
Mark your calendars and come out for the second Walking Tour if you missed the first!
Walking Tour: Washington Square Park Past, Present, and Future: A Guide to New York City’s Redesign of a Perfect Public Space * Sunday, July 27th, 12 noon.
Meet up at Washington Square Arch, Fifth Avenue and Washington Square North
* $5 * (Raindate: Sunday, August 3rd)
TRAINS: A,B,C,D,E,F to West 4th Street/Washington Square
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Washington Square Park Blog and Washington Square Community Improvement District(CID) present this unique walking tour of Washington Square Park.
Washington Square Park Blog will offer a guide to the redesign of Washington Square Park combined with history of this wonderful Park.
Some background on the redesign of Washington Square Park :
The pretext: They say they want to align the fountain with the Arch.
In the 1890s, noted architect Stanford White purposefully kept the two unaligned, and that way has worked just fine – thank you very much – for over a century. About this magnificent fountain, Jane Jacobs writes: “In effect, this [fountain] is a circular arena, a theater in the round, and that is how it is used, with complete confusion as to who are spectators and who are the show.”
The reality: They are cutting away public space to control public gatherings and un-permitted performances.
The City is:
• Digging up 18th Century and 19th Century burial grounds
• Ruining the historic nature of the park with much reduction in public space
• Chainsawing 40 to 80-year-old trees (14 cut down thus far. Plans allow for more to be felled.)
• Fencing in the Park
• Removing the famed chess tables (and rebuilding SOME of them)
• Dismantling the large circular Fountain, which also serves as public rallying venue, rebuilding it in a much smaller version eight yards away with vast reduction of the ad-hoc seating
* Renaming the fountain (a plaque on each side) for the billionaire Tisch Family media tycoons … after the Tisch family contributed $2.5 million to the Mayor’s Fund.
• Adding lawn space — more “picture perfect” for NYU’s graduation ceremonies.
• Narrowing the public walkways
* Spending $25-30 Million on this unwanted redesign (the original budget was an already high $16 million; it has now skyrocketed past that).
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Hope to see you — !
sickening, but not unexpected. Welcome to McHattan! Land of the dead, land of the survivors, and all the developers for whom the Biblical verse: “The love of money is the root of all evil” fully applies.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for stopping by! I just went to your site and saw the photo of the Voice billboard “welcome to McHattan” – never heard that expression before you wrote it above.
What’s happening at Washington Square Park just reflects back what’s happening across the city.
I appreciate your documentation of it all.
Take care-
Cathryn
WSP Blog