Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Ordinarily, commenting on people who live within five blocks is not advisable, in my book. One doesn't want to unlist one?s phone number, and prefers to be greeted with friendly nods instead of facing clenched jaws. But this Aldon James /Sharen Benenson Gramercy Park brouhaha has boiled over our neighborhood borders, and it is time to give outside people a proper perspective. Now that a lawsuit of racial exclusion has been filed against two of the three Park trustees, next thing you know this paper will be flooded with barrages of letters by partisans, and the rest of the city will start viewing us as the local Appalachian Valley, with the Hatfields and McCoys on the prowl, racoon dogs unleashed (we already have too many of the latter, unleashed dogs, that is). Courts may move to invalidate the trust, and, horrors, real estate values may suffer. But I digress.
The true nature of the unfortunate James/Benenson controversy has been dwelt upon over the years by the sensationalist press (that includes the New York Times). It is essentially a long-lasting disagreement about neighborhood priorities by two brilliant, stubborn, strong-willed and highly motivated neighborhood activists, concerned with the well-being of their neighborhood and their city.
The conflict erupted when Sherry Benenson, head of the Gramercy Park trustees, cut down the notorious twelve park trees seven Springs ago. She had advice from arborists to do it, it was stated to be for the protection of the people who use the park, and for the neighborhood. She was sued. That the park trees are aged and can fall was evidenced by two subsequent events - one huge tree falling within the park, around the time of the first court edict in favor of the trustees, and a major branch toppling into the landmarked park fence, narrowly missing a children's nurse and her charge, just a year or so ago.
Sherry's protectiveness extends into strict enforcement of the Park rules access for outside visitors. When authorized keyholders (such as parkside tenants who pay $275 for the privilege) bring a friend or three, yes, by all means, but they cannot bring entire groups. I found out about that myself, after attempting to take a small party of Stuyvesant Town seniors on a tour inside the park two years ago. I got a rocket. Benenson, who says it like it is and then some, was defending the 170-years old indenture of the property, a trust owned by the proprietors of the 44 lots surrounding the Park, that provides for ?quiet enjoyment of the Park? by residents (an expensive enjoyment; Parkside property values are much higher than those of the surrounding area). It has served as the legal basis for rejections of requests for admissions of groups since Samuel B. Ruggles, the Founder, established the Trust. Admitting a group of any kind would be discriminatory, no matter how laudatory the cause, hence the strict aplication of the indenture. By insisting on bringing in guided tours I would make the Trustees guilty of discrimination. By the end of the lecture I felt guilty enough to cut my wrists, or at least change my name and leave town. But there was no racism. To me, any racial bias on part of any of the three trustees is totally inconceivable. I know them for a decade or more, each of them does volunteer work with minority kids and adults, year after year.
The zeal of Sharen Benenson and the majority Park trustees in pruning the trees and protecting the private nature of the park has been a problem for Aldon James, longtime president of the National Arts Club. The perceived arbitrariness of the cutting of the trees has led the NAC into a long and still continued sequence of legal actions against the Park trustees, although the court decisions have favored the defendants. The NAC leadership apparently feels very strongly on the issue, and is willing to spend substantial sums to continue the lawsuits. The neighbors of the Park, when questioned about the issues, express discomfort, and their wishes that the whole scene should go away. One source indicated that the Park has spent some $250,000 of dues for legal defense, and the lot owners would rather spend the money on flowers. The NAC may have laid out two or three times that amount of dues money in legal fees.
Two years ago, the use of poisons in the park to limit rats brought on a barrage of letters to the editor of this paper, mostly condemning the Park leadership. Park visitors wrote of seeing children cry over inadvertently crippled squirrels and birds in the park. The poisons were discontinued, the conflict became intensified.
An event on April 4, 2000 brought the Park not just into the eyes of the neighborhood but exposed it to the criticism of the city. Aldon James, an education activist, brought 55 teenagers from the Washington Irving High School into the park, for a nature study, to iodentify city trees. To anyone who knows Sherry Benenson it would be evident that this would be like waving a red cloth to a bull in Pamplona. The reaction was instantaneous, the head of the Park trustees stormed in, demanded that the unauthorized visitors leave, and requested police to arrest them. At least that was what it looked like in the New York Post page Six article. There were intimations of racism.
Since then, on June 9, a member of the NAC brought 15 children from PS/IS217, all the way out of Roosevelt Island, further provoking Ms. Benenson. Her reaction was as expected. Now a non-resident, presumably a well-intentioned civil rights activist, has funded a federal lawsuit accusing the park leadership of racial exclusion. Next thing you know, Rev. Al Sharpton will be picketing us.
This is what is causing me to speak up. It is no pleasure. The neighborhood is being unjustly punished. If there is a better neighborhood in the city, in terms of social conscience, I'd like to know. I have been taking the pulse of this area as chairman of the Committee to Save the Police Academy, since 1986, and as Coordinator of Volunteers of the Brotherhood Synagogue's Homeless Shelter, since 1982, as a sometime co-president of the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association, and as participant in a dozen or two of other activities. The people of T&V Country - and that most assuredly includes Gramercy - are the most socially responsive and participatory among New Yorkers, in terms of time, money and support. We have associations of volunteers that take care of our parks, of the homeless, of hospitals, of schools. We have some 12 hospitals and clinics, six methadone centers, five homeless shelters, welfare offices and distribution centers, and a constant traffic of people from all over the city, including unfortunates, street people, addicts, coffee cup people; we accept all people, and we volunteer to help. Contrast that with residential areas in the other boroughs, where residents fight tooth and nail to keep out the homeless and other unfortunates. We do not deserve the stigma of racism. We do not deserve political ploys that use children as their pawns to give the neighborhood an ugly name.
