Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Stuyvesant Square Park celebrates Spring
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Visiting the West Park is a joy for the soul. The bushes are green, and although the crab apple, weeping cherry (there’s one near the 2nd Ave entrance), red bud, hawthorn, dogwood (a magnificent one at South entrance) and pear trees might be past their bloom (sorry, my spring alert was late this year), they are full of foliage. The aura of peonies, roses, rhododendrons (white and purple). irises (nearly finished), calibrachoa (small purple petunia, and newly planted lobelia, pot wine and impatience smoothes the spirits of the day that plague us. Come visit, and sit for a while, or walk around.
There is a new effort to keep the park up, the Stuyvesant Square Community Alliance (SSCA), founded in August 2006, that describes itself as a group of organizations, schools, businesses, institutions and individuals living and working around Stuyvesant Square Park, focused on the betterment of the park through community-driven projects and events. It was founded with the assistance of the NYC Partnership for Parks, an organization of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, whose Manhattan Outreach Coordinator Catherine Ponte at 212-408-0214 is listed as a contact person (also stuyvesantsquare@yahoo.com). The leader I met is local resident Phyllis Mangels. On Sunday June 1 SSCA had its first fundraiser in the Park, also hosted by our very active Parks gardener, Christie Dailey. Plastic bunting decorated the Park, and local people and Friends School students sold cookies, pastry and $2 and $5 potted annuals for planting in the park, which was done immediately, along the north fence, by Christie’s volunteers.
Young women in green Parks Department shirts had brought groups of Manhattan children to enjoy the Cinderella puppet show, presented by the Puppets in the Park, a Swedish Cottage Theatre traveling troupe sponsored by the City Parks Foundation. Local residents and parents with children in strollers, alerted by posters and Christy’s e-mail, came in groups and brought along their friends, and fun was had by all.
SSCA lists as their participants the Friends Quarterly Meeting and Seminary, Manhattan Comprehensive High School, Hospital for Joint Diseases, Garden of Forgiveness (Friends 9/11 memorial), Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship, Parks Department and its Foundation, and Stuyvesant Park Dog Owners Group, who maintain and police the off-leash dog run, maintained during specified hours in the East Park.
Last mentioned was Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association, Inc. (SPNA), which deserves special mention. SPNA the residents’ group founded in the late 1960s, with 200 dues-paying members, presided over by Rosalee Isaly,one of its earliest members, has been zealously protecting the Historic District (awarded 1975) and individual Landmarks designations of the area, and raising several thousand dollars a year to pay for the paeks' summer maintenance help and flowers. It has been working toward restoration of the park fences, the largest free-standing fences in the city. In the mid 1980s, after hard joint effort with a dedicated Parks architect, the late Rex Wassermann, it managed to connect with federal ISTEA highway funds to restore the West fence, at a cost in seven figures (hard times closed further funds for the East fence).
SPNA lost a Landmarks designation of the Dvorak House, at 328 East 17th Street, the residence of the Czech composer in the 1890s (when he directed the Music Academy, on the site of the now Washington Irving High School, learned the Blues from a Black St. George’s choir singer. and wrote the New World Symphony here), when Beth Israel Hospital persuaded the City Counsel to let them convert it to the Maplethorpe AIDS Center. Nothing daunted, SPNA was material in a joint effort with the Dvorak American Heritage Association (DAHA) and Jaromila Novotna, the late Czech Metropolitan Opera star, in rescuing the Ivan Mestrovic statue of Dvorak from benign neglect at the Avery Fisher Hall and placing it in the East Park corner, across from his former residence, and raising the $40K endowment that Parks Department requires for maintenance.
