Washington Square Park

[Luca]

Hell, you think THAT is bad; here in London they're always cordoning off chunks of 'public' parks for 'one-off' events that really spoil the feel of the park, epsecially as temporary architecture nowdays ain't the crystal palace, knowhatimean?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Both the renovation and the opposition to it are a bit overblown.

The plan will not change the park that much. The fountain plaza will be smaller, but the two playgrounds will be expanded.

On the other hand, the present park has good flow. The problem is that all the paths and perimeter sidewalks are paved with asphalt. They could reline and pave all the paths with hex pavers, install new furniture, reconstruct the fountain in place, and it would be fine.

If you move the fountain, it has to get smaller, or it intrudes on Garibaldi Plaza, but if they leave it where it is, the rest of the renovation can be done as planned with minor alterations.

The only objection I have is bringing the fountain up to grade.

Renovation plan


Present park.


New paths.

[lofter1]

The two "Display Gardens" (at the east and west of the fountain / plaza) are not a good feature -- they will serve to narrow / close in what are now open (although ugly asphalt) spaces and impede the pedestrian flow through the park.

I think the new lawn area at the SE of the plaza / fountain (described as "bring back to historic grade") has been nixed -- as it would mean the removal of the concrete "stage" area; many argued that losing that raised platform would serve to impede perfromances, etc. Not that this raised area shouldn't be redesigned / rebuilt.

The raising of the plaza / fountain to the same grade level as the rest of the park shouldn't happen. The "bowl" of the existing WSP creates an arrival spot in the center of the park. If that area is raised it will completely change the way that people interact with the park.

[lofter1]

The budget might save the Park ...

Wash. Sq. project is revised after overbudget bids


By Lincoln Anderson
The Villager

A total of three bids for the construction work for phase one of the Washington Square Park renovation plan were received by the Parks Department last month and all were way over budget. Parks is now “rescoping” the bid and will reissue another bid request.

Warner Johnston, a Parks spokesperson, said, “On April 28, we formally rejected the three bids we received as too high. They came in at about $111/2 million to $12 million. We’re going to refine the bids and rebid the project.” The bids had come in a few weeks before Parks rejected them, he said.

Johnston said the department is “rescoping” the bid, but declined to go into details. He said the changes might include certain types of materials or stipulations on where certain materials should come from.

Parks has set the price tag for the entire renovation project at $16 million. The project is to be done in two consecutive phases, each of which would require closing half the park for a year, while the other half would remain open. Phase one includes the restoration of the park’s fountain and moving it about two-dozen feet east to align precisely with Fifth Ave. through the Washington Square Arch.

“It’s not unusual for bids to come in too high and it’s not unusual for us to rebid the project,” Johnston said. Johnston said that because Parks lets out bids for “hundreds and hundreds of projects” each year, the department has a database it uses to judge whether a bid is too high.

Because of having to modify phase one, Johnston said the start of the project, previously set for July, has now been delayed.

“Things have changed a bit since we’re going to be rebidding the project,” he said. Asked what the project’s new start date is, Johnston said, “I don’t have the answer to that question.”

Parks doesn’t have a date for when it will reissue the bid either.

“We don’t have a timeline,” Johnston said. “We’re finding some changes and we’ll be putting it out [for bid] again.”

The modifications are significant enough that the plans must go back to the Landmarks Preservation Commission — which approved the last version — for another review. At some point, there would be a public hearing at Landmarks on the newly revised plans.

Some opponents of the renovation are charging that Parks secretly plans to shrink the size of the park’s central plaza around the fountain more than allowed under the agreement between Parks and Councilmembers Alan Gerson and Christine Quinn. The antis nervously note that no one from Parks signed the document.

However, Johnston said, “We are honoring our agreement with Councilmembers Gerson and Quinn. We are working on the exact size of the plaza.” Gerson and Quinn’s stipulations state that the renovated fountain plaza “will be no less than 90 percent of the current area.”

“It wasn’t a contract. It was an agreement which we intend to honor,” Johnston explained.

In addition, the Parks spokesperson countered project opponents’ claims that what was put out for bid did not conform with the plans shown at the Art Commission public hearing in January at which the commission gave its approval to moving the fountain. Johnston said what was put out to bid “wasn’t significantly different” from what was shown at the Art Commission, but that if it had been, the new plans would have had to have gone back for review to the Landmarks Preservation Commission and Art Commission.

