Disorientation Guide to NYU (students moved in this weekend!) includes WSP article within it

Downtown Manhattan, NYU Flags Abound
Downtown Manhattan, NYU Flags Abound

Politics as Puppetry Blog has the whole Disorientation Guide to NYU available for download. It contains material on Activism at NYU, a Flow Chart to How NYU Works, Taking Back NYU, Who the Trustees are, and more!

They write: “The Disorientation Guide is a growing tradition at NYU – the first one was published at the beginning of the 2002 school year, and students have published a new edition annually since.”

They asked WSP Blog to write a piece for the Disorientation Guide about what’s going on at Washington Square Park for new students to make them aware, engaged and hopefully involved. I’ve posted it below:

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Washington Square Park is world famous for the art, culture, music, politics, and community that has transpired there in its over 150 years as a public park in New York City. For NYC government under Mayor Bloomberg, its importance has become magnified because of its location in the midst of prime real estate in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. New York University owns much of (close to all) the real estate that surrounds the Park. The University rarely misses an opportunity to feature the historic Washington Square Arch in its advertising and promotional materials. The Park is the setting of NYU’s graduation ceremony.

In more recent years, due to neglect by the New York City Parks Department, Washington Square Park — while remaining vital to music, politics, art, students, tourists, people of all ages and from all backgrounds — was looking a little rough around the edges. That didn’t stop it from being a place where people gather in unique ways. A national organization called Project for Public Spaces did a study of Washington Square Park in 2005 and said, “As a neighborhood park and civic gathering place, it may be one of the great public spaces in the world.”

The New York City Parks Department is presently in the midst of a redesign of Washington Square Park. Currently in Phase I (of three phases), this “renovation” is really a complete overhaul of this historic, beloved space. The redesign will: align the Fountain with the Arch (after 137 years unaligned) at Fifth Avenue which entails moving the Fountain 23 feet east, level the unique ‘sunken plaza’ around the Fountain, reduce dramatically the public gathering space around the fountain, add more lawn, reduce the width of the pathways and areas at the corners of the Park, move the two dog runs, lose the small alcoves (sitting areas) on the northern and eastern sides of the Park, and basically move close to every piece of the Park into a different location.

Washington Square Park has been a counter-balance to

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