By Jefferson Siegel
Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe surveys the scene.
Last Saturday, over 150 parks throughout the city got a spring cleaning. At Sara D. Roosevelt Park, a seven-block long greenway that traverses the Lower East Side and Chinatown, over a hundred volunteers turned out to scrape, paint, plant and freshen up their eight-acre park. In a semi-annual ritual green thumbs and paint-brush artisans, mostly high school students and local residents, were intent on putting the best face on their local oasis.
“It’s a day when volunteers and community members are coming out to bring the energy back to the park,” said Lin Zeng of the Chinese-American Planning Council. Zeng helped organize a large block of the young volunteers from the council’s in-school youth employment program. Many of the teenagers were from L.E.S. Prep and the L.E.S. Craft and Dual Languages high school. The city-wide event was organized by the Parks Dept. and the City Parks Foundation.
Lower East Sider Eric Hurliman was busy scraping peeling paint off a low wall while his 3 1/2-year-old son, Ulysses, sat watching. “This is one of the busiest parks,” Hurliman said, laying down his scraper for a moment, “and it’s good that people help clean it up. It engenders a feeling of being involved.”
Volunteers spent several hours scraping old, peeling paint off low walls and benches, then covering the surfaces with a fresh coat of gloss. Others waded into patches of gardens, turning and covering the soil with compost and wood chips. “It’s really surprising but it looks so much better,” C.P.C.’s Zeng said between swipes of a roller paintbrush. Just before noon the hard-working volunteers took a break to listen to several officials, who commended their efforts and promoted the care and use of public parks.
Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, wearing blue jeans and a tee-shirt, was at the gathering, ready to pitch in. “This is the last of the unrestored sections of the park whose time has come,” he noted, referring to recent improvements elsewhere in the park.
Benepe said that with funding from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the two-story Parks Division headquarters building on Hester St., the District 3 parkhouse, would soon have public bathrooms. Another recent improvement, the synthetic turf and three-lane rubber track, “Hester and Canal Street Field” that was completed last November, was also funded through a $2.1 million L.M.D.C. grant.
“It’s really astounding,” Benepe observed, “considering how the park was ten years ago.” Just three years ago a sinkhole formed near the site of the track. Eight feet wide and two feet deep, the ground depression was reminiscent of problems encountered right after the park’s creation in the 1930s when, as Benepe said collapsed tenements were covered over during the park’s construction.
The eight-acre Downtown park area was acquired by the city in 1929. It opened in September 1934 and was dedicated to Sara Delano Roosevelt, a philanthropist active in numerous city activities and the mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Over the intervening years the park suffered from neglect. In a June 1973 N.Y.C. Transit Authority report on a portion of the Second Ave. subway proposed to run under the park, engineers wrote that, “The park is presently in a very poor physical condition and is only lightly used.
“Access to it is limited because of grade differential along the Chrystie St. side. The existing active recreational facilities (basketball courts and playgrounds) are little used,” the report noted.
In 1996, completion of a $2.7 million capital project elevated portions of the sunken park to street level. Other improvements included a new playground, basketball courts and sidewalk repairs.
However, Parks Dept. reports found unacceptable conditions as recently as 2003. But, the latest report from September 2005 found all aspects of the park, including bench and fence conditions, lawns, play equipment, trees and cleanliness, to be “acceptable.”
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