Edy Selman, of the Washington Pl. Block Association and a member of Emergency Coalition to Save Washington Square Park — a group suing to stop the project — said she expected the revised plan will now also have to go back to Community Board 2 for a vote. With new members on the board, she hopes this time the October 2005 resolution by the board’s Waterfront and Parks Committee, written by its chairperson Arthur Schwartz, will be approved.

“Arthur Schwartz’s resolution is the solution to the problem — not moving the fountain or leveling the plaza,” Selman said.

The Villager is published by Community Media LLC.

[MidtownGuy]

Leveling the plaza has always been my biggest objection to this. Let's hope they nix that part of the plan. The "bowl" is special.

[Schadenfrau]

Really, that bowl is everything in Washington Square Park.

I used to live a block away, and not a day went by that I wasn't sitting in that bowl at some point.

[ablarc]

Washington Square just needs a bit of a scrubbing, attention to things that don't work (like the fountain), sprucing up the rundown places, and a little modest gardening.

Problem is, there's a landscape architect; you can rely on him to want to do too much. If they got rid of the landscape architect, common sense would prevail, the park would end up better, and the city would save a ton of money.

[Scruffy88]

And those bathrooms. I understand that its a public park and the bathrooms are not going to be up the quality of the Madarin Oriental (which by the way are the best bathrooms in the city. I snuck in one day) But the way they are now are horrible, dirty, and the foulest smelling thing around. You sometimes can smell them from 200 feet away by the fountain. A better layout or better maintenance would help but the crud thats there needs to be taken out

as for what a previous post said. I had no idea what the hell those concrete lumps were supposed to be. a skate park? get the hell out of here. They suck. lose em

[pianoman11686]

Never been to the Mandarin Oriental, but I stopped in at the New York Palace a few years ago for a quick pitstop. Let's just say, I felt like I was in a real palace.

[pianoman11686]

Judge Halts Washington Sq. Park Redesign

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Published: July 27, 2006

A State Supreme Court judge has halted the city’s plan to redesign Washington Square Park, saying the Bloomberg administration violated the City Charter by failing to notify the public about all of the proposed changes.

The ruling, handed down on Tuesday by Justice Emily Jane Goodman, bars the Department of Parks and Recreation from beginning a $16 million renovation until the redesign plan goes through the entire approval process again, beginning with the local community board.

The proposal must also be re-approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Arts Commission.

The decision is the latest setback for the parks department in its effort to push through the park’s most significant alteration since the late 1950’s, when Eleanor Roosevelt and the urbanist Jane Jacobs took an active role and traffic was banned.

Now the city will again be forced to make its case for redesign, which has inspired impassioned debate in Greenwich Village and includes plans to move the centerpiece fountain about 22 feet so it aligns with the park’s arch and the installation of a perimeter fence.

Residents have accused the parks department of hiding critical elements of the plan and acting without sufficient community input.

In her ruling, Justice Goodman found that the parks department failed to fully disclose information about the redesign, including the addition of a 45-foot spray jet to the park’s fountain and reduction of the size of the plaza surrounding the fountain by at least 23 percent. The plaza has traditionally been used as a performance space, and the parks department pledged to a council member not to shrink the area by more than 10 percent.

In a statement, Chris Reo, senior counsel of the City Law Department’s environmental law division, said the city was reviewing its legal options.

“We believe that the court’s ruling is erroneous, because it ignores the fact that the parks department’s renovation plan for Washington Square Park has been the result of more than two years of public outreach and input,” Mr. Reo said.

While most people agree that the 9.75-acre park needs a makeover, opponents believe that many of the changes will turn an open space with a tradition of nonconformity into a cookie cutter park.

The park’s fountain has long been one of the city’s popular spots for residents and tourists — the site of poetry and musical performances in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, to mimes, dancers and hip-hop artists today.

The ruling did not address other elements of the redesign, including the shifting of the fountain and the building of a perimeter fence, though the proposal could be altered as it makes its way again through a second review process.

The redesign was approved by Community Board 2 last year after a series of raucous public hearings. The Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Arts Commission also ratified the renovation.

Jonathan Greenberg, a Greenwich Village resident who filed the lawsuit, which sought to stop the renovation,, said that the decision will allow the neighborhood to get another look at the proposal.

“I feel very pleased that there will be some transparency and accountability in this process,” he said.

