The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  “There used to be concerts and dance recitals in the park, but Arlene Harrison is afraid of who’ll show up,” Mr. James said in an interview last week. “It would be much truer to the spirit of the place if more people from the community could use it.”

  The Rescue of Prospect Park

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | May 27, 1990

  The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza forms the main entrance to Prospect Park.

  ARMIES OF PICNICKERS, MANY LUGGING elaborate barbecuing gear, will descend on Prospect Park in Brooklyn this Memorial Day weekend. Others will come just to sit or sleep or sip in the Long Meadow, six times the size of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park and said to be the longest continuous open space in any American urban park. “Coming to the park is like taking a bath,” said a 60-year-old man who has been a regular for half a century. “I leave with a refreshed mind.”

  This essay will stroll through the optimistic origins and triumphant rise of this 526-acre patch of green, pause to consider its decades-long decline, then let out a bit of a hoot over its resurgence.

  In the 1860’s, the value of Brooklyn’s manufactured goods and its population had both burgeoned. But just across the East River, Manhattan was growing faster and richer. Brooklyn was in danger of becoming a dumping ground for Gotham’s most obnoxious industries, bone-boiling for one. And as the cost of Manhattan living surged, more poor people arrived on the busy ferries. By building a park arguably superior even to the newly completed Central Park, Brooklyn’s city fathers hoped to lure affluent residents and increase the tax base.

  Enter the kings of park design. Frederick Law Olmsted, a social philosopher, and Calvert Vaux, an architect, first collaborated on Central Park, begun in 1859. Prospect Park, begun in 1866, was their next achievement, the one Olmsted always deemed greatest. These two visionaries working together, and then Olmsted working alone, would leave their mark on magnificent parks from Buffalo to Chicago to Montreal to Seattle to the Capitol.

  From the beginning, Prospect Park fulfilled its joyful purpose. Sepia photographs show Sunday-only gentry and a flock of sheep crowded on the Long Meadow. There was a wind-powered carousel on the lake, a penful of deer in the woods. Traditions coalesced: fishing contests, ice carnivals, Maypole dancing. In the 1930’s, parks commissioner and master planner Robert Moses brought more pedestrian but utilitarian things—a zoo, bandshell and skating rink with all the charm of a freeway Howard Johnson’s.

  After the Korean War, the world and Prospect Park changed. Soldiers bought houses in the suburbs; poor blacks forced from their homes by urban renewal landed in the houses of those who left. By the 1960’s, the Dodgers and neighboring Ebbets Field were history and Brooklyn was a sadder place.

  By the mid-1970’s, the fiscal crisis had dealt more brutal blows. Maintenance grew dreadful; buildings were boarded up. A poll showed 44 percent of New Yorkers thought no one should ever venture into the park.

  But as money came back to the city, people came back to the park. A park administrator was appointed in 1980; a torrent of volunteers has also descended. The Prospect Park Alliance, formed in 1987 by prominent private citizens deeply committed to the park. Though much poorer than the Central Park Conservancy, the alliance represents a watchdog, a high-powered independent advocate in case City Hall, in the words of the park administrator, Tupper Thomas, “drops the ball.”

  Coney Island is Alive! Step Right Up and See for Yourself!

  By ALAN FEUER | April 4, 2009

  Luna Park in Coney Island, 1912.

  CONEY ISLAND WAS LOOKING PRETTY GOOD for being dead. A new gear had been put on the Wonder Wheel. The sun licked at the windows of the Freak Bar. There was the smell of fresh-laid paint. Last September, when the Astroland amusement park was shut down in a battle with its landlord, erroneous reports went out around the world that all of Coney Island was a corpse. Overnight, it seemed, obituaries were composed.

  But the rumors of demise had been exaggerated greatly. All of Coney Island, from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs to the world-renowned Cyclone, had not dropped off the Boardwalk into the sea.

  “They’re all surprised when I tell them we’re still open,” said a frustrated Dennis Vourderis, whose family has run the Wonder Wheel for more than 40 years. “Unfortunately, the press did a great job announcing Astroland had closed, so now people think that Coney Island is closed.”

