By Reverend Donna Schaper
Most people just start shaking their heads cynically when they speak of Washington Square. The park people and the mayor want to straighten it out. They want to take out trees. They want to put up fences. They want to make it flat. These things are being recommended “for our own good.” Otherwise, the rats may fully take over ownership, the fountain’s ancient plumbing will result in water mess instead of water magic.
For all we know, New York University wants to use a straightened park to advance its position in the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” report card. Even this might not prevent gifted suburban students’ parents from being approached with the suggestion that they try some drug deal as they tour the less-than-sanitized and surely not straight park.
Those who love symmetry and flatness have their eyes on the park. There is no doubt. They have sharpened their pencils and are just waiting for the four lawsuits to die down, the community to shake its head a little more — and then they will pounce and improve and gentrify and straighten out the park. We are already being “Robert Mosesed” with needed repairs being delayed because “who can do anything till things settle down?” By the time all the concrete is cracked and unsightly, the Parks Department, for our own good, will be firmly in charge of one of the best performance plazas in the world.
When those who love and fully enjoy this park shake their heads, they are shaking them for good reason. The mayor and the Parks people will never admit they want the final gentrification and Starbuckization and Old Navyization of Greenwich Village to happen at Washington Square. They don’t need to admit it. They know Jane Jacobs is dead — or so they hope — and they intend to win the battle of homogenization, gentrification, symmetry and social class. They don’t even know what they’re doing to the “soul” of the Village — they just know that park musicians, chess players, performance artists, fountain splashers and hobos don’t look like the kind of city they want. Those folks aren’t white enough nor well dressed enough. They don’t just walk through the park; they stay and make music together, commune, watch the action, feel less alone, enjoy the unmistakable and joyous energy of a “gathering.”
There is another way to shake your head about Washington Square Park. It is nodding up and down rather than back and forth. Up and down says yes to a repaired, more beautiful, even livelier vision of what the park might be; back and forth lies down and lets the gentrifying-for-your-own-good people have their way with you. When we shake our heads back and forth, we give them our power. We say yes to their homogenizing, depersonalizing takeover. We make it even worse than it is! And it is bad. Up and down motions put a smile on our face: We begin figuring out what the dead buried in the park would do and how we who love and use the park want it to be.
We rise up with their courage and with the imagination Jane Jacobs showed us we have.
What follows is a half a dozen YES movements in and for the park.
1. We understand that we are not saving a park or even a magnificent performance plaza — we are saving our souls. Letting them “straighten out” what great park designers made “crooked” is an act against history, grace and God. Letting them do so without the fight of their life will kill our spirit.
2. We demand that the newly formed citizens’ group, appointed by every politician within 10 miles (including yours truly, appointed by State Senator Tom Duane), be the place where the community hashes out a design for repairing the park. Out of that resolve will come a simple positive version of the Save the Park banner. It is not a “DON’T DO THIS TO US” backwater, but “WORK WITH US TO IMPROVE THE PARK.”
None of us are against improvement, but most of us are against a wholesale teardown and reconstruction of a space that already achieves exactly what it was meant to achieve. Why let Robert Moses’ current-day incarnations have their way with us this time? Instead, let’s demand that this representative body come up with a Villagers’ wants list.
We want a performance plaza that’s the most successful in the world. We want all the gorgeous, flowering trees we have now, and then some. We want a green park in the park areas. We want the raised edges and areas which invite all those spontaneous gatherings. We want smooth concrete for those who are older or handicapped, so they can move about safely.
We want the rats gone or at least housed a little less close to our ankles.
We want to bring a positive approach to the Washington Square Park repair that makes sense, is beautiful and is twisted and crooked and funky. Not a racist, classist, anti-music and prim viewing garden, like the one the Parks Department and N.Y.U. want!
We want a diverse park. We want an informal park. We want an unfenced park.
We want a park with wide vistas. We want a wide, open park that continues to invite the human talent and exuberance for which it’s famous.
3. We know we need to decide now what we are going to do with the bulldozers, that is, if the unthinkable happens and they start to win. Even Jane Jacobs would know that today demonstrations ain’t what they used to be. The powerful have learned how to wait out — and, as we’ve now seen at antiwar protests, cage — the powerless. That is one of the reasons for our cynicism.
We must learn to be more than a little daring, creative, sustainable. A meeting every week from now until we win or lose should happen with the smartest, youngest, funniest Villagers of all. A list of 100 tactics should be adopted.
There should also be guerilla meetings, private ones, where we imagine how to save the park from straight lines, without letting the world know our plans. Not to mention a publicity program, which the cutest smartest, richest New Yorkers — the ones who get it — should donate immediately.
No whining allowed! Instead, we say what we want and imagine that we can have it.
4. We need to gather and have our optimism encouraged. Come to Judson Church on May 10, 11 and 12 for “The Revolt of the Castrati,” an original play by Ed Lynch about how two artists save the park.
5. We insist that the homeless and the musicians and the users of the park be involved in whatever decision-making happens about the place they call home.
6. We must make the issue of Washington Square Park and its performance plaza a major issue in the 2009 local elections: Articulate the genuine economic value to the city of the park and compare it to real estate campaign contributions to Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Councilmember Alan Gerson.
If the park becomes like every other tidy, sanitized “straight park” in the country, the city loses and the Village, especially, loses, psychologically and economically.
We will, between now and then, enjoy the unique and wonderful park that has served us perfectly for over 50 years.
Schaper is senior minister, Judson Memorial Church.