Gramercy Park is a private property, and requires care. The neighborhood has been happy with the professional care and the time Ms Benenson spends there, digging and planting. (She is a highly qualified gardener, and her volunteer activities include being Chairman of the Horticultural Society of NY, and a volunteer and member of the Council of New York's Botanical Garden). I've been informed that, in anticipation of an election of Gramercy Park trustees, to fill the two vacancies, an informal neighborhood support group has formed, and it has ample strength to assure the continuation of the present balance.
There is need for some form of reconciliation between the parties. Frankly, I think first we must recognize the contributions both parties have made to the neighborhood and to the city. Mr. James has made the NAC a major art center and cultural support organization in the city, even in the nation. A Benenson/James Award of Merit, for neighborhood activists would be appropriate. Issued by one of the major activist organizations (Concerned Citizens Speak, Gramercy Neighborhood Associates, St.George?s/Calvary Episcopal Church or Brotherhood Synagogue), the first recipients of this medal should be the two partisans in the actions. I would even sacrifice the hallowed name of the Washington Irving High School (his presence in the neighborhood is a myth, anyway) and rename it the Benenson/James or James /Benenson High School. Mind you, these proposals are off the top of my head. I’m willing to take positive ideas from the readership, in fact I’m looking for them. Rancor we have a surfeit of, now we need our own Oslo, a successful one.
Wally Dobelis is not a Gramercy resident, and does not own a key to the Park

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Utopia, the Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, is the subject of an ambitious program of exhibits and programs organized by the Bibliotheque nationale of France and the New York Public Library. The 550 objects are exhibited on the 1st and 3rd Floors of the NYPL at 42nd Stret and Fifth Avenue, and will close January 27, 2001. Run, do not walk, to catch the show.
If the thought of seeing what philosophers, social reformers and dreamers of two millenia envisioned as improvements to this vale of tears makes you yawn, don’t. Think of it as an art show, an opportunity of seeing books at their most glorious, when the printed word was created for the masses (allright, for the many), yet imitating the precious forms of beauty painfully formed by the hands of monk/artists in their cells, who sometimes took years to copy a single text, with illustrations. In this exhibit you will see some of the best early books, incunabula created as copies of illuminated manuscripts, depicting imaginary people, their dwellings, and continents that never existed. Garden of Eden appears in several varieties, including one by Theodore de Bry, better known for his 1590 American Indians, perfect physical specimens with no sagging busoms, who live in an idealized state of nature (although they roast and eat their enemy prisoners);
The search for utopia started with the one that man lost - Adam and Eve’s Paradise - and continued, with Saint Augustine’s City of God, with dreams of the golden Jerusalem ( although there are earlier intimations, in Plato and in Ovid’s Golden Age). The Medieval land of Cocaigne was a poor people’s paradise, with plenty of food and sex, whereas Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia was virtue-dominated. He invented the term, derived from the Greek "a place that never was" (as in topography and topology), An ideal one would be eutopia, and a terrible one distopia - as the ones created by Hitler and Stalin, whose posters proclaimed workers’ paradises, with the "progress" produced by concentration camp and Gulag labor. The exhibits and the films shown on the 3rd Floor provide the graphic evidence (don’t forget to look at the books that warned us, by Upton Sinclair, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell). Then, there are the modern industrial realities, as exemplified by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and photographs of men and machines, the warnings - H.G. Wells and Upton Sinclair - and the withdrawals from main-stream life, see the flower children of the 1960s
Utopia can be fun - think of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver who wakes tied up by the tiny Lilliputs (there is a modern counterpart of an astronaut flat down, surrounded by ant-like space aliens). Swift gave us also the giant Brobdingnagians, the noble horse-like Houyhnhnms whose language has no word for lies and the gross humanYahoos whose language is nothing but lies (what a counterculture name for an information system; did the corporate founders really know what they were doing? That reminds me of the unsuccessful builder, who advertised his houses as Jerry-built.). Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is utopian, as are the several modern imaginary voyages that come to mind (some are hoaxes, such as Walter Traprock, Joan Lowell, the London pretender who invented a Formosn language, none of which are included in this exhibit).
Of great American interest are the early maps, Amerigo Vespucci’s booklet that gave America a name, and the Columbus Letter, Sebastian Munster’s map and the Green Globe of 1506 with its shapely South America, seldom seen in exhibits . Now you have a chance. A striking American example of an Utopian thinker is Thomas Jefferson, who transcribed his original Declaration uf Independence, underlining the passages deleted by his editors, the Second Continental Congress, including a long one condemning slavery. Jefferson characterized their work as mutilation, and sent five hand-copied transcripts to his friends (three have survived). Let the Jeffersonian detractors put that in their pipes and smoke.
Of yet more American interest are the architectural planners of ideal cities - William Penn, who successfully squared off Philadellphia in 1682, and Governor Oglethorpe who did the same with Savannah. Frank Lloyd Wright, the New York grid of 1811, the Washington, DC. diagonals of Pierre L’Enfant, although mentioned in the catalog, are not part of the exhibit. American utopian societies - the Shakers, Mormons and some communities - are represented in the exhibit.
Some 17 institutions, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Donnell branch, China Institute and CUNY are participants in the exhibit consortium. A fine weighty tome, Utopia, The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, price $27.50), edited by the exhibit’s curator, Roland Schaer of the BnF, with Gregory Claeys of the University of London and Lyman Tower Sargent of the University of Missouri, is a veritable cultural history of the European and American experience.
We have found the phrase missing from last week’s column, third paragraph. It reads:
"Room stylists" clean up after you,