  The blame for the confusion has fallen partly on an inattentive public and partly on the media, which flocked to Coney Island last fall to cover the removal of Astroland’s iconic six-ton rocket as if it were a visit from the pope.

  “The thing is, we ain’t closed,” said Jimmy Carchiolo, an old salt with a pigskin voice who has run a dart game behind the Wonder Wheel for 43 years.

  Ever since the first carousel was installed on Surf Avenue in 1876, Coney Island has been a jumble of competing institutions, an amusement park cooperative of sorts. Today, there is the Cyclone, Nathan’s, the Wonder Wheel, KeySpan Park, the New York Aquarium, the Coney Island Circus Sideshow and the Coney Island Museum.

  The separate parts exist together, squabbling and sharing like a family, and giving off a tribal fractured energy, a mirror of New York’s.

  “People think amusement parks are Disney World, where you pay one price and enter at the gate,” said Aaron Beebe, the director of the museum. “But Coney Island isn’t like that. It isn’t homogenized. It has lots of moving parts.”

  But the mood is such that 2009 is already known as the Second Annual Last Summer. Joseph J. Sitt, a developer who owns most of the land in Coney Island, has proposed to bring in shopping malls and large Las Vegas-style hotels.

  “It always feels like New York is on the edge of losing its soul,” he said, “and Coney Island represents that.”

  The Forest Premeditated

  By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN | June 16, 2008

  SPEND SOME TIME AT THE NEW YORK Botanical Garden and the entire idea of a garden, let alone a “botanical garden,” starts to become even more strange. Is the garden a small part of nature, a set of organisms and plants replicating in miniature the vitality of their larger host? Yes, sure, but it is we, not nature, who create the garden, who give it its character within its man-made borders, and then labor to order it according to rules we establish. A garden is as much about the human world as the natural one.

  This garden in the Bronx, for example, began in 1891, when the New York State Legislature carved out 250 acres of the city’s undeveloped land for “the collection and culture of plants, flowers, shrubs and trees.”

  The inspiration came from Nathaniel Lord Britton and his new bride, Elizabeth Knight Britton, who, on their honeymoon in 1888, were smitten not with the untamed wild of Europe’s forests and mountains, but with the stupendous systematic achievements of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. They returned home, campaigning for a counterpart in New York; the project was supported by Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—the same men who in the space of 50 years helped create the great cultural institutions of New York.

  That’s what the garden literally is: a cultural institution. Or better, an institution that is about cultivation. All gardens are a form of culture on display, but a botanical garden incorporates scientific culture as well. And the garden has the fourth-largest herbarium in the world, a collection of 7.3 million dried and catalogued plants. There are branches dating from the late 18th century, cut by venturesome botanists sailing with Capt. James Cook and samples found by John C. Frémont’s expedition in the Oregon Territory and California in 1842-45.

  These plant fragments, decorously mounted on flat sheets, are stored in fireproof cabinets in a specially constructed storage space. They are gradually being digitally scanned and made available online (sciweb.nybg.org/Science2/vii2.asp). The herbarium is the garden’s antipode: natural habitats replaced by filtered air, living branches by dried twigs, bright colors by faded leaves and printed DNA analyses. But each part feeds the other.

  T
hat’s what the garden literally is: a cultural institution.

  Pool, and Pride, In the Bronx

  By SARA RIMER | August 11, 1985

  TO THE PEOPLE WHO GREW UP IN THE neighborhood, who saw it flourish and then nearly die, the Crotona Park Pool sometimes seems like an enormous mirage, its Caribbean-blue waters shimmering amid the empty lots and tightly packed brick apartment buildings of the South Bronx.

  “Every day my mother would say, ‘Go to the pool! Go to the pool! Get out of the house!’” said Teresa Gonzalez, 25, from her lifeguard’s chair. “But then the neighborhood went down and turned into what was known as ‘The South Bronx.’ All the abandoned buildings. The park was neglected. The pool got infamous. When I was a teenager, going to Crotona Pool was taking your chances.”

