but a small tribute to his memory. A monument to Johnson, constructed out of granite by Keystone Monument Company and funded by the Frederick Johnson Memorial Committee, was also unveiled. Ten years later, in 1981, Parks completed a $500,000 capital rehabilitation project, which provided resurfacing for all eight courts, new fencing, posts and nets, the rehabilitation of the comfort station, and new flood lights which provided more playing time for the community.
In addition to tennis courts, this park offers eight handball courts, and a playground with two separate play areas surrounded by benches and chess and checker tables. The silver maple trees (Acer saccharinum) surrounding the park provide a welcome canopy of shade while a stand of littleleaf linden trees (Tilia cordata) between the two sets of four courts shelters tennis players between games.
Outside Tennis Court #7, a bronze plaque mounted on a three-and-a-half foot concrete pillar sculpted by Albert Benevento in 1986 and funded by the Fred Johnson Park Association, honors the memory of Harlem’s cherished Councilman Fred Samuel, who passed away on September 12, 1985. Tennis Court #7 was officially dedicated to Councilman Samuel on August 11, 1992. A playground named for Samuel stands at Lenox Avenue and West 139 Street.
In 1996, Parks completed renovations of the handball walls and court pavement, which cost $25,000, and in 1998 new sidewalks, paths, pavements, and play equipment with safety surfacing were installed at a cost of $127,677. Mayor Giuliani funded both of these recent improvement projects.
Hell’s Kitchen Park
The name Hell’s Kitchen is taken either from a notorious 1860s gang of that name or from a nickname given to the area by local police in the 1870s. Legend has it that one rookie cop commented to his more seasoned partner, This place is hell itself. Hell’s a mild climate, his partner replied, This is hell’s kitchen.
In the mid-1800s, this West Side neighborhood was home to many industries that served the Hudson River piers, including slaughterhouses, lumberyards, warehouses, and other factories. Impoverished groups of Irish, African-Americans, Scots and Germans moved to shacks and tenements in the area to work at the nearby factories. Many formed gangs and fought to assert themselves in the growing neighborhood, making for frequent violent clashes that earned the area its nickname.
In the late 19th Century, the extension of the Ninth Avenue Elevated Train encouraged new groups to move into this densely populated area, including Greeks and Eastern European immigrants. Large numbers of Puerto Ricans and African-Americans from the South moved into the area in the 1940s. It was this neighborhood that served as the setting for Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story.
By the late 1950s, many neighborhood residents began to feel that the name had become synonymous with crime and decided to change the name of the neighborhood to Clinton, after the famous New York family that had owned the area in the 1840s. To this day, however, many residents of the neighborhood and many New Yorkers refer to the area as Hell’s Kitchen.
When local residents complained that there were few neighborhood playgrounds for their children in the 1960s, Parks began to study the possibility of constructing a park in a parking lot on 10th Avenue, between 47th and 48th Streets. On June 23, 1966, the City Board of Estimate approved the acquisition through condemnation of the land where Hell’s Kitchen Park now sits. In September of that year, $400,000 in New York State grant-in-aid was approved to acquire the lot. Land studies delayed the project for several years, and the playground opened on December 4, 1979.
Throughout the 1980s, members of the 47th Street Block Association and other residents hosted Halloween parties, barbecues and pot luck luncheons in Hell’s Kitchen Park, and worked to keep the park a safe environment by installing lights on buildings nearby. In the late 1980s, Parks built a fence around the lot, and the community’s activism continues to ensure that Hell’s Kitchen Park will remain, as its creators intended, a safe space for the people to enjoy.
Riverside Park
Riverside Park is one of only eight officially designated scenic landmarks in the City of New York. Rugged bluffs and rocky outcroppings created through prehistoric glacial deposits once descended directly to the Hudson River shore. They were densely wooded until 1846, when the Hudson River Railroad cut through the forested hillside. Acknowledging the city’s expansion northward, Central Park Commissioner William R. Martin proposed in 1865 that a scenic drive and park be built on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The land between the heights and the railroad was bought by the City over the next two years.
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 & 1903), renowned co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, was commissioned in 1873 and submitted a plan two years later combining park and parkway into a synthesized landscape which adhered to the general topographical contours of hill and dale. Over the next twenty-five years park designs were developed under a succession of landscape architects, including Samuel Parsons (1844 & 1923) and Olmsted’s partner, Calvert Vaux (1824 & 1895). The result, stretching from West 72nd to 125th Streets, was a park with grand, tree-lined boulevards, combined with an English-style rustic park with informally arranged trees and shrubs, contrasting natural enclosures, and open vistas.
The development of the park encouraged the construction of mansions along the drive. At the turn of the century, the City Beautiful movement sought to promote more dignified civic architecture, and found expression in the formal neo-classical detailing of the park’s extension from the 125th Street viaduct to 155th Street. Monuments placed along the drive during this era included Grant’s Tomb (1897), Soldiers and Sailors Memorial (1902), Firemen’s Memorial (1913), and Joan of Arc (1915).
The increased rail traffic and waterfront industries founded on shoreline landfill adjacent to Riverside Park led to an outcry by wealthy residents for action against these uses. After decades of discussion, a massive park expansion plan, crafted by architect Clinton Lloyd with landscape architect Gilmore Clarke, was implemented between 1934 and 1937 under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (1888-1981). The park was widened westward by 148 acres, and the Henry Hudson Parkway, ball fields, esplanade, 79th Street Marina, and Rotunda were added to it.
In 1980, Riverside Park was designated an official city landmark. In 1994, Council Member Ronnie M. Eldridge funded a renovation of the 79th Street Marina’s docks at a cost of $1.3 million. Council Member Eldridge also helped fund an $8 million renovation of the Rotunda, and construction is slated to begin soon.
In 2000, seven acres of land stretching from 68th to 72nd Streets was added to Riverside Park, called Riverside Park South. This section of the park, part of a proposed 25-acre, $16 million project yet to be completed, was made possible by the construction of new portions of the West Side Highway, now known as the Joe DiMaggio Highway, and Trump/New World (the site’s developers). Riverside Park South includes a soccer field, three basketball courts, and a public pier extending 750 feet into the Hudson River.
The Riverside Park Fund, a community-based volunteer organization, contributes up to $1 million each year to fund projects in the park in places such as the Warsaw Ghetto Plaza, 87th Street Dog Run, and 73rd Street Track. The group also funds salaries for park workers. Several recent and ongoing renovations have helped ensure that Riverside Park will continue to serve the two million-plus users that take advantage of this Upper West Side treasure each year.
In 1998, Council Member Ronnie M. Eldridge funded a renovation of the cantilevered riverwalk between 83rd and 91st Streets at a cost of $1.5 million. Council Member Stanley E. Michels funded a $1.4 million restoration of the path between 143rd and 148th Streets, scheduled to begin shortly. Council Member Eldridge also funded a $3.15 million reconstruction of the South Lawn, to be completed in upcoming years.
#73 – A
Golden Swan Garden
Situated on the southeast corner of the intersection of West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, this newly created viewing garden rests on what once was the site of the Golden Swan Cafi. A gilded life-size figure of a swan was perched outside the three-story brick building, which was constructed in the mid-1800s. The operator of the Irish saloon’s known to regulars as the Hell Hole’s was Thomas Wallace, a former prizefighter who also lived upstairs. Wallace died on the premises in 1922, but not before his tavern became the haunt of neighborhood artists and writers including the American playwright, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (1888-1953).
As a member of the theater troupe the Provincetown Players, O’Neill was often at their playhouse on MacDougal Street and frequently dropped in to drink at the Golden Swan. In a 1919 letter to his first wife Agnes, O’Neill recounts a trip to the Hell Hole in the midst of the Prohibition era, where he says there was no whiskey at the time but sherry was still relatively cheap at 20 cents a drink. On hearing that a song by Lefty Louie, a Hell Hole bartender, would soon be performed on Broadway, O’Neill wrote, I think all the hours seemingly wasted in the H.H. would be justified if they had resulted in only this. His astute observations about human nature came to influence his many works and brought him widespread recognition on Broadway and around the world. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936 and Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays. In fact, the Golden Swan served as part of the basis for the setting of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, first produced on Broadway in 1946 and later revived in 1956. With a cast including Jason Robards, this production was directed by Jose Quintero at Circle in the Square Theatre’s original location at Sheridan Square, not far from this site. The play’s main characters were modeled after people O’Neill knew and met at the saloon, including Harry Hope, based on real-life proprietor Wallace.
O’Neill was one of many writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists who were attracted to Greenwich Village, its cheap rent, and quaint brownstones in the early 1900s. It was here’s nurtured in its sundry cafes, taverns, and restaurants’s that a unique, revolutionary spirit of creative energy and freedom of thought blossomed and shaped the Village’s bohemian character. The Village’s first tearoom, called The Mad Hatter, once stood directly to the east of this garden at 150 West Fourth Street. The site of this garden was also inspiration for painter John French Sloan (1871-1951), who came to New York in 1904 and worked for some time as a freelance illustrator. With Robert Henri, he organized an exhibition of a group of urban realist painters, known as The Eight or the Ashcan School, who challenged traditional notions of art. Having moved to the Village in 1912, Sloan lived with his wife Dolly at 240 West 4th Street and at 88 Washington Place. He also had an eleventh-floor studio at 35 Sixth Avenue, a triangular building on the southwest corner across the street from this garden.
During a clandestine midnight picnic at the top of the Washington Arch in nearby Washington Square Park on January 23, 1917, Sloan and a group of actors and artists including Marcel Duchamp went so far as to declare Greenwich Village its own independent nation. The scene depicted in Sloan’s Arch Conspirators (1917) is one of his many works that give a glimpse of city life during his time. In 1917, Sloan also made an etching of the interior of the Hell Hole, in which Eugene O’Neill is portrayed sitting at a table in the upper-right hand corner. His painting, The City from Greenwich Village, includes a view of this corner, looking downtown toward the financial district, with the Sixth Avenue elevated train crossing the scene.
In 1928, the Golden Swan building was demolished for the construction of the Sixth Avenue subway. On June 8, 1934, by permit from the Board of Transportation, Parks was given jurisdiction over this parcel of land, and a playground was opened to the public here on October 14, 1935. The property was officially assigned to Parks by the Board of Estimate on August 27, 1953, and it is one of several small parks in the area that line Sixth Avenue’s including the adjacent West 4th St. Courts, Minetta Green, Minetta Square, Minetta Lane Playground, Churchill Square and Charlton Plaza. Continuing in the innovative traditions of the neighborhood, the site was used as a recycling center in the 1980s. The Village Green Recycling Team held a champagne reception here on January 6, 1984 to kick off a program of collecting newspapers, glass, aluminum, and tin for recycling every Saturday. The recycling program ended with the advent of large-scale recycling by the Department of Sanitation in the 1990s.
In 1999, Mayor Giuliani contributed $80,000 for a Requirements Contract to begin to turn this formerly bedraggled open patch of asphalt.
WRONG ANSWERS
Minetta Triangle
This small park is named for a not-quite-gone and not-quite-forgotten water feature of Lower Manhattan. When Dutch colonists settled in Manhattan in the 1620s, they learned from local Native Americans about a small brook that was full of trout. It originated near what is now Gramercy Park, burbled its way over and beneath Greenwich Village, and emptied into the Hudson at what is now West Houston Street.
Local Native Americans called the stream Mannette, which was translated as Devil’s Water. Over the years, this name was spelled and respelled and spelled again in a variety of configurations: Minnetta, Menitti, Manetta, Minetta, Mannette, and Minetto. The Dutch called the water Mintje Kill, meaning small stream. In Dutch, min translates as little, tje is a diminuitive, and kill translates as stream. The water was also known as Bestavers Killitie, Bestevaas Kelletye, Bestavens Killitie, Bestavers Killatie, and Bestaver’s Killetje.
Several families of freed slaves, released by the Dutch, established farms and homes along the Minetta Brook as early as the 1640s. With African Americans continuing to settle here in the 18th and 19th centuries, the area became known as Little Africa. Most of the brook has been covered over, though some Village residents claim that it flows beneath their basements and sometimes causes flooding. In the lobby of the apartment building at 2 Fifth Avenue, there is a transparent tube that is said to contain murky water spouting up from Minetta Brook. The brook’s most recent claim to fame is providing the namesake for the Minetta Tavern, one of the original watering holes of the Beat generation.
Minetta Triangle, located at the northeast corner of the Avenue of the Americas and Minetta Street, is one of three nearby parks named after the feisty brook. The City of New York acquired this parcel in 1925 as part of the southerly extension of Sixth Avenue (now Avenue of the Americas) and assigned it to Parks in 1945 after deeming the .075 acre excess.
In 1992, community members formed the Bleecker Area Merchant and Resident Association, or B.A.M.R.A. Along with the Bedford Downing Block Association, or B.D.B.A., they began the process of revitalizing Minetta Triangle and nearby Sir Winston Churchill Square and Minetta Green. With the help of Community Board #2, B.A.M.R.A. and B.D.B.A developed a successful proposal for the renovation of all three parks. In 1998 State Senator Tom Duane, who was then their council member, and Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields funded the $742,000 reconstruction of the parks.
New trees and shrubs, along with the creation of a curvilinear bluestone path featuring images of trout, transformed the rigid geometry of Minetta Triangle. The garden path is punctuated by small circular sitting areas surrounding trees, world’s fair benches, boulders and fluted cast iron urns. Small mounds, built up in the interior of the path, add depth to the previously flat landscape and create more of a pastoral setting. Once predominantly concrete, the sitting areas have become green garden coves.
Playground of the Americas
From White Street to Central Park South, Sixth Avenue is known as Avenue of the Americas. It was so named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1945 to celebrate the unity of the Western Hemisphere. Because New York City played a critical role in fostering Pan-Americanism, lampposts along the avenue bear symbols of the different Western nations. At 59th Street, statues of Simon Bolivar, Jose de San Martin, and Jose Marti, donated by the governments of Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba, stand at the entrance to Central Park. Each statue has its own plaza, designed by Gilmore D. Clarke. There is a statue of Brazil’s revolutionary, Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, on the Avenue of the Americas near the entrance to Bryant Park, between 40th and 42nd Streets. The name was almost changed back to Sixth Avenue in 1984 to make it easier for tourists, but some New Yorkers protested the change, and Sixth Avenue remains officially Avenue of the Americas.
