in and around the park, public space, NYC & more
Updated 9/5 This relates to Washington Square Park: There’s a larger story around privatization of public parks: how our public spaces are being used to fatten bank accounts and raise social capital. The New York … Read more…
The answer is to abolish private park corporations (and, yes, that’s what they are – private corporations) The New York Daily News this past week ran an Op-Ed by professor/author Kevin Loughran on private conservancies … Read more…
from left to right: Justine Leguizamo, Veronica Bulgari, Gwen Evans, Betsey Ely Last week, Gothamist ran an explosive piece, Mission Creep: Emails Show how Wealthy Donors Exerted Influence Over Washington Square Park outlining exactly that. … Read more…
ICYMI, Harpers in its July issue featured an article, The Death of a Once Great City: The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence. It is definitely worth reading, touches upon the … Read more…
Look at Madison Square Park 1893 minus Shake Shack! The park seems to have retained the ‘bones’ and basic layout of that era. What is obviously missing is the Shake Shack: it started out as … Read more…
In June of 2017, Washington Square Park was on the Community Board 2 Parks Committee meeting agenda after a long absence. Also on the agenda was the (controversial) private Washington Square Park Conservancy. At that … Read more…
Updated | Guest Op-Ed by Robert Lederman While posing as an advocate for the arts, Friends of the High Line, a private park conservancy that runs NYC’s most high profile public park, has been working … Read more…
Before the High Line was built into what exists today, people walked around with petitions, “Save the High Line!”, in an attempt to preserve its tracks and surroundings which had been unattended for close to … Read more…
“When cities rely on private donors, we end up with sterile, controlled environments,” states the preface to a recent New York Times Op Ed, How Parks Lose Their Playfulness. The piece delves into the redesign … Read more…
Updated Vanishing New York, the book, released late last month, is a more thought-out, expanded version of the Vanishing New York blog, run by Jeremiah Moss since 2007. The blog has been popular from its … Read more…
Updated – I’ve noted at this blog how the community around Washington Square fought back against a typical private conservancy model at the iconic park for years, choosing for the historic public space to remain … Read more…
Washington Square Park Blog began over nine years ago with the intention of chronicling the redesign of Washington Square Park. Although the contentious redesign of the park and its construction is mostly complete (the sidewalk … Read more…
Call it a victory for our environment, fish, wildlife and public space! At last, they came out ahead of the almighty dollar. Pier 55, the $200 million extravagant performing space set to be built atop … Read more…
Threat of Privatization Places Storied Public Space at Risk for Sanitized Change Apart from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Washington Square Park has been New York City‘s second most popular protest spot in the Trump … Read more…
I have written about the issues with privatization of public space here and here and also at The Huffington Post, and so, this article from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance news feed, The Public Good, … Read more…