  Vandals cut the fence, ripped out the brass pipes and littered the walkways with broken glass. In 1980 the pool was closed, becoming a walled fortress to the neighborhood’s children, for whom other city pools were too distant or too crowded or too small.

  Crotona Park Pool reopened last year after a $6 million renovation by the Parks and Recreation Department. It is just as grand now as when Robert Moses, who loved pools and had been a champion freestyle swimmer at Yale University, opened it and nine others in 1936.

  “Look at it!” Miss Gonzalez said in wonderment. “It’s beautiful!”

  The pool lies at the edge of the 147-acre Crotona Park, which has new picnic benches, rebuilt playgrounds and a newly dredged and beautified fishing and boating lake. Across from the pool, on Fulton Avenue, new windows gleam along a row of apartment buildings. A block away is the new Bathgate Industrial Park.

  And Julius Hardaway, the Parks Department’s 53-year-old chief of operations for the Bronx, can park his shiny green truck outside the pool and not lock the doors. “There’s hope everywhere now,” he said.

  The Bucolic Pleasures of Vanny

  By ANDREW L. YARROW | July 31, 1987

  ASK EVEN THE MOST CITY-SMART NEW Yorker to free-associate about the Bronx, and you’re not likely to hear of forests and wetlands, horse trails and farmhouses. But all that and more can be found in one of New York’s greatest natural and recreational treasures: Van Cortlandt Park, known to those who use it as “Vanny.”

  “If you want to see what much of New York looked like before it was developed, this is it,” said Paul Berizzi, the administrator of Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay Parks. “What occurs naturally here is what Olmsted and Vaux went to great pains to create in Central and Prospect Parks.”

  A trip to Van Cortlandt Park might well begin where the subway ends. The IRT No. 1 train conveniently deposits end-of-the-line riders near the park’s visitors’ center at Broadway and 242nd Street. Just south of the nearby cluster of ball fields known as the Parade Ground and a heavily used recreational area equipped with tennis courts, a 160-foot swimming pool and a small football stadium, stands the three-story Van Cortlandt Mansion.

  The Georgian-style fieldstone farmhouse takes its name from the family that owned this large tract from 1699 until it was acquired by the city for parkland in 1888. The house, built in 1748, is noteworthy not only as the oldest intact building in the Bronx and one of the oldest in the city, but also as a museum of Dutch, English and early American period furnishings. A 17th-century Dutch kas, or storage chest, is in a ground-floor parlor, great poster beds stand in second-floor bedrooms, and an early American dollhouse is in the nursery on the third floor.

  “If you want to see what much of New York looked like before it was developed, this is it.”

  On Vault Hill, where the Van Cortlandt family burial plot is located, dense, hilly forests extend as far as the eye can see. “Because of its size, Van Cortlandt has the kind of scenery you just don’t find in other New York parks,” said Mr. Berizzi. Only the sound of cars on the Mosholu and Henry Hudson Parkways and Major Deegan Expressway reminds one that this not the rolling hills of rural New England.

  A Rusty Relic from 1964

  By JAKE MOONEY | June 24, 2007

  The Unisphere, on the left, and New York State Pavilion, on the right, were part of the 1964 World’s Fair.

  YOU MIGHT NOT THINK A RUSTY 1964 STRUCture in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park has much in common with venerable edifices like the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem, or Monte Albán, a 2,500-year-old Zapotec ruin on a mountaintop outside Oaxaca, Mexico. This month, though, the New York State Pavilion, a crumbling relic of the 1964 World’s Fair that sits in the park, was named along with the other far-flung sites to the World Monuments Fund’s list of 100 endangered sites, which is released every two years.

  The pavilion, designed by Philip Johnson and familiar to drivers on the Grand Central Parkway for its three towers and open-air Tent of Tomorrow, made the list because it is in danger of collapse from rotting foundations, the group said.

  “It’s hard to see things that were built in your lifetime as important as something that’s been around for 200 years,” said Michelle Berenfeld, who oversees the endangered list. But she added, referring to the pavilion: “It’s been there for 43 years. It’s part of our cultural landscape now.”