Playground of the Americas is located on West Houston Street between MacDougal Street and Avenue of the Americas. Houston Street honors the American patriot William Houstoun (1755-1813). Houstoun was born in Savannah, Georgia, the son of Sir Patrick Houstoun, who was a Scottish member of Georgia’s royal colonial government. William Houstoun received a liberal education, which included legal training at London’s Inner Temple. When the Revolutionary War erupted in 1775, he returned from London to his predominantly royalist family in Georgia. Against his father’s will, Houstoun supported the colonists’ grievances, and later championed armed resistance. Following the colonial victory in 1783, he served as a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress from 1783 to 1786. In 1785, Houstoun settled Georgia’s border dispute with South Carolina. He also attended the Constitutional Convention for approximately two months during 1787. In 1788, he married Mary Bayard. Following his death, William Houstoun was interred at St. Paul’s Chapel churchyard in New York City.
In the 1790s, Mary Bayard’s father, Nicholas Bayard III, constructed a street that ran east-west through a tract of land he owned, and named it after his son-in-law. In 1833, Houstoun Street was extended to North Street, which at the time was the city’s northernmost border on the East Side, and North Street was officially renamed Houstoun Street. In 1858, Houstoun Street was connected to Hammersley Street to its west, and Hammersley Street, too, was subsequently renamed. The current spelling of the street, Houston, is a corruption; the last correct spelling of the street’s name was recorded in 1811. Because of this, the street name is often erroneously associated with Sam Houston (1793-1863), the commander of the Texan forces during the Texas War for Independence.
In 1925, the City of New York acquired this property and transferred it to the Department of Transportation as part of a Sixth Avenue renovation. The Board of Estimate placed the parcel under Parks jurisdiction in May 1934. It remained unnamed until February 1998, when Parks designated it Houston Plaza. In 2000, it was renamed Playground of the Americas.
The park features seal animal play sculptures, a water fountain, benches, and several London planetrees. A ground plaque dedicates the park as the Playground of the Americas in reference to Sixth Avenue’s full name.
Temperance Fountain
Dating to 1888, this neo-classical fountain was the gift of the wealthy San Francisco dentist, businessman, and temperance crusader Henry D. Cogswell (1820 & 1900).
Cogswell was born in Tolland, Connecticut in 1820, the son of an architect and builder. His mother died when he was young, and the family relocated to Orwell, New York. At age nine Cogswell returned alone to Connecticut, and endured eight years of labor in southern Connecticut and Rhode Island cotton mills, itinerant wanderings, and incarceration in a poorhouse. Managing to transcend these ordeals, and largely self-taught, Cogswell served as principal of Orwell High School, studied medicine, and became a dentist.
News of the California Gold Rush of 1849 lured Cogswell to San Francisco. There his prosperous dental practice and real estate investments permitted him to retire in 1856 with a fortune estimated at $2,000,000. He engaged himself in public philanthropy, founding the Cogswell Polytechnic Institute, and helping to advance the anti-alcohol or temperance movement. Often, his charitable acts were tinged with self-promotion, and in an effort to embellish his humble origins, he adopted the coat of arms of Humphrey Cogswell, a 15th-century English lord, from whom Henry falsely claimed his lineage.
Cogswell’s most lasting legacy was the 50 monuments he sponsored nationwide between 1878 and the 1890s. Most were versions of the temperance fountain. Several of the fountains, such as those in Washington, D. C., Boston Common, and in Tompkins Square Park, were covered by a stone canopy or baldachin supported by four Doric columns. As can be seen here, the four stone entablatures were emblazoned with the words Faith, Hope, Charity, and Temperance.
The erection of the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park resulted from Cogswell’s affiliation with the Moderation Society, which was formed in 1877 to address health conditions on the Lower East Side, and to distribute free ice-water fountains to encourage citizens to drink water instead of alcoholic beverages. Cogswell served as the group’s honorary president in 1890, and the collaboration produced another temperance fountain at the New York City main post office at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue.
The figure of Hebe, the mythical water carrier, atop the pyramidal stone pediment was originally fabricated in zinc by the J. L. Mott Iron Works in Mott Haven in the Bronx. The classically-styled figure is based on a marble statue made circa 1816 by the renowned Danish sculptor Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen (c.1770 & 1844). Thorvaldsen’s 1839 marble self-portrait stands in Central Park at East 97th Street.
Though the four ornamental luminaires with red, white and blue tinted glass, which once flanked the fountain, long ago vanished, this monument has withstood the vagaries of time better than most. In 1992, the fountain underwent extensive restoration, and the Hebe statue was replaced with a more durable bronze replica.
#74 – A
Fred Lebow Statue
This life-sized bronze sculpture depicts Fred Lebow (1932 & 1994), who is best remembered as the founder of the world-renowned New York City Marathon and longtime president of the New York Road Runners Club. The sculpture was created by Jesus Ygnacio Dominguez and shows Lebow in his trademark running suit and hat, checking his watch as runners cross the finish line.
The sixth of seven children, Lebow was born Fischel Lebowitz in Arad, Romania on June 3, 1932. In his youth he hid from the Nazis and later fled from the Communists, making brief stops in England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia and other European countries before settling in the United States. After moving to New York City, Lebow embarked on a successful career in the garment and textile industry.
Lebow began running to improve his stamina for tennis, but soon realized that running was his true passion. In 1970 he organized the first New York City Marathon, which was run entirely in Central Park with only 127 participants. Lebow used his own money to purchase prizes for the first ten people to cross the finish line. In 1976 the Marathon was re-routed to travel through the streets of all five of New York’s boroughs. The race now attracts more than 30,000 runners each year, and is supported by major corporate sponsors.
Lebow envisioned the New York City Marathon as a race for everyone — men and women of every color, creed and country, regardless of ability. Each runner seeks his or her own goal — whether to win, to achieve a personal best, or simply to finish.
Lebow served as president of the New York Road Runners club from 1972 until his retirement in 1993, after which he was feted by Mayor Giuliani at a Gracie Mansion reception. Under Lebow’s direction the NYRRC instituted programs and events which popularized running and helped provide a safe atmosphere in Central Park. The NYRRC flourished and became the largest running club in the world.
Lebow was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1990. He ran his final marathon in 1992 with Grete Waitz in celebration of his 60th birthday and his cancer’s temporary remission. Lebow finally succumbed to cancer on October 9, 1994.
To honor Lebow’s vision and work Daniel Mitrovich created the New York City Marathon Tribute Committee and commissioned this sculpture. It was unveiled November 4, 1994 in a ceremony held near the Marathon’s finish line near the West Drive at 67th Street in Central Park. The event was attended by 23 former winners of the New York City Marathon, Mr. Lebow’s family and friends, and hundreds of running enthusiasts. On November 1, 2001 the sculpture was reinstalled on a new black granite pedestal at 90th Street and the East Drive in Central Park, where runners gather daily to work out together. For the Marathon each year, the Lebow statue returns to a spot within view of the finish line amidst the cheering spectators.
WRONG ANSWERS
Robert Burns Statue
This statue of Scottish national poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), companion to the 1872 Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) across Literary Walk, is by Sir John Steell (1804-1891), and was dedicated in 1880.
Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, the son of a tenant farmer. His father died in 1784, and Burns became head of the household, but he had already started writing poetry. On July 3, 1786, he published his Poems, Chiefly in a Scottish Dialect, in nearby Kilmarnock, to enormous success in both countryside and city. Burns left his farm for Edinburgh on November 27, 1786, but the fame and attention he received there put him ill at ease; he never found a comfortable place in contemporary society’s class distinctions.
The Poems earned Burns fame in his lifetime, but little money. He published a second, enlarged, edition in Edinburgh in 1787, but by the summer of 1788 had taken up tenant farming again, in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, where he struggled. He kept up an active literary and intellectual life, and obtained a post in the excise service in 1789. He moved to Dumfries in 1791, and lived there until his death on July 21, 1796, of chronic rheumatic heart disease.
Burns is a national hero. Known affectionately as Rabbie, his works are unmatched by any other Scottish artist as a source of national pride. His birthday, January 25th, or Burns Night, is celebrated throughout the country and by Scots and admirers around the world with a banquet – a haggis (a Scottish delicacy made from calf or sheep organ meat boiled in the stomach of the animal) as the centerpiece, ceremoniously addressed with Burns’s odes to haggis and whisky before being served.
Burns’s genius was his poetic use of the rhythms and dialects of everyday speech, and it was his personal mission to revive traditional Scottish song. He traveled the country, collecting tunes, airs, fragments of expressions and songs, and created songs whole, even writing words to folk tunes which had never had lyrics. He captured something of the Scottish spirit which has endured, and each generation has claimed him again as its own, even as Scotland has struggled in a search for identity. He is credited with Auld Lang Syne, and his best-known poems include Scots, Wha Hae, Tam O Shanter, and To a Mouse.
Not long after the unveiling of Sir Walter Scott in 1872, a committee formed to erect a monument to Burns; a year later, specifying only the material and colossal size, it selected the same sculptor, John Steell, to create Scott’s bronze counterpart. Steell was born in Aberdeen, the son of a wood carver, and studied at the Trustees Academy, and in Rome. He became a member of The Royal Scottish Academy, and in 1838 was appointed Sculptor of the Queen of Scotland, producing numerous public and private art commissions, and managing a foundry, which introduced the art of bronze casting to Scotland.
Steel’s melodramatic conception depicts Burns seated on a tree stump, quill pen in hand, eyes turned heavenward in a pose of inspiration. At his feet is a poem dedicated to his lost love, Mary Campbell, and a plough alluding to his agrarian origins. The sculpture was unveiled on October 3, 1880, and the ceremony was attended by 5000 people, area Caledonian clubs in full Highland dress, and 100 distinguished guests, with music by Grafulla’s Band.
Wallace Bruce wrote Walter Scott’s Greeting to Robert Burns, whose first lines read: We greet you Rabbie here tonight; Beneath these stars so pure and bright; we greet you, Poet, come at last; With Will [Shakespeare] and me your lot to cast. Robert Burns also joined the 1876 statue of American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), whose 1822 poem Burns read in part, But what to them the sculptor’s art; His funeral columns, wreaths and urns? Wear they not graven on the heart, the name of Robert Burns.
In 1940 Parks’s monuments crew reconstructed the statue’s unstable pedestal, and it was rebuilt again in 1993; the quill, missing, was replicated, and the sculpture conserved through the Adopt-A-Monument Program, a joint venture of the Municipal Art Society, Parks and the New York City Art Commission. The restoration was funded by the Saint Andrew’s Society, which established a fund for ongoing care. On October 26, 1996, hundreds gathered here for the bicentennial of Burns’s death; world-renowned folk singer Jean Redpath performed, and the event was supported by the Burns Society of the City of New York, the American-Scottish Foundation, the St. Andrew’s Society of the State of New York, the New Caledonian Club, and Scottish Heritage USA.
Sir Walter Scott
This larger-than-life-sized bronze portrait of Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) which was crafted by Sir John Steell (1804-1891) was dedicated on the Literary Walk in Central Park in 1872.
Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and had an early career in the legal profession. His literary endeavors were launched when he anonymously published translations of Burger’s Lenore and Der Wilde Jager, and Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichgen (1799). In 1802, Scott issued the first two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of old ballads, which reflected his interest in the native language and traditions of his country. His first significant original work was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a narrative poem published in 1805.
Over the next quarter-century, Scott established himself as the pre-eminent Scottish author, and helped transform contemporary literature; his readers knew him as The Wizard of the North. He is credited with inventing the historical novel, and was a prolific practitioner of this genre. Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819) are some of the most famous examples of Scott’s romantic classics other well-known works include Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819).
In addition to his novels, he published a narrative poem, Lady of the Lake (1810), edited the author John Dryden’s (1631-1700) works (1808), published several plays – including Auchindrane or the Ayshire Tragedy (1830), the nineteen-volume set of The Life and Works of Swift (1814), the nine-volume Life of Napoleon (1827) – and a History of Scotland (1830). Yet at the height of his fame as a man of letters, Scott suffered enormous financial setbacks, and declared bankruptcy. He suffered two strokes in 1830, and died as a result two years later. It was only after his death that his debts were paid through the proceeds received from his numerous publications.
Scott’s work and career was marked with a nostalgia and pride in Scotland’s past, married to an acute awareness of its place in the modern world. It was Scott who rediscovered the country’s crown jewels the Honours of the Kingdom unearthing them from bricked-up chamber in Edinburgh Castle in 1818 after they had been lost for over 100 years. His novels based on Scotland’s history made the country a tourist destination, and some credit him with popularizing the romantic view of the country’s geography and culture that endures today.
In celebration of the centennial of Sir Walter Scott’s birth, a group of prominent Scottish citizens arranged for the placement of this sculpture in Central Park. They selected John Steell, a renowned sculptor from Edinburgh, to create a bronze replica of his marble of Scott (1845), the first such monument to a Scot to be created by a native artist.
Steell was born in Aberdeen, and was the son of a wood carver. After studying at the Trustees Academy and also in Rome, he became a member of The Royal Scottish Academy, and was appointed in 1838 Sculptor of the Queen of Scotland. He produced numerous public and private art commissions, and managed a foundry, which introduced the art of bronze casting to Scotland.