The landscaping has been recently refreshed (is it thanks to the Greenacre Foundation, its sometime benefactors?), but there is some concern about the handicapped-equipped park benches that the Hospital for Joint Diseases has placed near the statue, out of character with the Park’s ambiance (note that alittle green and white paint would cure most of the pain), without approval of CB6, Landmarks Commission and Arts Commission. However, it was accepted by an assistant head of the entire Parks and Recreation Department, to the regrets of the hardline preservationist contingent of the SPNA, who have been concerned with the Parks Department philosophy of making the city’s recreation facilities self-supporting, with inserting restaurants, particularly in landmarked areas. Over the years there have been several Parks Department attempts to find a restaurant owner to redo the closed brick utilities building in the East Park as a food kiosk.
Others may disagree, but as a former co-President of SPNA I should like to see the maintenance of parks for the tax –paying residents to be a City function, less commercialized,ith local residents pitching in on a non-commercial basis, when the city runs out of steam. SPNA has done so over the years, as a recent instance filling the North side of the West Park with blooms, with a minimal investment of $2,000 for flowers, bought directly, with more to come for the area facing St. George’s. This is a small fraction of the money the city has expended when gardening in the East Park with a landscaper, paying heavy administrative overhead. People cooperate, and Stuyvesant Park has received person to person voluntarily donated plants from Stuyvesant Town and Union Square,On the hottest Saturday a week later SPNA held its main fund-raising even, a flea market on 2nd Avenue where it bisects the parks (hence the 1985 ISTEA generosity), a major venue for dedicated SPNA members to recruit more neighbors. This type of dedication has for years underwritten the parks’ maintenance shortfalls. Walking through the West park, we found a Parks employee carefully feeding water to a plastic bag surrounding a new hawthorn that arrived two weeks ago and might suffer transplantation shock in the excessive heat, another example of dedication.
With this amount of attention from truly well-meaning people. City and local, the Stuyvesant Square parks are really blessed and should flourish forever – as long as people can cooperate without worry about kicking order considerations. To close, a brief heartfelt in memoriam for Jan Hird Pokorny {1914-5/12/2008), the Czech-born architect and Landmarks commissioner who was the main mover in bringing the statue of Antonin Dvorak to the Park.
Visiting the West Park is a joy for the soul. The bushes are green, and although the crab apple, weeping cherry (there’s one near the 2nd Ave entrance), red bud, hawthorn, dogwood (a magnificent one at South entrance) and pear trees might be past their bloom (sorry, my spring alert was late this year), they are full of foliage. The aura of peonies, roses, rhododendrons (white and purple). irises (nearly finished), calibrachoa (small purple petunia, and newly planted lobelia, pot wine and impatience smoothes the spirits of the day that plague us. Come visit, and sit for a while, or walk around.
There is a new effort to keep the park up, the Stuyvesant Square Community Alliance (SSCA), founded in August 2006, that describes itself as a group of organizations, schools, businesses, institutions and individuals living and working around Stuyvesant Square Park, focused on the betterment of the park through community-driven projects and events. It was founded with the assistance of the NYC Partnership for Parks, an organization of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, whose Manhattan Outreach Coordinator Catherine Ponte at 212-408-0214 is listed as a contact person (also stuyvesantsquare@yahoo.com). The leader I met is local resident Phyllis Mangels. On Sunday June 1 SSCA had its first fundraiser in the Park, also hosted by our very active Parks gardener, Christie Dailey. Plastic bunting decorated the Park, and local people and Friends School students sold cookies, pastry and $2 and $5 potted annuals for planting in the park, which was done immediately, along the north fence, by Christie’s volunteers.
Young women in green Parks Department shirts had brought groups of Manhattan children to enjoy the Cinderella puppet show, presented by the Puppets in the Park, a Swedish Cottage Theatre traveling troupe sponsored by the City Parks Foundation. Local residents and parents with children in strollers, alerted by posters and Christy’s e-mail, came in groups and brought along their friends, and fun was had by all.
