BY ZACH WILLIAMS | A group of Lower East Side regulars are banking that their private effort can make the critical difference in scrubbing Seward Park of urban grime.
They established a nonprofit conservancy last month devoted to restoring the park, which opened in 1903 as the country’s first municipally built children’s playground. Their ambitions include restoring historic features, updating infrastructure and improving public access to the park, located at Canal and Essex Sts.
As gentrification continues on the Lower East Side, the park provides longtime residents a way to be proactive about influencing their neighborhood, according to conservancy member Emma Culbert.
“Instead of letting the change take us over, we are trying to curate it in a way that both preserves the great things about the neighborhood and fixes the things that need to be fixed,” she said.
An area of high concern is the central fountain area of the park, where a mosaic-tiled map of the neighborhood has fallen into disrepair. Barefoot children often get injured from metal objects that jut up as they frolic there during the summer heat, she added.
“I see them falling down all the time,” Culbert said.
Also of concern is a patch of asphalt in front of the public library located on the park’s southern edge. Remaking this area with more absorbent materials would help relieve pressure from the sewer system, as well as offer park visitors a new area to frequent, according to Linda Jones, a member of both Community Board 3 and the conservancy.
Upgrading the park’s water system could remove archaic features, such as “Bruckner boxes,” which require a “quill” to access. Eventually, the park could reuse wastewater for irrigation, Jones suggested.
The park boosters also dream of transforming a storage building into public space, as well. And they noted that several sculptures in the park are damaged, including the seals that evoke William Seward, who was a New York senator and governor before engineering the purchase of Alaska for the U.S. in 1867 as secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson.
But for now, the new conservancy’s main task has been figuring out how to acquire more funding for the park.
The city Parks Department received $600,000 in the 2015 city budget to repair the Seward Park basketball courts, according to a spokesperson for Councilmember Margaret Chin, who secured the funding at the urging of C.B. 3. The project, though, has yet to go through the design and procurement process, according to a Parks spokesperson.
Conservancy members plan to supplement such public funding through private donations, which are already in the five figures, according to Amy Robinson, the new group’s president.
She said that a good place to use money to redefine the park “for the 21st century” would be through the restoration of Schiff Fountain — built in 1895 and moved to the park in the 1930s — which lies unused along the park’s western edge. The fountain is named for philanthropist and financier Jacob H. Schiff, who played a key role in establishing Seward Park, according to local historian Joyce Mendelsohn, author of “The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited.”
“We would like to get that refurbished because we feel that a fountain like that would be beautiful and it would be an anchor for the park,” Robinson said.
Schiff bankrolled much of the work of Lillian Wald, a nurse who worked helping the neighborhood’s poor. She established Henry Street Settlement in 1893, which emphasized manners, as well as literacy, as key to helping the Jewish and Irish immigrants who dominated the Lower East Side then, according to Mendelsohn. She added that Schiff bought Wald the property at 265 Henry St. that would host Wald’s first playground — a novelty for a time when child labor was still a common condition nationwide.
“It was really the settlement house movement that was behind Seward Park rather than the anarchists,” Mendelsohn noted.
A 1902 Parks Department report noted that the lack of safe play space for children could be blamed as a cause of crime and social unrest. The opening of Seward Park a year later drew about 20,000 people, a 1904 report noted. “Seward Park was right in the middle of everything,” Mendelsohn said of its prominence then.
Today the park continues to appeal to a diverse set of cultures, she added.
“Early in the morning you see all the Chinese doing tai chi and all kinds of exercises,” she said.