Steell’s effigy of Scott in Central Park eliminates the Gothic stone canopy – which critics have likened to a spire without a cathedral – of the original on Princes Street in Edinburgh. Scott is depicted seated on a rock, in a flowing cloak with workingman’s shoes, book and pen in hand. Beside him sits his faithful hound. The completed statue was formally unveiled here on November 2, 1872, where it joined the sculpture of William Shakespeare, installed earlier that year. A legion of Highlanders from the 79th Regiment, the National Guard and the Caledonian Club were part of the festivities. Among the speakers was poet, editor, and civic leader William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), who commented, and now as the statue of Scott is set up in this beautiful park, which a few years since, possessed no human associations, historical or poetic, connected with its shades, its lawns, its rocks and waters, these grounds become peopled with new memories.
In 1936 Parks’s monuments crew repaired the base and repatined the bronze. In 1993, both the pedestal and sculpture were again conserved through the Adopt-A-Monument Program, a joint venture of the Municipal Art Society, Parks, and the New York City Art Commission. The restoration was funded by the Saint Andrew’s Society, which has also established a fund for ongoing care.
William Shakespeare Statue
This full-standing portrait of celebrated playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was made by John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910) and unveiled here on Literary Walk on May 23, 1872.
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove-maker and commodities trader who rose to become a prominent local alderman and bailiff before suffering declining fortunes. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a substantial landowner. Little is known of Shakespeare’s upbringing; he was locally schooled, likely at the King Edward IV Grammar School in Stratford, acquired a reasonable knowledge of Latin and Greek, and read the Roman dramatists.
In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, and they had a daughter, Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet, who died in boyhood. The first account of his professional accomplishments appears in 1592, when rival playwright Robert Greene, in his book A Groatsworth of Wit, referred to the rising actor and dramatist as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers. In 1594, Shakespeare was a charter member of a theatrical company known as the Chamberlain’s Men (as of 1603, the King’s Men) who performed mainly at the Globe Theater in London. He held a one-tenth interest in the Globe, and it was there that many of his plays were performed before the theater burned in 1613 during a production of his Henry VIII; Shakespeare retired to Stratford around this time.
Shakespeare was enormously prolific; in his relatively short career he authored 13 comedies, 13 historical dramas, 6 tragedies, 4 tragic comedies and 154 sonnets. Many of his plays have become classics of the stage, and his poems are revered for their mastery of language and verse. He is the most widely known author of English letters.
In 1864, coinciding with the tricentennial of Shakespeare’s birth, a group of actors and theatrical managers, among them noted Shakepearean actor Edwin Booth (1833-1893), received permission from Central Park’s Board of Commissioners to lay the cornerstone for a statue at the south end of the Mall between two elms. Nothing further was done until the end of the Civil War, and through a competition in 1866, Ward was selected as the sculptor. Later referred to as the “Dean of American Sculptors,” he contributed nine sculptures to the parks of New York; among them Roscoe Conkling (1893), Alexander Holley (1888), William Earl Dodge (1885), Horace Greeley (1890), Henry Ward Beecher (1891), The Indian Hunter (1869), The Pilgrim (1885), and the Seventh Regiment Memorial (1874). The last three can be found in Central Park.
The committee raised funds through several benefits, including a performance of Julius Caesar. Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886) – chief architect for parks at the time, and responsible for much of the ornament and architecture in Central Park – designed the elaborate pedestal for this statue. Ward combined a classical pose with many details of Elizabethan dress, and he relied on numerous images of Shakespeare, especially a bust in Stratford. The sculpture was cast in Philadelphia in 1870, and due to delays in procuring and cutting the granite pedestal in Scotland, was unveiled on a temporary base in 1872; some commentators found the work a noble effigy, and others derided it statue as a costume piece.
In 1986, a replica was made by Tallix Foundry for the State Theater in Montgomery, Alabama, which hosts an annual Shakespeare Festival. In exchange, Montgomery benefactor William M. Blount established a maintenance endowment for the original here in Central Park, and in 1995, the Central Park Conservancy conserved the sculpture.
Central Park has other Shakespearean associations. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin released 80 starlings into the park, because they were mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays (there are now over 200 million of them in America). In 1915, the Shakespeare Society assumed maintenance of a rock garden, built in 1912, in the park near West 79th Street. In 1934, the Shakespeare Garden, which features species named in his works, was relocated to the hillside between Belvedere Castle and the Swedish Cottage, and in 1989, a new landscape design by Bruce Kelly and David Varnell was implemented. In 1958, after two seasons at the East River Amphitheater, Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival moved to Central Park; the Delacorte Theater, its permanent home, opened in 1962.
#75 – A
Abingdon Square Doughboy Statue
This sculpture honors those servicemen from the neighborhood of Greenwich Village who gave their lives while serving in combat during World War I. The dramatic bronze statue on a granite pedestal, dedicated in 1921, is by Philip Martiny (1858 & 1927), and depicts a foot soldier (known commonly in World War I as a doughboy) holding a swirling American flag in battle. The derivation of the term doughboy remains in question. It was first used by the British in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to describe soldiers and sailors. In the United States the nickname was coined during the Mexican-American War (1846 & 1848), and was widely popularized during World War I (1914 & 1918) to refer to infantrymen. After the war, in which Americans saw combat in 1917-18, numerous communities commissioned doughboy statues to honor the local war heroes. The Abingdon Square Doughboy is one of nine such statues erected in New York City’s parks.
The monument was a gift of the Jefferson Democratic Club, whose headquarters once stood opposite this statue on the site now occupied by the residential high rise at 299 West 12th Street. Philip Martiny was a well-known sculptor of his day who received numerous public commissions, among them the statues on the Surrogate Courthouse in Lower Manhattan, and the Chelsea Doughboy./em>at 28th Street and 9th Avenue (for which the same model posed). The unveiling of the statue is reported to have been attended by 10,000 spectators, including 200 Gold Star Mothers (those who lost their sons in battle), and New York Governor Alfred E. Smith.
WRONG ANSWERS
Balto
The glowing bronze of this statue on a rock outcropping near the East Drive at 67th Street reflects the loving pats of countless children and adults who recall the story of a heroic dog. In January 1925, the city of Nome, Alaska experienced an outbreak of diphtheria. At that time, Nome had a population of 1,429 people and there was only enough antitoxin serum in distant Anchorage to treat about 300 people exposed to the disease. A train line did run over 325 miles from Anchorage to Nenana, the station closest to Nome, but Nome was icebound seven months out of the year. Alaska’s two open-cockpit planes were not safe in the frigid and windy weather.
A relay of mushers and their dog-sled teams was the only way to deliver the fur-wrapped twenty-pound package of serum to the ailing community 674 miles from Nenana. The route followed the old Iditarod Trail used by mail drivers from Anchorage to Nome (now the route of the dog-sled championships). The 20 teams of over 200 dogs covered the frozen terrain at about six miles per hour, in blizzard conditions with temperatures of 50 degrees below zero. An international audience listened over their radios and read in their newspapers of the race to Nome. The last musher, Gunnar Kasson, and his team lead by Balto, a black and white Alaskan malamute, raced over the frozen tundra in only five days and seven hours & a world record time. Within days after the arrival of the serum, the epidemic, which had claimed five lives, was over.
Gunnar Kasson later described the incredible trip to reporters: I couldn’t see the trail. Many times I couldn’t even see my dogs, so blinding was the gale. I gave Balto, my lead dog, his head and trusted him. He never once faltered. It was Balto who led the way. The credit is his. Balto survived the journey, and toured the United States with the rest of the dog team. On December 17, 1925, 10 months after his arrival in Nome, Balto was present as this bronze statue was unveiled in Central Park. Balto died in 1933 in Cleveland, Ohio, where his stuffed body is on display at Cleveland’s Natural History Museum.
Private donations collected under the auspices of the Municipal Arts Society paid most of the cost of this sculpture. Brooklyn-born sculptor Frederick George Richard Roth (1872-1944) received the commission for the statue, which was awarded the 1925 Speyer Prize by the National Academy of Design. A low-relief plaque shows the dogsled team braving the blizzard and bears an inscription dedicating the statue to all of the sled dogs that helped save lives of so many people. From the moment of its unveiling, the sculpture has been a favorite of young park visitors, many of whom come from far and wide to sit astride the dog hero celebrated in several books as well as in Steven Spielberg’s animated film, Balto (1995).
Father Duffy Statue
At the apex of the triangle defining the north end of Times Square, the massive statue of Father Francis Patrick Duffy (1871-1932) by Charles Keck (1875-1951) has stood sentinel since it was unveiled May 2, 1937.
Duffy was a military chaplain and priest in the Times Square area. Born in Cobourg, Canada, Father Duffy moved to New York in 1893 to teach French at the College of St. Francis Xavier (now Xavier High School). He was later ordained as a priest, and in 1898, he accepted a teaching position at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, New York, where he remained for the next 14 years.
Father Duffy’s military service began in the Spanish-American War of 1898, serving as First Lieutenant and chaplain of the legendary Fighting 69th Infantry, serving in Europe during World War I as part of the famed Rainbow Division, and earning a number of medals. After the war ended Father Duffy returned to New York, and in 1920, he was appointed pastor of the Holy Cross Church, located at 237 West 42nd Street. Father Duffy died on June 26, 1932 after serving the theater district community for over a decade. In 1940, veteran character actor Pat O’Brien portrayed Duffy in the Hollywood film based on his life, The Fighting 69th, which also starred James Cagney.
In Charles Keck’s bronze effigy of the soldier-priest, he depicts a stoic Duffy, nearly eight feet tall, in military garb, helmet at his feet and bible in hand. The statue is set on a pedestal backed by a green granite Celtic cross, which is more than 17 feet tall. Keck’s sculptural maquette for the head of Duffy is in the collection of the New York City Art Commission, and is on display in City Hall. In 1997 the statue was conserved and repatined through a project funded by the Times Square Business Improvement District.
A sculptor who received numerous public monument commissions, Keck also created the Alfred E. Smith Memorial (1950) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the monumental stone figures on the Brooklyn War Memorial (1951) in Cadman Plaza. For decades, his portrait of Father Duffy has enthralled millions of visitors to this hub of Manhattan, and is a permanent reminder of the local hero who ministered in the decidedly secular world of Times Square.
Washington Heights-Inwood War Memorial
This impressive monument stands at the apex of Mitchel Square, where Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue converge at West 168 Street. The memorial’s central image, by the esteemed sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875 & 1942), is a three figure group in bronze depicting two soldiers, one kneeling and one standing, who support a third slumping comrade in battle. The monument, which was dedicated on May 30, 1922, honors those men from the adjacent communities in northern Manhattan of Washington Heights and Inwood who gave their lives while serving their country in World War I.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was born in New York City on January 9, 1875. In her youth she trained with private tutors, at the Brearley School, and with Hendrik C. Anderson and James Earle Fraser at the Art Students League. Whitney was active in the war relief effort, and established a hospital for wounded soldiers in the Parisian suburb of Juilly. This experience caused her to model a series of 24 small bronzes based on battles scenes, which were exhibited in 1919 at the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village in the show Impressions of the War. Her involvement in the war found sculptural expression in evocative large-scale memorials which she executed in the United States and France.
This monument was commissioned by the Washington Heights and Inwood Memorial Association. They retained the renowned architectural firm of Delano and Aldrich, who designed the circular granite pedestal, set within a two-colored flagstone paving into which are set 20 bronze star-shaped plaques listing the 357 local casualties. The architect Albert Randolph Ross also collaborated with Whitney on the DAR Memorial (1929) in Washington, DC.
The monument’s dedication on Memorial Day 1922 coincided with parades and military demonstrations throughout the five boroughs. Whitney, just back from an arduous six-week trip abroad, curtailed her vacation to participate in the festivities, which were witnessed by several thousand spectators lining the streets. For her work on this monument Whitney won an award from the New York Society of Architects.
One of Whitney’s last works was the Peter Stuyvesant statue, which she created for the Netherlands Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair of 1939, and which was later installed in 1941 in the western portion of Stuyvesant Square Park. Besides her prolific career as a sculptor, she established the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1930. She died in New York City on April 18, 1942.
The parkland is named for John Purroy Mitchel (1879 & 1918), a reform mayor, and also the youngest in New York City’s history, who was killed during a flight training accident in World War I. In 1998 the monument was fully restored, and a long-missing bayonet replicated, as part of an overall renovation to the park funded by Council Member Guillermo Linares.
66.627 acres
#76 – A
Coogan’s Bluff
Coogan’s Bluff, a large cliff extending northward from 155th Street in Manhattan, once was the site of the fabled Polo Grounds, home of the New York baseball Giants, and the first home of the New York Mets. It sits atop a steep escarpment that descends 175 feet below sea level. In 1891, John T. Brush (1845-1912), the Giants’s owner, bought the land for the stadium from James J. Coogan (1845-1915), a real estate merchant and Manhattan Borough President (1899-1901).
The Giants originally played in a polo field on 111th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Brush kept the name, Polo Grounds, when he moved the team to Coogan’s Bluff in 1891. In April 1911, the Polo Grounds, an elaborate wooden structure, burned to the ground. By October, the Giants were hosting the Philadelphia Athletics for the 1911 World Series in a rebuilt stadium of concrete and steel. The new Polo Grounds boasted box seats of Italian marble, ornamental American eagles on the balustrade, and blue and gold banners, 30 feet apart, flying from a cantilever roof. At the time, it was the premier Major League Baseball stadium.
Baseball soon established itself as the quintessential American game, and the New York Giants made significant contributions to 20th century baseball lore. Mel Ott (1909-1958) and Willie Mays (b.1931) are thought to be among the finest players of all time; and the names of Christy Mathewson (1878-1925) and Carl Hubbell (1903-1988) are still mentioned whenever great pitchers are discussed. The Giants also provided baseball with one of its most dramatic moments: the shot heard round the world. In 1951, the Giants and their arch-rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the ninth inning of the deciding game in a play-off to determine the National League pennant winner. With two outs left in the game, the Dodgers were ahead 4-2 when Bobby Thomson came to bat for the Giants and hit a 3-run home run winning the game for the Giants, and making baseball history.