While the city’s community boards have only advisory power, Justice Goodman said that a board’s role in the democratic process is protected by the City Charter.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Peddling Images of a Lost City


Robert Otter
Getting ticketed in Washington Square Park in the early 1960’s, when cars were sometimes permitted

NY TIMES
By BERNICE YEUNG
August 13, 2006

ON days when the weather is fine, Ned Otter wheels a hand truck laden with black-and-white photographs from his SoHo apartment to a stretch of sidewalk on the Avenue of the Americas and West Third Street in Greenwich Village. There he sets up shop, selling photos of the neighborhood as it looked in the 1960’s.

Mr. Otter, who has what he describes as a highly developed “nostalgia bone,’’ runs a business that is a kind of shrine to his father, Robert Otter, a native New Yorker who died in 1986. Robert Otter worked for several years as a photographer. After marrying and starting a family in the Village, however, he chose instead the relative security and solvency of a job as a real estate broker.

But in his off hours — roaming the streets at night or on the weekends — Robert Otter continued to practice his art, taking the photographs that his son, the second of three children, now peddles.

Ned Otter, 47, is himself a struggling artist, a jazz saxophonist who has played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and George Coleman. He began making prints from the original negatives and selling them on the street a year ago, mostly, he said, to put his father’s work before the public. And if he makes a little money, well, that never hurts.

Robert Otter

Barefoot in Washington Square Park in the early 1960’s

A main attraction of the images is that they provide an unstudied sense of a Greenwich Village that no longer exists. “My father was a street photographer,” Mr. Otter said. “These photographs — he caught a moment.”

There are images of late-night shoppers at the original Balducci’s, a police officer ticketing a driver in Washington Square Park when traffic was still allowed in the circle, the famous Eighth Street Bookshop and the meatpacking district long before it was transformed into a club and restaurant hotbed.

Robert Otter

The famous Eighth Street Bookshop in the mid-1960’s

Mr. Otter’s sidewalk shop has become a popular stop for folks who grew up in the neighborhood or whose relatives once owned stores in it. Delighted by the images of their own memories, they thumb through the stack and reminisce (“Cafe Wha? I lost a liver there,” one passer-by announced). And a photo of the Eighth Street Bookshop was recently featured on C-Span in a segment about Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian, whose father and uncle owned the business.

Robert Otter

The Bleecker Street Cinema, a beloved theater that closed in 1990

In the process of selling the photographs, Mr. Otter has had to become something of a historian himself, since his father didn’t often bother to date or identify the pictures. The son has spent long hours examining the images for clues that might help him determine their dates and locations.

Recently, Mr. Otter also bought a digital voice recorder so he can capture the Village lore that emerges from his conversations with longtime locals, like the one about the time someone threw a desk — or was it a chair? — out a window of the Greenwich Hotel, killing a man. “Sometimes,’’ Mr. Otter said, “the back story is more interesting than the image itself.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Washington Square Village (as seen in the last photo above, circa 1960) in August 2005,
with full-grown London plane trees along Bleecker St.:



http://community.webshots.com/photo/...72148447FoGemT

[bubdanose]

Photos like this make my heart sing....dang he was good....I visit, your wonderful city, each year for only two or three weeks ....I will definately ck this out....thank you....

[ablarc]

WASHINGTON SQUARE "VILLAGE"




I used to shop at a previous iteration of the above supermarket when I lived in Washington Square Village. Here it is not yet built:



I wondered then as I wonder now how the owners of this property could justify a single-story strip mall in the city. Could they have transferred most of the development rights from this block to the other side of Bleecker Street where Washington Square “Village” looms?

In any case, it’s a textbook case of Modernist planning: the single-use Corbusian apartment slab in a “park” of its own making, separated from the sidewalk and separated from its commercial facilities which are zoned (really banished) to the other side of the street.

I’d like to think that in this perhaps more enlightened age, we’d combine the two, build streetwall to the sidewalk, and develop Bleecker Street’s south side to a decent FAR. Or have we here a case where development rights have been transferred and therefore this God-forsaken place is doomed to perpetual suburban underutilization?

How many other such future abominations are we creating with FAR-transfer schemes? And will we in time come to our senses and allow future development despite the present using up of development rights in such places? We could after all up-zone such places, creating the potential for increased future building mass.

Incidentally, I enjoyed living in my Corbusian ville radieuse, though I could barely afford the rent. Ensconced in Suburbia I could venture a few steps into the urban bustle of Washington Square. And the strapping doormen wore capes!

[ManhattanKnight]

^Reluctant as I am even indirectly to provoke another "I hate Andrew Berman" sub-thread, here's a little of the history of this site:

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_...permarket.html