  The city is studying the possibilities for restoring and reusing the site, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said—but he added pointedly that the pavilion was originally intended to be a temporary structure. The city recently spent $70 million on a new pool and skating rink in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, he said.

  “The question, given all the other demands for Flushing Meadows Park, is, is this the best use of that money?” Mr. Benepe said. “I honestly don’t know the answer.”

  A Thoroughfare For Wildlife

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | May 16, 1994

  CARLTON BEIL SAYS HE HAS NEVER HEARD A mockingbird imitate a wood duck, though generations of Staten Islanders are sure for some reason that he has. But he has heard a wood frog in mating season. It sounds like a duck with a sore throat.

  Mr. Beil, 86, talks of turtles and American chestnut trees and finding his first rare fossil. Children gaze at him with awe as he lights a fire the Indian way. He is a naturalist, a teacher, a student.

  “Carlton is kind of a repository of the natural history of Staten Island,” said Thomas A. Paulo, the borough’s parks commissioner.

  The accomplishment Mr. Beil most treasures is his part in preserving a 2,500-acre slice of forests, swamps and meadows called the Greenbelt, where great blue herons nest, raccoons roam and 16 species of dragonfly flit about. The Greenbelt straddles the very middle of the island. It is bordered on the west by the Fresh Kills landfill, on the east by Moravian Cemetery, on the north by Todt Hill and on the south and southeast by historic Richmondtown.

  The emerald swath snakes through precisely the place the city planner Robert Moses figured on building a freeway, between the Outerbridge Crossing, which connects New Jersey to Staten Island, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Only because hundreds of what Moses called “daisy sniffers” resisted—led at one point on a hike through the snowy woods by a new mayor, John V. Lindsay—was technology’s march stopped in its tracks.

  “It’s the city’s first great post-Moses park,” said Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, who persuaded Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1984 to acquire the land.

  Another important symbol is that the Parks Department is erecting rustic signs along the Greenbelt’s perimeter, giving it a collective identity its parts and parcels have lacked. As this goes forward—along with other elements of a $40 million, 20-year development plan announced last year—Mr. Paulo said, “Young people will see the Greenbelt as an entity rather than the symbol of some kind of argument over a road.”

  Queens Sculpture Garden Is Made A Permanent Park

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | December 6, 1998

  NEW YORK CITY HAS SIDED WITH ARTISTS and their allies over developers and will make Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, a permanent park.

  The park’s future had been unclear until now. Developers had long been eager to build on
the four-and-a-half-acre site, a former marine terminal with stunning views of Manhattan, Oz-like across the East River. Though the site has been a park for 14 years, its status was only temporary. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the final step and declared the site a permanent park last week.

  “It is a spectacular setting for major works of sculpture,” said Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern.

  The city’s decision to preserve the park came in the face of a private proposal by a physician, Angelo Joseph Acquista, to spend $100 million to build luxury apartments and a marina. Many in the community had supported the plan as a way to bring life to a pretty dreary area. “They don’t even have a delicatessen in that neighborhood,” said George Delis, the district manager of Community Board 1 who pushed strongly for Dr. Acquista’s idea.

  But officials decided a stunning cultural attraction was the better bet. “I have a lot of other land on the East River to develop,” said Claire Shulman, Queens borough president. “The truth of the matter is that they cleaned that whole area up and made it beautiful. It’s like an oasis on the New York City waterfront.”

  Lions (and Tigers and Bears) In Winter

  By BRUCE WEBER | January 3, 1997

  At the Bronx Zoo, visitors can view the tigers in their habitant through a glass panel.

  FOR SOME TIME NOW, BECAUSE I HAVE A friend who travels frequently, I have lived in close proximity to animals—hers. They are a dog and a cat, Lucille and Maggie—granted, not exactly critters you find in the wild, but there is a zoolike quality that my apartment has taken on. I’ve been witness to (and occasionally a victim of) a lot of stalking, a participant in a lot of nonverbal communication, a monitor of mood swings.