In 1957, the owner of the Giants, Horace Stoneham (1903-1990) broke many New York hearts when he announced that he was moving the Giants to San Francisco. The Polo Grounds remained for seven more years, serving as home to the New York Mets for the 1962 and 1963 seasons. In 1964 the stadium was demolished and now the Polo Grounds Towers, a housing project, occupies the site. All that is left of the original Polo Grounds is an old staircase on the side of the cliff that once led to the ticket booth.
Today, Coogan’s Bluff is part of Highbridge Park, which was assembled piecemeal between 1867 and the 1960s, with the bulk being acquired through condemnation from 1895 to 1901. The cliffside area from West 181st Street to Dyckman Street was acquired in 1902, and the parcel including Fort George Hill was acquired in 1928. The park extends from 155th Street in North Harlem to Dyckman Street in Washington Heights/Inwood. The Friends of Highbridge Park are involved in preserving the park’s history and the New York Restoration Project has cleaned the park and restored its trails.
WRONG ANSWERS
East River Park Anchor
Pulled from the East River, the origins of this anchor are unclear. When it was placed on the site in 1970, the accompanying plaque stated that the piece was donated by the F&M Schaefer Brewing Co. in memory of the William H. Brown shipyard. The Brown shipyard was famous for building the schooner yacht America, which was launched on May 3, 1851. The international yachting race known as the America’s Cup was named after this schooner.
It has been suggested that the anchor honors another ship built in a yard on the East River, the steamship S.S. Savannah. The Savannah, the first vessel of its kind to cross an ocean, was built in 1819 with elegant passenger accommodations. The boat’s owners found it difficult to attract passengers, however, after potential travelers realized that a continuous fire burned on board to generate power. Lacking public support for the vessel, the owners declared bankruptcy and converted her into a sailing ship. The Savannah wrecked off of Fire Island in 1821.
In a more symbolic sense, the East River Anchor serves as a monument to the crucial role the harbor and the rivers have played in New York City history. Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, more than thirty shipbuilding companies were operating in yards located along this section of the East River between the Battery and 14th Street.
The shipbuilding industry went through a period of decline in New York City following the Civil War, especially on the East River docks. The maritime depression and lack of skilled ironworkers drove many ship carpenters to Brooklyn and Staten Island, or out of the city entirely. It was not until World War I that the slump ended on city docks, as dormant companies were called upon to manufacture cargo ships, minesweepers, naval tugs, and destroyers.
While outer borough and New Jersey builders continued to operate through the rest of the 20th century, their activity began slowly to decline after the wars of the 1930s and 40s. The remaining firms, mostly found in Staten Island, were small repair operations rather than large-scale builders. These firms remain active today, serving as reminders of New York City’s rich maritime history.
East River Roundabout – 60th Street Pavilion
This 80-foot long aluminum helix is by artist Alice Aycock (b.1946). Dedicated on November 6, 1995, the sculpture is attached to the skeletal steel roof supports of a former waterfront garbage transfer station.
Aycock was selected to create this sculpture as part of a project to transform a defunct sanitation facility into a public plaza. The resulting piece, its shape reminiscent of a roller coaster, is her response to the clamorous visual environment of the Queensborough Bridge, F.D.R. Drive, heliport, and commercial river activity which envelope the plaza. A consortium of organizations helped to plan and finance the project, including New York Hospital, the Hospital for Special Surgery, Rockefeller University, the East River Waterfront Conservancy, the Parks Council and the Municipal Art Society. Quennell Rothschild Associates, a landscape architecture firm, and Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum P.C. Architects created a waterside viewing pavilion and passive recreational space, by adapting portions of the existing structure.
Aycock’s spiral sculptural conception, with its undulating fan-like canopy attachment, was also inspired by the weightlessness of Fred Astaire’s dancing. Her bold design was engineered by Thorton-Tomasetti Engineers and fabricated by Dover Tank & Plate Company. A sculpture maintenance endowment is managed by the Municipal Art Society’s Adopt-A-Monument Program.
Aycock’s design for East River Roundabout is intended to stand out in a highly competitive visual environment, and engage motorists and pedestrians alike. When the sculpture was installed, Aycock described the project as an opportunity to galvanize this extremely dynamic situation, calling attention in a dramatic way to the visual forms of movement inherent in this very active place. The Roundabout is a theater around which New York City enacts itself. And the viewer becomes a spectator in the play of the city as well as an actor in the spectacle.
Fort Tryon Park
Originally inhabited by the Weckquaesgeek Tribe, who lived in the area until the early 17th century, this densely forested high ground at the northern end of Manhattan was Lang Bergh or Long Hill to the early Dutch colonists. The Continental Army called the strategic series of posts along the Hudson River Fort Washington during the summer of 1776, until Hessian mercenaries fighting for the British forced the troops to retreat. The British then renamed the area for Sir William Tryon (1729-1788), Major General and the last British governor of colonial New York.
Margaret Corbin (1751-1800?), for whom the park’s drive and the circle near the entrance are named, took control of her fallen husband John’s cannon during the 1776 attack and was wounded during the clash. In 1977, the City Council named the drive in her honor.
During the 19th century, wealthy New Yorkers built elegant estates around the Fort Tryon area, the most notable being the house of Cornelius K.G. Billings, a wealthy horseman from Chicago. From 1901 to 1905, Billings reportedly spent more than $2 million building his Tryon Hill mansion. In 1909, Billings funded a stele erected at the apex of the park memorializing Corbin and the Continental Army’s defense of the site in honor of the Hudson Fulton Celebration.
In 1917, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960) bought the Billings mansion and began developing the property, employing the Olmsted Brothers architectural firm to help him realize his vision for the site. Rockefeller even purchased land on the New Jersey side of the Hudson now known as the Palisades State Park
to preserve Fort Tryon’s stunning views. Although the Billings mansion burned to the ground in 1925, a small frame and stucco gatehouse from the original property remains located just west of Corbin Circle. Rockefeller donated the land to the City in 1931, and it was designated parkland the same year.
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870-1957), son of the co-designer of Central and Prospect Parks, spent four years transforming the site’s rocky topography and thin soil into a manicured landscape. Olmsted designed Fort Tryon Park with promenades, terraces, wooded slopes, and eight miles of pedestrian paths, careful to preserve open areas and the spectacular views of the Hudson and the Palisades. He noted in 1927 that this park had one of the few unspoiled river views in Manhattan.
The Cloisters opened in the north end of Fort Tryon Park in 1938 after Rockefeller bought sculptor George Grey Barnard’s (1863-1938) collection of medieval art. Inspired by Romanesque monasteries, the museum includes several cloisters, or courtyards, from actual French monasteries. Now a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was designated an official New York City landmark in 1974.
The plaques and monuments in the park commemorate the 1776 siege and Rockefeller’s gifts, and several modern sculptures connect the park’s historic past to its present. In 1983, Fort Tryon Park was designated an official City landmark, and a plan was developed the following year to fully renovate the park. The park’s Heather Garden was one of the first projects slated for renovation. By the 1980s, the garden had become overgrown. Thanks to volunteers and the Greenacre Foundation, Parks completed a three-year restoration of the garden and reopened long-lost views of the Hudson and the Palisades in 1988.
Fort Tryon contains two notable playgrounds. In 1985, Parks dedicated a playground at the southern end of the park for Jacob Koppel Javits (1904-1986), the noted legislator from the Lower East Side. The Anne Loftus Playground, which was named in 1990 for Anne Susan Cahill Loftus (1925-1989), an Inwood resident and district manager of Community Board 12, was part of the original Olmsted design.
Containing one of the highest points in Manhattan, Fort Tryon Park towers above the Hudson River, offering magnificent views of the Palisades and the lower Hudson Valley that challenge the notion that Manhattan’s best vistas are experienced from its skyscrapers.
#77 – A
Abraham De Peyster Statue
This impressive bronze portrait statue, created by American sculptor George Edwin Bissell (1839-1920), depicts Mayor Abraham De Peyster (1657-1728). Born in New Amsterdam (now known as Manhattan), De Peyster came from a prosperous mercantile family. In his youth he spent nine years working on the family farm in the Netherlands, before returning in 1684 to New Amsterdam. He quickly ascended the City’s political ladder, occupying almost all of the important colonial offices, including alderman, mayor, member of the king’scouncil, and acting governor. De Peyster amassed great wealth, and by the end of his life he is said to have been one of the city’s wealthiest merchants.
In the late 19th century, John Watts De Peyster, Abraham’s great-great-great grandson, commissioned this statue. Bissell, whose family ran a marble company in Poughkeepsie, New York, sculpted the piece in his studio in Mount Vernon, New York, and cast the bronze at the E. Gruet foundry in Paris. He also sculpted the portrait of President Chester A. Arthur (1898) located in Madison Square Park, as well that of John Watts in Trinity Church cemetery. He depicted De Peyster, sporting a lavish cloak, wig, army boots, and sword in hand denoting his political and military roles in the colonial government.
The De Peyster sculpture was originally placed in the center of nearby Bowling Green Park in 1896, at a site once occupied by a statue of King George III. Vandalism to the statue prompted the resetting of the sword in 1939, and an overall conservation effort in 1942. In 1972, park and subway renovations at Bowling Green forced removal of the statue. It was relocated four years later on a new pink granite pedestal (on which the original inscriptions were transcribed) in Hanover Square. In 1999, the sculpture was conserved by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program, with funding from the Florence Gould Foundation, the American Express Company, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
The sculpture has been removed from the park to accommodate the redesign of Hanover Square as the British Memorial Garden. It has been temporarily placed in storage until a new location has been determined for its reinstallation.
Updated Apr. 09, 2007
WRONG ANSWERS
Discus Thrower Statue
The Discus Thrower statue was created by Greek sculptor Kostas Dimitriadis. Dimitriadis, who also studied and worked in Paris and London, was inspired by models from classical antiquity, and was influenced by more modern sculptors such as Auguste Rodin.
This sculpture was awarded a prize at the 1924 Olympic Games held in France. Commissioned by Ery Kehaya, the bronze sculpture was installed in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum in 1926. The noted architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White designed the statue’s granite pedestal and a twin or replica stands in the Zappeion gardens facing the Panathinic Stadium in Athens, Greece.
In 1936 when Municipal Stadium (also known as Triborough and later renamed Downing Stadium) was erected on Randall’s Island, the sculpture was placed in front. The stadium opened in July 1936, and was host to the American Olympic track and field trials.
Over the years the sculpture was assaulted by acid rain and graffiti, and vandals stole the discus and amputated the arm. In 1970 the statue was removed to storage for safekeeping. In 1999 the sculpture was conserved, and missing components replicated under a project sponsored by the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, and funded by Michael Bloomberg.
The restored monument was placed at a new, prominent landscaped triangle at the entrance of Randall’s Island. A rededication ceremony held on July 21, 1999 included four-time Olympic gold medalist discus thrower Al Oerter and nine-time New York City Marathon victor Grete Waitz. The Discus Thrower, now the logo of the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, has also become a symbol of the renaissance of this municipal park and athletic facility.
The Indian Hunter
This striking bronze statue by John Quincy Adams Ward (1830 & 1910) demonstrates the technical mastery of an artist later dubbed the dean of American sculptors. It depicts a Native American hunter, bow in hand, restraining his snarling hunting dog. Cast in 1866 and dedicated on February 4, 1869, the statue was the first sculpture by an American artist to be placed in Central Park, and is one of the oldest works on outdoor display in the park.
The Indian Hunter derives from Ward’s artistic exploration of that theme beginning in the late 1850s; he displayed a smaller version of the subject at the Washington Art Association in 1859, and three years later, he exhibited a statuette of the Indian Hunter at the National Academy of Design. After the Civil War, Ward set about enlarging his conception to a full-size sculpture. In an effort to include naturalistic details, he traveled to the Dakotas, making sketches and three-dimensional models based on his direct observations of Native Americans.
Returning to New York, he crafted a full-scale, life-sized plaster model that was displayed in 1865 at Snedicor’s Gallery. Such was the romantic appreciation of Indian life, coupled with respect for Ward’s noble interpretation, that in 1866 a group of 23 prominent citizens – many of them Ward’s artistic peers – financed the $10,000 cost of casting the artwork. The acclaimed finished work was then displayed in 1867 at the Paris Exposition, and secured Ward’s prestige in the art world.
In 1868, the Committee of the Indian Hunter Fund presented the statue to the Board of Commissioners of Central Park, and commented, It justly ranks among the best examples of the plastic art, for its bold and vigorous treatment, and its truthful delineation. We have the peculiar satisfaction in placing at your disposal a work so truly American in subject, and so admirably executed, by one of our native and most celebrated sculptors. The commissioners concurred with this estimation, and selected a prominent placement southwest of the Mall.
Ward went on to a long and prolific career. He ultimately contributed nine sculptures to the parks of New York, among them Roscoe Conkling (1893) in Madison Square Park, Alexander Holley (1888) in Washington Square Park, William Earl Dodge (1885), now in Bryant Park, Horace Greeley (1890), now in City Hall Park, Henry Ward Beecher (1891) in Columbus Park, Brooklyn, and William Shakespeare (1872), The Pilgrim (1885), and the Seventh Regiment Memorial (1874) in Central Park.
Scholars have noted that the Indian Hunter may have been influenced by classical forerunners such as the famed Roman Borghese Warrior statue, with its forward leaning pose. In 1937, the Parks monuments crew replaced the vandalized bronze bow and in 1992, the Central Park Conservancy Monuments Program fully restored the statue. Returned to its former glory, this early work by Ward, with its fusion of realism and idealism, maintains its popularity with park goers.
Joan of Arc
This impressive bronze equestrian sculpture of 15th century French patriot and martyr Joan of Arc (1411 & 1431) is one of the finest works of art in the Parks collection. Created by the eminent artist and art patron Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876 & 1973), the piece was dedicated in 1915.
Jeanne La Pucelle, later known as Joan of Arc, was a peasant maiden said to have been divinely inspired to help liberate the French from English rule. Through her determination, she was able to gain an audience with the Dauphin of France, later to be King Charles VII, at the time when the city of Orleans was under siege. Charles appointed her commander-in-chief of a small provisional army, which under her inspired command forced the English to withdraw in 1429. With the siege lifted, the Dauphin was crowned in Reims Cathedral, with Joan seated in the place of honor next to him.