SSCA lists as their participants the Friends Quarterly Meeting and Seminary, Manhattan Comprehensive High School, Hospital for Joint Diseases, Garden of Forgiveness (Friends 9/11 memorial), Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship, Parks Department and its Foundation, and Stuyvesant Park Dog Owners Group, who maintain and police the off-leash dog run, maintained during specified hours in the East Park.
Last mentioned was Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association, Inc. (SPNA), which deserves special mention. SPNA the residents’ group founded in the late 1960s, with 200 dues-paying members, presided over by Rosalee Isaly,one of its earliest members, has been zealously protecting the Historic District (awarded 1975) and individual Landmarks designations of the area, and raising several thousand dollars a year to pay for the paeks' summer maintenance help and flowers. It has been working toward restoration of the park fences, the largest free-standing fences in the city. In the mid 1980s, after hard joint effort with a dedicated Parks architect, the late Rex Wassermann, it managed to connect with federal ISTEA highway funds to restore the West fence, at a cost in seven figures (hard times closed further funds for the East fence).
SPNA lost a Landmarks designation of the Dvorak House, at 328 East 17th Street, the residence of the Czech composer in the 1890s (when he directed the Music Academy, on the site of the now Washington Irving High School, learned the Blues from a Black St. George’s choir singer. and wrote the New World Symphony here), when Beth Israel Hospital persuaded the City Counsel to let them convert it to the Maplethorpe AIDS Center. Nothing daunted, SPNA was material in a joint effort with the Dvorak American Heritage Association (DAHA) and Jaromila Novotna, the late Czech Metropolitan Opera star, in rescuing the Ivan Mestrovic statue of Dvorak from benign neglect at the Avery Fisher Hall and placing it in the East Park corner, across from his former residence, and raising the $40K endowment that Parks Department requires for maintenance.
The landscaping has been recently refreshed (is it thanks to the Greenacre Foundation, its sometime benefactors?), but there is some concern about the handicapped-equipped park benches that the Hospital for Joint Diseases has placed near the statue, out of character with the Park’s ambiance (note that alittle green and white paint would cure most of the pain), without approval of CB6, Landmarks Commission and Arts Commission. However, it was accepted by an assistant head of the entire Parks and Recreation Department, to the regrets of the hardline preservationist contingent of the SPNA, who have been concerned with the Parks Department philosophy of making the city’s recreation facilities self-supporting, with inserting restaurants, particularly in landmarked areas. Over the years there have been several Parks Department attempts to find a restaurant owner to redo the closed brick utilities building in the East Park as a food kiosk.
Others may disagree, but as a former co-President of SPNA I should like to see the maintenance of parks for the tax –paying residents to be a City function, less commercialized,ith local residents pitching in on a non-commercial basis, when the city runs out of steam. SPNA has done so over the years, as a recent instance filling the North side of the West Park with blooms, with a minimal investment of $2,000 for flowers, bought directly, with more to come for the area facing St. George’s. This is a small fraction of the money the city has expended when gardening in the East Park with a landscaper, paying heavy administrative overhead. People cooperate, and Stuyvesant Park has received person to person voluntarily donated plants from Stuyvesant Town and Union Square,On the hottest Saturday a week later SPNA held its main fund-raising even, a flea market on 2nd Avenue where it bisects the parks (hence the 1985 ISTEA generosity), a major venue for dedicated SPNA members to recruit more neighbors. This type of dedication has for years underwritten the parks’ maintenance shortfalls. Walking through the West park, we found a Parks employee carefully feeding water to a plastic bag surrounding a new hawthorn that arrived two weeks ago and might suffer transplantation shock in the excessive heat, another example of dedication.
With this amount of attention from truly well-meaning people. City and local, the Stuyvesant Square parks are really blessed and should flourish forever – as long as people can cooperate without worry about kicking order considerations. To close, a brief heartfelt in memoriam for Jan Hird Pokorny {1914-5/12/2008), the Czech-born architect and Landmarks commissioner who was the main mover in bringing the statue of Antonin Dvorak to the Park.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 9:19 PM 
