By Albert Amateau
Friends of LaGuardia Place had two big reasons to celebrate last week at the group’s annual Fiorello Gala:
David and Henrietta Whitcomb, members of Friends for many years, announced their donation of $15,500 to make a final payment on the heroic-size bronze statue of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia that has been on the east side of the street since 1992.
Councilmember Alan Gerson, a LaGuardia Pl. resident and member of Friends, announced a $90,000 city grant to design and plant a children’s garden on LaGuardia Park, a pair of ivy-covered plots on either side of the statue between W. Third and Bleecker Sts.
The city funding, estimated to cover about half the final cost of the garden, will make it possible for work to begin in the spring, according to Rick Bell, a member of the Friends and the director of the Center for Architecture of the American Institute of Architecture across the street from the statue.
“We’ve been planning for the garden for two years,” said Lawrence Goldberg, president of Friends. “It will be a great place for neighborhood children, especially since Washington Sq. Park will be undergoing reconstruction for up to four years when they get around to it,” he said.
The LaGuardia Park redesign began with a Center for Architecture project that Erin McCluskey conducted last year with a group of children between 7 and 12 years old drawing pictures to develop ideas for the park.
A team of Columbia University graduate students guided by Adrian Smith, a landscape architect, is incorporating some of those ideas into a design for the park. Child-friendly pathways, plants native to the region and topiary animals are in the preliminary planning stage.
The redesign is being called “A Garden for The Little Flower,” referring to the nickname of Fiorello LaGuardia, a Village native who was New York City’s 99th mayor, serving from 1934 to 1945. Mayor LaGuardia, considered by many to have been the city’s greatest mayor, famously read the funnies on the radio during the newspaper delivery strike of 1945.
The Friends had been paying for the LaGuardia statue, erected in 1992 and dedicated in 1993, “with what little money we’ve at the end of a year,” said Bertha Chase, a member of the Friends board. “The donation by the Whitcombs was a wonderful surprise,” Chase said.
Neil Estern, designer of the statue who was at the Oct. 17 event, said that he recalled Mayor LaGuardia giving him his high school diploma at his graduation from the High School of Industrial Arts in Queens.
Estern said the statue design evolved over the years beginning with 36-inch-tall clay models. “Al McGrath [founder and first president of Friends of LaGuardia Pl.] called me in 1988 about a LaGuardia statue, and I worked on a full size piece for about two years,” Estern said.
“Kids used to hang on it, and a few years ago it developed a crack in a leg. So I had to take it back to the foundry to have it repaired. It came back much stronger and it’s anchored now with solid rods,” Estrin said. “I haven’t looked at it recently, I’ll have to go back and make sure nothing is wrong with it,” he said.