Though a popular figure, Joan was restrained by the new King from marching on Paris. In 1430, while conducting an unofficial campaign, she was captured by Burgundian soldiers at Compiegne, and sold to the English, who charged her with witchcraft and heresy. She was subjected to a long trial in a French ecclesiastical court presided over by the Bishop of Beauvais, and was eventually found guilty and condemned to death. On May 31, 1431, she was burned at the stake. Twenty years later an investigation into Joan’s trial proceedings led to the annulment of her sentence. On May 16, 1920, nearly 500 years later, Jeanne la Pucelle was canonized as Saint Joan by Pope Benedict XV.
The exploits of this heroine from the Middle Ages have been revisited by authors and artists ever since her death. Among the many notable works surrounding her myth are Mark Twain’s novel The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), a fictionalized account of her life, playwright George Bernard Shaw’s political play Saint Joan (1923), and Carl-Theodor Dryer’s landmark silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
In New York, a prominent group of citizens formed a Joan of Arc monument committee in 1909. Their efforts coincided with those of a young sculptor, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to create a sculpture of Joan. Her first version, in which she emphasized the spiritual rather than the warlike point of view, was submitted to the prestigious Salon in Paris. It received an honorable mention from the jury, nevertheless skeptical that such an accomplished work of art could have been made solely by a woman.
The New York monument committee, headed by J. Sanford Saltus, was so impressed by her work, that they awarded her the commission. Architect John van Pelt was retained to design the pedestal, which is made of Mohegan granite composed of Gothic-style blind arches, decorated with coats of arms. A few limestone blocks from the tower in Rouen where Joan of Arc had been imprisoned were incorporated into the base. Van Pelt situated the monument at the top of the steps in the park island at 93rd Street and Riverside, and had planted a screen of trees to disguise the buildings.
Huntington’s version is both heroic and infused with naturalistic detail. For Joan’s armor, she conducted research at the arms and armory division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the refinement of the equine anatomy was based on a horse borrowed from the fire department of her native town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her niece posed astride a barrel, as she modeled the figure, first nude, then in costume.
On December 6, 1915, the sculpture was unveiled in an elaborate ceremony, which included a military band and French Ambassador Jean J. Jusserand. Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison was among those selected to pull the cord that released the shroud. Huntington went on to have a long and illustrious career, and also sculpted the statue of the Cuban patriot, Josi Marti (1965), which stands at Central Park South and Avenue of the Americas. A replica of Joan of Arc stands in front of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
In 1939, Parks repaired Joan’s sword, which had been broken, repatined the bronze statue, and repaired the staircase. In 1987, the sculpture again underwent a full conservation financed by the Grand Marnier Foundation through the Municipal Art Society’s Adopt-A-Monument Program.
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#78 – D
Sakura Park
Located between Riverside Church and International House, Sakura Park owes its name to the more than 2000 cherry trees delivered to parks in New York City from Japan in 1912. The word sakura means cherry blossom in Japanese. The cherry trees were to be presented as a gift from the Committee of Japanese Residents of New York as part of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909.
This 18-day celebration, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s innovative demonstration of the steam-powered boat on the Hudson River and the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery and exploration of that river, took place throughout the state of New York. However, the steamer that carried the original delivery of cherry trees from Japan was lost at sea. A new shipment of trees arrived in New York City in 1912, and they were planted in Riverside and Sakura Parks at that time.
Land for Sakura Park was purchased from John D. Rockefeller by the City of New York as an easterly extension of Riverside Park in 1896. Also known as Claremont Park, this land directly east of Grant’s Tomb featured rolling terrain with a curvilinear path system and benches facing the Hudson. With a donation from Mr. Rockefeller, the City hired the firm of Olmsted Brothers as landscape architects to redesign the park in 1932.
The two year process included grading the site and laying formal paths to create rectangular plots of grass and shrubs, enclosed by hedges and fencing. A massive buttressed retaining wall, whose design reproduced that of the wall surrounding Kenilworth Abbey in England, was built on the eastern border of the park along Claremont Avenue. The park was reopened to the public on May 25, 1934.
A monument to General Daniel Butterfield (1831-1901) was erected in 1918 in the southeast corner of Sakura Park. Sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who also designed Mount Rushmore, the bronze Butterfield monument depicts the Civil War hero standing on a rock with his arms crossed and hat cocked. Butterfield, a Union soldier who rose to the rank of major-general and chief of staff of the Army of the Potomac, is best known for composing Taps, the melancholy bugle call performed during military funerals and memorial ceremonies.
A stone Japanese tori, or lantern, was donated to Sakura Park by the City of Tokyo and officially dedicated on October 10, 1960 with Crown Prince Akihito, now Emperor of Japan, and Princess Michiko in attendance. A common fixture in traditional Japanese gardens, this tori was made from the native rock of Japan. Its inscription read: Presented by the citizens of the Metropolis of Tokyo to the citizens of the City of New York in celebration of the Tokyo-New York sister-city affiliation inaugurated on February 29th, 1960. In 1987, the Crown Prince and Princess personally rededicated the ten-foot tall lantern in a ceremony hosted by Mayor Edward I. Koch and Parks Commissioner Stern.
In 1981 the architectural firm of Quennell Rothschild Associates was engaged to renovate Sakura Park. The capital reconstruction included the installment of a play area for toddlers and plantings of linden trees, barberry shrubs, and several varieties of Japanese cherry trees. A pavilion, which is used as a performance space by the Manhattan School of Music, was also added to the park.
At the 1986 ribbon-cutting ceremony, Japanese Consul Hideo Nomoto stated: In Japan, the sakura is a symbol of renewal and bright promise. The appearance of their fragile blossoms each spring strikes a resonant note in all Japanese. New Yorkers can enjoy cherry trees once again in Sakura Park, an island of calm on the hectic island of Manhattan.
2.067 acres
WRONG ANSWERS
Clara Coffey Park
In 1936, landscape architect Clara Stimson Coffey (1894 & 1982) accepted a position with Parks as the Chief of Tree Plantings. In this capacity, she supervised several prominent landscaping projects throughout the city including the plantings on the Hutchinson River and Belt Parkways (1941) and the redesign of the Park Avenue Malls (1970). Other projects Coffey worked on included Clement Clarke Moore Park in Manhattan (1969) and Yellowstone Park in Queens (1970).
Coffey’s philosophy of design – understated, practical and accessible & is exemplified in her plan for the Park Avenue Malls. The project replaced fences and tall hedges with flower-beds, supplemented existing crab apple trees (Malus) with kwanzan cherry trees (Prunus serrulata), and displayed seasonal flowers within wood borders. In 1977, Coffey was appointed by Mayor Abraham Beame (1906 & 2001) to the Art Commission as its professional landscape architect in residence.
In 1991, a granite marker dedicated to Coffey was placed in this park at 54th Street, within a former sandbox converted by the Sutton Area Community Block Association to a lush garden with a decorative urn. The park also features an Armillary Sphere (1971) by Albert Stewart, inspired by Renaissance examples of the astronomical models once used in Ancient Greece.
This park is one of a series of five vest-pocket parks that run along the East River in the vicinity of Sutton Place, itself located on York Avenue between 53rd and 59th Streets. The parks were originally known as Five Parks, but an Executive Decree in 1997 renamed them for Effingham B. Sutton (1817 & 1891), the entrepreneur who developed this neighborhood.
Sutton was a shipping merchant and one of the few prospectors who succeeded in building a fortune in the California Gold Rush of 1849. In 1875, Sutton built brownstones between 57th and 58th Streets in hopes of re-establishing a residential community. By the turn of the century, however, the neighborhood along the waterfront had become neglected, suffering from poverty and blanketed with substandard tenement housing. During this era, the neighborhood was infamous for gangs of street toughs, known as the Dead End Kids, who congregated at the end of these streets before Sutton Parks were built. Stanley Kingsley’s 1935 play about the area, Dead End, inspired several films depicting the area and the gangs.
Sutton’s venture was saved by the arrival of the Vanderbilts and Morgans in 1920, which began the neighborhood’s transformation into a wealthy enclave. Sutton Parks were created in 1938 following the construction of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, which runs next to and underneath the properties. When the highway was built, some Sutton Place residents lost their access to the East River. The City built private backyards for them in compensation, and three of the five Sutton Parks are between these backyards. Parks took over maintenance and operation of Sutton Parks in 1942.
In 2001 a $429,000 renovation of the parks funded by Council Member A. Gifford Miller and Borough President C. Virginia Fields expanded the horticultural beds, unified the overlook and the parks, and added new lighting, paving, fencing and park benches using plastic slats. Also in 2001 an endowment in the memory of Bronka Novak, a long-time resident of Sutton Place, was established by her husband Adam. The endowment will provide for the maintenance and care of the flowers, trees and shrubs in the parks.
Jefferson Market Garden
Where some went to market, and some went to jail, today’s Greenwich Villagers tend the Jefferson Market Garden in the shade of the landmark Jefferson Market Courthouse.
Named for Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, the Jefferson Market opened on this site in 1833, alongside a police court, a volunteer firehouse, and a jail. The market grew rapidly to include fishmongers, poultry vendors, and hucksters. It was razed in 1873 to make way for a new civic complex and courthouse.
The Jefferson Market Courthouse, with its fire-watch bell tower, and lighted clock dial, was designed by Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux, and built in 1877. The ornate courthouse struck the New York Times as inappropriate for such a shoddy neighborhood’s a jewel in a pig’s snout. Nonetheless, architects polled in 1895 deemed the building to be the fifth most beautiful in the United States. While Vaux believed that the cells should be strong, secure, and entirely unattractive, he created a six-tiered structure that allowed some light to penetrate and air to circulate. At the turn of the century, the triangular parcel between Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, and 10th Street was thus entirely occupied, and connected to the rest of the city by the Gilbert Elevated Railway’s Sixth Avenue line, inaugurated in 1878.
In 1927 the jail, the market, and the firehouse were demolished and replaced by the City’s only House of Detention for Women, an 11-story building designed in the French Art Deco style by Benjamin W. Levitan. By the time the Women’s House of Detention opened in 1931, the adjacent courthouse heard only cases with female defendants. Corrections Commissioner Richard Patterson introduced the facility as undoubtedly the best institution of its kind in the United States if not indeed in the entire world. Contemporaries noted the facility’s modern equipment, one of its most striking features being a turntable altar in the chapel, with sections fitted respectively for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish services.
Use of public transportation declined during the Depression, and the clattering elevated railways were criticized for lowering property values. The 6th Avenue line was demolished in 1939. Amendments to the district court system in 1945 led to the abandonment of the courthouse, which was to be sold by auction in 1959. The Greenwich Village Association (GVA), led by Margot Gayle and Verna Small, campaigned forcefully to preserve the building, and won their first victory in 1961 by saving the four-sided clock in the tower. A year later Mayor Wagner agreed to establish a Village branch of the New York Public Library in the Jefferson Market Courthouse.
The Board of Estimate transferred the site to Parks in 1974, and the Jefferson Market Garden Committee, Inc., composed of Village neighborhood associations and homeowners, was entrusted with its care. Landscape architect Pamela Berdan originally designed the garden in the spirit of Frederick Law Olmsted, who co-designed Central and Prospect Parks with Calvert Vaux. The garden was planted with 10 Star and Saucer Magnolia trees, 7 Yoshino Cherry trees, 2 American Yellowwoods, 7 Thornless Honeylocusts, 10 Crabapple trees, 70 fairy hedge roses around the lawn, 60 pycarantha, and 56 holly bushes in clusters. Volunteers have since planted tulips, daffodils, and crocuses in the garden.
In the late 1960s, GVA and Community Board 2 held town meetings to discuss the removal of the Women’s House of Detention and the creation of a passive recreation area on the site. At the time, friends and families of inmates lingered outside the House at all hours of the day or night, yelling their news and greetings. Nearby residents were disturbed by the noise. Gawkers came to watch the scene. The facility was overcrowded and had become obsolete. The Women’s House of Detention was demolished in 1973, after 42 years of use.
A generous grant, one of the last made by the Vincent Astor Foundation, funded the new decorative steel fence, which recalls the design of the courthouse fence and unifies the site. On October 13, 1998 Mrs. Brooke Astor dedicated the fence at a ceremony attended by members of the Greenwich Village community.
Kimlau Square
Second Lieutenant Benjamin Ralph Kimlau (1918-1944) was a Chinese-American bomber pilot who died serving his country in World War II. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, Kimlau moved to New York City with his parents when he was fourteen. After graduating from Dewitt Clinton High School in 1937, Kimlau first traveled to China, where he witnessed firsthand Japanese military aggression. The next year, he returned to the United States and entered the Pennsylvania Military College (now the United States Army War College). Kimlau graduated with honors, earning a commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Field Artillery.
Interested in airborne defense, Kimlau transferred from Field Artillery to the United States Army Air Force, and, following flight school, he was assigned to the Flying Circus, the 380th Bombardment Group of the Fifth Air Force in Australia. Beginning on February 27, 1944, along with four other pilots, Kimlau embarked on a mission to bomb Japanese airbases around New Guinea. On March 5, 1944, Kimlau and his fellow pilots were ordered to attack the Japanese rear line at Los Negros, an island adjacent to New Guinea. During the attack, the Japanese defenders shot down the attacking U. S. bombers, killing Kimlau and the other pilots. For their heroism and devotion to duty on this occasion and several others, the members of 380th Bombardment Group earned two Presidential Unit Citations.
The Lt. Kimlau Memorial monument was a gift of the Lt. B.R. Kimlau Chinese Memorial Post 1291, founded by Chinese-American World War II veterans in 1945. The post is the largest in New York City, promoting numerous patriotic programs and community service initiatives within Chinatown, such as petitioning the Department of Transportation for more traffic lights in Chinatown, establishing and contributing to a capital fund for the construction of a recreation center at the Chinese Community Center, publishing the American Legion’s first bilingual newsletter, offering a weekly Tai-chi class, as well as teaching new immigrants basic English.
