Got distracted by a park
There’s this park I like to go to just north of Houston Street and west of Broadway. We call it “the Soviet park” because it’s in the courtyard between two large Soviet-looking apartment buildings. The park has distinct seating areas and trees for shade and a very serene water feature. It feels nice the way a museum feels nice: a space designed to be enjoyed.
But while being in the park feels good, getting to the park feels bad. The buildings enclosing it are too big, each the length of three city blocks and 17 stories high. Matt says they remind him of downtown Croydon, the South London town where he’s from. It was destroyed by Nazi bombers during World War II and rebuilt largely in concrete, making it “distinctive only in how indistinct it is, the kind of place where Ikea is a landmark.” He says it’s weird to get a whiff of Croydon in New York, that the whole block feels like an architectural no-go zone.
Which is why it’s surprising, really, that it took me several months of visiting this little urban oasis for me to realize two things: one, that it’s technically not open to the public, and two, that the man largely responsible for its existence is the infamous planner Robert Moses.
Regarding it not being open to the public, let me first say that there aren’t any explicit signs, but maybe that’s because they aren’t needed, the block’s keep-out architecture is doing the job just fine, evidenced by the fact that there’s no one ever there.
“Keep out design” — that is classic Moses, who seemed almost comically evil, destroying communities to build highways and massive ugly buildings that spanned blocks. If you’ve ever walked around New York and thought, god, why is there a massive road here, it’s probably because of him. So it was jarring to discover that this place I like so much was a product of his taking his big red marker to a map of Manhattan.
We recently watched a documentary about the showdown between Moses and activist Jane Jacobs. She wanted to preserve the character and humanness of the city, and in the West Village, she won. But not before whole swaths of the Bronx and Lower East Side were reduced from brownstones and storefronts to highways and superblocks. Now I know that this little bit of Manhattan was razed by him, too. But while the before and after photos are a real bummer, I know that what’s here — housing for students and families, this basically if not technically public park — is likely better than the alternative. The blocks that Jacobs did save, that is, the rest of the West Village, now primarily house brownstones for billionaires, chain stores, empty storefronts. Surely not what she had in mind.
Washington Square Park, though, which Jacobs famously kept from becoming a highway, is still exactly what Jacobs had in mind, the “sidewalk ballet” made real. It’s just a few blocks away, and while the Soviet park is quiet, empty, calm, Washington Square Park is loud, vibrant, alive. You’ve got your chess players, your kiddie play area, your big dog run, your small dog run, your sax players, your street artists, your tourists, your pigeon people, your shirtless yoga people, your bikini sunbathers, your park nappers, your bench sleepers, your college kids, your squirrels, your birds, your whole milieu. This park rarely fails to give me a zing of “New York!”
I end up in Washington Square Park at least a couple times each weekend. Sometimes I head to the east side and chill under a nice tree, sometimes I meet Matt on the south side, where we sit on a bench and look at the small dogs.
But sometimes I like to walk right through it, hang a right at the east entrance, make my way to the Soviet park. I still go regularly, even since finding out it’s technically not for me. The solitude it offers is too enticing to give up. Plus, I’ve never seen anyone patrolling, though I imagine that even if I did, I’d be overlooked. I guess you can call that park privilege, or maybe it’s just the regular kind. I’ll keep going until I can’t anymore, whether it’s torn down or locked up or they put a guard at the gate. I’ve accepted one of those things will happen eventually. Nothing stays the same in New York.
Watercolor by Matt Davis
Referenced :
Ric Burns’ “New York” documentary, clip featuring Moses v. Jacobs
An aerial photo of the Soviet park (and apartment blocks), just after they were built
