Letters to the editor

To The Editor:

With the controversy about the plans for the Washington Sq. Park renovation, it was good to read Carol Greitzer’s letter in your April 20 edition (“Washington Sq. Park: Déjà vu”). She asks, “What happened to our institutional memory?” In the early ’60s, the Greenwich Village Planning Board 2 appointed a committee of local architects because the official Parks Department plan had been rejected by the community. Moses’ traffic scheme had been defeated. The community’s main concern was to get rid of the buses using the fountain as a turnaround and to restore the park to its walkers and users.

The Architects’ Committee’s redesign was modest. The budget was low — at the start it was less than $1 million. Care was taken to keep the park’s midcentury Victorian character. Olmstead’s Bethesda plaza and fountain at the edge of the lake in Central Park was seen as a sister space. The original paths and basic design remained the same. We sought to blend the old with the new to reflect the character and history of the community as well as its needs. We added a playground, a bocce court and small, intimate sitting areas, newly designed street furniture and a permanent stage. We celebrated the central fountain by creating a theater-in-the-round effect.

Whatever the merits of this 1960s design, there was one serious mistake. No provision was made for proper maintenance and upkeep of the new design elements. Parks provided Washington Sq. Park the same minimal (and unimaginative) maintenance it provided to its standard-issue cookie-cutter parks. Thus, the lovely, curved wooden benches that were constructed to fit on top of the curved concrete bases at the northwest and southeast entrances were never repainted. When they rotted they were simply taken out. The steps down to the fountain, which were made with cast concrete — with a generous budget they would have been made out of stone — were sloppily patched with asphalt making them ugly and hazardous. The three play mounds and the adventure playground for older children in the southwest corner of the park were similarly allowed to fall into disrepair — the wooden equipment was removed when it too began to rot. The play mounds, once green, were patched with unsightly black asphalt. Most important, the newly planted large trees — Sophora Japonica — did not get the requisite care: their subsoil and root condition were not checked regularly by an expert, leaving them vulnerable.

Perhaps there is not a total “loss of institutional memory” and this may be an opportunity for Parks to learn from its mistakes. Greitzer quotes the author of the “AIA Guide to New York City” at the time that “this community consultation should be a model for all park development in the city.” A community/Parks partnership can still be forged and a community oversight committee formed with a budget for appropriate maintenance. The $16 million price tag for the current redesign plan seems wasteful. The community is clearly unhappy with several key elements of the design: the fence, the leveling of the park — which will eliminate the performance stage and the theater-in-the-round effect of the fountain area — the alignment of the fountain with the arch, the destruction of the play mounds, etc. A park is a living thing. The key to the success of any park is active neighborly interest and attention. It makes more sense to invest half of the proposed $16 million in a “maintenance endowment” and use the rest to make much-needed repairs and improvements. Rather than insisting it knows best (a la Robert Moses), Parks should work with the community. Community consultation and foresight — informed by hindsight — should be the model for the Parks Department this time around.

Robert B. Nichols

Nichols was the lead architect for the 1960s renovation of Washington Sq. Park. He was appointed by the Greenwich Village Planning Board’s chairperson, Tony Dapolito. He currently lives in Thetford Hill, Vt.