Located at the intersection of Oliver Street, East Broadway, the Bowery, and Park Row, Kimlau Square stands at the center of Chatham Square. In 1961, a local law named this island within Chatham Square in recognition of the contributions of Lt. Kimlau and the veterans post. That year, the post erected this memorial, designed by architect Poy G. Lee (1900-1968). Standing at the head of Oliver Street, it is reminiscent of a triumphal arch. The memorial stands eighteen feet nine inches in height and is sixteen feet wide. Inscribed on the memorial is a dedication in both English and Chinese: In Memory of the Americans of Chinese Ancestry who lost their Lives in Defense of Freedom and Democracy. In June 2000, the post celebrated its 55th anniversary, which included a parade and a rededication of the Kimlau Memorial.
#79 – A
Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold was born on July 29, 1905 in Jonkoping, Sweden. He was the youngest of four sons of a Swedish nobleman, a scholar and statesman named Hjalmar Hammarskjold, who served as Prime Minister of Sweden during World War I. Young Hammarskjold spent his childhood in Uppsala and earned three degrees at Uppsala University by 1930: a Bachelor of Arts, a filsofic licenciat in economics, and a bachelor of laws. He then moved to Stockholm, where he worked as secretary of a governmental committee on unemployment and attended the University of Stockholm. Upon receiving his doctoral degree in 1933, he was made an assistant professor in political economy at the university.
Hammarskjold held a series of governmental positions: Permanent Undersecretary of the Minister of Finance, Chairman of the National Bank’s Board, Foreign Minister, and Cabinet member in the Social Democratic government. He represented his country at the Paris Conference of 1947, the Paris Conference of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948, UNISCAN, and the sessions of the United Nations General Assembly from 1951 to 1953. Hammarskjold never joined a political party, regarding himself as politically independent.
As a compromise candidate from neutral Sweden, Dag Hammarskjold was unexpectedly asked to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1953 succeeding Trygve Lie, and reelected unanimously for a second term in 1957. As Secretary-General, he strove to prevent war and serve other aims of the United Nations charter. In the Middle East, this included diplomatic activity to support the Armistice Agreements between Israel and Arab nations; organization of the United Nations Emergency Force; clearance of the Suez Canal in 1957 and assistance in solving the Suez Canal dispute. The Secretary-General’s 1954 visit to Peking resulted in the release of fifteen Americans detained by the Chinese.
When President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of the Congo requested United Nations military assistance, Hammarskjold urged the Security Council to act. The United Nations Force in the Congo was established, and the Secretary-General made four trips to the Congo to review operations. He died in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia while en route to the Congo on September 18, 1961. For his outstanding service to the United Nations and world peace, Dag Hammarskjold was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961.
The park on East 47th Street between Second and First Avenues, just north of the United Nations, was acquired by the City of New York in 1948 and named Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in 1961. For many years it has served as a popular gathering place for public demonstrations. The Friends of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza was formed to raise funds, to organize special events, and to keep the park green and clean.
In 1997 the plaza underwent a $2.3 million reconstruction which created a symmetrical layout from north to south with six steel pavilions each housing a fountain. The same year marked the planting and dedication of the Katharine Hepburn Garden on the south side of the park. In 1998-99 the park area was expanded by a half-acre to the north to provide a visual link to the United Nations lawn and promenade. The plaza was updated with new trees, a steel lattice dome, additional park benches, and improved lighting.
WRONG ANSWERS
Dorrance Brooks Square
This square honors Dorrance Brooks (d. 1918) an African American soldier who died in France shortly before the end of World War I.
A native of Harlem and the son of a Civil War veteran, Brooks was a Private First Class in the 15th New York Infantry. Until 1948 African American soldiers served in segregated divisions, which usually provided only support functions, but the 15th NY Infantry was renamed the 369th United States Infantry and assigned to fight in the French Army’s 161st Division. The black soldiers proved courageous in battle and earned many decorations. Brooks distinguished himself in battle by taking charge of the remnants of his company after the enemy severely reduced their numbers and killed the commanding officers.
When this square was dedicated on June 14, 1925, more than 10,000 people attended the ceremony presided over by Mayor John F. Hylan and Colonel William Hayward, commander of the 15th infantry. The New York Times reported that Dorrance Brooks Square was the first public square to be named after an African American soldier. When the square was dedicated, a flagpole and a cannon stood at its south end. At the time, many parks were decorated with surplus World War I vintage artillery pieces, but during World War II, the demand for metal was so high that Parks donated all but eight of its cannons as scrap metal for the war effort.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Mamie Clark (1917-1983) and Ella Baker (1903-1986) formed an organization called We Care Media Arts in St. Mark’s United Methodist Church across the street from this park. We Care helped area residents obtain employment, job training, health care, and legal assistance, and published City Scene, a community events newspaper. In 2002, two benches and two trees were dedicated to Dr. Clark and Mrs. Baker, in honor of their contributions to this community.
Parks acquired this site, bounded by West 136th and 137th Streets, St. Nicholas, and Edgecombe Avenues, by condemnation on July 22, 1913. Today, the square falls under the aegis of the Greenstreets program. Members of the Edgecombe Avenue Block Association help to maintain the square’s benches, tree pits, and flowerbeds.
Montefiore Park
Bounded by Broadway, Hamilton Place, and West 138th Street, this park honors Sir Moses Haim Montefiore (1784-1885), a distinguished nineteenth century Jewish philanthropist. Montefiore was born into a wealthy Italian Jewish merchant family in Livorno, Italy. Several years later, his family immigrated to Great Britain. In 1812, Montefiore married Judith Cohen (bef. 1812-bef. 1885), making him the brother-in-law of the noted British financier Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836). Soon after the marriage, he became Rothschild’s stockbroker as well. By 1824, Montefiore had amassed a considerable personal fortune on the London stock exchange. He used this money to help found the Imperial Continental Gas Association (which pioneered gas lighting for homes in Britain) and the Provincial Bank of Ireland.
At age forty-four, Montefiore retired from business and devoted his time and resources to civic and Jewish community affairs. From 1835 to 1874, he served as president of the Board of Deputies for British Jews, where he worked to end discriminatory practices against European and Middle Eastern Jews. Montefiore personally financed many efforts aimed at helping Jews living in Palestine, which today is the nation of Israel. There, he acquired land on behalf of several Jewish communities and attempted to bolster the region’s economy by introducing printing presses and factories. He inspired the founding of several agricultural settlements as well as Yemin Moshe, which today is located outside of Jerusalem’s Old City and is named for Montefiore. In 1846, Montefiore visited Russia to ask authorities to stop their persecution of Jews. In 1863 and 1867, he traveled to Morocco and Romania for the same purpose. On each of these visits, Montefiore was able to obtain better treatment for Jewish people.
Montefiore’s imposing physical stature (he stood at 6 feet, 3 inches tall) combined with his strong religious beliefs and his philanthropy earned him considerable respect throughout Great Britain and the rest of the world. In 1837, he was elected Sheriff of London. That year, in recognition of his humanitarian efforts, Queen Victoria (1819-1901) knighted Montefiore. In 1847, she bestowed upon him the title of baronet. In 1884, Montefiore’s 100th birthday was declared a public holiday in Jewish communities around the world. That year, the Montefiore Home for Chronic Individuals was formed on 84th Street and York Avenue (Avenue A) by prominent New York City Jewish philanthropists. Montefiore passed away the following year in his home outside of London; his legacy, however, lived on. In 1889, the Home relocated to Broadway between 138th and 139th Streets, to the north of this very park. In 1913, the institution, now known as Montefiore Medical Center, moved to its present location between Gun Hill Road and 210th Street in the Bronx.
In 1906, pursuant to a resolution of the Board of Aldermen, the City of New York acquired this property and designated it Montefiore Park. That same year, Parks assumed jurisdiction over the property. In 1991, a renovation of the park began that was completed in 1993, the rehabilitation project completely transformed the park. New benches and pavement were installed on the north side, and several new plantings were added. New species included the Sweetgum tree (Liquidambar stryaciflua), the Green Mountain Silver Linden tree (Tilia tomentosa green mountain’), the Regent Scholar tree (Sophora japonica regent’), as well as flowering bulbs, including the crocuses and the daffodils.
The Montefiore Park Neighborhood Association, established in 1996, assists Parks in maintaining this gently sloping triangle. The Association initiates new plantings, facilitates community involvement, and organizes events, including an annual Christmas tree lighting. Today, Montefiore Park serves as both a memorial to a dedicated humanitarian and a place to rest the body and restore the senses.
Robert Wagner Greenstreet
United States Senator Robert F. Wagner (1877-1953) was born in Nastatten, Germany and immigrated with his family in 1886. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1898 and from New York Law School two years later. Wagner joined the Tammany Society and became a staunch Democrat. In 1904, he was elected to the State Assembly, and was a major supporter of the reform policies of Governor Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944).
Wagner was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926. Over the course of four terms, he co-sponsored several important pieces of legislation. These include: the Wagner-Peyser Act, which created the United States Employment Service and later became part of the Social Security board; the Wagner-Connery Act, which established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); and the Wagner-Steagall Act, which set up the United States Housing Authority (USHA), forerunner to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Wagner championed social causes in the Senate until 1949, when his health forced him to retire. He died four years later at the age of 75.
Located on the corner of South Street and Robert Wagner Senior Place, this is New York City’s 800th Greenstreet. A joint project of Parks and the New York City Department of Transportation, Greenstreets began in 1986 and was revived in 1994. Its goal is to convert paved street properties, such as triangles and malls, into green spaces. Funded by Mayor Giuliani, the project to date has enlivened the streets with 400 rosebushes and 11 blue spruces.
This property was dedicated on January 6, 2000, the birthday of Senator Wagner’s grandson Robert F. Wagner Junior (1944-1993). Son of Mayor Wagner and Grandson of Senator Wagner, Bobby (as he was called by his friends) continued the family tradition of a career in government. A graduate of Exeter, Harvard College, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, the youngest Wagner was elected to the City Council from Manhattan (1974-77) and afterwards Mayor Edward I. Koch appointed him successively Chairman of the City Planning Commission (1978-79), Deputy Mayor for Policy (1979-86), and President of the New York City Board of Education (1986-90). His personal library was donated to the Parks Library, located in the Parks headquarters in Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street, where it is available to the public. The library, which includes books on such subjects as architecture, political history, sports, gardening, and writing, demonstrates the breadth and depth of its owner’s interests.
#80 – C
Gay Liberation Monument
This sculpture by George Segal (1924 & 2000) honors the gay rights movement and commemorates the events at the Stonewall Inn opposite this park that gave rise to the movement.
Located at 51-53 Christopher Street, Stonewall Inn was formerly two adjacent two-story stable houses erected in 1843 and 1846. After numerous alterations, the two buildings were joined into a restaurant by the 1930s. By the 1950s the place was known as Stonewall Inn Restaurant. In 1966, it closed for renovations, and reopened in the following year as a private club known as Stonewall Inn – a bar and dance hall which, like numerous local establishments, catered to the homosexual community of Greenwich Village.
In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn and a melee ensued in which 13 people were arrested. Word of the raid and the resistance to it soon spread, and the next day hundreds gathered to protest the crackdown and advocate the legalization of gay bars. Further protests erupted in early July, and on July 27, a group of activists organized the first gay and lesbian march, from Washington Square to Stonewall. The events of that summer and their aftermath are often credited as the flashpoint for the gay rights movement in the United States.
A decade later, Peter Putnam (1927 & 1987), a wealthy arts patron from Louisiana and trustee of the Mildred Andrews Fund, commissioned the Gay Liberation monument. With Putnam as its steward, the Fund had commissioned other contemporary sculptures, notably George Segal’s Kent State Memorial and Richard Hunt’s Harlem Hybrid. Though Segal was not the first artist approached, he accepted the commission, which stipulated only that the work had to be loving and caring, and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people . . . and it had to have equal representation of men and women.
George Segal was an important and influential American artist in the late 20th century. Born and raised in New York City, he settled in 1940 on a farm in South Brunswick, New Jersey. His first one-man exhibit was in 1956 at Hansa Gallery, and he was later represented by Sidney Janis Gallery. Segal’s work is in more than 65 public collections, and he has been the subject of several major museum retrospectives. Some of his more noteworthy pieces include The Holocaust (1982) in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, The Commuters (1982) in New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, and his three tableaux for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. (1995).
Segal’s conception for Gay Liberation is typical of his work. Four figures – two standing males and two seated females – are positioned on the northern boundary of the park, in natural, easy poses. Using a process in which bronze casts are made from plaster moulds from the human models, Segal tempers the realistic surfaces with an unearthly white-painted finish. The result is specific, evocative, and understated, showing the public comfort and freedom to which the gay liberation movement aspired.
Though the work had received all of its community and design approvals by 1982, public opposition and a planned renovation of Christopher Park (completed in 1985) sidelined the project for years. In the meantime, a second cast of the piece was installed on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. On June 23, 1992, Mayor David N. Dinkins and Parks Commissioner Betsy Gotbaum helped unveil the monument in Christopher Park. The initial opposition and rancor which had greeted the project had subsided; the advent of AIDS, which had devastated the gay community in particular, added another poignant dimension to the monument and its mute figures’ impact. In March 2000, Stonewall Inn was designated a National Historic Landmark. Today, Segal’s sculpture is a popular pilgrimage site for tourists and local residents alike.
WRONG ANSWERS
Cactus Couple
Located on the south roof deck of the Parks administrative headquarters in Central Park, this lovely garden sculpture by Thea Tewi (b.1915) was dedicated on January 16, 1990.
The artwork consists of two cactus plants, measuring 54 inches and 18 inches tall, carved out of a dark green serpentine marble. The couple is installed on a low rough-hewn base of white marble. Prior to being received into the city’s official outdoor sculpture collection, the work was displayed in an exhibition of the artist’s work entitled A Garden of Stone, held at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the spring of 1989.
Tewi was born in 1906 in Germany, and received a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. She immigrated to the United States in 1938, and her earliest exhibitions were in New York’s Greenwich Village. Later in life, she settled in Forest Hills, Queens. Known for her masterful stone carving, her work is in numerous private and public collections, and in addition to holding many gallery shows, she has exhibited at the Stony Brook Museum (1963), the Springfield Museum (1965), New York University (1966), Stamford Museum (1968), the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (1972), and the Hudson River Museum (1982), among other venues.
Tewi was president of the League of Present Day Artists from 1966 to 1972, chair of the Sculpture Jury of the National Association of Women Artists in 1973, and, beginning in 1971, served for two decades as president of the Sculptors League. She has also been affiliated with the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research, and the New York Academy of Science.
Cactus Couple is typical of Tewi’s art, sinuous in its carving, respectful of the natural stone, and expressing a quiet humor.
Eagles and Prey Statue
Eagles and Prey, by Christophe Fratin (1800-1864), is the oldest known sculpture in any New York City park. Cast in Paris in 1850, the statue was a gift given to the City by Gordon Webster Burnham (1803-1885). It was installed in Central Park in 1863. Burnham, a manufacturing giant, also commissioned the heroic-sized statue of Daniel Webster that stands on the West Drive at 72nd Street.
Fratin was born in Metz, France, and began his studies under a local sculptor named Pioche, who had achieved a measure of fame in Paris. Fratin’s father was a taxidermist, which might account for the sculptor’s penchant for animal images. In Paris, Fratin joined the atelier of the painter Giricault, an artist celebrated for his anatomical studies and for the monumental picture Raft of the Medusa.
By the 1830s, Fratin became associated with the sculptors known as animaliers, because of their preference for animal subjects. During this time, he produced a series of small bronze pieces that were thought to be fanciful and romantic in tone. He exhibited for the first time at the Parisian Salon of 1831. Fratin subsequently cultivated patrons in France, Germany, Austria, England, and the United States. His work was particularly well received in England, where he was awarded a medal for work displayed in the Great Exposition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851.
Eagles and Prey illustrates the animaliers’ interest in the elemental forces of nature: a helpless goat is caught in the talons of two birds of prey. The work’s rich surface texture and anatomical detail are typical of Fratin’s style. Introduced into Central Park just a year after the park’s Board of Commissioners committee formed to review new statuary, Eagles and Prey was considered by some to be an intrusion. Critic Clarence Cook felt that Fratin’s choice of subject and wild, exotic depictions’ did not fit in with the tranquil rural beauty of the park scenery.’
Eagles and Prey, however, outlasted such initially squeamish sentiments. The sculpture, cleaned and repaired by the Central Park Conservancy in 1992, remains an integral member of the group of 19th and early 20th century statues in and around the Mall.
Josi Marti Monument
Sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (-1876 & 1973) created this larger-than-life bronze equestrian statue depicting Cuban patriot and author Josi Marti (-1853 & 1895). Hyatt Huntington also created the Joan of Arc (1411 & 1431) bronze equestrian sculpture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park (1915). Her last major work, Hyatt Huntington executed this piece at age 82, and presented the statue as a gift to the Cuban government for presentation to the people of New York City. The Cuban government donated the monument’s dark granite pedestal, which was designed by the architectural firm of Clarke & Rapuano.
Marti campaigned for the liberation of Cuba from Spain and was imprisoned by Spanish authorities in 1868. Fleeing to New York in 1880, he continued to advocate for Cuban freedom while in exile and organized the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892. Marti returned to Cuba in 1895, at the beginning of Cuba’s successful fight for independence. The monument depicts a reeling yet resolute Marti after being fatally wounded while atop his horse during the 1895 battle at Dos Rios. Although the statue was completed in 1959, the political climate between pro- and anti-Castro elements in New York necessitated the delay of the monument’s unveiling until 1965.
The piece is one of a trio of bronze equestrian sculptures representing Latin-American leaders that greet visitors to Central Park at the north end of Avenue of the Americas, which was named in 1945 at the suggestion of Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882 & 1947) to honor Pan-American ideals and principles. Following the renaming of Sixth Avenue, a new plaza was designed where the avenue meets Central Park, and the monument of Simon Bolivar (1783 & 1830) was moved to the eastern side of the plaza and rededicated. A month later the statue of Argentine general Josi de San Martin (1778 & 1850) was unveiled on the west side of the plaza, and in 1965, the Marti monument was dedicated between the two earlier works. The Central Park Conservancy conserved the Marti monument in 1992 using funds raised by Cuban-Americans from throughout the United States.
#81 – D
The Little Red Lighthouse
The Little Red Lighthouse stopped being used as a functional lighthouse long ago, but over the years this 40-foot-high structure has become a beacon of another kind. Located underneath the George Washington Bridge along this treacherous section of the Hudson River once known as Jeffrey’s Hook, this is one of the few surviving lighthouses in New York City and serves as a quaint reminder of the area’s history.
Long ago, Native Americans known locally as the Wiechquaesgeck’s part of the Lenape tribe’s inhabited much of upper Manhattan and eastern New Jersey. The Wiechquaesgeck, and later the Dutch and English colonists, fished and hunted along the banks of the Hudson River. The Hudson was also an important route for travel, connecting upstate cities such as Albany to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. As traffic increased along the river, so did the number of shipwrecks at Jeffrey’s Hook. In an attempt to reduce accidents, a red pole was placed at Jeffrey’s Hook jutting out over the river to warn travelers of danger. In 1889, two 10-candlepower lanterns were placed on the pole to aid navigation. Much of the land surrounding the lighthouse, including the riverbanks of Jeffrey’s Hook, was acquired by the City in 1896, and became known as Fort Washington Park.
In the early 20th century, barge captains carrying goods up and down the Hudson demanded a brighter beacon. The Little Red Lighthouse had been erected on Sandy Hook, New Jersey in 1880, where it used a 1,000 pound fog signal and flashing red light to guide ships through the night. It became obsolete and was dismantled in 1917. In 1921, the U.S. Coast Guard reconstructed this lighthouse on Jeffrey’s Hook in an attempt to improve navigational aids on the Hudson River. Run by a part-time keeper and furnished with a battery-powered lamp and a fog bell, the lighthouse, then known as Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse, was an important guide to river travelers for ten years. The George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, and the brighter lights of the bridge again made the lighthouse obsolete. In 1948, the Coast Guard decommissioned the lighthouse, and its lamp was extinguished.
The Coast Guard planned to auction off the lighthouse, but an outpouring of support for the beacon helped save it. The outcry from the public was prompted by the children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, written by Hildegarde Swift and Lynd Ward in 1942. In the popular book, the Little Red Lighthouse is happy and content until a great bridge is built over it. In the end, the lighthouse learns that it still has an important job to do and that there is still a place in the world for an old lighthouse. The classic tale captured the imaginations of children and adults, many of whom wrote letters and sent money to help save the icon from the auction block.
On July 23, 1951, the Coast Guard gave the property to Parks, and on May 29, 1979, the Little Red Lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It did not receive much attention over the years, until City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin worked with Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern to find funding for its restoration. In 1986, Parks hosted a party in honor of the lighthouse’s 65th anniversary and to celebrate a $209,000 renovation of the lighthouse that included reconstruction of the concrete foundation and the installation of new steel doors. In the year 2000, the lighthouse received a fresh coat of red paint that is true to its original, historic color, along with new interior lighting and electric lines. Today, the Little Red Lighthouse remains a stalwart symbol of the area’s heritage, lighting the way into the city’s past.
The Little Red Lighthouse is owned by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and is a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City.
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Alexander Hamilton Monument
This larger-than-life-size statue depicts Alexander Hamilton (1757 & 1804), the eminent statesmen for the fledgling nation of the United States. The monument, located along Central Park’s East Drive at 83rd Street near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is unusual in that it is carved entirely of granite. Hamilton’s grandson John C. Hamilton donated the piece to the City in 1880.
Sculptor Carl H. Conrads (1839 & 1920) represents Hamilton in Colonial-era clothing. Born in the British West Indies, Hamilton moved to New York in 1772 for his formal education, attending King’s College (now Columbia University). While still a teenager, he volunteered for service in the Revolutionary War in a New York artillery company, where he rose to the rank of captain. From 1777 to 1781, Hamilton served as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington (1732-1799) at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
After the war, in 1780, Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, connecting himself to one of New York’s most powerful families. Hamilton was admitted to the bar in 1782 and began to practice law in New York. He also served as a delegate in the Continental Congress and served in the New York State Legislature, playing an important role in the ratification of the United States Constitution in New York.
A supporter of strong federal government, and co-author of many of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton was appointed the first Secretary of the Treasury by President Washington in 1789, when the new government was set up in New York City. While holding this position, Hamilton laid out his legacy in fiscal policy, giving the new nation both a circulating medium and financial machinery. His concentration on business aided the growth and development of New York City as a financial center. He also provided public credit and developed plans for a congressional charter for the first Bank of the United States.
A lesser-known aspect of Hamilton’s influence on our developing nation was his innovative proposal to create the Revenue Marine, which is now the United States Coast Guard. He also played an important role in the creation of both the United States Navy and Naval Academy through the Naval Act of 1784. Hamilton retired from his cabinet position in 1795 but stayed active in public life. He resumed his law career and remained an important political advisor, starting the New York Evening Post (now the New York Post) in 1801 to present his opinions.
Alexander Hamilton was the most distinguished resident of the neighborhood that later became known as Hamilton Heights. In 1800, he began construction of his country home in Harlem. The estate, known as the Grange, is located on Convent Avenue and 141st Street in Harlem Heights and was completed shortly after his death in 1804, when Hamilton was fatally wounded in a duel with political rival Aaron Burr (1756 & 1836). Hamilton is buried in Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church cemetery.
Giovanni Da Verrazzano Statue
This heroic sculpture of Italian explorer and navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano (c. 1485-1528) is by Ettore Ximenes (1855-1926) and was dedicated October 9, 1909.
Verrazzano, the son of a noble family, was born at the Castello Verrazzano in Greve near Florence, Italy. In his early 20s he moved to Dieppe to start a maritime career, and sailed on behalf of the French monarchy. In 1523, with the support of the French king Francois I, as well as Florentine bankers, Verrazzano set sail on the ship Dauphine in search of a passage to the Pacific Ocean and the Far East.
On this voyage, Verrazzano explored the coast line now comprising the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, and, in 1524, became the first European known to have entered New York Bay. On sighting the mouth of the harbor, he later described a very agreeable site located between two hills between which flowed to the sea a very great river. Verrazzano wrote a report based on his travels to the New World. This document, called the Cellere Codes (a copy of which is located in the Morgan Library in New York City) later served to instruct explorers such as Henry Hudson.
A second voyage from Dieppe in 1527 again failed to yield a northwest passage, and after an insurrection by his crew, and a detour to Brazil, Verrazzano returned to France with a valuable cargo of longwood. In 1528 Verrazzano embarked on a third voyage, in which he explored the Florida coast, the Bahamas and Lower Antilles. The life of the explorer was cut short when upon setting foot on one of the islands he was immediately attacked and killed by the native people.
At the time of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Italian community was mobilized by Carlo Barsotti, the editor of the Italian language newspaper Il Progresso, to contribute funds toward the creation of this statue. The larger than life bronze bust of the proud explorer was stationed on an elaborate granite pedestal with side volutes, with a bronze female allegorical figure representing discovery installed on the facade. Sculptor Ximenes later modeled a statue of Dante, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and dedicated in 1921.
Christopher Columbus Statue
In 1473, Christopher Columbus (1451 & 1506) embarked on his first maritime voyage from his home near Genoa, Italy headed for the island of Khios in the Aegean Sea. Upon his return in 1476, he traveled in a convoy destined for England. Legend has it that pirates sunk Columbus’s ship near the coast of Portugal. Columbus swam to shore and settled in Lisbon, where his brother Bartholomew worked as a cartographer.
Based on speculative maps, Columbus concluded that there was a quicker route to the markets of Asia than was yet known. Instead of heading south and circumnavigating Africa, Columbus proposed to sail west. In the 1480s, Columbus presented this proposal to the monarchs of Portugal and Spain. In April 1492, King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella of Spain agreed to sponsor Columbus’s proposed voyage. On August 3, 1492, the three modest ships that comprised Columbus’s party, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, set sail. They sighted land on October 12, 1492. The ships landed on Guanahani, an island in the Bahamas. Columbus claimed the land for the King of Spain and renamed the island San Salvador. Believing he had reached the West Indies, Columbus called the natives los Indios, or Indians. The members of the expedition returned to Spain triumphantly on March 15, 1493. After receiving a title of nobility, Christopher Columbus immediately launched a larger expedition. On November 3, 1493, this fleet of 17 ships anchored near present day Puerto Rico. His third and fourth voyages set sail in 1498 and 1502.
Columbus’s early descriptions of the Americas, as in his Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage (1493), liken the land to an earthly paradise brimming with potential for European colonists. By the time that he sent his Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage (1503), he had been undone by political charges against him, several mutinies, and the realities of his colonizing mission. He died impoverished in Spain in 1506 with his public reputation in tatters. Later, when Americans looked for founder-heroes in the early years of the republic, authors like Washington Irving (<i>The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) documented Columbus’s story. Focusing largely on his arrival in the Americas as opposed to the colonization of the area, Irving and others enshrined Columbus as a hero. His popular reputation ever after became that of the bold, courageous adventurer who enabled American civilization, and he is memorialized here and elsewhere as such.
For the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage in 1492, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society commissioned Spanish sculptor Jeronimo Sunol (1839 & 1902) to fashion this bronze portrait sculpture. The statue employs religious and imperialist imagery as the explorer holds in his right hand the Spanish flag with a cross on top. At his side, a globe is mounted to a cable-entwined capstan. The statue bears similarities to Sunol’s Columbus monument installed in 1885 at the Plaza de Colon in Madrid.
The statue rests on an elaborately carved granite pedestal with numerous undercuts, bevels and moldings designed by architect Napoleon Le Brun. It complements the monuments of Shakespeare, the Indian Hunter, and Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns installed earlier in the southern region of the Mall in Central Park. On May 12, 1894 the statue was unveiled during a ceremony presided over by the sculpture committee’s chairman, General James Grant Wilson. The large crowd of spectators and participants included Vice President Adlai Ewing Stevenson, Mayor Thomas Francis Gilroy, Park Board President Abraham Tappen, Bishop Henry C. Potter, Italian Ambassador Baron de Fava, Spanish Minister Senor Don Muruaga, business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and author and social reformer Julia Ward Howe. Mr. Chauncey M. Depew, the orator for the occasion commented, New York can add nothing to the glory of Columbus, but she may enforce the lesson of his life and discovery. The Central Park Conservancy last refurbished the statue in 1993.
#82 – C
The Dairy
When the Board of Commissioners of Central Park organized the design competition for a new park in 1857, the rules did not stipulate that the plans include any features for children. After a few years, however, the Board decided to set up a children’s district with attractions specifically intended for younger park visitors. By 1872, this district comprised the Carousel, a playground (now the Heckscher Ball Fields and Playground), the Children’s Cottage (since destroyed), the Kinderberg Rustic Shelter (now the Chess and Checkers House), and the Dairy.
Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) designed the Dairy, which is constructed of Manhattan schist and sandstone. The structure incorporates many features typical of Gothic Revival architecture. The windows of the Great Hall and the spire recall a country church. The steep pitched roof and loggia (open-air porch) evoke images of a mountain chalet. Finally, the framing of the beams and gambrel ceilings resemble those of a rustic barn. Situated and designed to catch the cool breezes coming off the pond (the site of the present Wollman Rink), the bucolic loggia provides respite from the summer heat.
Central Park’s designers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) planned the Dairy as a place of respite to maximize summer breezes. It was to feature a refreshment stand with light snacks and fresh milk for children. In the 1850s, a rash of tainted milk was sold in New York. This milk, known as swill milk, was taken from cows which had fed from swill’s mash leftover from the beer brewing process. In the mid-1860s, the production and sale of milk became strictly regulated. As a result, most of the milk consumed in New York City was shipped in from upstate farms, as inner-city dairies became less common and less able to meet the heightened standards. Despite the regulations, milk quality remained a concern to social reformers and health advocates. Olmsted and Vaux may have been thinking of those recent scares when they drew up the plans for the Dairy.
The Dairy was also to include a kiosk to loan out toys, but this became the province of the nearby Children’s Cottage. When finally opened to the public in 1871, the Dairy barely resembled Olmsted and Vaux’s original plan. Park officials from the Tweed Administration had installed a public restaurant priced to attract middle-class New Yorkers. By the time the restaurant closed in the 1950s, the Dairy’s dilapidated loggia had been torn down, and the stone building had become a maintenance shed.
In 1979, after years of vacancy, designer James Lamantia and Weisberg Castro Associates restored the interior of the Dairy. It reopened as the park’s first visitor center under the new Central Park Administration. Two years later, the loggia was restored to its Victorian splendor and the Central Park Conservancy took over management of the Dairy. The Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1980, manages Central Park under contract with Parks. Today, the Dairy houses a permanent exhibit on the history and design of the park.
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The Arsenal
The historic Arsenal Building is one of two buildings within the borders of Central Park that predate the park (the other is a blockhouse at the northern end, which dates from the War of 1812). Built between 1847 and 1851 by the State of New York as a storage repository for munitions, the construction was financed by bonds issued by state comptroller Millard Fillmore (1800 & 1874), who later served as President of the United States from 1850 to 1853.
The Arsenal’s architect was Martin E. Thompson (1786-1877), whose New York work also included the Old Assay office in Lower Manhattan, and the Marshall Mansion, a Greek-Revival mansion which formerly stood in Pelham Bay Park. For this commission Thompson designed a fortress-like structure, with a crenelated cornice and rooftop turrets. Over the doorway was placed a cast-iron eagle, one of numerous copies manufactured in 1851 by the Daniel Meeker Foundry of Newark, New Jersey.
The building’s military use proved short-lived. Between 1853 and 1856, the State seized the land beneath it for a public park. In 1857 the City purchased the Arsenal for $275,000, removed all arms, and established park administrative functions on the premises. Some park advocates recommended its removal; diarist George Templeton Strong considered it a hideous blight on the landscape.
The Arsenal, however, remained. Over the ensuing decades it has served diverse roles. In 1857 the 11th Police Precinct was stationed here. In 1859 the Menagerie (later the zoo) was created in and around the Arsenal. When the American Museum of Natural History was founded, its first home was the Arsenal, from 1869 to 1877; also at that time B. Waterhouse Hawkins, an eminent British paleontologist, set up a studio on the second and third floors, where he reconstructed dinosaur skeletons.
A gallery of art occupied the first floor in the early 1870s, and the Municipal Weather Bureau’s instruments were kept on the Arsenal roof from 1869 to 1918. Through these years, the interior underwent extensive remodeling to accommodate changing uses, including a restaurant. Yet the years took their toll and the building’s stability declined. From 1914 to 1924 the Manhattan Parks Department vacated the premises, in favor of the newly built Municipal Building, and in 1922, the New York Times declared in a headline, Parks Arsenal a Near Ruin.
Though the building was a candidate for demolition, the City gave the Arsenal a $75,000 renovation, completed in 1924, which added central turrets, as well as a clock facing the zoo. When Robert Moses (1888 & 1981) was appointed the first citywide Parks Commissioner in 1934, the Arsenal again underwent extensive renovation and the original stucco was removed from the exterior brickwork. Lavish murals inspired by images of old New York in the lobby were part of a 1935-36 Works Progress Administration project by artist Allan Saalburg (1899-1987) and a team of assistants. The front entrance was also redesigned to include military-style decorative drums over the door, and cast-iron musket replicas supporting the banisters.
In 1967, the Arsenal was designated an official city landmark. The central chamber on the third floor has been used since the early 1980s as a public gallery. The Conference Room holds the original Greensward Plan submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, which won the design competition for Central Park. In 1999, Commissioner Stern established a public library on the second floor. Today the Arsenal is home to Parks’ central administration, the City Parks Foundation, Partnerships for Parks, the Historic House Trust, the Wildlife Conservation Society offices, and the Central Park Administrator.
The Blockhouse
During the War of 1812 New Yorkers constructed fortifications along the waterfront at the Battery and Ellis Island, assuming that a British attack would come from the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Therefore, when the British stormed Stonington, Connecticut on Long Island Sound on August 10, 1814, the city was quite unprepared to defend itself from an attack from the east or the north.
Under the direction of General Joseph Swift, citizens from New York, New Jersey, and Long Island banded together in patriotic zeal to construct a line of defense running through this area of Manhattan. According to Edward H. Hall in McGown’s Pass and Vicinity, they came from every conceivable class of men: the Society of Tammany, the students of Columbia College, medical students, the Marine Society, the Society of Tallow Chandlers, butchers, members of the bar, Free Masons, firemen, Sons of Erin, colored citizens. The unevenness of the stonework is testimony to the haste in which these fortifications were constructed. In September 1814, less than a month after construction, The New York Columbian commented: The works at Harlem heights are numerous, compact and judiciously placed, and form a romantic and picturesque view.
This is the only remaining blockhouse, officially called Blockhouse #1; three others were on the site of Harlem Heights, now known as Morningside Heights. In his report to the Common Council, General Swift explained his military strategy: [In this area] commences a chain of almost perpendicular rocks, and wooded heights, of difficult ascent, except in one place, and accessible only to the lightest of troops. On these heights have been erected block houses .within supporting distance of each other, and near enough for the interchange of grape shot; all of them to mount heavy cannon on their terrace. Although soldiers were certainly stationed at the Blockhouse and surrounding fortifications, there was not any military action in the area. The British did not attack New York City, and in 1815, one year after the completion of these fortifications, the Treaty of Ghent was signed.
According to recent studies of the Blockhouse, there was formerly a heavy timber floor which supported a heavy cannon. All four sides of the structure have two small gunports. A timber stair used to connect the ground entrance to the terrace level. The current entrance and staircase are not original and were probably added at the turn of the century. The upper two feet of the Blockhouse walls are noticeably different in color, composition and stonework. They were added at a later date, perhaps during peacetime when the Blockhouse was used as a powder magazine or storage building for ammunition.
In 1858 the design competition for Central Park only included the land from 59th Street to 106th Street as these rocky bluffs and their surrounding swamp (now the Harlem Meer) were considered unsuitable for park terrain. Nonetheless, the area was added to the Park in 1863, when the land was deemed too difficult to develop for commercial or residential purposes. When the team of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux designed this area, the Blockhouse was treated as a picturesque ruin with vines covering portions of the walls, and landscaped with alpine plants and evergreens.
The Obelisk
The oldest man-made object in Central Park is this Obelisk, located directly behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nicknamed Cleopatra’s Needle soon after its installation, the stone shaft has nothing to do with the legendary Queen of the Nile. Thutmosis III, an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled from 1479-1425 B.C., had a pair of obelisks made to celebrate his third jubilee (30th year of reign). This is one of them, and the other stands on the bank of the Thames River in London. Made from the quarries at Aswan, the two pink granite monoliths once stood on either side of the portals to the Temple of the Sun in the sacred city of Heliopolis on the Nile River. The shafts themselves are sixty-nine feet high from base to tip, and weigh somewhere between 193 and 200 tons. The base and steps, which were added in Alexandria, are 27 feet high and weigh over 50 tons.
The obelisks remained in Heliopolis until the Romans, under Emperor Augustus, floated them down the Nile to Alexandria around 12 B.C. They were placed in front of the Caesarium, the temple dedicated to the deified Julius Caesar, where they remained until the late 19th century. The Khedive of Egypt, who governed as a viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey between 1879 and 1914, donated Egyptian antiquities to western industrialized nations in exchange for foreign aid to modernize his country. The London obelisk was raised in 1879, and this one arrived in New York two years later.
The Obelisk’s trip from Egypt to New York was a complicated engineering feat. The delicate moving process required laborers to inch the monument on parallel beams, aided by roll boxes and a pile-driver engine. It took nineteen days just to cross the 86th Street transverse road, and it took another twenty days to move it from Fifth Avenue to its resting place on Greywacke Knoll due to a winter blizzard. All together, it took one hundred and twelve days from the time the Obelisk touched upon the banks of the Hudson River until it reached this place. A huge crowd was on hand for the turning of the obelisk upright on January 22, 1881. A crowd of thousands stood in the snow to watch the event. As reported in the New York World, Bonfires had been built on each side and the scene was most picturesque as the huge mass of 220 tons swung majestically from the horizontal to the vertical position.
The base of the Obelisk is supported at each corner by replicas of bronze of sea crabs crafted by Roman artisans, each of them weighing approximately nine hundred pounds. Visitors can find the original crabs on display in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum. Jacob Wrey Mould (1825-1886), the designer behind many of Central Park’s most famous structures, created the decorative fence. The plaques that translate the hieroglyphics were donated by the famous filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959), who fondly remembered playing in the area as a boy. A recently restored plaza surrounding the Obelisk has benches positioned to invite a closer look at the monument’s hieroglyphic inscriptions.
#83 – D
Tigress and Cubs Statue
This striking bronze sculpture is one of the oldest in Central Park. Sculpted by Auguste Nicolas Cain (1822 & 1894), it depicts a tigress and her young who are in the process of devouring a peacock.
Cain was born in Paris, France on November 4, 1822. His first professional experience was as a wood worker, but he then was influenced by his father-in-law, sculptor Pierre Jules Mene (1810-1871), and subsequently studied sculpture with contemporary artists such as Francois Rude (1784-1855), best known for his work on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Cain became associated with the animaliers, a group of artists dedicated to depicting animal themes. Originating in France, this genre combined naturalistic detail and romanticism; some of its major adherents were Christophe Fratin (who sculpted the Eagles and Prey, also in Central Park) and Antoine-Louis Barye (1796 & 1875), one of Cain’s teachers.
Cain exhibited animal figures at the Parisian Art Salon of 1846, including a wax group of a linnet songbird defending her nest against a rat. Soon recognized for his ability, Cain was awarded third class medals in 1851 and 1863, and also received a prize for his work at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. During this period, Cain was prolific and received numerous important commissions. After 1868 he spent much of his time on monumental statuary, including a massive equestrian statue of Duke Charles of Brunswick for the City of Geneva (1879).
Cast at the F. Bardienne Foundry in Paris, Tigress and Cubs was presented in 1867 to the Board of Commissioners of Central Park by twelve New York citizens, including artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse (1791 & 1872). The piece was placed in a wooded area on a rock outcropping near the lake. In 1934, it was relocated to the Central Park Zoo, and after the 1988 renovation of the zoo, it took its current position in a protected setting between the Intelligence Garden and the Tropical Zone. In 1996, the Central Park Conservancy’s Sculpture Conservation Program conserved the statue. Though real tigers no longer roam the Central Park Wildlife Conservation Center, Cain’s masterful bronze continues to delight zoo patrons.
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Central Park Wildlife Conservation Center
Central Park’s zoo was almost not meant to be. The park’s designers, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) excluded any zoo from their 1858 plan for Central Park. Yet shortly after construction of the park began a bear cub was left in the custody of a park messenger boy, Philip Holmes. Holmes took care of the bear, and before long a temporary collection of animals grew in and around the park’s headquarters at the Arsenal.
Responding to this ad hoc situation the commissioners of the park sought an alternate location which would not compromise the pastoral landscape. State legislation in 1861 authorized that a portion of [Central Park], not exceeding sixty acres [be set aside] for the establishment of a zoological garden; Vaux prepared a plan for Manhattan Square, today the site of the American Museum of Natural